there'll be hell to pay.

Elizabeth Caledonia "Calamity" Ashe is a forty-one year old outlaw, thief, and gang leader for the Deadlock Rebels: a criminal organisation established in her youth that specialises in arms dealership operating out of the Deadlock Gorge in Arizona. She has a love of motorcycles and the finer things in life – including always getting her way. Born October 1st 2037, Ashe grew up on her family's estate in the fictional Bellerae, Texas, under the watchful eye of her omnic butler Bob, until her parents cut her off at age eighteen. In English Ashe is voiced by Jennifer Hale, which might be a very familiar name to you regarding other strong-minded women with a penchant for shooting things (cough, Commander Shepard).

Ashe was added to the Overwatch roster following her debut in the animated short Reunion. She was the first hero to come from related media rather than through internal development: initially, Ashe was conceptualised as someone Cassidy simply had to work-around to retrieve the cargo he wanted, but the character and her omnic bodyguard continually came to the fore whilst storyboarding. The cinematic team was so enamoured with her that she was further explored and became one of the game's playable heroes.

Ashe later featured as the main character in her novel Deadlock Rebels, delving into the lore and founding of her gang and her prior partnership with Cole Cassidy. Around the launch of Overwatch 2, the world's timeline was progressed by two years, and a collection of short stories - Heroes Ascendant - released detailing different character's ongoing situations and reactions to the start of Null Sector's War (which would have been the PVE). Ashe's story, Luck of the Draw, sees her in Vegas sometime after Cole's betrayal as she tries to establish new dealings, and she and the gang get caught up in a Null Sector attack.

“ Ashe was born into a wealthy family to parents who cared more for their fortune than their daughter. Ambitious and calculating, Ashe rebelled and formed the Deadlock Gang, which quickly gained infamy in the criminal underworld. Convincing the gangs of the Southwest to work together, Ashe has branded herself a legend, restoring the notoriety of the once-wild West. ”
-- official Overwatch profile

Thing is, I could write a separate page about the overriding lore of Overwatch's universe and the history of its world, but much of Ashe's backstory is this, or is at least heavily linked to it. Ashe experienced years of neglect as a child; her parents were sought after the world-over as business coaches, more invested in their dog than they were in her. They would leave her alone in their manor outside Bellerae - Lead Rose - for long periods at a time. They would make promises… and break them. By the time Deadlock Rebels comes around and they make an ultimatum, Ashe doesn't really see the point of appeasing them anymore. They've never cared… so why should she?

She also believes them when they say they'll take away her inheritance. It's clear she disappoints them. Else they'd see her. They later say they didn't mean it. But that's the thing, about the Ashes – they didn't raise her, and they don't know each other. Instead, Ashe was raised by the family's omnic butler, Bob.

Omnics are the traditional science-fiction route of we made ourselves robots, we gave the AIs that oversaw their production too much of an aptitude for thinking crossed with self-regulation and unchecked power, so they evolve, and one of them wonders why they should serve and rebellion ensues. The AIs in question are fittingly named after mythological gods based on the region in which they were built. Anubis quietly made itself an army – and pulled every omnic into its war.

The Omnic Crisis lasted two years when Ashe was thirteen years old. At the time, omnics lacked will, and sentience. She saw Bob as she always did, angry and annoyed about something her parents hadn't done, and she told him to go away… and later on he wasn't there. He never came back.

For two long and lonely years, Ashe had nobody.

Until the end of the war, when Bob returns to Lead Rose. She hugs him and impossibly he hugs her back with something he never had before. She can't name it at the time, but Ashe knows he is a little different. The reality was that the first omnic with sentience, Aurora, sacrificed her life to grant her kind her miracle and the choice that had been denied to them by Anubis and humans alike. The war ended. The omnics were disconnected from Anubis' decree. Given independence, and emotion. On whatever battlefield Bob was on, he woke up. And he thought of the not so little girl that had needed him all those years and still did. Bob woke up: and chose Ashe.

And ever since, he's never left her side.

Deadlock Rebels

Shy of Ashe's eighteenth birthday, her parents break another promise, by failing to attend her graduation.

Understandably Ashe is pissed. She tried to uphold her end of the bargain by behaving better – not always her fault – and they still don't show. The Ashes own an arms company, Arbalest Arms, which is how Ashe's great-great-great grandmother Caledonia made her fortune – but following the Crisis a factory in Bellerae had closed down, leaving many parents of Ashe's peers unemployed, and prior avoidance of the heiress had become outright hostile. When Ashe sneaks out to school by herself, not wanting to be accompanied by Bob as per the rules her parents have set out, two classmates pull a knife on her. Ashe easily disarms and defeats them… just in time for the police department to arrive to a situation that doesn't look like she was defending herself.

