Bonus Features
A huge thank you to everyone who read this story--truly! Trying to remain faithful to such a beloved character, while filling in some of the knowledge gaps is quite daunting. I hope I succeeded and that you enjoyed the journey!
The story went through several drafts and looks quite different from when I started planning it out in my head a little under a year ago. However, there were some things from the very beginning that, surprisingly, survived all the cuts and edits throughout that whole time.
Therefore, I wanted to include a "bonus section" that explained some of the ideas displayed and why I did what I did and how the story ended up where it is today. I always loved when video games, movies, and books included stuff like this, so I'd like to continue the trend!
Some of the ideas presented will make more sense if you have played the game or read the lore, so if you haven't, you may be a bit lost on some things.
The story went through several drafts and looks quite different from when I started planning it out in my head a little under a year ago. However, there were some things from the very beginning that, surprisingly, survived all the cuts and edits throughout that whole time.
Therefore, I wanted to include a "bonus section" that explained some of the ideas displayed and why I did what I did and how the story ended up where it is today. I always loved when video games, movies, and books included stuff like this, so I'd like to continue the trend!
Some of the ideas presented will make more sense if you have played the game or read the lore, so if you haven't, you may be a bit lost on some things.
Why Overwatch?
- If you have played video games within the past several years, you have probably heard of Overwatch. It is an objective-based, first-person shooter. The game is quite fun and has been a great game to come home to after work and play for a bit. It has been wildly successful (between fans and critics alike) and its characters are already gaming icons, despite being fairly new.
- Team Objective-Based games have always been my preferred, instead of the typical "Deathmatch" games out there. So needless to say, Overwatch fit those expectations exactly! A friend of mine gifted the game to me Christmas of 2016, and I have put about three hundred hours across all game modes into the game (which still isn't much compared to some players, haha)!
- To say Overwatch lore has been lacking is a bit of an understatement. There is not much out there in terms of story--at all! The stories that have been told are mainly through 10-minute cinematics for specific heroes. These cinematics have been really fun and have told good stories in them. To someone who has written several short stories, the Overwatch universe seemed like a good place to "make my own cinematic," in a sense. I liked its characters, I liked the world Blizzard created, and I've always wanted to tell a "superhero" story. This seemed like my chance.
What is your Overwatch Rank and Main?
- I am currently 2645 in Competitive. I have never gotten into Diamond, though I have been close, with 2901. One day... Maybe...
- If you look at my profile (which is public), you would say I am a Mercy main (BIG shocker, I know!). However, I like to flex where I can (my profile may not show it, because Mercy was a must pick for several seasons). DPS heroes are probably my weakest, so I avoid those in ranked at the moment. However, my FAVORITE character is not Mercy...it is Ana. She is, in my opinion, the best made and most fun hero out of the entire game! Ana was not viable for a long time, so I am glad she is in the meta again.
Why Mercy?
- There were two characters who I instantly gravitated towards when I first started playing: Tracer and Mercy. Tracer was on the box, so I figured the company wouldn't put her on the box if she wasn't fun to play (I am a terrible Tracer, though). When it came to our beloved Mercy, as a Christian and as someone who naturally plays healers and support characters in other games like World of Warcraft, a healer who dresses as an angel was a perfect fit. She felt like she was specifically designed for someone like me!
- For a long time, she was my favorite go-to hero in the game. Though the time on my profile doesn't show it, I much preferred "Mass Resurrect" as an ultimate ability when compared to her new rework. I understand why they changed it, but I personally loved the "Game Theory" behind Mass Resurrect. No, I do not mean "Game Sense." I'm talking "Nash Equilibrium," scientific "Game Theory" (look it up). You have this a bit with other characters, but this type of style was originally at Mercy's core, and I just LOVED that. I do not like "Valkyrie" as an ultimate. I can't tell you how many times my team gets wiped despite me using it. I've seen several "play of the games" this season (Season 12) by someone on the other team where the person destroys us as I am using "Valkyrie" in the distance.
- If you do not know, Mercy has gone through a large rework and has been tweaked incessantly by Blizzard. I believe she has been nerfed about 13 times--in a row! In other words, Mercy has had it rough for a while in the game. To say she has gone through a bit of an identity crisis would be fairly accurate. It is this identity crisis that started giving rise to this story. Mercy (and the developers) are trying to figure out who she is and how best to represent her in the game. Being in such a crisis is very scary for the person going through it, so my tale naturally turned into a horror-esque story. How would a character like Mercy respond to such a crisis of faith? How would she respond if we were to plop her down in a horror setting? What would happen if Mercy visited a place like, say, Silent Hill? What are her biggest fears?
