Pop Culture Fix: Overwatch 2 Confirms Pharah and Baptiste are Queer on Pride Eve

One day until Pride! And here is your Pride Eve Pop Culture Fix!


+ Overwatch 2 short story confirms Pharah and Baptiste are queer. (Also, Overwatch is dropping all its Pride content tomorrow.) “Among the Pride name cards and player icons, you’ll find specific ones dedicated to Overwatch 2’s LGBTQ+ heroes, including a lesbian card for Tracer, a gay card for Soldier: 76, a pansexual card for Lifeweaver, a bisexual card for Baptiste, and a lesbian card for Pharah. The latter two also reveal the sexual orientations of those two characters, as explored in a new short story.”

+ All LGBTQ+ characters in League of Legends.

+ Saving Face director Alice Wu looks back on her 2004 queer romantic comedy. 

+ Somebody Somewhere’s season two finale is a pitch-perfect, achingly beautiful sendoff.

+ Black Mirror introduces five new nightmares in season six trailer.

+ Wrabel on writing Pride Anthem “Turn Up the Love” and combatting LGBTQ+ hate.

+ Where does Yellowjackets go next? ‘

+ Breanna Stewart went home and conquered.

+ Five first-look photos from Heartstopper season two.

+ Puritanism took over online fandom — and then came for the rest of the internet.

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1719 articles for us.

8 Comments

  1. I have Problems with Blizzard which is why I stopped playing Overwatch a while back, but did want to note that the illustration for that story is by excellent lesbian artist Hannah Templer, of Cosmoknights and Flung Out of Space!

  2. Unfortunate that every time Activision-Blizzard does something like this it’s to distract from something awful going on with them on the same day. And oh look, there’s a Variety interview out today with Bobby Kotick saying that all the claims about Blizzards Harassment culture are false and everything going wrong at Activision-Blizzard is the unions fault.

  3. Echoing the other two commenters above, particularly Death’s comment, Blizzard has been horrendous behind the scenes. Their track record has shown they are one of the grossest mega corporations atm, and that’s saying something.

    Something further though is that Blizzard have taken the coward’s way out during this Pride month by making the Pride celebration OPT IN, so quite pointless and appeasing the bigota, and IT IS NOT AVAILABLE IN ALL COUNTRIES. So if you’re queer in a country that it isn’t released, GFY I guess.

  4. I’m always torn when it come to representation – especially at Pride. Overwatch isn’t inherently a good example for this as these characters aren’t erased during the other 11 months of the year – but there are plenty of times when a company has thrown out something Pride related just to jump on our bandwagon. Nah. Either ride with us 24/7, 365 or GTFO.

    And where do the Yellowjackets go next? At this rate, they’re gonna have to randomly produce even more team members to devour because it looked like we got down to a core group and well… we’re running out of ladies to eat here. Wait… No. I stand by that that double entendre.

  5. It is disappointing to see that whenever Activision-Blizzard makes a controversial move, it appears to be a tactic to deflect attention from something negative happening within the company on the very same day. Coincidentally, a recent interview with Bobby Kotick was published on Variety where he refutes all accusations of harassment culture at Blizzard and blames the union for everything going wrong at Activision-Blizzard.<a href="https://doorsec-qatar.com/"Facilities Management Services

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