Blizzard Gives Us the Gayest Gift Of All: A Girlfriend For Overwatch’s Tracer

Ever since Overwatch, a bright, colorful and creative multiplayer first person shooter came out earlier this year, fans have been creating queer headcanons for nearly all the characters and drawing fanart and writing fanfic of these headcanons. Finally, all that hope paid off with the recent release of Blizzard’s holiday Overwatch comic, “Reflections,” which shows what our favorite Overwatch heroes are doing for the holidays. In the best sequence of the comic, we see that Tracer has a very charming home life and a very charming live-in gal pal. In case that wasn’t clear enough of a message, Blizzard later confirmed that Tracer is a lesbian on Twitter.

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In this absolutely adorable comic we see Tracer settling down on a couch in a cute apartment with a cute redhead who’s bringing her a cup of cocoa.  When this redhead, named Emily, opens up a present from Tracer — a scarf — she gets a huge smile on her face and jumps into tracer’s arms and kisses her on the lips. Blizzard later confirmed that Tracer is indeed a lesbian and Emily is indeed her girlfriend whom she lives with. This is a great step forward for queer representation in video games. In several recent games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect you can choose to make your character queer, but here we have the main character of an extremely popular game being confirmed as canonically gay. Women and queer people have a ridiculously tough time getting respect and representation in gaming, and here Overwatch is giving us both.

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Tracer being gay is doubly important because she’s the mascot of the game, basically the main character. She’s on the video game packaging. She’s one of the most popular characters. And in addition to being gay, she’s very visibly queer-coded. With her outfit and goggles and that alternative lifestyle haircut, she would fit right in at any Autostraddle meet-up.

This leads to a lot of speculation about which other Overwatch characters are queer. Since Tracer is a lesbian that probably means that Widowmaker is too, right? I mean, why else would everyone ship the two of them together? If you take one look at Zarya, a hugely buff woman who, like Tracer, has an alternative lifestyle haircut, you’ll immediately know she’s queer of some kind. And D. Va is obviously a nerdy trans girl while Sombra is probably a pillow princess. I think Hanzo and McCree are probably gay too. Then there’s this character who’s fat, wears glasses and is a woc named Mei; I wonder if she might be a transgender lesbian like someone else who fits that description.

She’s definitely gay.

Now, I want to clear up some things that some angry (straight, male) Overwatch fans have been saying. No, they’re not “just” kissing on the lips because they’re British and that’s what friends do there. No, her girlfriend kissing her and not the other way around doesn’t make it less gay. And finally, no, having her come out at Christmas isn’t literally equivalent to having a gay pride parade at the Vatican. Sorry guys, but your fav is gay. There’s no version of the Overwatch universe where she’s gonna fall for you. You can stop hoping that she’ll notice you. She has a girlfriend, she likes the ladies.

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Mey

Mey Rude is a fat, trans, Latina lesbian living in LA. She's a writer, journalist, and a trans consultant and sensitivity reader. You can follow her on twitter, or go to her website if you want to hire her.

Mey has written 572 articles for us.

19 Comments

  1. “No, her girlfriend kissing her and not the other way around doesn’t make it less gay.”

    Oh, how some people need to hear that! On Polygon’s article about the comic literally the first comment is this:

    And it has not failed in a week to make me laugh every time I see it.

  2. The OVW staff have already said that there are multiple LGBT characters in the game, too, so IT’S JUST SO EXCITING WHO’LL BE NEXT?! I’m pretty certain everyone in this game is queer, that’d be a nice plot twist for the crybaby boy gamers

  3. If you guys are at all into reading web comics, do check out this title called always human, it’s free to read and everything. I just read their christmas special and was like, more people need to read this.

  4. I was given a early copy of the next issue of Raven The Pirate Princess by Jeremy and I can’t wait for you guys to read it! Such an awesome issue!

  5. I find it hard to describe how happy this makes me. Even though I’ve never gotten to play Overwatch (doubt my computer can handle it), I’ve seen some videos from it and I came to like Tracer. Part of me hoped she was a lesbian (but TracerxWidowmaker fanart along with MercyxPharah fanart was all I figured I would get towards my hopes), so I’m pleased to see this.

    • I am so brokenhearted about my pharmercy ship after this issue, but still it will live on forever on tumblr so there is that

      • I don’t think this issue did anything to hurt Pharmercy! The developer’s said Phara wasn’t on a romantic date and the consensus I’ve seen is that the older man she was with is probably her Canadian father. :)

        • I said so because of the genji letter thing and how so many are saying that blizzard is laying ground work for them to be a thing, or more likely just giving the genjixmercy people something to cheer about.

  6. Ahahaha! As someone who lived in Britain NO ONE kisses their live in roomies on the mouth to say hi! The straight gamer dudebros strike again!

  7. Also, the Love is Love comic book is out today! Just bought it, haven’t read it yet, but it looks good.

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