- The character is also a bit weird. Think about it. She doesn't have a ton of flaws (if any) in the game and she doesn't have much depth to her outside of her virtues. Per the lore, everything she basically touches turns to gold (such as becoming the Head Surgeon at an extremely young age). On top of that, SHE CALLS HERSELF 'MERCY!' This baffled me for a long time. Referring to herself as the embodiment of this virtue is a bit...presumptuous on her part, even if it was her call-sign (and was she the one that selected that call-sign?). In my view, this is either out of extreme arrogance or out of extreme humility. Eventually I decided, "Why not both?" What if we made it where she was arrogant and saw herself as righteous at the beginning and then turn it into humility by the end? But to do such a transformation, I came to the conclusion that I would have to completely and utterly break her (sorry, Mercy mains)!
- If you play Mercy in the game, there is a high chance that you will get chastised by your teammates. In your attempt to keep everyone healed, there will be some who question how you prioritize each member of the team--sometimes justifiably so! There's been some games where my priorities were wrong and I got chewed out by some teammates. When those happened, I regretted letting my team down. It was this feeling that spurred how I would go about breaking her. Her priorities would need to be skewed, and she would need to be chastised for it. Only then could she receive "mercy" and go about bearing the image of an angel.
- The title of the story was not always Image Bearer. Older titles included Sweet Mercy, Blessed are the Merciful, and the runner-up, Angelic Descent.
- Believe it or not, Mercy was actually my second choice when I decided on writing fan-fiction for Overwatch! The original story was about Sombra! NOTHING from the Sombra story made it into what you just read. It wasn't even a horror story (actually, more of a comedy/adventure). I still have the ideas and themes for Sombra, so I may still do it one of these days. We'll see...I hit writer's block with Sombra and started thinking of what I could do for other heroes. Mercy's tale just "clicked" for me and spurred me all the way to completion. I guess everything Mercy touches DOES go "gold," haha!...Sorry, my jokes are bad, which is probably why I had so much trouble with Sombra's story...
Why did you make Mercy sing?
- I know singing can be seen as incredibly "cheesy" and "unoriginal," but it felt right for the character. After all, song is very much a part of the Angelic Tradition. These celestial beings are often depicted as singing or with musical instruments in their hands. Plus, if you listen to Mercy's voice lines in the game, there is a melodic nature to how she speaks. I wanted to factor this into the story. Plus, I always felt that Mercy is the type of person who has a solution for everything. Even though I purposefully made Mercy feel like a failure, I still imagined that she had a solution (or a treatment, if you will) that would heal her grieving heart: a psalm.
- Her singing was one of the things that stayed from the initial planning all the way into the final product. I tried to take it out several times, worrying that everyone would see it and instantly write it off. However, every time I thought about removing it, logic favored leaving it in, as described above.
Isn't the Overwatch Swiss Base in Zurich?
- The Overwatch Wiki specifically states that the Swiss Base is "presumably" in Zurich. In order for this story to work, I needed it elsewhere, because I could not have Mercy return home at all until the start of the story. If the Swiss Base was in Zurich, and Mercy had worked there, then she never really left home, which kind of defeats what I was going for. That is why I moved it to Geneva.
- Believe me, I tried to keep it in Zurich. The explosion of the Swiss Base was actually more prominent in the story. In one of the drafts, it starts with the base exploding and Mercy running a rescue operation to try and find any survivors and figure out what happened. I then changed it to Mercy being elsewhere when the explosion happened and one of the chapters was her wandering through the rubble once she returned.
- One thing that I liked about having the base in Zurich was that I got to have a chapter where Mercy went underground to check on the prisons and see that Marcion had escaped. I felt like a lot of tension and horrific ambience would work here. This was especially true when the explosion just happened, because the way I pictured it, Mercy would go down to the basement (prison) and the building would still be on fire and some muffled screams could still be heard from outside. It would be like Mercy diving into the depths of Hell to uncover the mystery. However, this seemed a bit too dark, especially with the "Teen" rating I was going for.
Tell us a bit about Marcion.
- If you couldn't tell, Marcion is the opposite of Zenyatta. Blizzard often called Zenyatta "Cybermonk" when they were creating him (and before they chose his name). The developers decided to go the more Buddhist monk style for Zenyatta, but I thought it would be cool to have a character that was more of the martial art monk style, like Bruce Lee, or something. Plus, for me, the monsters most scary in horror stories were the ones who looked human but did not act human. So when you apply that idea to a martial artist--a person who conditioned and trained his or her body to its limit in order to turn it into a weapon--then you have an intimidating and "frightening" villain for Mercy to fight, in my opinion.
- The mirrored-glass blades on his wrists were originally something he gained later in the story. Basically, instead of Mercy interrogating Marcion in the prison, it was Jack Morrison, or Soldier: 76. The conversation originally ended with Morrison saying something like, "You want to see what humanity looks like? Then look in a mirror." Then later on in the hospital, Marcion would see himself in a mirror and punch it, sending shards everywhere. He would then take some of those shards and attach them to his wrists. I ended up cutting this, because it felt like too much setup for weapons that were going to be dismantled in the fight with Mercy anyway.
- He is named Marcion for several reasons. First off, Marcion was one of the first heretics declared by the Christian Church. Without getting too much into detail, his theology denounced the Old Testament, because he could not reconcile the Jewish God with Christ, saying that the God portrayed in the Old Testament is vengeful and angry, responding solely with judgment, and therefore, could not possibly be associated with Jesus Christ. In my story, I have an Omnic who denounces humans because he cannot reconcile the depravity of humanity with the mercy of humanity. This resolution makes the Omnic vengeful and angry, responding solely with judgment, and therefore, is the bitter enemy of Mercy. It felt fitting, in my opinion. Secondly, I originally wanted a name that could be associated with the famed Omnic, Maximilien (as perhaps a brother or a subordinate of Maximilien or something). This idea was eventually scrapped. And third, the name sounded a bit like Mercy, and given how he is a direct foil, it felt appropriate. Not gonna lie, it is also just a pretty cool name...
- Marcion and Junior were actually the same person in the very first draft! The initial plan was for another human to try and reach the heights of Mercy, but to have it go horribly wrong (in a very mad scientist kind-of-way). This ended up being scrapped, because it paints the picture of Mercy just being better than other humans, which was the complete opposite of the path I wanted to go down.
What is with the music and why did you choose the songs you did?
- I forget who said it, but there was a famous movie director who said something like, "If you don't want to be scared during a movie, cover your ears, not your eyes." Most of my experience with horror has been with movies or video games. I haven't read much horror, so trying to do a story where I didn't have sound and pictures was quite a challenge (but a welcome challenge, nonetheless). I listened to this music as I wrote, so I felt like it added to the atmosphere I tried to create. Because of that, I felt that including it with the story wouldn't hurt the experience.
- The songs selected were all from video games (minus the hymn Mercy sings), because I wanted the reader to feel like they were playing a video game with Mercy as the main character. This was not always the case, as some songs were originally from other places besides video games, such as anime (like Ao No Exorcist), Stellamara, or even from religious artists (like Taize or Divna Ljubojević).
- As a side note, I have played all of these video games except Reaper of Souls (but I have played Diablo 3), Bloodborne, and God of War (I do not have a Playstation 4 at the moment). Apparently, I am missing out on some great experiences.
- You'll notice that all the songs selected have a choral element to them. This was intentional, as it goes back to the idea that angels like to sing.
What else have I written?
- Counting this story, I have written four short stories (to which I count this one as), one long story, and one blog, all for fun. Currently, only the blog and one other short story are available to the public. Maybe someday, I'll post the other stuff.
- My other short story is called Repose, and it is in the "Recore" Universe. You do not have to know the lore to read the story. Recore is not a well-known intellectual property, but I saw a lot of potential in the world and wanted to write a thing to hopefully get it more attention. If you like old adventure games, then this throwback for the XBOX One will scratch that itch. It's not perfect, but I found it rather charming. Curiously, Repose is also about a medic...*shrug* Please visit recorefanfic.weebly.com/ to take a look. If you do, then thank you very much!
- If you would like to read the blog, please visit kingdomheartsdojo.weebly.com/. A word of caution though, the blog is about the interaction between Christianity and video games, so please be respectful if you decide to read it.
Any plans for future stories coming up? (said no one ever, haha)
- As of now, I have a project I am working on with the blog, but once that is done (hopefully by the end of this year), then we'll see where we feel like going.
- As I mentioned previously, I have the Sombra storyline I could do, which is basically all planned out now and can be written. I also have a McCree storyline that sounds fun, but I haven't done anything with it yet. That being said, I do not want to become just an Overwatch fan-fiction guy. I don't play the game THAT much.
- Before I switched gears to Overwatch, I made an outline for an Assassin's Creed fan-fiction set in the Sengoku period of Japan. A story in that setting has been highly requested by fans of the series and Ubisoft has been reluctant to make that game as of now. I did a research paper on this period in college and I think I know of a way to make it work (it's not the only way, mind you, and if Ubisoft ever did make a game set in Japan, I doubt they would take the route I want to go). Not only would I do the Historical setting, but I also have an outline for the Modern day stuff. No joke, the outline in total is 28 chapters long, which will probably get longer as I write. If I decide to do this, then it would be the biggest story I have ever done! That's a lot of work for very little gain...
- All this to say is we will see what I feel like. Again, I am an Accountant first and foremost. This is solely a hobby, and it needs to remain a hobby. I will update this portion if/when the time comes!