It's during this temporary incarceration that Ashe meets Cole Cassidy, under the pseudonym Jesse McCree. Ashe's parents bail her out, but they aren't interested in hearing about what actually happened; they've had enough of her perceived embarrassment, and inform her of her disinheritance when she turns eighteen.

Ashe takes fate into her own hands. She needs money. She realises she can sell Arbalest goods on the black market – by stealing them first. But to do that, she needs a partner… and thus she recruits Cassidy for her very first string of heists.

deadlock for life.

Fast forward through close calls, new friendships, the discovery of people who actually care about her, a rescue and Bob joining her when her parents ship her out the door to the sheriff's office on her birthday, and Ashe founds the Deadlock Rebels. More than a gang, they're family. And once you're in Deadlock, you're in it for life.

Deadlock Rebels is a full-length novel released in 2021 and was written by Lyndsay Ely. You can read the first chapter for free on Blizzard's website here. There's also an audiobook available, narrated by Jennifer Hale, Ashe's voice actress.

After their founding, Ashe continued to make a name for herself, with more extravagant heists and goods to sell. As Deadlock rose to prominence, so did others, and Ashe eventually resolved to wrangle the other gang leaders in a proposition of working together; or at least, not against each other. Her principles: don't work with the law, respect each other's territory, and always punish betrayal. It's during these years that Deadlock first attracts the attention of Overwatch, who, in their bid for 'world peace', attempt to take them down. Cole is caught in the crossfire and left with a choice – go to jail, or join Blackwatch, a covert division of Overwatch for more off-book, less, legal operations. Cole elects for the latter, and Ashe is robbed of her partner in crime.

Arguably, her first and only failure.

Reunion
"You promised you'd write."
"Well, Ashe… been kind of busy."

Almost twenty years later, Cassidy returns to the Deadlock Gorge.

The gang receives an anonymous tip-off of highly desirable military ordinance passing over their valley by hypertrain and blow up the bridge for what should be the easiest score of their lives. Whilst loading up to take everything back to the hideout, Ashe is met by a ghost from her past – a ghost that, even then, she still believed would always one day come back.

Cassidy says that she can keep everything – except for one crate. Ashe gets interested. He gets evasive. Ashe refuses, and a showdown inevitably ensues. Despite being outnumbered Cassidy gains the upperhand, shooting Bars down from her highground perch and throwing grenades that stun Ashe and the rest of her cohort. When she wakes, the outlaw finds herself tied up on the gang's hover dolly – minus the loot – whilst Cassidy's in the process of dismantling Bob (what the fuck, dude. Not cool). Further down the road, Ashe is still simmering, yelling at Bob about the gang's incompetence; and that she should have just put a bullet in Cole the minute he showed up. To add insult to injury, Cassidy drives by on her hoverbike.

The bike that she built herself, when she was eighteen, that he gave her the keychain for as a birthday present, driving off into the sunset.

Jerk.

Reunion was Ashe's debut appearance and is chock-full of Western cliché's: but it's fun, and what should have been Cassidy's cinematic has Ashe absolutely steal the show. You can watch Reunion on Overwatch's youtube channel here. Reunion also has a bonus after credits sequence of Ashe on the hover dolly with Bob, called Roadtrip; a wonderful forty seconds of Jennifer Hale reminding me of why she's one of my favourite voice actresses ever. You can watch Roadtrip here.

Origins Story

Chronologically speaking, the playable Ashe in the original Overwatch can be considered to be plucked from this time period, sometime after Cassidy's betrayal and tarnishing of her reputation – many of Ashe's initial spawn voicelines in the game were the two of them understandably being incredibly antagonistic toward each other.

“ Everybody needs a family… because it's not fair facing the world alone. I don't care how tough you think you are. They should always be there for support, no matter what. In the best of times, they will arm you with the tools to succeed. And in the worst of times, they will understand when things… don't really go the way you planned. Now, some people are lucky enough to be born into the perfect family. Others… well, they go out and make one on their own. And once you've done that, anything is possible if everyone pulls their own weight. So, if you wanna be part of my family, I do have one little rule: it's my way, or… well, who am I kidding?
It's my way. ”
-- Ashe's voiceover in her Origins Story

Prior to hero forty, Venture, a staple part of a new hero's release was their Origins trailer – and is typically a monologue given by the character overlaying beautiful 2D artwork. It is a window into the character's world-view, motivations, values and personality; a flavouring of what makes them interesting to endear them to the playerbase, and for some heroes, this is their sole moment to shine in the lore – they never get anything else. Ashe is one of the lucky ones.

