In May of 2016, a Tumblr user called radtone posted a picture they had drawn of Overwatch’s

tiny ravenous progeny of Soldier 76. Aggressively cute, this new interpretation of the character started to gain traction elsewhere on Tumblr, with artists giving her a Dorito and Dew addiction and a git gud ‘hardcore’ attitude. The result was a ferality both adorable and, for anyone who lives on the internet, very familiar.‘Gremlin D.Va’ is just one of many archetypal reimaginings in the headcanon of Blizzard’s shooter. Across fan sites and conventions the Overwatch lore has been remixed beyond Blizzard’s narrative in an ever evolving track of gender bending, romantic partnerships, unexpected familial relationships and alternate timelines. Beyond the game itself, anything is possible in the Overwatch universe.

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Fans and Fiction

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Much of its popularity can be put down to Overwatch’s character roster, which is diverse in such unexpected ways that even certain online reactionaries who believe a skin-colour-palette in a video game is the depressing result of “creative censorship” have remained remarkably silent on the matter. According to the fans I spoke to for this piece, Overwatch transcends the hot-button topic of ‘token diversity’ because its diversity is seemingly effortless.“It wasn’t just grabbing stereotypes and chucking them into the game,” says professional cosplayer Yasemin Arslan. “They moulded all these sensibilities and did it in such a tasteful way. Most other games are whitewashed. With Overwatch, it didn’t smack you in the face that there were characters of different race, gender or possibly different sexualities. They just said ‘here these characters are, bam’."This sense of Overwatch’s diversity as ‘baked in’ stems from Blizzard’s original idea that its new shooter should present us with a hopeful future. Senior designer Michael Chu explains that the team wanted its cast to “reflect earth”, the real earth, where people aren’t one color, athletes aren’t always lean and youthful, and those of different ethnicities don’t fall into one of three basic stereotypes.For Charlet Chung, who voices D.Va, the latter idea was particularly vital. The portrayal of Asian-Americans in video games, she explains, errs on a tired sort of coy sexiness, a trend D.Va bucks against with her vitality and smart mouth on the battlefield. “I personally loved how [Blizzard] really was able to meld in some throwbacks to other games, and culture in general, and making it very relevant”, she says. “In terms of representation of Asian-American characters in video games, particularly women, they might be over-sexualized - and I don't know if I'm being too candid here - I feel like D.Va is more of a real person. She happens to have some sex appeal, but that's not why she's in the game. She's not there to be an exotic lotus”.Even Soldier 76, who in such a diverse cast of characters could be dismissed as an overly familiar white guy, has been embraced as Overwatch’s aging patriarch. ‘Dad 76’ has become a popular reinterpretation of the character, and comics of him as a gruff, hawaiian shirt-wearing blue collar guy struggling to juggle his kids (usually tiny, feral versions of D.Va, Lucio, Junkrat and Tracer) are splashed across Tumblr. It’s a minor phenomenon 76’s voice actor Fred Tatasciore has adored watching unfold. “He's definitely a father figure... I totally get it. I see him as that too, and that's one of the most moving parts of him. Even if you're a soldier on his team, he's going to try and teach you. Even if you're fighting him, he'll say, "You got to learn differently." He is a protector, and he will watch over everyone, and he's trying”.Such character remixes are born from a certain openness in Overwatch’s lore. Although we have Pixar-esque animated shorts and pre-match dialogue to help flesh out its characters, we’re offered very little information about their personal lives, those intimate, thrilling spaces where headcanon can thrive. It’s here that relationships are formed, and if they gain enough traction, eventually worshipped.In Overwatch’s fandom, several romantic couples dominate fan-fiction and sites like Deviantart. As is often the case where developers leave their characters’ sexuality unspecified, the most popular of these are queer; not unusual for a large amount of the population who rarely see themselves in fictional media.“A lot of people who write femslash (two women romantically involved together) especially, never expect it to become canon”, says fanfiction writer SniperCT. “It’s something that doesn’t happen. So nobody expects it. So say you know, Pharah hooked up with a guy, it would be disappointing but not unsurprising, because that’s what always happens”.

Pharah is half of what might be Overwatch’s most prolific fan couple, ‘Pharmercy’, a ‘ship’ - the act of imagining two characters together who are not confirmed canon - that pitches the offence hero together with the matriarchal healer (other popular ships include Widowtracer, McHanzo and Mercymaker).

