Harsher In Hindsight / Overwatch

• Zarya's backstory describes her as having had a promising future as a competitive weightlifter, and had the opportunity to join the Russian Olympics weightlifting team had she not chosen to defend her home from the Omnics. Blizzard's celebration of the 2016 Olympics even adds an Olympic-themed skin for Zarya. However, this all came amid news that many Russian Olympic teams, including the weightlifting team, had been banned from the competition due to evidence of doping among many of the athletes.
• The reveal of Katya Volskaya's secret can bring to mind the frequent misinformation commonly employed by leaders during the days of the Soviet Union and New Russia.
• Both Zarya and Torbjörn's anti-Omnic traits came off as a little over the top with how dead-set their hatred and distrust of anything Omnic is, even to the peaceful monk Zenyatta. But with The Last Bastion short, we get to see a small portion of what the Omnic Crisis actually consisted of, and the word "crisis" really doesn't begin to cover just how horrible and devastating it was. Suddenly, their staunch anti-Omnic rhetoric doesn't seem so hard to understand.
• Sombra is a villainous character of hispanic descent who is characterized as a former gang member who has now become a professional thief and hacker with enough skill to cause trouble for large entities. Mere days after she was announced in early November 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States amid swirling and persistent controversies that accused his campaign of fear-mongering by painting Mexican immigrants as criminals and gangsters and cooperating with foreign powers who influenced the election's outcome through the use of hacked materials.
• Alive is about the assassination of a peace advocate in England. Just a few months following its release, Jo Cox — known for being a vocal supporter of unity and peaceful resolution to tensions in the Middle East — was murdered by a far-right extremist in Birstall, making her the first Member of Parliament to be assassinated in over a quarter of a century.
• Uprising reveals that the assassination's aftermath isn't the first time Tracer has seen her home in flames, as her first mission as a field agent involved resolving a crisis in King's Row by rescuing hostages being held by omnic terrorists. Among the hostages is mentioned to be none other than Mondatta himself, meaning that her very first mission entailed her helping to save him and possibly getting to personally know him, all in the process of protecting her home. With all that in mind, her grief at the end of Alive now comes across as far more personal.
• Remember that amazing cinematic trailer where Tracer and Winston stopped Reaper and Widowmaker from stealing Doomfist's gauntlet? Their heroic efforts are rendered meaningless in Orisa's origin story since Doomfist himself attacked Numbani, and took back his gauntlet.
  • When you consider that Doomfist was able to retrieve his gauntlet and rejoin the conflict before any additional agents were confirmed to answer the recall, Tracer's comment about the world needing more heroes feels less like a pithy way to close the action and more like a sobering assessment of the world's current state.
• Winston's comment at the end of Reflections that he has a good feeling about the coming year now feels a bit presumptuous given the much more grim and melancholy tone the lore took in 2017, which involved Talon regaining one of its leaders, growing even stronger and undoing much of the heroes' progress while Overwatch's return kept its usual pace.
• Retribution reveals that Gabriel Reyes had very strong camaraderie with Gérard Lacroix, and he took his injuries at Talon's hands from the bombing of Blackwatch HQ very personally. Nowadays, as Reaper, he willingly works with the people who tried and eventually succeeded in killing him, often right alongside the man's wife who was tragically twisted into doing the deed, and he doesn't even seem to care. Either his experiences have left him far beyond the point of caring about anything anymore, or he has fallen even further than initially thought.
• D.Va is a fountain of memes regarding gamer culture, to the point the devs have nodded before to the 'Mountain Dew and Doritos' stereotype (from both properties' penchant for marketing toward gamers). Come Shooting Star, we see that D.Va and her assistant almost purely subsist on chips, soda, and ramen...because she is obsessively tinkering and repairing her MEKA out of fear of another attack, and the pressure of being the only MEKA pilot healthy enough to respond.
• Ana advising Reinhardt to not "charge in this time" in Uprising? Funny. Knowing that one time he did charge in recklessly caused the death of his mentor, the one who was initally asked to join Overwatch, and that he probably carries severe Survivor Guilt over that? Not so funny.
• One of Hal-Fred Glitchbot's randomly-played lines has him remark that Jesse McCree is "a terrible name for a cowboy". Come 2021, the Blizzard employee that McCree was named after got fired after allegations of sexual harassment, and Blizzard renamed him to Cole Cassidy in agreement.
• The popular fandom meme that Overwatch 2 was Vaporware that was never going to come out because the staff weren't really working on it became a lot less funny when a producer for the game stated that a lot of work had been done on Overwatch 2 but that no meaningful progress could be made because Bobby Kotick's constant Executive Meddling kept forcing them to cancel and throw out whatever they had.
• The entire plot of Overwatch, a once-beloved global organization gradually falling apart due to internal corruption, can feel eerily similar to Blizzard's own reputation drastically falling in the years after its release, as scandal after scandal came to light about the company until its name became synonymous with corporate greed to many players, and many members of the original Overwatch team left or got laid off, most notably Jeff Kaplan. Perhaps harshest of all, Overwatch 2, an arc about Overwatch coming back and redeeming itself in the eyes of world, ended up dealing the biggest blow to the game's reputation instead when Hero Mode was cancelled, resulting in overwhelming disappointment from the playerbase.

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