mythicfictionist:

overwatch canon according to background info: the world has recently come out of one of the most violent and destructive wars in history and is now moving forward into a new era with the challenges of accommodating a new race of robotic citizens. a second crisis has broken out in russia and australia has been reduced to a nuclear wasteland. with the world in such an unstable condition, a group of heroes from the first war’s era, who had been disbanded following public denouncement despite their efforts to protect humanity, must come together to carry out clandestine operations in order to defend the very people who turned their backs on them

overwatch canon according to the game: twelve randomly selected people meet up and beat the shit out of each other 

fandom-geek:

farronheit:

Northcott on the Blizzard forum:

 “I’m not a “shipper”. Not my scene. I do, however love a good story… and the Genji/Mercy thing is nothing like a good story. It has uncomfortable parallels to another franchise-killer.

Mr. Chu’s done some fantastic things with Overwatch. Under his lead, it’s become a very interesting setting, with a lot of interesting characters. Falling into having favourites is the kiss of death for good writing, however – especially starting to favour one character in an ensemble cast that depends on the strength of its diversity to create its market appeal.

William Faulkner’s advice to writers was that “In writing, you must kill your darlings.” You have to find the things you’re doing in a story that please you, and then ruthlessly examine whether or not it serves the story – if not, kill it.

In an ensemble cast story, you need to dole out different story beats between a variety of characters, so that each has their shared moments of power and pathos. The movie “Love, Actually” is a brilliant example of how this can be balanced among a large, diverse cast to create appealing stories for all. If instead the elements of four or five of those stories had been rolled into one character, the movie would have been a bomb.

This is the problem with Genji. He’s already been handed several very big, powerful story themes. He’s got family issues, forgiveness, spiritual awakening/enlightenment, and redemption beats going on. He’s already dancing on a huge story. Handing him a romance plot line, too, would be heavy-handed overkill.

More to the point, because a) you can’t have multiple groups of characters getting involved with each other without making it feel common and trite, relationships between central characters is magnified in importance, and b) Mercy has not yet been given any story beats herself (a history, yes, but not a story to move forward with), it has the issue of compounding the problem. People are already accusing Mr. Chu of using Genji as a “Mary Sue”. If he goes this route, that perception will only spread over time, because Genji really will be displaying many of those unfortunate traits.

And that’s a shame, because Genji really does have a wonderful, compelling story ready to go. Keeping him as a self-contained warrior monk adds an elegance to that tale. Having Mercy as a very dear, very close friend – but platonic in nature – gives him more emotional depth without falling into the trap of heaping all the big story beats on a favoured character.

It’s a common trap that writers fall into. Sadly, it’s the kind of thing that could eventually erode Overwatch as a franchise. Not by itself, but by the ripple effect in the story, implicitly sidelining the many wonderful characters still to be explored… Mercy included.”

#yes this#genji has already close ties to hanzo and zenyatta#while lots and lots of other characters#like mei#zarya#dva#lucio and symmetra#dont have those#id much rather have them tied into the larger ensemble via meaningful#even romantic#relationships#if the first real arc for mercy is the fact that shes someones girlfriend#well then goodbye to her as an independent character

puckish-saint:

Caveat: As always, I don’t have anything against Gen/cy as a fandom ship. In fact I will fight anyone who says they shouldn’t be shipped because they’re ~problematic~ and that includes what I’m about to write here. If I catch any of you harassing Gen/cy shippers referring to this post you will catch these hands.
This is just to explain why I have a problem with canon Gen/cy and why canon Mercy needs either serious rewriting or a redemption arc.

So here have a detailed explanation on why canonically there was no possible way for Genji to have consented to being turned into a cyborg.

This is extremely long so I’m going to put it under a cut.

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