Summary
Overwatch 2 Season 16is finally here, which meansa whole new batch of skins are on the way too, whether they are included in the battle pass, or added as shop items. For the most part, everything seems to be pretty fine - apart from the fact there’s a disappointingly small number of magical girl skins in the battle pass - but there is one skin that appears to be kicking up a stink.
Genji is getting a new skin this season, and it’s another one of those human-form skins that we all love so much. That wouldn’t be too bad if that was just the case though, but many are pointing out that Genji, a very obviously Japanese character, appears to have been turned into a white British man with his new skin.
Overwatch 2 Season 16 Skins Coming Under Fire For Whitewashing Genji
Pretty much every discussion about Season 16’s new skins has some form of comment from someone claiming that Genji has been whitewashed (including the tweet from OWCavalry above).A Reddit user called SirSwagAlotTheHungwas one of many to point out that Genji is looking a lot whiter than usual in his new skin, with another user called CobraSkillX joking that “his name is George now”.
There are loads of comments in these threads also mistaking Genji for Solider 76 thanks to his new skin, and the whitewashing accusation even go back as far as last month, when Genji’s skin leaked before the season started. In these comments, someone says that Blizzardturned Genji into a “western Disney prince”, alongside loads of other commentswondering exactly why Genji is now Caucasian.
What makes this even more bizarre is thatHanzo appears to have been given a matching skin, yet he doesn’t appear to have been whitewashed nearly as badly as Genji has. Then again,Blizzard has a history of releasing dodgy skins, so maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised.
