Fareeha Andersen, the voice actor behind Anran, Overwatch’s newest fire-wielding hero, has thrown her support behind an ongoing fan movement begging Blizzard to redesign her character.
If you open the comments section of just about any Overwatch social media post, you’ll likely see dozens if not hundreds of fans spamming comparison images of Anran as she appears in the game versus how she looked in the animated trailer for Wuyang, her younger brother and a support hero added to the game last year. The difference is pretty stark, with her original design having sharper features and a longer nose.
The Anran that showed up in Overwatch itself looks pretty different, with a smaller nose, rounded face, and a distinct resemblance to previous heroes Kiriko and Juno. This has fans calling her another example of Overwatch’s “same face syndrome” in which characters, women especially, tend to all look alike.
Now that fans have gotten loud about it, Andersen has responded in a video that supports the fan movement, with her calling on Blizzard to make Anran look more like her original appearance.
“I got to mourn Anran between the design I had hoped for her and the design we ended up with,” Andersen says. “Because I think in her comic and the cinematic Elemental Kin, there was a precedent set by it. There was an unspoken promise that said, ‘We are going to challenge the beauty standards plaguing—ransacking—media these days,’ right? The ozempic-chic, the ‘contour your nose, you have no nose, the tiniest nose,’ and I think because of that precedence, people feel understandably let down.”
She continued, “Overwatch is a trailblazer at challenging that, right? Of trying to break those molds, trying to explore the bounds of what it means to be good, what it looks like to be heroic, and I think the result we got says something else. It says something that leaves a bad taste in our mouths. It’s not the bold, optimistic swing that we know Overwatch to make.”
Andersen says that she has shared the community’s concerns with the Blizzard team, and she hopes that they see and hear all of the feedback. She encourages others to do so as well with “boldness and kindness.” We’ve reached out to Blizzard for comment on the situation and will update the story if we hear back.
Given the massive response (seriously, you can’t look at pretty much any of Overwatch’s social media channels without seeing people spamming the comments about this), I would be surprised if Blizzard doesn’t make some changes, but it’s probably not going to be overnight. Anran is currently playable as part of a testing phase before her proper launch tomorrow, February 10, alongside four other heroes as part of the game’s next season.
There isn’t time for Blizzard to update her look before she’s in the game but maybe in a future patch we’ll see some of those more distinct features come back.
