'Overwatch' Hanzo Main Insult: Is It Really That Bad?

A tweet about Overwatch went viral on Thursday and it wasn’t a sick play of the game, crazy highlight or interesting artwork. A child had been sent home for calling another child a “Hanzo main” and the mom thought it was so funny she had to post it on social media. Since then, the internet has been going crazy over this, but if you don’t play Overwatch you have no idea why this is so funny. Why do people hate Hanzo and the people who play him so much?

Dirty Hanzo Mains

Overwatch fans love their memes. D.Va likes Doritos, Soldier:76 is a cranky old man and if you main Hanzo, nobody likes you. Sure, that’s a bit of a stretch, but picking Hanzo in a high stakes game of Overwatch is usually seen as a bad idea and your teammates will flame and type mean things in chat if you do pick the archer. Every one of the 23 heroes in Overwatch serves a purpose in the game. Reinhardt protects your backline so they don’t all die to Bastion bullets, Ana heals your allies when they jump directly into a Genji blade and Torbjorn builds turrets that kill enemies without aim. Every hero serves a purpose, except for Hanzo.

Picking Hanzo in most situations in Overwatch is usually a terrible idea. He’s a long archer, who shoots arrows long distances that can deal massive damage. If you land a headshot with Hanzo on a squishy hero with low health, they will die in one shot. If you miss, you wasted your time and will, most likely die since Hanzo has the mobility of a caterpillar trying to escape a hawk. You won’t get very far if a D.Va rocket boosts into your face and unleashes those twin gatling guns.

It doesn’t matter who you pick in Overwatch, as long as you play them well. A bad Genji is just as useless as a bad Hanzo, the joke about bad “Hanzo mains” isn’t exclusive to that hero. I hate having a Widowmaker that looks in her scope four feet in front of an enemy just as much as I hate having a Hanzo that aims his blue dragons off a cliff. Hanzo is seen as the worst hero and teammates often think he’s useless, but your teammates are just projecting their loss on something else.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard in voice comms “we would have secured that Payload if we didn’t have Hanzo!” No, we would have secured that Payload if you weren’t an idiot and kept charging a Bastion as Sombra.

Being a “Hanzo main” isn’t the worst thing ever, but if you want to get flamed less, pick another hero in Overwatch.