Here I'd like to discuss Anna's role in overwatch and her backstory. Unless you're an overwatch lore freak who scours the internet for anything that could be story driven you probably won't know anything about these characters. The fact that the game has no single player campaign hasn't stopped the fans from learning as much as possible about the lore of the characters as well as the world they inhabit. Let's get started.
Anna is an Egyptian sniper and one of the original founders of Overwatch. This includes Soldier 76, Reaper, Torbjorn, and Reinhardt. The sixth is a character named Liao who hasn't been revealed yet from Blizzard. This team ended the first Omnic Crisis (omnics are robot people) and saved the world. They paved the way for the larger Overwatch team that we know today.
In addition, we know that Anna is Pharah's mother. Fun fact: Pharah's real name is Fareeha Amari. Anna's origin story trailer focuses on Anna being motherly to Pharah and hoping she wouldn't follow in her footsteps by joining Overwatch for her own protection. Her digital comic legacy reveals that her driving force for combat was to protect others. Also, her fellow agents called her Mama Bear, reinforcing that motherly image.
All that aside, Anna is an ace sniper due to her cybernetic eye. Her robotic eye makes her vision six times greater than a normal human eye. At least she had a cybernetic eye until Widowmaker shot her straight down her scope, practically killing her. Now she has an eye patch where her aiming eye used to be and we don't know whether or not her one good eye is cybernetic.
As explained in the overwatch legacy comic, (all these can be found online btw by simple google searches) Anna was about to take out Widowmaker but hesitated to shoot-a deadly mistake that nearly cost her her life. The reason she hesitated is related to Widowmaker's backstory. Basically Widowmaker was the wife of an Overwatch agent, got kidnapped by evil baddies, got brainwashed into becoming an assassin, and was "rescued" by Overwatch before her conditioning kicked in. She killed her husband then returned back to the evil baddies. When Anna saw her she realized that she was the missing agent's wife and knew what happened. She paused and Widowmaker fired. Eye patch acquired.
Anna was saved but everyone thought she was dead. This is similar to Soldier 76, Reaper, Genji, this seems to be a trend from Blizzard. Anna figured the world would be better off if she was dead and expresses in the legacy comic that killing so many people took a toll on her. Now sixty years old, we're not exactly sure why she's come back to the forefront of overwatch. In her origin story she says that there are people who still need protection.
In conclusion, Anna is a cybernetic soldier who helped save the world and found the organization the game is named after. She's the mother of the cool rocket launching girl (Pharah), was almost killed by one of the most recognizable villains (Widowmaker), and is the fourth character to come back from the dead. I love the image of a motherly loving figure for a video game. That wasn't really a thing until now and its so radically different from what we see in first person shooter games.
Things are looking great for overwatch's post-launch heroes. Gotta hand it to Blizzard for delivering the goods. I look forward to finding out new information and reading the comics when I find the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment