“Mei-gyver”, why Blizzard’s new short is so powerful
Blizzard takes us deeper into Mei’s origin story.
The excitement is real! Blizzard has released a new Overwatch animated short, and it’s adorable. I’m a big fan of the game, what with its accessible gameplay and diverse group of characters, but I am a sucker for their shorts. This time was no different, Blizzard delivered another brilliant piece of animation, covering Mei’s origin story and the creation of her endothermic blaster.
At ten minutes, it’s our longest short to date (oxymoron). And it is gorgeous, from its use of a blue color palette to hitting the audience with waves of emotional plunges and uplifts, I was in tears by the end of it.
Mei’s character has thus far been defined by her positive and upbeat disposition, mainly through her character design and voice lines in the Overwatch game. While she is cheery in appearance, she is just as deadly in battle, especially when she combines her endothermic blaster with icicle and blows your brains out.
However, we get a new layer to her character in this short, and it has to do with what I assume is the first prototype of her blaster. Mei is an optimistic character, this has already been established. When faced with the deaths of her teammates and complete isolation in a station abandoned by the outside World, she does not despair. Instead, she analyzes the situation calmly and Mei-gyvers a way to fix the satellite tower in order to receive a message broadcast on the Overwatch emergency line. A message that indicates someone, Winston, knows that Ecopoint Antarctica still exists.
By gathering equipment, tools and appliances from around the station, she engineers the preliminary model of her blaster.
Mei is resourceful and relentless.
We are offered hints of her enterprising character in the first minute of the short, when she narrates into a handheld recorder how she will leave the sensors on while she and her team hibernate in order to have a new data set to examine when she wakes up. This made me fall in love with her even more! Her curiosity and optimism combine to make such a forward-thinking character, and I absolutely adore her for it. Her dire situation and response to it gave me a lot of Andy Weir’s The Martian vibes. Like Mark Watney who finds himself stranded on Mars, Mei uses the power of science to solve her problems. Neil deGrasse Tyson said it best in his tweets about The Martian when he described it as a story “where you learn all the ways that being scientifically literate can save your life.” That is exactly what we get from Mei, an example of how far one can go with some optimism, resourcefulness, a dash of luck and a whole lot of scientific literacy.
But of course, the actual science behind her endothermic blaster is something that belongs in the realm of suspension of disbelief.
Mei is an excellent example of diversity in the World of story telling and video game narratives. Her curves ground the character in a realistic and diverse depiction of the female body, but also reaffirms the positivity of this representation by making her character not only optimistic and cheerful, but scientifically literate and resourceful. She is driven and determined, and makes the World of Overwatch all the better for it.
