Last week, Blizzard revealed the newest Overwatch character, Sigma. In his lore, Sigma was mentally damaged during his experiments with black holes, turning him into what he is. However, much like the Omnic Crisis at the core of Overwatch‘s backstory, this was not very well thought out. These bits of lore caused controversy because it runs into an ongoing problem in media, the portrayal of mentally ill people as villains.

Sigma is reliant on a bunch of stereotypes related to mentally ill people, most of them negative. In the video showing his backstory, he’s shown to be fluctuating between two minds: one a tortured scientist, the other more composed yet obviously evil. It reflects ongoing negative stereotypes of people with conditions like disassociative identity disorder, with people that have multiple personalities “obviously” having an evil side. The very fact that Sigma is cast as a villain on the side of Talon is problematic alone, due to the general villainization of people with mental illness in fiction.

Sigma’s own design loudly calls attention to his past, incorporating signs of mental illness into his menacing design. He is notably barefoot, which an Overwatch artist claims was to “sell the ‘asylum’ look a bit more.” This had some people preferring that the whole barefoot thing was a foot fetish instead, because creating an “asylum appearance” for a villain only further conflates mental illness with villainy. The same artist also said that the team experimented with giving him shoes, and honestly, he should have had shoes to begin with to keep the team from digging into this hole.

One of his non-event epic skins further emphasizes the relationship between mental illness and villainy, regardless of intention. You know what says “crazy?” How about a skin called “Asylum?” It’s got belts around him to create a straitjacket kinda look and he has a face mask on him to make him look more unnecessarily threatening. Sure, you can say that the mask is a Hannibal Lecter reference, but Silence of the Lambs wasn’t exactly a great movie about stereotypes, either.

Video games have had a long history of portraying mentally ill people as villainous, like how any level that takes place in an asylum usually has “evil patients” as enemies. Heck, the iconic Batman: Arkham Asylum is pretty much all about beating up asylum patients. Sigma only furthers this problematic trend. Overwatch isn’t exactly good about stereotypes to begin with, like how one of the Japanese characters has to be a ninja, the Korean girl has to be a cute geek, Roadhog has to be an evil fat person with a pig motif, etc. Now, Overwatch can add ableism to its set of poor portrayals with Sigma.

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