Overwatch turned accurate footwear into fetish wear

polygon.com:

This past February, Blizzard trolled dedicated players of the team-based shooter series Overwatch with a single piece of footwear: a Greek warrior sandal. A screenshot showed the strappy shoe worn by Ramattra, an Omnic tank hero and the 36th playable character added to the game’s roster. What stuck out was not the sandal itself, which was a part of a limited event inspired by Greek mythology, but what it showed: Strapped into the sandal was a human foot, one that did not belong to a robot at all. As if the bizarre inclusion of the manicured hoof was too subtle, Overwatch’s official Twitter account posted a close-up of just Ramattra’s toes with the caption: “Poseidon Ramattra has toenails. Discuss.”

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Overwatch’s character designs have long toed the line between horny and practical. But Blizzard’s tweet illustrated that the line is much blurrier in a time when all aspects of a character, not just bulging pecs or booming bustlines, can be hypersexualized. A piece of Twitter commentary from 2019 showed how many heroes in the game’s then-31-deep roster had some sort of barefoot or open-toe situation; the accompanying graphic revealed that a majority, 17 out of 31, had at least one skin where the character’s feet were visible, with six being women’s feet, seven being men’s feet, and the others belonging to either animals or robots.

In the time since that tweet, six more characters have been introduced: Echo, Sojourn, Junker Queen, Kiriko, Ramattra, and Lifeweaver. Of those additions, both Lifeweaver and Ramattra, one a human male and one a robot male, have skins that have