When Overwatch’s latest comic, Searching, released yesterday, Blizzard introduced a new character to Overwatch’s lore: Lynx Seventeen.
Seventeen is an omnic hacker that helps Zarya search for Sombra. But that’s not all: Seventeen is also Overwatch’s first gender neutral character. “In the Searching comic, Lynx Seventeen is gender neutral,” said Overwatch lead writer Michael Chu. “Lynx would prefer you refer to them with ‘they/them.'”
Seventeen’s gender is never explicitly mentioned in the comic. Instead, Zarya calls Seventeen “it,” while others simply refer to them as a robot or a hacker.
Tracer became Overwatch’s first queer character when Blizzard introduced her girlfriend, Emily, in a 12-page digital comic called Reflections. The developer has suggested in the past that there are multiple queer characters.
Related: Zarya learns to live with omnics in new Overwatch comic, Searching
“It’s a decision that we make when we’re developing these heroes early on,” Chu said in November. “We want these stories about characters’ relationships—and not just romantic, but familial relationships and stuff like that—to come out in the course of stories that we feel really do them justice.”
Overwatch continues to be an inclusive space for players, at least with regard to lore, in an otherwise traditional medium. Chu’s tweet has garnered massive response from fans excited to see non-binary representation in the game’s lore.
