the fucking hamster

[solarbird]

The Fucking Hamster.

I've been letting this ruminate all day, hoping my initial incredibly negative reaction would smooth itself out, but... jfc... as someone in this in large part for the lore, as a fan writer/creator who has put hundreds if not thousands of hours into works trying to make sense of the Overwatch universe... I feel incredibly discouraged right now.

Four novel-length works. Two novella length. Two collections of short stories, all kind of AU-ish, sure, but building on the ideas and concepts and tone and drama and everything that's been thrown around. Two legit professional editors coming to me and saying, 'hey, you really ought to file the serial numbers off this shit and try to sell it, it's actually good,' and now...

...a bloody hamster in a battle hamsterball.

Shatters the tone. Really does. Shatters the world - I can stretch suspension of belief pretty fuckin' far, but I don't know how to paper over this.

I mean, introducing more light characters? Great! I'm all for it! But... for those of us doing all this fan creative stuff... goddamn, it feels like a "ha ha fuck you" from the creative team.

Yeah, I don't have to write it. I don't have to include it, and I most certainly won't be. But... christ.

Frankly, it's kind of embarrassing. "Oh, you're doing all this serious writing in that game world with the hamster? lol, why?"

It feels like lore fans are being given notice: "Yeah, all that backstory and tragedy? That's cool, but we'll break the world for a cheap gag, so for fuck's sake don't actually get invested in it."

And hey, it's their world. If that's how they want to play it, so be it.

But honestly, I really feel kind of kicked.

(Adopted and slightly expanded from tweets I made to PlayOverwatch)

Comments

[oh6]

I guess that's a pretty inescapable risk of fan fiction. You can insulate yourself by having most of your investment in the characters be your own invention, or write fan fiction for a canon that's pretty ridiculous to begin with (or both, as with the Gundam Wing fan fiction that James Nicoll reviewed, where I wondered why they didn't just write an original story until I got to the bit about Duo and Chang falling for each other) but you can't really choose your inspirations on that basis, or at all, usually.

[solarbird]

Yeah, all of this.

My total word output in fiction before this was like 25K? 27K? Lifetime. Now it's ten times that in the last year. I didn't think I'd ever write a novel. I've written four. In a year.

(Well, three, and most of another. Old Soldiers isn't finished, but what's finished is novel length already. It only has a few more chapters to go. But: Old Soldiers, The Armourer and the Living Weapon, Of Gods and Monsters: The Arc of Creation, Of Gods and Monsters, The Arc of Ascension. I have a fucking trilogy. What the fuck.)

I didn't turn that on on purpose. I really don't want to turn it off.

[sylverthorne]

It's not just you. I'm not a fan-ficcer, I just play the game, and I was really hoping it was a badly timed April Fools joke.

[solarbird]

So much this. But then it showed up on the PTR and I was like... </3

Sympathies.

[kathmandu]

It is hard when something you love gets sabotaged for somebody's amusement.

Re: Sympathies.

[solarbird]

Oh I don't think for a minute it was sabotage. I just think it's a really bad idea.

Apparently the dev team was severely divided about him too.