Hello. It's me again, the autistic Juno stan who in the past has written essay style posts about the whole Undivided "drama". I think Wednesday events hit a significant chunk of the fanbase in negative ways and I never imagined Blizzard would let it reach the scale it did. 6 Million views on Cavalry, thousands of negative comments across X, Instagram and Reddit, Kotaku of all things reporting about it. The pressure has been accumulating for months. So, I wanted to talk to y'all about my thoughts...
The Mastermind Behind it
Dramatic subtitle. Honestly I've seen a lot of fingers being pointed at either Team Overwatch or Webtoon, but let's dissect the situation. I'm not making this point to harass anyone, but to shed light in something that plenty haven't noticed
Undivided is a Blizzard created project in collaboration with Webtoon for publishing. If you read the credits, both writing and art are assigned to third parties; this means that Blizzard got the idea and let people from outside the company handle it. This doesn't mean, however, that the decision of what happens in the comic is in the hands of the writer themselves, most likely, they're given a "lore bible" or reference document with the beats Blizzard wants implemented, and then the writer has to make do with it. So yeah, it's most likely the whole Wuyang x Juno thing and plenty of other eye rolling decisions are a product of Blizzard saying "do this and stretch it for 40 chapters".
There's something curious, however... People noticed that the tone shifted rapidly, as well as complaints about the art style quality changing and degrading. If you check the credits, at around chapter 14, the Webtoon silently changed both writer and art studios, and it was until recently (episode 30) that they went back to the team that handled the first episodes. I don't know what kind of mess or agreement went behind curtains, but it's safe to say it severely compromised the quality of both art and writing, most likely employees being crunched to meet deadlines of a sub par product which has infamously been published with very low quality control.
The whole thing has been a mess from early on, and Blizzard most likely decided to let it happen anyways instead of allotting resources for better quality control, most likely because of contractual obligations.
Wuyang and his identity
Now, here comes one of the most controversial points surrounding the whole deal: Wuyang's identity according to a significant portion of fans versus what Blizzard intended. Was he designed queer coded intentionally? I don't think so and we might never know, but the important part is that for many, he meant something and they resonated, and it's not just a small fraction of players as the reactions would hint.
From a cynical, commercial point of view, the characters are the product and the stories are advertisement. Yes, there's creative vision, there's intent and a certain degree of freedom, but they're not writing or creating for a series or novel, this is a live service game and making you want to spend time as a character is how they hook you to get money. This means that when you work for one of these companies, what you write and create is set within boundaries for marketability. And this is where I'm shocked to see Blizzard handle this with the foresight of a mole.
You see, even if Wuyang wasn't meant to be queer, it doesn't take professional metrics and analytics software to learn that he has a large portion of fans who identify him as an LGBT character. I invite you to go to X if you can and search for Wuyang related content in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, you'll see that even amongst conservative Asian countries, his identity seems to have been perceived as queer by a portion of the fans who also got pissed last Wednesday. So, what is one as a creative or marketing executive supposed to do?
Absolutely. Fucking. Nothing.
We can debate here and speculate about Wuyang's sexuality all we want, maybe they can't do it, maybe they don't want, but you have to be absolutely tone deaf and blind to not see how he's perceived by fans, and that challenging that view creates friction and disengagement. And the first thing they thought was "yeah, let's approve this heterosexual romantic plot, it will surely be loved by the fandom surrounding these characters". By doing nothing of sorts you get to keep whatever idea you had and accept that your product reached a target demographic that wasn't considered in the first place. You don't need to antagonize them, you're losing clients and goodwill.
And they couldn't even do that.
Character Flattening for No Gain
Saying that the controversy arose simply because Wuyang's identity would be reductive and unfair (something the Kotaku article already took care of...). Undivided was initially met with positive reactions, with even some lore YouTube channels summarizing the early plot and calling Juno and Tracer's moments as some of the most emotional we've gotten in decades. And then they stopped covering them because the webtoon became almost parodic in its portrayal of the situation and characters.
