Do you have a headcanon for Zenyatta's background?
forgive for late answer, but i went to bed bcs it was 4am hahaa
also i hope you don’t mind me replying publicly, since u didnt specify whether you wanted a private reply and i love to talk about zen
ye, i have a lot of them. i like to juggle with more than one because i can never make up my mind on them, but it all comes down to three specific things i like to reference more than others (but also having a lot means i can pick whichever i feel the best whenever i want to write something hehe)
one of the main ones i have is that he comes from a sino-tibetan omnium, originally as a guard omnic, and for a period he was taken under the chinese organized crime to fight in illegal omnic/human rings, but ultimately got free
another one i have is that he was born, due to his pleasant appearance, to be a pleasure bot (perfect for angst or smutty lines of fanfic), which obviously goes for a different kind of backstory, and deals with omnics seen as toys or objects, and his growth as a character.
a third one is that he was not born to be a pleasure bot, but the relative parts were installed later on and against his control (again, good for fics and general angst backstory ideas)
a general theme i have with zenyatta backstory is that due to many of his in-game voicelines, i feel he went through a lot of bad shit and learned from them how to harness and accept everything that comes at him (for example, as opposed to every other hero whenever being discorded, his line is ‘i welcome adversity’, which is his version of ‘come at me bro’, but in general, he seems to be weathered, and that includes his appearance)
i also feel like he had to curb a lot of his attitude, born from being considered nothing and having no soul, so there was anger and frustration there, which ended up with him learning how to relax and channel that energy in safer ways.
overall, i just believe that as most omnics, his past was not sweet nor nice, and it helped him grow in who he is as a character at the time of overwatch recall.
other assorted ideas are: he was born as a null factor omnic, and was present during the uprising but followed mondatta on the way out; he was born as a vessel for a god ai virus, which never happened/he was born to become a new sort of god ai virus but that did not happen
