to what extent & in what sorts of situations do you think amélie / widowmaker still experiences feelings / emotions? and does her current self view such moments in a positive or negative light?
inférence °☆ ( headcanon ):
TO LAY THE GROUNDWORK, I think that the “ ALIVE ” short does a really good job at setting the tone in showing us just what Widowmaker feels these days— which is to say, it’s a bit skewed. It’s an older cinematic and I am not going to do some deep dive into it, but to summarize, basically she laments that she was afraid of spiders because she was told they feel nothing at all but then she realizes ( as she adopts the spider motif for herself ) that at the moment of the kill they DO feel alive.
ANYWAY, Widow doesn’t feel emotions in the range that normal humans do ( and as she tells Moira, “ that’s the point isn’t it? ” ), believing, as she was overhauled to believe, that emotions leave you vulnerable and vulnerability renders you useless. Many of her canon lines center around this fact— she doesn’t feel alive unless she is killing, she doesn’t feel the cold, emotions are pitiful etc. But clearly, if she feels alive at the moment of kill then she feels something, right? It’s not all just emotionless shell of a woman? Yes but that’s what I mean when I say those emotions are awry, and to get to how she feels now ( or even how she copes with how she feels now ), I think we have to look at how she got here to begin with and how emotions have surfaced and evolved since becoming Widowmaker and having Amélie stripped from her.
Widowmaker was reconditioned and re-purposed by Talon to create the perfect sniper— heartbeat slowed, precision enhanced, emotional response dulled. Talon’s emotional manipulation of Amélie came long before she was The Widowmaker, in the form of activation of her sleeper agent status, ( after they abducted and returned her– an oversight of Overwatch to not look into ) allowing them to use her as a tool to take out Gérard— her own husband whom, by all accounts, she loved and had a happy life with. She was able to then assault Ana Amari, who she also had a positive relationship with up until that point. Where am I going with this? Well… Widowmaker is still a human at her core, and through the basic hard reset of her emotions, functions, and moral compass, she has been redesigned both at the hands of Talon but also from the natural passage of time. A weapon with sentience will learn from it’s surroundings and that is EXACTLY what Widowmaker is— a weapon with a human consciousness. From working exclusively with Talon the things she began to excite in were morbid and horrible acts of crime and assassination. She felt alive because she felt something and feeling something was addicting— better than feeling nothing. She relished in that, headshot after headshot, the rush of having an emotion.
As terrible as it sounds, to relish in death and killing, it was her job and what she was exceptionally good at. Foe after foe would fall and she would FEEL: alive, accomplished, anything at all that proved she wasn’t what she used to fear. It gave her power to know she COULD feel, and so she excelled within Talon to continue to be able to do so. But it’s like when you pop the cork, you know? You can’t contain that forever and she began to tap into those residual memories— a pinch here, a pinch there. Places that seemed familiar, names that sounded like she knew them, tastes she could place from a bygone era. It was morose, it was angering, and it was something she ABSOLUTELY kept to herself.
Fast forward to now, it’s clear that Widowmaker expresses some forms of emotion ranging from bloodthirst to lamentation. Things that crop up and trigger her memories are often regarded as somber, though fleeting. Those hints of Amélie that sometimes swell up in the back of her throat, that she has been conditioned to subdue, are pondered and put aside. There is guilt and anger that she can’t exactly act on— and with those things there is a protective and defensive shield enacted because what else can she do to preserve those things BUT protect them in the recesses of her conscience? Specifically Amélie, her life with Gérard— the topic of Gérard or Gérard as an entity on his own— she guards fiercely ( this can be seen in her interactions with Ana Amari in game dialogue ). And while I say she is defensive of Amélie I think it’s also very important to note that Amélie is still present, though quiet; a wisp, a haunting echo in an abandoned cathedral— she’s the ghost of Widow’s past life, ethereal in a sense, haunting her identity in ways that Widow both clings to and rejects simultaneously. Sometimes she doesn’t feel worthy of Amélie and sometimes she wears the name like a badge or symbol that she isn’t completely lost.
Widowmaker’s disdain for Moira, and for human interaction in general, go hand in hand with her “ spider ” persona— a lone killer, in need of nothing and self sufficient. A by-product of how she was created, she has used this web of isolation to her benefit which has contributed greatly in her ability to hide her emotions, to repel them, to spin them up and revisit them when she finds convenient. She reacts to them how she deems appropriate and when she deems appropriate because it’s the only thing she CAN control– which is a part of why they are skewed in the first place: she feels nothing about feeling anything. Emotions make you vulnerable, put them away until it’s appropriate, if it ever is. Is that unhealthy? It sure is. But would she rather express herself as thoughts cross her mind? No, that’s for people who end up like Amélie; and she won’t let anything happen to Amélie ever again— thus is the burden of Widowmaker.
