#lenaperseveranceoxton

[lenaperseveranceoxton]

Cheers, love! It's time to save the world.

About Me

I'm Kushion55!

This is a self-indulgent secondary blog for all things Lena “Tracer” Oxton. I’ll post or reblog anything from character analyses and memes to fan art and fan fiction, and I’ll sometimes rant about lore inconsistencies or fan interpretations, so long as it ties into Tracer. Emily is the one exception to this rule, but they ARE frequently bought together. Do not separate. During the height of Overwatch’s popularity in 2016, I felt an inexplicable connection to Tracer that I have never experienced with any other fictional character. I guess some people might call it kinning? It all started when the “Alive” cinematic showed up in my YouTube recommendations. Several obsessive replays later, I would go on to watch many videos about the game itself, and I could not get Overwatch out of my head during my eighth-grade classes. Ugh, how time flies. Anyway, I think Tracer made past me realize I wasn’t allosexual or cisgender. Whoopsies! The open beta for Overwatch eventually rolled around on May 5th, and my brain chemistry has never recovered since.

Tags

My posts could be better sorted, but there is a method to the madness. They will always be tagged with "#overwatch", its mentioned offshoots (e.g. "#questwatch", "mirrorwatch"), and other related topics (e.g. "#lego" if I talk about the LEGO Tracer minifigure, "#fortnite" if I talk about wanting Tracer in Fortnite).

Then, I'll tag Tracer skins when applicable, followed by "#tracer" and "#lena oxton" (such as "#overwatch 2 #tracer #lena oxton" if the post contains their Overwatch 2 design).

I'll tag other relevant heroes with their in-game names and most used canon names afterward. If their in-game name includes their real name, I'll only tag them once. Soldier: 76 is tagged with both "#soldier: 76" and "#jack morrison" (as opposed to "#john francis morrison"), and Kiriko is tagged with "#kiriko kamori" (as opposed to "#kiriko yamagami").

Any relevant ships will be tagged after every hero relevant to the post is listed. "#lemon tea", which will always be tagged after Lena and Emily, is the one exception to this rule because they are very important.

Lastly, I'll sometimes tag posts into a category. The two most frequent tags of this type are "#meme" and "#art". I've never bothered to tag most of my posts similarly because I can never decide how to categorize them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Headcanons

I headcanon Lena as a sex-repulsed asexual lesbian. Emily is the only person they've ever had romantic feelings for, and they are soulmates. (I do not ship Lena with anyone else, and I am Widowtracer's #1 hater.)

I also headcanon that Lena falls somewhere under the non-binary umbrella and primarily uses they/them pronouns. I used to feel "wrong" for having such a headcanon, so my older posts might not reflect that.

[lovingoverwatchguys]

Oh man. Hey @lenaperseveranceoxton . I just noticed this in the new previews for the Overwatch Declassified book.

JACK FEELING GUILTY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO LENA. I'm gonna cry. I love them so much.

[lovingoverwatchguys]

Soldier 76 and Tracer [warning: long post]

A lot of this boils down to headcanon, because this storyline is clearly incomplete (and will probably be expanded upon later...hopefully) and also is often implied rather than said aloud, but I really do think Soldier and Tracer have the kind of father-daughter dynamic in canon, the same way people give him and Dva one in fanon.

At this point, I think it’s pretty well-established that Jack wants to look out for Lena’s safety. Consider what he says when you select her in the Uprising event:

(This line truly touches my cold, dead heart.)

