Butt controversies are now a thing in video games. After we all fought through the war surrounding R. Mika’s butt-slap in Street Fighter V, we’re forced to strap on our helmets and muddied boots yet again, venturing back into no man’s land as fans of Blizzard’s Overwatch are up in arms over the removal of a supposedly “sexualized” pose given to one of the game’s female characters.
Tracer’s ‘Over The Shoulder’ pose features the character, er, looking over her shoulder. However, as the camera is facing towards her back, her butt is visible, because butts are typically located on a human’s back (unless you’ve been involved in a particularly gnarly car accident).
A post on the game’s official forums raised this as an issue, with user Fipps describing how Blizzard had created a great character in Tracer, only for their efforts to be undermined by this pose. “Out of seemingly no where we have this pose,” Fipps writes, referencing the screenshot pictured below. “WHAT?” Fipps continues. “What about this pose has anything to do with the character you’re building in tracer? It’s not fun, its not silly, it has nothing to do with being a fast elite killer. It just reduces tracer to another bland female sex symbol.”
After a number of comments both agreeing and disagreed with the riled user (though most fell into the latter camp), Overwatch‘s Game Director Jeff Kaplan waded into the debate, writing: “We’ll replace the pose. We want *everyone* to feel strong and heroic in our community. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel uncomfortable, under-appreciated or misrepresented.
“Apologies and we’ll continue to try to do better.”
This controversy and Kaplan’s reaction has raised the ire of many fans of the game online, with it actually inspiring the creation of a fucking Megathread on the r/Overwatch subreddit. I shit you not, this is a thing that’s actually happening right now. There are over 700 comments in that thread at the time of this writing, meaning that hundreds of people are legitimately arguing among themselves over the positioning of a video game character’s butt crack. A moderator has even had to step in and tell commenters to “keep things civil” because of the intense level of vitriol these ass cheeks have inspired.
It remains to be seen whether Blizzard will respond to this outrage, though personally I hope that this will be the case so that I’ll be able to write another news post, this time explaining how a company worth $19 billion had to release a public statement pertaining to a video game character’s arse.
