We all knew that one day, I would definitely find a reason to dedicate a whole blog post to my new favorite game, and guess what? Today’s the day.

I’ve now been playing the game for over half a year, loving it throughout all this time, though, let me assure you, I won’t waste your time just telling you how much I love it. Instead, why not focus on the yuri aspect with this post?

When it comes to that, I’ve come to compare Overwatch a lot with Love Live!. To make it a little more clear what I’m talking about, let me just say the following: Fandoms of both titles tend to ship the characters a lot – with each other. Of course, there are many other games, as well as shows, where this applies, but these two go way further when it comes to shipping than many others go. It’s not just a few popular pairings, no, you could almost say that pretty much every character get shipped with numerous others, depending on what people enjoy most. You can easily google what I personally would call a weird pairing, like let’s say D.Va x Symmetra, and still get quite a number of fitting results. Same goes for Love Live!, which is exactly why the two feel so similar when it comes to this aspect. Kantai Collection might be another game with a similar, let’s say “shipping system”, though right there, we got many more than 100 different characters, and despite the fact that there are quite a few crack pairings, most of the characters have a set ship girl that they usually get paired up with.

Though, let’s get back on track. Right now, Overwatch consists of 23 playable characters, most of which getting paired with one or numerous others. Let’s take Mercy, for example. She’s probably one of the most, or maybe even the most, popular female character in the whole game. She basically get’s shipped with pretty much everyone, be it male, female, human, or machine. The only difference we get here is the fact that most of the shipping material, meaning the doujinshi, the short strips, and the fan-made pictures, don’t originate from Japan, but pretty much from all over the world. It might be thanks to my recent interest in the game and my resulting increase of Overwatch-related blogs or people I follow on Tumblr and Twitter, but I noticed that there is already quite a lot of yuri material available, and it keeps growing. The number of amazing fanfiction I’ve already read, the awesome fan art, and all the fun and cute short strips I’ve read actually just make me wonder why not more yuri blogs talk about this game and all the amazing yuri pairings that we got from it.

So to finally get where I wanted to go with this post from the very beginning, let’s simply take a moment to talk about some of the pairings, well, the more popular ones, to be exact.

Judging from the amount of fanfiction on Archive of Our Own, the following might be the most popular Overwatch pairings right now:

Of course, I pretty much can’t go into detail when it comes to McCree x Hanzo or Soldier 76 x Reaper, but it’s interesting to see Pharmercy and Widowtracer in third and fourth place. Well, what’s even more surprising for me is how anyone would actually ship Roadhog and Junkrat, but that’s a totally different story. 😀

So yeah, we might have some other more or less popular yuri pairings, such as Mei x Zarya or recently also D.Va x Sombra, but undoubtedly the most popular ones are the two I already named.

In the case of Pharah and Mercy, I can easily see where fans got the idea, since they are an awesome combination in the game and share quite a few nice voice lines that, let’s just say, give the ones who want to ship them even more reason to do so. Well, for Valentine’s Day, Mercy might get some quite suggestive lines with Genji where she is exchanging chocolates with him, though as a die-hard Pharmercy fan, I will, of course, never lose hope and just wait for the Valentine’s voice line between her and Pharah that will surely follow as well!

As for Widowmaker and Tracer, we can’t really say that they work especially well together as a team. What made fans start shipping them is probably rather their interactions in some of the animated short cinematics, especially in the one called “Alive“, where we also got this little “fan-subbed” gif from:

Well, as most of us know, Tracer already has a confirmed girlfriend, namely Emily, though as it turns out, this is not in the slightest an obstacle for all the Widowtracer fans out there. And despite the fact that I love seeing Tracer as a confirmed gay character with a cute girlfriend, I still can’t stop shipping her with Widowmaker~

So, if you’re playing the game too, or if you simply enjoy the pairings, what are your favorites?