shot in the heart, and i'm to blame.
Once upon a time, Cassidy was getting himself a cinematic short.I was in skirmish with friends watching the Blizzcon 2018 livestream together, and we muted for Reunion's debut. I liked Cassidy, reasonably, but I had no clue about who was soon going to walk into my life.
It's high noon. Outside the diner Cole's sequestered himself in, the train tracks blow up, and he exits to find the Deadlock Gang picking up the ordinance that has easily fallen into their hands. The leader of the gang is there too. We see them at distance, and I think to myself, "that's a woman".
This excites me: I love when women get put in leaderships roles – it is always the correct decision to make when creating a character. And hell; I love how many women there are in Overwatch's roster that are in charge of something in general. I go through the whole process. Is this just a figure from Cassidy's past that'll remain on the sidelines? Does she have a unique enough silhouette to be playable? Her outfit's so snappy and stylish and also distinct. "Ashe," one of her underlings calls her, as she stands there undoubtedly in charge. We knew that sometime in the next few hours we would be told about hero twenty nine. Is this her? Is it the omnic bodyguard she's with? I would not be against either of them.
And then we get a close up. Red, electrifying eyes peeking out atop a mask bearing the gang's logo. The mystery woman stares foreboding at her counterpart for a moment – then pulls the mask down.
Words? They don't do this justice: you're getting the gif. This, for me, was the definitive "oh" moment, because she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. The lip quirk, the smile: everything. Even now I look at it and I'm just wowed. And then— and then— she says her first line, and I know who's voicing her.
And you don't hire Jennifer Hale for a bit part in your cinematic short, no. This, this gorgeous creature, is the new hero; and I lose it.
And would you believe that this was before Ashe became my favourite character in the game as well as ever? Yeah, this predates that by like, two years. She waited for me. She was there the whole time and I simply didn't see it. For the rest of the short all I can look at is Ashe and think about how excited I am to play what seems to be a sniper like my Commander Shepard was, and not have to reach a canonical end point where you have to say goodbye to her like you do in a game with a solo campaign.
I can see why the cinematic team picked her. Ashe has so much presence during Reunion. I love her confidence, how much of a sore loser she is when she doesn't get what she wants – but it took me a long time to consider the rest of her layers, or to even begin peeling them back.
You can blame Amélie Lacroix for that one. Whilst writing my second fic about Ashe and Widowmaker, Even if it makes you cry – because I couldn't stop thinking about the spontaneous, out of nowhere ship that had dawned on me in the early hours of New Year's Day '21 – I wrote Amélie slowly falling in love with Ashe. Her charisma that slowly won her over, the dreamlike state of having something that's going to end and getting overly attached all the same… but also the similarities and understanding, in that there was something Ashe missed that she also could never get back, that love can hurt and has hurt you but you still want it. And I uh, projected too hard, and fell in love with Ashe too.
Perhaps because Ashe is so isolated from every other member of Overwatch's cast, I'd never considered any of it before. I started writing more about her, really getting to know her as a character. I love deep-dives into character psyches: reading into their motivations, unravelling what makes them tick. Ashe was no exception to this and I've been proven right multiple times. She's crippled by fear of abandonment but she never lets it show. She's secretly a softie, she's dedicated to her family more than anything else – found family is a trope I am infinitely weak for. And her relationship with Bob… man. It's readily overlooked, but he is the one person who's been with her always and their friendship completely dismantles the whole argument the big bad hinges his war upon. It only gets richer with time.
Ashe singlehandedly won me over. As of now, in March 2025, she's been my favourite for four years. Writing this site over the last six months only made me appreciate her even more – I was three pages in, having a blast, already at seven and a half thousand words… completely worth it. Every single one. And she is beautiful. She is! Her design and colour co-ordination? It works and it's good.
And it was like someone heard me, because as I really fell in love with her character, Ashe started getting more tie-in things that explored her in depth, like her novel. A lot of Overwatch narrative content, particularly exploration of backstories or ongoing events are in side media and most of it is prose which I now struggle to consume. You might not think it by the fact I can write so much and edit over what I've got down, but the compromise for this creativity is I can't read things by other people, I can't read books – I can't read Deadlock Rebels, the story about my most favourite girl in the world… and it hurts a little that this is something I lack the brain for and the inaccessibility of it. I should be able to turn on the game to learn everything about my chosen character, but that's just not so in a PVP game.
I did cave on Deadlock Rebels though. I now own it, and have multiple methods to try to tackle reading it… but I'll have to set aside at least a month to attempt to do so. But I'll do it for her.
By the time Deadlock Rebels released, the deal was sealed: Ashe was it. She was my new favourite… but I couldn't play her. I'd tried in a less committed manner in the past without much success. Soon after Mass Effect: Legendary Edition came out – something I'd been looking forward to revisiting as I was, thanks to Overwatch, much more familiar with playing a shooter than I was the first time. And surprisingly, a lot of what you learn for sniping in that game applies directly to Ashe.
Did you know one of Shepard's sniper models in Mass Effect 2 is called Viper? Because I'd completely forgotten due to the arrival of my one true love of the Widow sniper rifle (yeah, I found that naming coincidence pretty funny myself). The point was, Ashe could benefit from the same style of quick scoping in the middle of a fire-fight, and instead of overly relying on incendiary abilities (yeah, I know, the little fire thing an Infiltrator Shepard has from behind cover, it's just dynamite) (me, realising my Shepard was Ashe spec'ed long before she existed) (this really does go back so many additional years) I took the time to get used to being under pressure and still landing my shots. Whilst critical hits are best, even just being able to consistently track and hit a moving target does wonders – and it did. A hundred hours of the Mass Effect trilogy later, I could hit things as Ashe. I took that, and ran with it.
I came to love her playstyle. It's exciting to hit good dynamites, to think outside the box of how you might want to use Bob. I love listening to what Ashe has to say for herself – I love playing as her, she's so useful. The truth is I was drawn in from the start: and the joy of something like Overwatch is that I was still playing it when I finally realised how much I'd overlooked her. I might never have known otherwise.
And really that would be a shame… for a lot of reasons.
© deadlockrebel.org 2025 ↑ top
