to what extent & in what sorts of situations do you think amĂŠlie / widowmaker still experiences feelings / emotions? and does her current self view such moments in a positive or negative light?
infĂŠrence °â ( headcanon ):Â
TO LAY THE GROUNDWORK, I think that the â ALIVE â short does a really good job at setting the tone in showing us just what Widowmaker feels these daysâ which is to say, itâs a bit skewed. Itâs an older cinematic and I am not going to do some deep dive into it, but to summarize, basically she laments that she was afraid of spiders because she was told they feel nothing at all but then she realizes ( as she adopts the spider motif for herself ) that at the moment of the kill they DO feel alive.Â
ANYWAY, Widow doesnât feel emotions in the range that normal humans do ( and as she tells Moira, â thatâs the point isnât it? â ), believing, as she was overhauled to believe, that emotions leave you vulnerable and vulnerability renders you useless. Many of her canon lines center around this factâ she doesnât feel alive unless she is killing, she doesnât feel the cold, emotions are pitiful etc. But clearly, if she feels alive at the moment of kill then she feels something, right? Itâs not all just emotionless shell of a woman? Yes but thatâs what I mean when I say those emotions are awry, and to get to how she feels now ( or even how she copes with how she feels now ), I think we have to look at how she got here to begin with and how emotions have surfaced and evolved since becoming Widowmaker and having AmĂŠlie stripped from her.Â
Widowmaker was reconditioned and re-purposed by Talon to create the perfect sniperâ heartbeat slowed, precision enhanced, emotional response dulled. Talonâs emotional manipulation of AmĂŠlie came long before she was The Widowmaker, in the form of activation of her sleeper agent status, ( after they abducted and returned herâ an oversight of Overwatch to not look into ) allowing them to use her as a tool to take out GĂŠrardâ her own husband whom, by all accounts, she loved and had a happy life with. She was able to then assault Ana Amari, who she also had a positive relationship with up until that point. Where am I going with this? Well⌠Widowmaker is still a human at her core, and through the basic hard reset of her emotions, functions, and moral compass, she has been redesigned both at the hands of Talon but also from the natural passage of time. A weapon with sentience will learn from itâs surroundings and that is EXACTLY what Widowmaker isâ a weapon with a human consciousness. From working exclusively with Talon the things she began to excite in were morbid and horrible acts of crime and assassination. She felt alive because she felt something and feeling something was addictingâ better than feeling nothing. She relished in that, headshot after headshot, the rush of having an emotion.Â
As terrible as it sounds, to relish in death and killing, it was her job and what she was exceptionally good at. Foe after foe would fall and she would FEEL:Â alive, accomplished, anything at all that proved she wasnât what she used to fear. It gave her power to know she COULD feel, and so she excelled within Talon to continue to be able to do so. But itâs like when you pop the cork, you know? You canât contain that forever and she began to tap into those residual memoriesâ a pinch here, a pinch there. Places that seemed familiar, names that sounded like she knew them, tastes she could place from a bygone era. It was morose, it was angering, and it was something she ABSOLUTELY kept to herself.Â
Fast forward to now, itâs clear that Widowmaker expresses some forms of emotion ranging from bloodthirst to lamentation. Things that crop up and trigger her memories are often regarded as somber, though fleeting. Those hints of AmĂŠlie that sometimes swell up in the back of her throat, that she has been conditioned to subdue, are pondered and put aside. There is guilt and anger that she canât exactly act onâ and with those things there is a protective and defensive shield enacted because what else can she do to preserve those things BUT protect them in the recesses of her conscience? Specifically AmĂŠlie, her life with GĂŠrardâ the topic of GĂŠrard or GĂŠrard as an entity on his ownâ she guards fiercely ( this can be seen in her interactions with Ana Amari in game dialogue ). And while I say she is defensive of AmĂŠlie I think itâs also very important to note that AmĂŠlie is still present, though quiet; a wisp, a haunting echo in an abandoned cathedralâ sheâs the ghost of Widowâs past life, ethereal in a sense, haunting her identity in ways that Widow both clings to and rejects simultaneously. Sometimes she doesnât feel worthy of AmĂŠlie and sometimes she wears the name like a badge or symbol that she isnât completely lost.Â
Widowmakerâs disdain for Moira, and for human interaction in general, go hand in hand with her â spider â personaâ a lone killer, in need of nothing and self sufficient. A by-product of how she was created, she has used this web of isolation to her benefit which has contributed greatly in her ability to hide her emotions, to repel them, to spin them up and revisit them when she finds convenient. She reacts to them how she deems appropriate and when she deems appropriate because itâs the only thing she CAN controlâ which is a part of why they are skewed in the first place: she feels nothing about feeling anything. Emotions make you vulnerable, put them away until itâs appropriate, if it ever is. Is that unhealthy? It sure is. But would she rather express herself as thoughts cross her mind? No, thatâs for people who end up like AmĂŠlie; and she wonât let anything happen to AmĂŠlie ever againâ thus is the burden of Widowmaker.  Â
