Overwatch Cosplayer Gets Bullied Online for Being Black
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![Overwatch Cosplayer Gets Bullied Online for Being Black](https://nextshark.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/overwatch-1-e1497058206863.jpg?width=1536&auto_optimize=medium&quality=85)
By Khier Casino
The game Overwatch reached a milestone in April with more than 30 million registered players worldwide across PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
But for a video game that features characters and voice actors from different nationalities and ethnicities, the community is still rife with racism.
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Cosplayer Krissy Victory posted a YouTube video back in May, discussing what she goes through when dressing up as Overwatch’s Korean character, D.Va, and the comments she gets as a black cosplayer.
She told Now Loading’s Jay Vergara in an interview: “It kept going. It was a sea of n-words.”
But that was just the beginning.
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Victory went on:
“[Words like] ape, kill yourself. It got so out of hand it shell-shocked me. I would keep banning people off my pages. They would share the picture to insult me anyway, and there would be nothing I can do.”
She then received even more hate on Facebook following the interview, as you can see in the screenshots she shared on Twitter:
As Mic notes, black people will always be seen as the “black version” of a character that is being cosplayed, and viewed by fans as ruining their characters.
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The cosplay community can be just as toxic as the gaming community, with nerds of color getting so much shade for liking comics, etc. and it’s such a shame.
Victory, however, also talked about how the positive support from fans outweighed the negative remarks.
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“Through the cloud of hate there were people there telling to me push forward,” she said in her interview.
“If I just gave up and never did D.Va again, there wouldn’t have been as many D.Va cosplayers as there is now that were black. And by no means do I mean that in a narcissistic way. … It was so much second-guessing but I did D.Va anyway. I kept bringing her to cons, I kept taking photos and smiling. Mainly to piss off racists. And eventually I started seeing more D.Vas.”
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