Ever taken a long, hard look in the mirror and seen a face that doesn’t feel like your own? Overwatch‘s latest hero, flail-slinging support Briggite, is having that problem in a very literal sense.
For the past few days, Overwatch fans have been passing around images and videos showing how similar Brigitte’s in-game face is to Mercy’s.
— Reploid (@KingReploid) March 3, 2018
Their face shapes, eyes, eyebrows, noses, and lips are all similar, if not outright the same.
From this, people have drawn a few conclusions:
1) Brigitte’s in-game face is noticeably different from her face as seen in Reinhardt’s cinematic mini-movie from last year.
2) Blizzard has a habit of giving women characters similar faces and body types.
3) Mercy and Torbjorn fucked???
There’s been a fair amount of debate over how similar Brigitte and Mercy’s faces actually are when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, but many fans seem to favour Brigitte’s Pixar movie face from the short over her Mercy makeover in the game.
“She looks like a cross between Zarya and Mercy here,” said poster hatmonkey3d on Reddit. “She looked more unique and characterful in the short.”
“I can’t believe they turned her in-game character model into another variation of Mercy,” said another user named LaChancla. “I want the fuller lips, I want the freckles, I want her exactly as she was in the cinematic.”
While it’s not uncommon for heroes to look a little more detailed in cinematic shorts, Brigitte’s whole in-game look seems to be more in-line with other characters like Mercy, D.Va, and Tracer.
“I love Briggite’s concept, but seriously Blizzard, you can do it better than a default oval face and hourglass bodyshape, again,” said fan and illustrator Tetra on Twitter. They added that while male characters could use some more variety as well, there’s tremendous, immediately noticeable difference between the likes of Junkrat, Roadhog, Hanzo, Doomfist, Reinhardt, and Briggite’s dear old dad, Torbjorn.
Players think it stems from women being held to conventional standards of attractiveness that men aren’t. It’s an issue not just in Overwatch, but in animation and other mediums as well.
On Overwatch‘s official forums, a player named Aqur suggested that this leads to all sorts of ripple effects. For example, because of differing visual standards for men and women, men get to look relatively close to their own ages while women end up looking younger than their ages and experiences would suggest.
“Ana looks 40 at best, and she’s older than Reinhardt,” they wrote. “Mercy and Mei both have convenient reasons to look 19 at 40. Soldier has scars and stubble and a distinct jaw, while Torb has an entirely different face shape and size and such.
The women more or less have same shape, same face, same height. The men and the women in this game look like they’re from different genres.”
Other players chalk the similarity up to lore. Torbjorn and Mercy, some speculate, hooked up, and Briggite is their kid. Then, of course, there’s the elephant in the room.
“So if Torb hammered Mercy,” asked player TCpls on Reddit, “when does this new hero get flying turrets that heal?”
Comments
6 responses to “Some Overwatch Players Think Brigitte’s Face Looks Too Much Like Mercy’s”
Except Mercy would have been only 14 years old when Brigitte was born……
Yuck.
Probably just a skin.
Almost like instead of something interesting, the endless machine that spits out sassy cosplayable characters from a whiteboard of marketable traits has done it again.
Have the slow mo guys ever captured an ass farting? Because that I feel would be the appropriate gif response here.
File this under: OMG WGAF
First world problems.