Home

from whence ye came

  Message

whats up?

  me

who is mineapple?

  art

self-explanatory

  commissions open!

want me to draw something for you?

  Art Blog

just the arty bits

 

D.Va: Headcanon I never realized wasn’t canon at all.

headcanonfiringrange:

So, it looks like I’ve done that thing again.  The thing where I have a headcanon so deeply ingrained that I’ve forgotten that it’s headcanon.

Case in point:  I watched a YouTube video critisizing D.Va, accusing her of being a Mary Sue.

The youtuber rants about D.Va’s personality being ridiculously saccharine and pandering.  Well, of course it is!  She’s streaming the entire time she’s in her mech, there’s millions of people watching her.  It’s called a stage persona.

I always assumed that the personality we see when playing D.Va is just the “D.Va Brand,” and her personality outside of the spotlight is very different.

The youtuber rants about how her backstory is too “fairytale,” and nothing bad has ever happened to her.

Wait, what?!

I always assumed that she was drafted into the MEKA program.  I assumed that Hana was terrified when she was notified that the government was going to pit her against the same robo-kaijuu that routinely wrecks her country, flattened her neighborhood and killed many of her family members the last time it surfaced.

Pretending that the life-and-death battles she’s sent out to fight are all “just a game” is how Hana copes with the stress and pressure.  If you die in a video game, you’ll just respawn… don’t worry about dying.  Just concentrate on completing the objective. 

Streaming her battles has a twofold purpose: one, it’s live footage of a kaijuu attack.  That’s valuable information for emergency crews, news stations, and evacuation efforts.

Two, it reinforces the “it’s okay, it’s just a game” coping method.  Spider-man doesn’t crack jokes to get people to laugh, and D.Va doesn’t insist on always speaking in a gamer’s lexicon for the sake of sounding clever.  They’re both stress responses that emotionally distance them from what’s really going on.

Something that stuck with me was the following dialogue between Widowmaker and D.Va:

WM: “This is no place for a child….”

D.Va: “Who are you calling a child?!”

Hana had a tone of not only offense during this exchange, but disbelief.  When you see as much death as she has - both in and out of her MEKA, the innocence of childhood has been decisively torn away.  Being a successful “pro gamer” doesn’t just mean winning in a virtual environment to Hana anymore.  Ever since she deliberately blurred the line between what’s virtual and what’s real, her battle cry of “I play to win!” has taken on a darker light.

It means that Hana intends on making it out of the fight alive.

She’s seen too many of her “co-op companions” get a permanent Game Over to consider any other outcome.