Luminum's video on Mercy disappointed me

Luminum released a video on Mercy a few days ago, specifically on the topic of the state of Mercy's balance and why she cannot be buffed without nerfs to compensate. She announced this video a day prior, and I was excited for it! Mercy has walked a rocky path for most of her life as an Overwatch character and Mercy players have vocalized their dissent for the character. Luminum has a somewhat broad platform and, just as importantly, has formerly been a support main in Overwatch. However, having watched this video, I'm disheartened, and I think Luminum has not wielded their platform with as much responsibility as I'd like to have seen.

Before I continue, I want to say that this is not a call to denounce, cancel, or de-platform Luminum. I also want to say that I used to be Luminum follower back when Symmetra had an auto-aim beam, back before she moved to streaming more. I only occasionally watch her stuff now, so it is entirely possible that the way she talks in this video is a result of her style and language evolving over the course of her influencer career.

Now with that out of the way, I have some minor nitpicks on a few things first. This video is pretty poorly constructed, and a lot of its length comes down to reiterating points that have already been established and ending up on side-tangents that only vaguely apply to the topic at hand. There are a few times in the video where she says Blizzard said/did something about a problem, but she doesn't show screenshots or leave links in the description to what she's talking about. Having hard evidence in Blizzard's own words to reinforce her point could have gone a long way in her credibility.

That's not what I want to focus on on this post, but I still wanted to say it and thought it worth mentioning. The biggest problem I have is how Luminum's choice of words perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Mercy players, and reinforces hate against the entire subculture of gaming that is support players.

She refers to them as "e-girl support characters," saying its a classification of characters in a lot of PVP games with support. She makes no effort to reclaim the term as empowering or to even say that e-girl support characters are fine and good design in games, but instead parrots common talking points that the Mercy hate train does. Things like how Mercy is problematic because she's so easy to boost. Mercy with a second on smurf will get boosted way faster than any other hero will. She calls Mercy an overall low skill hero, further pushing negative stereotypes of women being intrinsically bad at video games and playing less-skilled characters to compensate. At the beginning of the video, she even says that she's seen a lot of Mercy balance and rework posts, and says that they're all terrible, and that all of them miss the real underlying problem with Mercy that she sees. If you'd like a specific receipt, its minute 1:54 to 2:22. "Now a lot of people out there have made their own suggestions on how they'd fix Mercy and what buffs they would give to her, and every time I read all of these suggestions, I can't help but think, like, pretty much all of them are wrong in a sense that none of these changes, none of these suggestions would ever really fix Mercy's core problems, because all of them are like band-aid solutions. There's a real problem underlying with Mercy that people are just not addressing." My issue with this is that she's effectively denouncing the opinions of ALL Mercy players, silencing their own cultivated opinions and thoughts from playing her.

Further more, she goes as far as to say refer to many league of legends characters as e-girl supports, mentioning Yuumi by name, but even when talking about Soraka's positives still refers to her as an egirl support character. Even more ridiculous when the word enchanter is an official term Riot (league of legends' company) uses to refer to this subclassification of healers and buffers, and it fits Mercy FANTASTICALLY and doesn't have all of the sexist and derogatory stigma around it. This terminology also pivots the conversation away from real game design discussions. There are ABSOLUTELY fundamental game design problems with Yuumi, but calling her an egirl support character lumps it under "[character] is bad because egirls play them" and ALL enchanter-like characters, Mercy included, are unjustly dragged down.

I have one last thing that I want to bring up. I think that this is all especially irresponsible from Luminum. She is a TRANS WOMAN. She faces this hate and bigotry all the time. I'm not just mad because this peddles senseless hatred for hatred's sake, I'm mad because Luminum should KNOW BETTER. She should UNDERSTAND our situation and know why this is such a delicate discussion. She does mention at minute 1:40 that Blizzard doesn't keep Mercy unbalanced because of sexism or homophobia, and that may be true, but that doesn't make the homophobia and sexism around this topic disappear. Overall, I feel that could she have handled this video more delicately, this could have been great for Mercy and her playerbase.