The Ladies of Overwatch

It's no secret for those who dwelve in our Discord chat that I'm a big videogame player (actually I'm a big player of many kind of games, sue me) and I'm kind of sursprised that none so far seemed to consider the characters from Overwatch within the bouduaries of our genre. Granted, none of them fit the amazon/kryptonian typecast that is often favored, but many of them are very much superhuman.
For those who don't know Overwatch is a first person shooter based on a new IP from Blizzard that can be accurately described as "cyberpunk superheroes".
Just for a sample here we got some of them.

Pharah (Fareeha Amari)


Pharah holds the distinction of being the only character in the game capable of true and sustained flight (for now at least, patch incoming). While she has no actual superpower, her power armor and military training makes her pretty much a one-woman-air-strike. In terms of personality Pharah is just one step below Vasquez from Aliens in terms of hard-assed military girl: she has a mission, she will finish it one way or another. In actual fact this is what she looks like on the outside, but a lot of her BG material was designed to show that she does actually care for other, she just fear that showing it would make her vulnerable.

Sombra (Real name unknown)


"Ms hacker supreme", Sombra's IT skills are so good to border the supernatural. To put that into perspective: when she was barely 12 she was already able to hack into almost every computer in her native Mexico and by the age of 18 was able to uncover the traces of a global conspiracy that linked multiple organizations (including Overwatch itself). After this discovery she was hit hard by the Conspiracy agents, but survived and was able to orchestrate the deletion of all the data regarding her real identity from a hospital bed, while a surgeon worked to rebuild parts of her brain with a wi-fi interface.
In short there's nothing she can't hack, including other people, she can turn invisible and create lifelike holograms able to interact with the rest of world to a limited degree.

Tracer (Lena Oxton)


The mascot of the game, Tracer is former test pilot that was caught in a freak accident while piloting a jet with an experimental teleport system. As a result she has become a temporal anomaly: super-fast, able to rewind time - including her own wounds - in short bursts and to run over water or up walls. She's the most clearly superhuman character in the game but, true to the cyberpunk-ish vibe of the setting, this comes at a price: without a piece of technology to stabilize her, Tracer start to shift in and out of the time stream. In spite of this she remains - almost annoyingly - positive, friendly and adorably crazy.

anterion wrote: A bit surprised that the list did not include Zarya .. or as some people call her: Team Fortress' Heavy big sister

I'm planning to add her tomorrow.

Continuing with the defensive heroes.

Widowmaker (Amélie Lacroix, née Guillard)


Widowmaker was a world famous ballerina and the wife of an Overwatch agent, who was kidnapped by the terrorist group Talon and received a manciarian candidate style brainwashing. After her rescue she lay low for a while until she killed her husband and disappeared. Years later she resurfaced as genetically engineered killer for Talon. Beside her genetic modification that lower her body temperature and breathing to something almost imperceptible, Widowmaker is arguably the greatest - or second greatest, opinions tend to vary - sniper, able to square off against opponents with superhuman powers with relative ease . As a result of her brainwashing, she seem terribly detached from her emotions, a cold and calculating killing machine feeling no guilt or remorse mixed with a domineering and flirtatious cold-blooded predator. In spite of these claims bits and pieces of her original personality still resurface - like giving a curtsy after certain shots - although her reactions seem to be completly scrambled, to the point of laughing when she feels pain or feeling sexual pleasure in killing.

Mei (Mei-Ling Zhou)


Before the fall of Overwatch Mei was a climatologist and part of the scientific branch of the organization, studying the effectsof climates in the Antartic. Alongside the rest of her team she underwent an experimental cryosleep treatment that should have woke them up in a years and instead lasted almost a decade. when she woke up Mei discovered that she was the only survivor and the station was wrecked. In spite of these difficulties she endured and built a cryo-gun (in the vein of Mr Freeze and Captain Cold) and used it to repair some of the damaged structures. She succeded, but only discovered that after 9 years the world has gone down the drain and Overwatch was disbanded, but she didn't lose hope and decided to set off on her own. Just to put things into perspective, Mei was able to return to civilization from the middle of the Antartic using only her wits and ingenuity , if that's not superhuman I don't know what is. While she share a sort of undying optimism with Tracer, Mei is much slower and more constant. Tracer is pretty much a ball of crazy entusiasm rebounding everywhere, Mei is more like a glacier: slow, steady but unrelenting.

(PS: in spite of a billion tons of fanmade material stating the opposite, Mei isn't fat, she's chubby for sure, but wearing layer on insulating clothes all the time makes her much bigger than she really is)

I've got nothing

One of the most interesting elements about Overwatch design is that out of six tank heroes (i.e. big character able to take ungodly amounts of damage) currently in the game we got three girls. Granted, Orisa is a robot, but she has a definite female personality set-up.

