Overwatch/YMMV

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: When she was first released, Brigitte was hated thanks to her fighting style being obnoxious to play around. She was way too good at healing, tanking, and attacking, so naturally she'd eventually get nerfed... only she was nerfed so hard that she became borderline unplayable due to her shield turning into a flimsy piece of cardboard and the loss of the extra armor provided by her health packs. That, and her already-existing struggles of fighting ranged opponents made her viability plummet to the point where even her biggest haters genuinely feel bad for her and criticize Blizzard for going way too far to overcorrect their mistakes.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Thanks to all the vagueness surrounding him, there are a lot of ways to interpret Reaper. Why did Gabriel Reyes join forces with Talon, when the Retribution event showed how much he hated them after Antonio killed dozens of young Overwatch agents in a terrorist attack? Does he hate Jack Morrison so much that he'd sell out to terrorists out of spite and jealousy? Did he come to agree with Talon's social darwinist philosophy and thinks that Overwatch is standing in its way? Given that a recent short story mentions him having a family, was he coerced into joining to protect them? Or is he like Widowmaker, a brainwashed puppet who had his life ruined and mind twisted against his will? There are even those who theorize that he's actually a full-on good guy working to sabotage Talon from the inside, and that all the Overwatch agents he's killed over the years were corrupt or evil in some way. Given that plot developments happen at a snail's pace, only time will tell when we'll finally find out just what his deal is.
• Badass Decay: After being introduced as a master hacker who effortlessly manipulated everyone around her, later comics would go on to make Sombra look way less competent than she should be. Reaper reveals in Masquerade that he's fully aware that Sombra's scheming behind his back and only lets her get away with it because she's valuable to Talon, and in Searching, Zarya effortlessly tracks her down and even learns her name in the process, something she supposedly erased all traces of in the past. Understandably, fans who fell in love with her for being a smooth master planner weren't exactly thrilled by Blizzard's handling of the character.
• Catharsis Factor: It always feels good to kill any of the Heroes when they're really being annoying, but special mention goes to Mei. Her freezing mechanics and tankiness make her an absolute pain in the ass to deal with, and fewer things are more frustrating than helplessly watching her corner you and slowly freeze you before killing you with an icicle to the face. So when you finally kill that annoying Mei who's been a menace to your team, even if it doesn't do much to change the flow of battle it's still satisfying as hell. Many fans would agree, because there's actually a subreddit dedicated to gifs of Mei dying in various ways.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: While there's a good selection of healers to choose from, Mercy's always been a favorite pick since day one. While her healing output and damage boosting can be outdone by a few of her fellow heroes, she has one key tool to keep her viable: Resurrection. In a game where dying is painful due to how long it takes to get back to fighting, being unable to undo deaths and keep players in the fight is insanely good. In the original release, Mercy could even reverse a team wipe with it! It eventually got demoted from her ultimate to a normal ability and nerfed to where it could only revive one player a pop, but it's just too good of an ability not to have.
• Demonic Spiders: In Junkenstein's Revenge, Zombardiers go from mildly annoying enemies to this when they all decide to exclusively target one specific player. Their grenades track your movement and do 30 damage, and since every character approved for Junkenstein's Revenge has a health pool ranging from 150 HP to 250, it adds up fast and can completely ruin the targeted player's flow when they're forced to run around and avoid their relentless volleys of pain. It's especially bad for Hanzo and Widowmaker, who as snipers need breathing room to aim if they want to get those valued headshots.
• Discredited Meme: While there was originally a lot of fans petitioning Blizzard to let big-name Overwatch fan Terry Crews voice Doomfist, that sentiment wore out its welcome when a lot of those same fans began to grow annoyed with it, saying that Doomfist should be voiced by someone who'd be able to put on a fitting performance for such a dangerous and serious character. While Terry's a fine actor in his own right, it's clear that people wanted him to voice Doomfist for the sake of memes more than anything. Once Doomfist was properly revealed and voiced to perfection by Sahr Ngaujah the sentiment practically died overnight, with Terry's praise for Sahr serving as the double tap.
  • Lots of fandom memes in general tend to annoy people as time goes on: Mercy mains being held back by stupid DPS players, Genjis being reckless and stupid, D.va being a mountain dew and dorito addict, Pharmercy in general...
• Draco in Leather Pants: A surprising amount of fans really like to downplay how malicious Moira is, and paint her as a truly neutral figure siding with Talon only because they were sympathetic to her research. While she was shafted by the scientific community, all signs point to it being her own damn fault for tossing ethics out the window. And aside from that, she's hardly a neutral player in Talon's hierarchy: she's one of the top dogs approving of and organizing their terrorist attacks in the first place! She also laughs evilly while slowly draining the life out of people in the actual game, and goes out of her way to make Mei cry to boot.
