#actiblizzwalkout

For the time being my response has will be to no longer monetarily support the company in any way, while still engaging in the fandom. I’m not saying this is the correct way to go about it, nor am I saying this is necessarily the stance I will stand by forever, but for now that’s what I’ll be doing, and for transparency’s sake I want to explain my reasoning for it here.

My reason here is two-pronged: first, there is the - I think - main point that I feel like a full on, publicly performed boycott of blizzard might incorrectly signal that this is a problem with this particular company and their properties. It’s not. Blizzard is grossly mishandling the situation and I cannot repeat enough how much I do not support them, but this is still an issue of an entire industry that is ripe with abuse and bigotry. We cannot meaningfully change this culture by freezing out the company currently being exposed and let the rest of the industry go unexamined: I’d rather engage critically with this property than disengage fully from the conversation

Secondly, my feelings on overwatch are complicated by the fact it isn’t the product of a single, now-revealed-to-be-bigoted creator, but of a huge team of developers, some of who were the victims of abuse. I have before, at length, discussed the issues in overwatch (how it’s military propaganda, how the characters of color are sometimes flattened and their culture fetishized uncomfortably, the white washing and so on), but these aren’t - necessarily - directly related to the bigotry of the higher ups. I’d rather engage critically and remain vigilant about the icky themes and undertones present in the text than throw the whole thing away, because among those things are also the hard work, talent, passion and brilliant writing of the actual people who were victimized

I realize this is incredibly personal and it will vary greatly where different people draw the lines for how they want to engage in the media they’ve consumed, but for me, these are the factors that contribute to my stance: to firmly reject Blizzard as a company, keep supporting the workers in every strike (and hopefully unionizing) endeavor, stay vigilant about enforcing an open, non-bigoted space in any and all spaces that has to do with gaming, while still engaging in fan produced content

In general, I encourage anyone who is a fan of any Blizzard property to do what feels right. Keep the victims at the front of your mind always, and engage critically always, but please be compassionate both to yourself and the people around you. Nothing is comparable to what the actual women went through, but I sympathize deeply with any fan who finds this shocking, horrifying or even possibly (re)traumatizing to read about a work of fiction you enjoyed. My inbox is always open to anyone wanting to talk, and I encourage you to seek profesional help if you’re able and this is impacting you negatively

As a last, and a lot less consequential note, I have seen already in a couple posts around the fandom, posts trying to (however playfully) erase the undeniable fact that the character McCree is named after somebody who is - at the very least - indifferent to misogyny existing in his space. In my eyes this position is indefensible and comes from a place of (however well intentioned) ignorance and dangerous unwillingness to face the facts about the situation. I’m still undecided on wether i think the character should be fully renamed, but I think that engaging in ‘Miku gave him that name uwu’ types of jokes is distasteful and disrespectful to the women who had to see a beloved character they worked hard to realize, be named after a man who hurt them. I know this is a small point and again, one whose importance pales next to talking about the victims and where to go from here in the gaming industry as a whole, but I’ve already seen discussions about this character and their name propping up a lot of places and I wanted to make my stance 100% clear to avoid it becoming a potentially focus-stealing conversation later on

We cannot sweep this under the rug, we cannot deny the abuse that produced a product we ended up loving. I don’t want to police how anyone reacts but please, please, please do not try to erase or minimize the hurt caused or suffered - and do not try to paint any sort of fandom activity as comparable to activism.