And when he sees her get killed in-game: (I believe the ‘seeing teammate get killed’ voicelines were taken out of the game because there’s already so much audio clutter. Which is understandable, but a bummer, because there was so much relationship insight in them)

Plus the iconic:

A lot of the time, people have the idea of the new generation of Overwatch being the ‘kids’. The thing is, while someone like Cassidy might have been Overwatch’s kid, I’d say Lena was Jack’s kid in particular. He quickly takes a liking to her, and she admires him a lot. I think she even still would defend him. In the London Calling comic, despite her polite smile, she doesn’t seem to like the public perception of other Overwatch members:

When you look at someone like Angela, who clearly holds resentment or at least regret towards Overwatch’s fall, versus Lena, who seems to remember it fondly and hate how people perceive it...it’s clear to me that she still believes in it. And not just in the abstract sense of ‘likes its original ideas’; she believes in how it was, including the leadership.

Including the Strike Commander. 

As of right now, we haven’t gotten a ton of canon material regarding the relationships between the characters between the time of Retribution and the Zurich explosion. We have the Ana comic where she ‘dies’, but that doesn’t really go very deeply into anyone’s mindset other than Ana herself. The scraps we have at least seem to imply that Lena fit right into the Overwatch ‘family’. 

With that thought in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised if she formed a bond with the Strike Commander, even with the bubble he put himself in. She was certainly at least in touch with the people closer to him. She also seems to be quite familiar with Ana. 

I think Jack cares about Lena and has a specific protectiveness of her, moreso than the other ‘next generation’. Like some kind of father, if you will. (Also, the gay and lesbian thing might be a coincidence, but it’s still worth considering...)

Now, let’s talk about parallels. (Thank you to @lenaperseveranceoxton for inspiring parts of this post, echoing a lot of how I already felt, but giving a couple new details I hadn’t thought of, in this post )

There are a lot of things about Soldier 76 and Tracer that are similar, and I don’t think this was an accident or excessively basic characterization. And I think Jack picks up on this. (I’m unsure about if Lena does)

Now, I could talk about how he refers to her ‘potential’, but I think the biggest piece of direct evidence here is this part of the Uprising comic. Lena comes to try and convince Jack to put troops in London, despite the fact that many governments are very deadset on not doing that. (When you think about it, that probably does mean he put his surrogate daughter over the law...be gay do crimes moment.)

The thing that informs Jack to make the decision to send troops into London is this after his conversation with her: 

The implication I got was that Tracer, with all of her spirit and belief in doing what was right, reminded Jack of himself when he was younger and more idealistic. It reminded him what he originally created all of this for.

And while this is hopeful and all, Jack does eventually lose that type of idealism (well, to some extent, but I already went off about that elsewhere). Meanwhile, Lena is left with it.

Now, there’s also Vincent and Emily. Lena is still with Emily, and her decisions are often influenced by her caring for her girlfriend. Lena will do things to protect her and retain their happy relationship.

Meanwhile, Jack split with Vincent over his job. Unlike some people, I don’t think Jack is still in love with Vincent as a person; Vincent represents the life he gave up for the Commander position, and how sad he is about that. It’s not even about who Vincent is now. Who knows if they’d even still be together? What it’s about is living a life with a family and not constant stress. Something simpler.

So, Lena is someone who hasn’t given up that life yet. But she’s still young enough that she someday could.

But all of that just leads me to the speculation that Jack doesn’t want Lena to go into this, because he fears that she’ll end up the same way he did. The idealistic person getting their dreams crushed by the cruel world of politics. He wouldn’t want her to be part of new Overwatch, because he thinks she’s putting herself in danger.

You know what I think would be cool? If ultimately, that was what pulled him back into this whole fight once and for all. Obviously he has plenty of reasons to want to go back, but I’d love if what pushed him over the edge was protecting Lena and feeling responsible for keeping her from what he went through. It’d be a nice parallel, and a moment where he could show how much he genuinely does care. And most importantly, it would show that he still has something to learn from the younger people. I think that’d be a good growth moment for him, and could even be a nice theme for the audience.

Okay, maybe I also just want them to have cute moments together. Maybe I want him to try and take her fishing or some other lame old man thing. Is that so wrong?

In conclusion: sometimes a family is a gay old man, his lesbian daughter, and her cute girlfriend.