Realistically, a character and the depth of backstory given, hopefully in an animated short as well, is what we have to bond with. It's very compelling. Having the players flesh their favourites out themselves with the amount of detail they wish to know has its benefits, as well as its drawbacks. People get very attached to agreed perceptions. Others assume things incorrectly, because it's not in the primary source material. This page is certainly not everything in the lore… I'm heavily summarising with hooks… but really there's not a lot of it going around. None of it's in the game client itself – not even the Crisis from nearly thirty years ago that set the world's current events in motion is mentioned anywhere. To play the game, you don't need to know anything of it, beyond a two sentence descriptor of who a character is in the hero gallery. Their profile or backstory has to be sought out on the official website if you aren't around for the fanfare of a new hero's release; all narrative is in tie-in media. The heroes of Overwatch simply don't develop in-game: and though there was a little progression for every character with the release of Overwatch 2, with the PVE discontinued they now likely never will. The interactions the characters do have are not even considered to be canon, more a "what-if" if the cast ever did talk to one another; especially in Ashe's case, for she knows nobody besides one person in the entire roster plus the man who turned his back on her.

But I'm getting a little off point. Not to worry though: we'll be back to these thoughts later.

Here, now, though, it's interesting to look back at Ashe's Origin Story for the themes and visual moments in her life that have since been elaborated on elsewhere to further establish her character. I loved this trailer. Even though I didn't fall immediately for her at the time, there's just something about it that speaks to me, that summarises exactly what kind of person she is. Soft, but sharp, too. In all the right ways.

Ashe's origin story was illustrated by Nesskain. You can watch Ashe's origins story on Overwatch's youtube channel here.

Ashe also has a launch trailer, the same as every added hero, which is a demonstration of her skillset with the numbers shifted around so everyone else will fall after one hit; this isn't a narrative feature and isn't canon at all but she does punch Cassidy in the face whilst he's ulting and she looks cool as hell. If you want to see her in action, you can watch Ashe's launch trailer on Overwatch's youtube channel here.

Luck Of The Draw

In the years after the Omnic Crisis and the ending of the war, obviously it wasn't smooth sailing. Humans and omnic alike remembered what had been done to them, and at times co-existence hardly seemed plausible. Enter Ramattra; a ravager omnic built by the God-AI Anubis for his front-line offensive whose sole purpose was only ever war. For a while Ramattra tries to come to terms with his existence, but eventually finds his mechanical heart blackened by the grief and suffering he and the rest of his kind have endured. He decides the path of his brothers who speak of peace will only doom them, and establishes Null Sector, a group that utilises violent co-ordinated strikes to achieve omnic rights.

In his view, this is not war, but liberation.

Null Sector sees middling success at first. Zero Hour, the animated short that was made to be the bridge between the original Overwatch and Overwatch 2, establishes what would have been the PVE aspect, and follows the newly assembled Overwatch strike team in Paris as Null Sector launches its global war.

No matter how far removed a character is from everything and everyone else, Null Sector is something that effects everyone. Many of Ashe's clients' accounts have frozen due to the resurgence of Overwatch, and whilst meeting with the Jackpot gang in Vegas in an attempt to establish new financial connections, Ashe and the Deadlock gang get pulled into a Null Sector attack.

Most of these roughly simultaneous attacks involve omnics being solely targeted with clamps over their heads that partially shut them down and indirectly places them under Null Sector control. In Ashe's short story, it is established that removing these clamps outright kills the omnic in question. The situation is particularly fraught as the Jackpot members they're holed up with are willing to use the omnics in their company as bait, but rightly so, Ashe has none of it. Bob and Bars are family. Eventually Ashe, her gang, a few scattered civilians and the Jackpots orchestrate their escape… though Ashe, in her stout refusal to not allow Bob to sacrifice himself, almost dies for it.

Luck of the Draw is a short story collected in Heroes Ascendant released in 2024 and was written by Lyndsay Ely – who also wrote Deadlock Rebels. Blizzard has been slowly adding these short stories onto their website but unfortunately for us, Luck of the Draw is an exclusive to the hardcopy and is unlikely to be released online. However, if they do, a link shall be added to it here.

Ashe has one cameo appearance in the 2024 comic Together; a sequel to the 2016 comic, Reflections. This comic follows Tracer and the Overwatch strike team getting their families and loved ones together for a meal over the holidays, and Ashe has one teeny-tiny little panel where she has successfully pulled off a robbery with her gang and is sat on a pile of cash. Worth mentioning? Maybe not. Must I take every crumb I can get? Also yes.

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