D.Va (Hana Song)


The youngest character in the game (barely 19), D.Va was a professional e-sport player that was recruited to pilot the new generation of mechas fielded by the Korean army. The reason behind it was that no one else had reaction times fast enough to handle the metric crapton of informations from the HUD while manuvering the unit with enough agility at the same time. While most of her abilities comes from the mecha, D.Va isn't exactly in bad shape and even on foot is good shot and pretty fast on her feet. Similar to Tracer, she's very optimistic, but also extremely cocky and annoying, showcasing a very pro-gamer attitude. She enjoy a celebrity status and has been the lead actress in a movie.

Orisa


As I said above Orisa might not be considered female, since she's a robot. Built from the scartches of several OR-15 security robots, she was reprogrammed to act as protector of the people of Numbani after a series of anti-robotic terrorist attacks. Her "creator/mentor" is Efi Oladele -- a 11 years old girl-genius -- who pretty much tried her best to make Orisa into a walking incarnation of Mother-Earth: motherly, compassionate and very defensive, albeit still inexperienced (she's barely a few months old) and prone to overreacting.

Zarya (Aleksandra Zaryanova; Александра Зарянова)


Hailed as "the strongest woman in the world", Zarya left a stellar career in weight lifting to enlist with the Russian Army and defend the Siberian border during the Omnics Crisis. Her weapon of choice is a particle cannon that is normally used as an emplacement weapon. Just to reiterate, she use a 60 Kg guns with same ease a normal soldier operates a 3.5 kg rifle, amking her potentially 15-20 times stronger than a normal person. According to some references she even fought hand to hand with some combat omnincs and won. As far as personality goes, Zarya is incredibly confident in her own abilities, to the point of recklessness, very prone to bragging and yet very respectful of others' achievements. She also have a thing for making jokes about her guns (every possible pun intended). In many ways she seem to be a stereotypical '80s Russian vibe.

TheOne25 wrote: I've actually been watching Overwatch on GINX Esports TV yet I've never played the game before:P

It would be interesting to write a story around Tracer or even all the female characters there:)

Well, the running theory behind Mercy's youthful appearance is she's been zapping herself with a tissue regenerator almost continuously for 10+ years. If that isn't a set up for a uberfying metamorphosis, I don't know what is...

Finally we came to the support heroes of Overwatch the category were -- sadly -- most games tend to relegate female characters.

Ana (Ana Amari)


Pharah's mother, Ana is the only possible opponent to Widowmaker for the title of world's greatest sniper. One of the founding members of Overwatch, she was already the most decorated sniper in the Egyptian army with a monster kill record. During one of the late operations before the destruction of Overwatch she was counter-sniped by Widowmaker and lost her bionic right eye and was presumed dead. Years later she resurfaced under the alias of Shrike pursuing a one-woman-war against Talon and, in spite of being 60 years old, she's still incredibly lethal. Ana's weapon of choice is a rifle that fires darts filled with various chemicals based on Mercy's researches that allow her to damage opponents and heal her allies. In terms of personality she has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and is very caring, convinced that nothing is more important than protecting her loved ones. While she would never admit it, she's probably very proud of her daughter, even if she actively tried to descourage her from following inher footsteps.

Mercy (Angela Ziegler)


A true and tried medical prodigy, Mercy was a late addition to the original Overwatch, but quickly became their medical officier. During her studies she developed numerous application for nanomachine based healing. She also developed the valkyrie rapid response suit, allowing her to take all her discoveries to the battlefield. Mercy is pretty much an entire surgery unit in and of herself, her nanobots are so advanced that they can even resurrect the recently dead and it's heavily implied that she dosed herself with them effectively stopping her aging process. As her codename implies, Mercy is a stauch pacifist and while, she collaborated with Overwatch, she believes that the world is better without so many gun-tooting people around.

Symmetra (Satya Vaswani)


Born in poverty in India, Symmetra was scouted out by the Vishkar corporation as a promising candidate for their light-bending architect project: a revolutionary technique that used hard-light holograms to create structures and devices apparently out of nowhere. Symmetra turned out to be a natural, albeit extremely unconventional, as she used dancing motions to shape the light instead of more tried and true techniques. Her skills were so exceptional that the corporation used her not for her intended role, but also as a covert agent to sabotage their competitors by providign her access to a unique weaponized version of their technology. The true key to Symmetra's abilities comes from the fact that she's on the autistic spectrum: she's very much a control freak, obsessed with order and believes that freedom does more harm than good, all of this allows her to superimpose her own vision upon reality with perfect clarity and so shape incredibly precise constructs that none of her colleague can match. In short Symmetra is pretty much a Green Lantern in terms of powers and abilities, but with a really mean streak inside.