  • Yeah, they're funny, badass, and a joy to play as and watch, but if you listened to obsessive Junkrat and Roadhog fangirls you'd think that they were mischievous, misunderstood Australian hotties who are totes in love with each other instead of dangerous criminals with a love of mayhem and murder.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: From a lore standpoint, Junkrat and Roadhog don't bring much to the table in terms of plot progression. But thanks to their hilarious antics, the dynamic duo is among the most popular Overwatch characters period, right up there with more plot-important characters like Soldier 76, Reaper, and Doomfist.
  • Doomfist himself owes being playable to this: he was supposed to be a background character mentioned as a blurb in the game's background lore, but fans fell madly in love with the thought of a man being able to level entire buildings with a single punch. And so after more than a year later, the devs changed their mind and added Doomfist to the roster, and even though his playstyle's proven contentious he's been very well-received as far as his characterization and plot importance goes.
  • Maximilien's cool design and status as a truly evil Omnic made him a hit when he first appeared in the Masquerade comic. It helps that he looks good in a suit, and carries himself with dignity even when stabbing his comrades in the back.
  • Fio, the Blackwatch pilot who serves as your mission control in the Retribution event got a lot of fan attention with her snarky attitude and great back-and-forth with McCree and Reyes.
• Evil Is Cool: While Reaper really plays up his edginess to silly degrees, there's no denying that a dual shotgun-toting phantom in a skull mask who can teleport is still pretty badass. The same goes for the rest of Talon, whose most prominent members include a man who can level buildings with his enormous metal arm, a brilliant hacker and infiltration expert who has played entire corporations like a bunch of fiddles, and a mad scientist who can drain the life out of people and melt them with what's basically a Kamehameha wave.
• Evil Is Sexy: Widowmaker's got an excellent figure and a skintight jumpsuit that flatters it, a shapely rear, and a husky French accent on top of that. It's safe to say that the devs really had fun invoking this with her: one of her skins is even a bikini!
  • Moira also invokes this in a beautifully androgynous Tilda Swinton/David Bowie sort of way. Her outfits tend to be a lot more conservative, but her eerie beauty and dry wit make up for it and then some.
  • She's mostly attractive thanks to her playful attitude and sexy voice, but Sombra still gets quite a few costumes that show off her amazing bod.
  • For the ladies, there's the perpetually shirtless and muscular Doomfist, who's got charisma in spades. Maximilien has also earned this status among those who love robots due to his smooth voice and the fact that he looks sharp in a suit.
  • And for the non-Talon affiliated villains, there's the curvaceous Vishkar-affilited Symmetra as well as outlaw cowgirl Ashe. Neither are as morally bad as the ladies of Talon, but are still drop-dead gorgeous.
  • Even Mercy flirts with this trope during the Junkenstein's Revenge event, where she appears as the true power behind Dr. Junkenstein as a beautiful bombshell of a witch whose outfit shows off quite a bit of thigh. Her Devil and Imp skins are more conservative, but still very flattering.
• Fanon Discontinuity: It's by no means universal, but compared to Tracer's generally well-received reveal as a lesbian, Soldier 76 being revealed as gay caught a lot more flack from some parts of the fandom. Compared to the reveal of Tracer's sexuality, detractors found it a lot more forced due to its suspicious timing where it was revealed right when Blizzard was hit with a number of controversies and came off as a distraction tactic to earn good-boy points from the media. And as such those people prefer to ignore it, especially those who like female-centric Soldier 76 ships such as the classic Mercy76 pairing or the surprisingly common D.va76 pairing that appears in a lot of... well, dirtier animations.
  • Similarly, there are plenty of people who simply refer to Wrecking Ball as Hammond since that's the name they knew him as for a year before he made the cut as a playable character. It doesn't help that Hammond rolls off the tongue better.
• Goddamned Bats: Devastators in the Uprising event. They aren't much more dangerous than Null Sector's rank-and-file troops, but their bulky health pools and shields make them a slog to take down, and if you want to scrap them in a timely manner you'll often have to divert your attention from the easier-killed, but way more dangerous Slicers constantly trying to melt the payload.
• Moral Event Horizon: As far as McCree is concerned, Reyes crossed this by murdering Antonio in cold blood when they were supposed to extract him. Players might be willing to forgive him for giving a leader of a terrorist group responsible for mass murder what he deserved, so for us, there's Reyes' transformation into the murderous Reaper and betrayal of Overwatch, which led to him hunting down and murdering Overwatch agents out of what's hinted to be for little more than spite.
• Most Wonderful Sound: If you're the one responsible for it, "TEAM KILL!"
  • While a lot of voice lines get annoying when spammed, Doomfist's "AND THEY SAY- AND THEY SAY- AND THEY SAY CHIVALRY IS DEAD" is weirdly hilarious and a joy to hear.
• That One Boss: In the original release of the Retribution event, Talon's Heavy Assault Troopers were a pain in the ass. Even in the easiest difficulty their machinegun fire was powerful enough to melt you in seconds, and when you combine that with their tanky health pools and surprisingly fast charges that they close the distance with, the result is a lot of team wipes. Their attack power got hit hard with the nerf hammer just in time for the release of Storm Rising, but they still qualify as this in higher levels of difficulty.

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