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“Yeah, it’s mostly gay”, says fanfiction writer A E Dooland. “Go to fanfiction.net, An Archive of Our Own, both of which have enormous FanFiction communities, Overwatch fanfiction there is absolutely huge. There's particular ships that are really popular... I write a bit of non romantic stuff as well, but to be fair, it's mostly all gay fiction.”Gay or straight, these stories are hugely seductive, full of suppressed yearning and racing heartbeats, the sort of guilty pleasures you’d find at an airport bookstore. But they’re clever, too, reimagining timelines, pasts, alternate universes, current events. Many come in multiple parts, sprawling and Harry Potter-esque; some are for sexual titillation only. “People just want to build relationships with particular characters. It helps solidify their fandom”, says Arslan.

Blizzard pays close attention. When I tell Chu of the most popular ships, he doesn’t skip a beat, responding with “did you hear about Junkrat and Mei?” (I hadn’t). As for the ones I’d listed: “I think there’s something at the core of all those couples”.

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Our World

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Regardless of canonical truth, Chu’s happy for fans to continue to riff and reinterpret the characters Blizzard has presented them. Blizzard’s dream when building Overwatch was that players would feel a connection to its characters, and Chu calls the subsequently overwhelming embrace “humbling”. “We're still very protective of them, obviously, and we love them - but the second that the game came out, they’re really not just our characters anymore. People have their own versions of them, they want to explore them in different ways”.Blizzard still has stories to tell, however, which have the potential to cause huge ripples in the Overwatch fandom. Considering the trends in the game’s headcanon, is it possible the fans may influence Blizzard’s approach to future storytelling?“We definitely have a direction for the story”, says Chu. “We have story arcs for... we're positioning characters, and moving them forwards. But then, you look at something like in a recent patch where we added the new legendary emote for D.Va, which is the ‘Game On’ one. We always envisioned that aspect of her character, but then the community, I think, helped crystallize it in our minds”.The emote Chu is referencing sees D.Va firing up a holographic shooting game, sitting hunched, cross-legged, chowing down on off-brand Doritos and swigging energy drinks.A gremlin.“I think on so many levels Overwatch has just done the representations so well,” says Dooland. “Because each of the individual characters... I think there's someone for everyone there. It's not forcing you to love or be obsessed with a particular character. You can focus on what you're interested in”.Speaking to Overwatch’s fans, it’s clear that they can see these diverse heroes as part of their own very diverse lives. The characters are identifiable to a single gay woman living in Sydney, a young female wannabe pro-gamer in Auckland or a married man with children in Seattle, as if they had been made with them in mind. And it’s clear, then, in our present, in our year of great anxiety, that Blizzard has succeeded in its goal of creating “a hopeful future”.“Back when Overwatch came out, I was going through some rough times”, says Arslan, whose first Overwatch cosplay was a stitch-for-stitch recreation of Tracer’s avian attire, almost indiscernible from her digital inspiration. “I was going through a dark time and I’d lost interest in games. And then Overwatch came out and it was so beautiful and alluring and I got absorbed into Tracer, she was such a positive and overwhelmingly happy character. I felt inspired again”.“Each in their own way, you know? I can see myself in each of them”, says SnipeCT. “Pharah’s devotion to what’s right, that feels nice. With Mercy, you have her wanting to save people, to fix people who are hurt, and I’ve always had that. When someone is hurt, I want to fix it”.When I tell Chung and Tatasciore that people are finding comfort in the game, they trip over themselves with enthusiasm; for a project that took as long as it did (and is still ongoing), the rewards for the two voice artists have been tenfold."That’s amazing”, said Tatasciore, “and I'm so honored to be a part of that and the fact that could happen, and that's occurring for people is really huge. It makes it all worthwhile. This is why we do this”.“For me personally, I've actually met a few fans,” says Chung, “who have recognized me on the street from social media and stuff, and they're like, 'D.Va!', and being able to connect with people, and seeing that it's an international thing, it’s amazing. All the characters, whether it's Genji or Hanzo, everybody can be represented, all different people from all different walks of life, and in that sense, I feel like it does connect people to one another, and act as an escape from what's really happening in the world”.For Chu, the response has been thrilling, but he still sees work to do; Overwatch is ever-evolving, and its world remains a work-in-progress. “We always set out to make a hopeful future and we're still trying to make that a reality within the game, and I think that it's a challenge, and a goal for us, and it's something that we will keep building towards”.These will surely be heartening words for Overwatch’s fans, who are already lost in Overwatch’s world, creating their own stories inspired by its colours, its bubbly optimism, by the heroes they have long deserved.“Most people – they like to play video games, they’re not actually going to care that the character isn’t white,” says SnipeCT. “They’re just going to play and enjoy it. But people who aren’t white have spent most of their video game time putting themselves in characters who aren’t like them. So give them a chance to play a character like them? That’s never a bad thing. As I see it, it’s important to reflect real life occasionally. Real life is filled with a lot of diverse people with a lot of diverse backgrounds of every shape and colour and look. And video games, you know, they could reflect that more”.

Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.