exaltcurse liked your post: It’s a certain someone’s birthday today! If...
Casually scoops the kiddo up into a tight hug and ruffles his hair, a glowing smile stretching from ear to ear. Hopefully, it’ll distract Marc from the unfinished gift lying in plain sight for now...
❝ Happy birthday, Marc! I was just about to go looking for you.~ ❞
So I know people are kinda buzzing about some lore tidbits being dropped through the PTR and meh, just figured I’d write down some of my critical (and not-so-critical) thougs.
Too Long; Didn’t Want to Read: I predicted like a solid percentage of some of the “new lore” (some of which...isn’t that new, actually), the rest has potential, but above all else I’m kinda mad because the new feature is REALLY sloppily implemented and just not great overall.
More under the cut.
Alright so just to get myself kinda organized here:
Things I predicted:
1) Amélie having been a professional ballerina. @starsherit can actually attest to this because I went on a massive fucking rant about my Amélie love and interpretations like two weeks ago.
For those of you who read my fics, you know that I’ve provided “titles” to Reaper and Soldier (Segador and Soldado respectively, along with 127 and 76 as their SEP numbers). Amélie’s title is “Soliste,” French for the ballet position of “soloist.” “In ballet, a soloist is a dancer in a ballet company above the corps de ballet but below principal dancer.” It is easy for me to imagine that Amélie was working her way up to being a principal dancer or prima ballerina before Talon kidnapped her.
2) Sombra joining Los Muertos “for a price.” - this was heavily implied by her Origins video, actually. “Now she understood how the world worked.”
3) Ana being called “Shrike” - the skin with the name “Shrike” is a direct reference to her bounty hunter get-up in the Old Soldiers comic, and Ana has been “wanted” for some time now (which is how Jack tracks her down).
For those of you unaware, the bird species “Masked Shrikes” are a unique type of passerines which have tomial teeth - an adaptive trait that is shared with Falcons. You can see where this is going. Masked Shrikes also have part of their migrations in Egypt.
Things that were new and noteworthy:
1) "At his first opporunity, a young Jack Morrison enlisted in the American Armed Forces to defend his country against the Omnic Crisis.”
Now, this is an issue for a few reasons.
A) THIS IS NOT WHAT JACK’S ORIGINAL LORE STATED:
“At eighteen, Morrison packed his bags and joined the military. He had planned to serve a brief stint in the armed forces and then return home to the family farm, but his work ethic and courage caught the eye of the military brass. Before long, he earned a coveted position in the government's controversial and still-classified (but widely acknowledged) "soldier enhancement program." Military scientists shaped Morrison and other inductees into the perfect soldiers, blessed with superhuman speed, strength, and agility. Morrison and his fellow augmented soldiers would soon put their abilities to use with the advent of the Omnic Crisis.”
In the new PTR update, Jack joined specifically to fight against the Crisis.
In his old lore, Jack intended to join the military and eventually return home, but he was brought into the Supersoldier Enhancement Program and then eventually put to fight in the Crisis.
So unless this part of the First Strike overhaul, this does subtly change some of Jack’s internal motivations.
B) More fucking timeline problems.
“The story goes that– [how do I do this? The math is a little weird] If the present day of “Overwatch”, is something like 60 years in the future then, “Whoot”, thirty years back from that point, there was a global crisis. And of course, it was robots, and robots are just bad for everybody.”
Alright so basically, I took this quote to mean that the start of the Omnic Crisis was 30 years BACK from “present day” in the game/lore. This is the loose number thrown around on like, Reinhardt’s bio, general dates, etc. And the original lore left enough wiggle room that you could throw down whatever ages you wanted for Soldier and Reaper - they just had to be semi-trained military adults by the time of the Crisis.
But with this new lore we got a few options:
Either the Crisis was a helluva lot LONGER than previously stated
OR
Jack Morrison was REALLY, REALLY YOUNG when the Crisis started.
Like...”the Crisis started when he was approximately 16 - 20″ kind of young. If the old lore is still somewhat accurate, then Morrison was about 18 yo when the Crisis started.
Which makes him like... 48 years old in-game (or approximately, if you wanna fudge that around a bit, be my guest).
This makes him like, NOT REALLY THAT OLD.
This also means he was probably THE YOUNGEST MEMBER OF THE STRIKE TEAM.
HE WAS PRACTICALLY A CHILD.
Which leads me to:
2) Promotion?
The Strike-Commander skin (well...technically the Daredevil skin because someone got careless somewhere) briefly mentions that Morrison was promoted to Strike-Commander after the Crisis. Meanwhile, NONE OF REAPER’S SKINS even MENTION the promotion. His Blackwatch Reyes skin simply states that he was the former Commander of Overwatch, and then later the commander of Blackwatch.
Between this, the slight shifts in lore, the whole “we’re moving in a different direction” thing, and the fact that this promotion is like literally never talked about anywhere except for the “On the Trail” article (which is old at this point) leads me to really, really think that this “issue” of the promotion has been cutted or edited down in the lore. The subject isn’t even talked about in Old Soldier, which is pretty much all there is for interactions between Soldier and Reaper.
Just kinda...eh.
Besides the Widowmaker and Shrike stuff, as well as the Morrison lore stuff, I was honestly kinda blah about the update. The vast majority of the characters have NOTHING new. In fact, many of them have NOTHING noteworthy for their skins at all. McCree, Mei, Winston, Tracer - characters who hypothetically have a FUCKTON of lore just waiting to be explored got nothing new. Roadhog has two skins - Mako and Toa - that MUST be related to his background and heritage and yet there’s literally nothing on them.
I don’t know if this is meant to be deliberate (”we have all this info, we just aren’t ready to share it yet”) or if it’s just more mess, but it comes across as, well, more meh story-writing and handling. The fact that Mercy doesn’t even have a character description, or putting the Strike-Commander blurb on Daredevil, or the fact that many characters have literally NOTHING “to say” about their skins just reads as carelessness. All the “bad guys” in Junkenstein’s Revenge get blurbs but you can’t tell me about McCree being inspired by Eastwood or the Journey to the West skins? There’s literally nothing special to say about Mako/Toa or Mariachi/Blanco or Luna/Chang’e? Not even like “Mako grew up learning about his family’s heritage” or “Reyes used to play the guitar” or “Mei always loved the story of Chang’e”?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but the sheer dearth of information for the majority of the characters irks me. Some characters have “tons of blurbs” for their skins (which is how it SHOULD be - you spent all these times making these skins for your characters, Blizzard, and we would love to know more about the process behind them or what motivates a character for x skin or y mythology), but so many of them have literally nothing special.
It’s a little disheartening to be honest. I could have lived without knowing the Shimada bros’ father’s name in exchange for one blurb on McCree or Zenyatta or Mei or Roadhog.
i wrote this emotional ass paragraph for some of my old friends and like... i want them to see it?? and know how much i miss them and love them and everything but i dont want to tag them cus it makes me think that theyre gonna interpret it as me being selfish or like i want all the attention/love/pity/whatever but and i just dont want that kind of attention i just want them to know how much they mean to me... and the one person (whos super sweet by the way) is mad(?) at me (i think) so i dont want to tag them but i really want them to see it and know that i really am sorry and i want them to forgive me but i dont want to tag them, have them see it, and have them get mad at me or take it the wrong way or anything like that so i just dont know what to do and right now i just feel so scared but so numb... i dont know what im feeling right now or if im really feeling anything or if im just being over dramatic and everything just sucks like this and i just need help and suggestions of what to do... congrats if you made it this far... congrats if you find what im talking about (its not on tumblr btw)... congrats if your someone im talking about cus i really care about you and i really really miss you...
