Elon Musk doesn’t know his Mercy fetish is boring

In May 2016, billionaire Elon Musk and actress Amber Heard dragged to the Met Gala, just weeks before Heard filed for divorce from Johnny Depp. The two had met several years previously, while Heard was filming Killed with machetes, for which Musk had been hired as a consultant – but it was at the prestigious fashion charity event that the two became friends. The same month, Blizzard Entertainment launched its first new game franchise in years with the colorful hero shooter. Monitoring, which would sell more than 50 million copies. And, years later, these two moments in pop culture history intersected.

On September 12, Elon Musk, a biography of Walter Isaacson, has been published. Isaacson spent two years with the current owner of X (née Twitter), producing a wooden narrative of Musk’s entrepreneurial life and his struggles with family, mental health and relationships. This two-sentence bombshell, without any additional information, was casually tossed into the chapter about his recurring entanglement with Heard:

He told her that she reminded him of Mercy, his favorite video game character. Monitoringso she spent two months designing and ordering a head-to-toe costume so she could play a role for him.

At least an opinion of the book pointed out this detail, which instantly became another reason for the Internet to clown Musk. Undeterred by shame, Musk accepted responses from a joke article retweeting the Dexerto cover to wordlessly post proof in the form of a private photo of Heard in the suit (apparently without his permission) and, in a separate post, mention how cool was that. The candid photo of the actress in a skimpy, corseted version of the supporting hero’s armor quickly spread across social media, especially in the Overwatch community. Everyone seemed too happy has remain speechless has a photo published in a way that comes dangerously close to revenge porn.

The billionaire is a longtime fan of Monitoring: He mentioned that it was one of his favorite games in 2017and he exchanged tweets with the official Overwatch Twitter account in 2020. sometimesrevealing that he’s a main Torbjorn.

Despite all his money, Elon Musk behaves like a typical sexist gamer brother who, in this case, has Monitoring as his favorite game. Him ignoring the privacy of his ex-girlfriend (who written about being “sexually assaulted” in the past) in order to prove that this happened and gain some cool points, this is no different than any other random dude bragging about something like this, although Musk was named l one of the best of this year. the most influential people. The fact that the Overwatch community joined in shortly afterward, using the exchange as an opportunity to mock mercyis also not surprising. Both parties have the same deeply strange and misogynistic relationship with the hero.

Mercy has a specific place in Overwatch culture, much of which has to do with the persistence of sexist attitudes in the wider gaming community. She is deeply loved by those who lead her, but she is also considered a particularly incompetent hero due to its more collaborative playstyle and less emphasis on aiming (although this characterization is an oversimplification at best). This joins the perception that only women play Mercy, as well as the perception that women are not good at video games. This brings hands of Mercy (no matter the gender) A a truck of sexist harassmentwhether by SMS or voice chat.

Despite being so hated, Mercy has an appealing visual design, which makes Elon’s interest more readable. Being white, blonde, body-normative, and feminine allows Mercy to fall squarely into stereotypical (and also white supremacist) ideas about purity and holiness, while also making her the ultimate blank slate onto which to project broad fantasies sexual. While Overwatch porn has long been a category of interest that tops the charts on Pornhub, Mercy herself specifically dominates a number of these searches, whether in animated form or through an artist dressed like her. The idea of ​​a girlfriend doing this in private would absolutely be some guys’ dream.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon

This is where the rubber meets the road with Mercy as a playable character, media object, and performance; when something is so specifically gendered as feminine, then all of these ideas are reproduced in a myriad of strange ways. She’s not a very competent heroine, but she starred in a Professional level in the sport. It’s run by “toxic” girls, but men still fantasize about her. have their girlfriends play like her, or about to fall in love with their “pockets” of Mercy.

So it’s not a stretch to understand why something like a “healer” a community exists for Overwatch; a lot of Mercy porn presents her as demure and flirtatious, or more explicitly submissive. Hence the logical conclusion: wouldn’t it be great to have a sexy, nerdy girlfriend who hangs on your every word, obeys your every command, and unquestionably respects your power? While this is a completely acceptable phenomenon to practice in spaces designed for this purpose, this conception of Mercy also has its origins in the Overwatch community’s strange behavior towards her, which can be mapped to the over time. existing heteropatriarchal power dynamics that exist outside of designed folded spaces. This is all floating around in the circumstances where Musk posted a photo of Amber Heard and it ricocheted across social media.

Musk’s biography spends a lot of time on how he became someone who finally emerged from the ordeal of harassment, and yet he seems to be the biggest bully of all, especially to the women in his life . Despite what he described as a “dark vortex” surrounding his time with Heard, Musk still felt encouraged to appear cool to other random men online by sharing this private photo. This is deeply insecure behavior from someone who is already functionally bulletproof due to their wealth and privilege, but it’s also like a DPS player to need a overworked and underappreciated support to keep his self-esteem boosted.