Over the past few days the Overwatch community has been up in arms over a female player stepping down from competitive Overwatch because of harassment. That female player played on a “semi-pro” contenders team called “Second Wind”. As players learned more about Ellie they started to question the true identity of the player on the account. Once players began to dig deeper into the mystery of who Ellie was, it was discovered that Ellie is actually a 17 year old girl that only uses the headset for the real players who play on the battle-tag “Ellie”. The truth regarding who Ellie was was revealed by a streamer known as “Aspen” and confirmed by esports consultant “Slasher”.

Who Ellie actually is…

Aspen telling her viewers that “Ellie” was just a social experiment and that the player behind the battle-tag is known as “Punisher”

Alright there’s so much talk around this Ellie person.Feel free to clip whatever I say I seriously don’t care. Ellie is not Ellie, okay? Ellie is not Ellie. The whole situation was meant to be in a way a social experiment. Ellie is actually Punisher and he told me yesterday, so, there you go. Hello Reddit. Yeah, Ellie is Punisher he did this as a social experiment sort of thing and did not expect it to get out of hand. That’s kind of the juice around that, that’s all the juice.

Slasher confirming what Aspen has said to her stream as well as stating that Blizzard is hosting a meeting with players and management of “Second Wind”, the organisation Ellie played for.

Regarding Ellie: – Ellie has said in private messages to teammates in the last hour confirming she has not been the one playing, she is a 17-year old girl but is ‘not good’ at OW, no Second Wind players/mgmt knew

– Blizzard is currently holding a meeting with SW players/mgmt — Rod Breslau (@Slasher) January 4, 2019

Backlash from Ellie debacle in Overwatch

After it was revealed that Ellie is in fact a male playing under the identity of a female many female gamers were upset. For a while female gamers have described how painful it is gaming online. A few female members of the gaming community stated it wasn’t fair that he could just go back to being a male and wouldn’t have to deal with the misogyny.

very cool also that this dude decided he didn’t feel like dealing with the backlash of being a woman in gaming anymore so he just got to stop. where’s MY opportunity to opt out of misogyny — bonnie ? (@bonniequeue) January 4, 2019