Ya’ll know how much I love lobbing my opinion that no one asked for into the mix-not unlike a grenade-and then disappearing into the night, so hear it goes–my take on Symmetra’s Halloween Skin. This is gonna get a bit wordy, but bear with me. Let me say flat out that I hate it, and I can hear some of you roll your eyes and already start to scroll past this, but hear me out. For those of you who believe these skins to not just be costumes, but actual “real” skins for the characters, most of you argue that it makes sense for her to be not just pale, but chalky grey if she’s an undead, 500+ year old vampire who hasn’t seen sunlight in centuries. Except that even if you’re dead, and you do lose some of the melanin that keeps your skin not-chalk-white, there’s no way someone as dark as Symmetra would be so pale-period. Biologically, it’s impossible. She would never realistically be so pale even in death because you don’t lose all the melanin in your body. She would be noticeably paler, but nowhere near the effect that her new skin gives her. For those of you saying that she’s simply wearing a costume-I’ll get to that in a second. I’ve seen a lot of people try to deflect some of the anger that we’ve seen towards Symmetra's skin towards Hanzo's by making comments that no one is up in arms about his Halloween skin making his skin “blacker”. And there’s a reason for that. For his Halloween skin, Blizzard didn’t darken his skin in any way that would even give any indication, any hint to the idea of his skin being a take on Blackface, and the fact that people try to offhandly make comments like this is absolutely astounding in it’s own right. The creators made him into a demon, and not just the broad idea of a demon, an Oni-a demon originating from Japanese folklore. I’ve seen plenty of people mourn the fact that the creator’s could have added the classic horns and teeth set that is normally associated with an Oni-the face of one you can clearly see on his bared chest and down his arm-but didn't. I'll come back to this part later as well. You see, Overwatch's creators do try to do this thing with their characters where they give them cultural backgrounds without simply tacking on the label and moving on without much thought. You can see this is Reaper’s classic skin-his mask isn’t a dramatized skull normally associated with westernized-designs revolving around death, but rather the face of a Barn Owl-a bird that, in Mexican culture, is a very symbolic omen of death. Which is an incredibly clever and tasteful design choice for an afro-latino character to have personally made when considering the mask of his new persona. The creators of Overwatch have a understanding that peoples' cultures are a fundamental part of who they are, and that they affect individuals in very specific ways-such as 'costume design choice'. Which is why it's so difficult for me to wrap my head around Symmetra's Halloween skin in a way that leaves me satisfied and feeling like she wasn't cheated somehow. Symmetra is Indian, and in Indian folklore, the idea of what a vampire is differs from the more popular western idea of what a vampire is. And on a design level it seems incredibly cheap and lazy to overlook her own cultural identity in order to design her as what a popular westernized vampire would look-that is, undead chalk-grey. Not when the creator's have already shown themselves to be aware of their own characters. Added onto the fact that within days of the Halloween skins release, people were creating absolutely phenomenal skin re-dos, some of which were revolving around this "Queen of the Damned" idea-it's hard for me to imagine that what we got was the best plan for her skin and that it was never questioned at any stage in development. Which leads me to the idea of the skins being costumes. If you want to believe that Symmetra's skin is solely attributed to the character's personal choice to dress up as a westernized idea of what a vampire looks like, and that her skin is the result of makeup with this idea in mind, there's really nothing I can do to stop you. The reason I can't get behind this, is that I can't imagine that Symmetra, perfectionist that she is, would go through all the effort of giving her skin such a pale appearance attributed to this idea of a westernized vampire, and not include fangs. Is it possible that I'm just splitting hairs? Sure! But I can't imagine her being dedicated enough to create herself to look like a "classic" vampire if she wasn't going to add one of the most iconic pieces, or worse-forgot to. As kind of an added on-thing, and something based entirely in my own opinion, one of the main reasons that "it's her costume don't get mad about it" is that these skins don't seem like just costumes. Specifically with Hanzo's skin, and his dragon tattoo being replaced with one of an Oni, one could argue that if it were just his costume, he could have concealed his original tattoo with makeup and had just had someone paint the Oni or something. But I just cannot imagine Hanzo, even with the fan-added choice of teeth and horns through special effect prosthetics, going through the effort of using makeup to cover up his dragon tattoo at all. Not when the dragons are so closely and inherently tied to both his family name and who he is. His dragons come to form down the length of the tattoo along his arm when he draws his bow to summon them, so I absolutely cannot picture him covering up such an essential part of who he is for the sake of a Halloween costume. And I cannot see Symmetra forgoing her own culture's folklore in exchange for dressing in a cheap, incomplete imitation of a lazy Halloween costume idea in the first place.
blakekathryn
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