Sexualized 'Overwatch' Tracer Pose Removed After Community Backlash

In today’s volatile Internet market, anything can set off a spark of discussion. A post on the Overwatch forums by user Fipps called “ Overwatch 's Strong Female Heroes and that one Tracer Pose” blew up yesterday. Tracer, the fast mascot for the Overwatch series (she’s the one on the box) has a pose that shows her looking backwards, backside to the camera. Fipps thought that this pose “over sexualized” the character who should be known for her gun-toting skills not her badonkadonk.

After the forum post reached 30 pages, Overwatch’s game developer Jeff Kaplan took to the page and said: “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.” The community went bananas, shaming Kaplan for breaking under the pressure of a few members of the community.

The next day Kaplan wrote a second post that says that the whole team was still not sure about the pose, and that they: “wouldn’t do anything to sacrifice our creative vision for Overwatch , and we’re not going to remove something solely because someone may take issue with it. Our goal isn’t to water down or homogenize the world, or the diverse cast of heroes we’ve built within it. We have poured so much of our heart and souls into this game that it would be a travesty for us to do so.”

This is a touchy subject, but if Kaplan wants to remove the pose he should be allowed to. It looks to some that he caved to player demand, but in reality all he did was make a creative decision. Overwatch is still in Beta, a testing period that looks for bugs and other improvements to the overall game. If the game director didn’t feel the pose captured the character, he has all the right to change it. The forum post may have convinced him to change it, but it was just the catalyst for a decision that was on the minds of the devs anyway..

If you think that pose is bad, just take a look at Neith’s victory pose from Smite .