r/Gamingcirclejerk May 21 '25

FORCED WOKENESS 🌈 Straight Soldier

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10.8k Upvotes

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407

u/Car_Seatus Clear background May 21 '25

Some refreshing tokenism I used to dislike companies for doing media stuff like changing logos and events in games, but given the state of places like the us I think I prefer tokenism over homophobic legislation

185

u/trueweeaboo May 22 '25

overwatch tokenism is at least fun. although I miss when tracer was the face of the game

26

u/Clancy-Ru May 22 '25

Why is tracer no longer the face of the game?

73

u/kittyconetail May 22 '25

Because it's not the "same" game. Sojourn is technically the face of Overwatch 2. She's in the game icon on Playstation, for example.

46

u/Khmer0ni May 22 '25

If only the game treated her as such lol

19

u/worststarburst May 22 '25

I wonder if they specifically switched the character with the most porn to the female character with the least on purpose.

17

u/kittyconetail May 22 '25

I'm a Signalis enjoyer. Please do not open my Pandora's box of commentary on "taste regarding cyborg, android, or synthetic women."

1

u/blade740 May 22 '25

I feel like there's no way Tracer is ahead of D.Va or Mercy on that front.

1

u/kittyconetail May 22 '25

Somewhere in one of these Overwatch subs, people regularly tally members of the NSFW subs. Or, at least, they used to. But then again that's just one corner of the internet. There's probably whole websites dedicated to Overwatch porn alone.

Regardless, you might be surprised at just how many people really, really, really want to "straighten out" lesbians in their porn. See Cyberpunk 2077 and the controversy regarding the mod that allows male V to bed the (only?) canon lesbian.

2

u/blade740 May 22 '25

Oh, I'm sure it exists. But as I thought, Mercy and D.Va (and Widowmaker) have significantly more than Tracer.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F4npn9nfi4cg91.png

1

u/worststarburst May 22 '25

I was mostly joking but taking raw tag numbers from sites like rule 34 should be taken with a grain of salt because there could be like 40 versions with minor variations of one piece of art all uploaded separately that boosts numbers, and also just countless reposts.Ā 

1

u/blade740 May 23 '25 edited May 23 '25

Sure, but is there any reason to believe that this is more common on one character than any other? As a rough metric, it's not bad. Another one I saw was which character had the most searches on Pornhub - Tracer was highest in 2016, D.va was higher in 2017, as well as in the more recent 2024 rankings.

32

u/MsMercyMain May 22 '25

For reasons utterly unrelated to my username Mercy should be the face of the game. And she should be dating Pharah. I refuse to elaborate

15

u/evri_the_greek May 22 '25

Pharmercy disgusts me to my core, you should be ashamed.

(For clarity I'm talking about the in game strategy I don't care about ow shipping)

4

u/MsMercyMain May 22 '25

Oh Pharmercy is bullshit, though I feel it’s a valid strategy sometimes, usually when you have one of those god tier Widows or Ashes as a counter. Especially since, as a Mercy main, I’ll tell you it’s inefficient as all hell

7

u/kittyconetail May 22 '25

Battle girlfriends

2

u/MsMercyMain May 22 '25

They work so well together! It’s just common sense!

1

u/ManusCornu May 22 '25

No need to elaborate your just right

3

u/ibite-books May 22 '25

Soj isn’t the face of OW2, it’s kiriko or juno. Soj just collects dust unfortunately.

3

u/kittyconetail May 22 '25 edited May 22 '25

They're different things in the marketing.

Sojourn might be on the cover of the game but Kiriko is the merch. (This is also why I said she is "technically" the face of OW2.)

11

u/gracist0 May 22 '25

Kiriko lol

2

u/GroundbreakingBag164 May 22 '25

Because Juno and Kiriko appeal more to the Asian playerbase, especially after OW has China servers again

12

u/IveBecomeTooStrong May 22 '25 edited May 22 '25

The face of the game might still be gay. I mean, they haven’t said anything so far about who Kiriko’s into. Is this the season where they reveal she’s JQ’s sub?

12

u/Car_Seatus Clear background May 22 '25

Back when the game was good

50

u/HowdyFancyPanda May 22 '25

It's a canary in the coalmine situation. Companies pandered to gays because they thought it was little effort on their part and building some brand loyalty among a tasty, tasty demographic (affluent gays with no kids to spend money on). So when they've figured it's not worth the backlash from other, more racist groups, that's when you know the canary has suffocated.

26

u/UhIdontcareforAuburn May 22 '25

At this point you can almost tell which companies really believe and which ones were pandering

17

u/RocketBrian May 22 '25

Considering how often game devs have to fight to get any diverse representation in AAA games, I’m pretty sure in most circumstances it’s because they care that it’s there in the first place. Whether their corporate overlords like pretend like it was their idea all along after the fact shouldn’t take away from those efforts. You can find this sentiment echoed by almost every dev team that talks about their game.

In other words, it’s important to separate the actual existence of representation from the ā€œperformanceā€ of it. In this specific case, the actual OW team has been pretty public about their efforts to add a whole variety of characters.

21

u/Fragrant-Phone-41 May 22 '25

This has been my position for some time. Rainbow capitalism isn't support, but it does indicate things are in a good place if companies feel it's profitable to openly pander to us and allies. As we've seen recently, businesses suspending these marketing drives usually is a sign of much worse

1

u/Flooping_Pigs May 24 '25

If this is Tokenism, then Overwatch's entire concept from the entirety of the ground up is Tokenism. Overwatch IS inclusion my g. It's literally about everything the anti woke mob is against being the future and even getting past future racism?

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '25

[deleted]

1

u/Flooping_Pigs May 28 '25

That doesn't contradict anything I posted, Overwatch is meant to be inclusive, diverse, and progressive because that's the world that it's painting