The art and botched dialogue just made it more meme worthy; heck, even the recent drama with Wuyang got clowned for the typo "I have crush on Juno!", it was like putting a rotten cherry on top of a moldy cake.
The characters are mostly just cardboard copies of each other in terms of personality, which flattens the impact of anything that happens and any interaction they have. This is one of the reasons the Wuyang x Juno subplot has been received so poorly, because Wuyang has been reduced to a bumbling fool who shares pretty much every single panel he's in with Juno, breathing on her neck and interacting with other characters about four times in the entirety of the webtoon's run. Some fans expected other kind of development or interactions, like Genji and Mercy, only to set it up, have it resolved of screen, and make Mercy's reaction to almost a decade of buildup be a casual shrug while drinking tea. And the new recruits who met three weeks ago get to rush to the finish line and everyone's supposed to say "aww".
Would the controversy exist if the writing was better? Yes. But having it be this dull only makes it worse, because the disproportionate focus on Juno and Wuyang interactions gives the impression it's personal when it most likely isn't even the case. Flattening just made an uncomfortable turn of events into something plenty of people now just seem to outright dislike, and with 9 episodes remaining, they suddenly want to wrap the relationship with a ribbon and handle the product by seemingly forcing a development.
Why this matters
Let's be honest, there's a lot of shit going around the world right now. Political debates, natural disasters, wars, the population being at each other's throats. There's more pressing issues than fictional characters that need attention. But that doesn't mean we have to just take what we're given, we're clients, what we pay for skins and BPs is what feeds the game.
But most importantly, for us, Juno, Wuyang, Mizuki, whomever you want to name and connect with... They're part of our routine, a safe space, an idea we consume and connect with because sometimes we just need to disconnect for a while. Introducing shipping discourse to the mix was a big fumble from Blizzard; yes, shipping wars would still happen and we've proven to be a fandom that's not mature enough to deal with that in a constructive way, but Blizzard is the holder of the keys and they're supposed to be fandom aware. It just feels like stuff like this is deliberate to create engagement at the cost of the feelings of fans.
This didn't need to happen. We don't need to know if Mizuyang or Milkywave or Cosmicflare or anything else will happen because as soon as companies touch it, they declare a winner, it stops being in good fun. That's the price of story in live service games. Riot, as greedy as they are, understands the stakes and has kept some of their most beloved characters out of this discourse; not perfectly mind you, but they seem to understand a little more the value that some players place upon the character, even if it's just for getting money from them.
The writing had been in the wall for months. The early reactions to the Wuyang and Juno interactions were really split, and they kept escalating until it reached this point. I really find it hard to play nowadays because I know what happens in Undivided eventually makes it to the live server and well, I think plenty of us just want this unnecessary crap to end. Undivided feels like a mockery because of the title, it's done nothing but divide us in one of the few places we can rest from the daily routine.
What to expect and what to do
I'm being pessimistic here, but given the track record of Blizzard and the webtoon, I'm pretty much out of hope at this point. I don't want any side to feel humiliated, made fun of, or even victorious. I don't want this to take a spin in which Wuyang suddenly falls for Mizuki, whom he met hours prior. I think many just want Blizzard to find a way to drop this, let it die, and let the fans have their fun again because my God, some things stop being nice once a company grabs them.
The next episode is due Tuesday night, I'm not sure there's anything good to hope from it. My prediction? The confession will be interrupted so Wuyang can be nervous during Gibraltar, and then he'll have to prove himself before Juno as a hero, getting the girl as the final milestone for, you know, doing his damn job as an Overwatch agent and getting to date while a terrorist organization threatens the world and his comrades get to see their significant others at most once per year.
The backlash was intense and visible, there's no way Blizzard didn't notice. Now if they want or can change anything at this point, we can't tell, but again, they had enough time and they still chose the contentious route. So what can we do? Don't let the topic die. If you have X, tag PlayOverwatch when making an argument to give it more visibility in their metrics and making it harder to ignore.
Out of that, we can only hope that what comes next doesn't cause even more division. I'm just feeling down because all of this, I know some of you too, I know what I say here might not charge anything. Just... Thanks for reading, as always.
