Characters / Overwatch: Tracer

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Lena Oxton / Tracer

"Cheers, luv! It's time to save the world!"

Species: Enhanced human
Age: 26 (1), 28 (2)
Birthday: February 17th
Occupation: Adventurer, Pilot
Base of Operations: London, England
Affiliation: Overwatch
Appearances (shorts): Cinematic Trailer, Tracer Origin Story (focus), Recall (cameo), Alive, King's Row Uprising Origin Story (focus), Doomfist Origin Story, Zero Hour
Appearances (comics): "Reflections" (focus), "Uprising" (focus), "London Calling" (focus)
Appearances (Archives events): Uprising, Storm Rising

"Cheers, luv! The cavalry's here!"

Voiced by: Cara Theobold (English)^note Other Languages:Analiz Sanchez (Latin American Spanish), Ana de Castro (European Spanish), Emiri Katou (Japanese), Dorothée Pousséo (French), Luíza Palomanes (Brazilian Portuguese), Gea Riva (Italian), Luisa Wietzorek (German), Sin-hee Bak (Korean), Coco Tao (Taiwanse Chinese), Hóng Hǎitiān (Mandarin Chinese), Weronika Łukaszewska (Polish), Lina Ivanova (Russian)

Lena Oxton (call sign: "Tracer") was the youngest person ever inducted into Overwatch's experimental flight program. Known for her fearless piloting skills, she was handpicked to test the prototype of a teleporting fighter, the Slipstream. But during its first flight, the aircraft's teleportation matrix malfunctioned, and it disappeared. Lena was presumed dead.

She reappeared months later, but her ordeal had greatly changed her: her molecules had been desynchronized from the flow of time. Suffering from "chronal disassociation," she was a living ghost, disappearing for hours and days at a time. Even for the brief moments she was present, she was unable to maintain physical form.

Overwatch's doctors and scientists were stumped, and Tracer's case seemed hopeless until a scientist named Winston designed the chronal accelerator, a device capable of keeping Tracer anchored in the present. In addition, it gave Tracer the ability to control her own time, allowing her to speed it up and slow it down at will. With her newfound skills, she became one of Overwatch's most effective agents.

Tracer was one of the agents that were recalled to serve Overwatch after Winston reinstated the organization. At the time, she was in King's Row, London, awaiting the ill-fated speech of Omnic monk Tekhartha Mondatta. She was the first to join after being contacted.

Tracer uses her incredible speed to zip around the map, harassing and ambushing foes.

• Her Pulse Pistols fire rapidly and deal consistent damage at close range.
• Her Blink ability grants her incredible mobility, allowing her to teleport a set distance horizontally and has three charges that replenish over time.
• Recall resets Tracer's location and health to where they were exactly three seconds ago while fully reloading her pistols.
• Her ultimate, Pulse Bomb, tosses out a sticky grenade that adheres to the first enemy or surface it hits and explodes shortly after, dealing massive damage to foes within its blast.

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A-E

• The Ace: She is internationally recognized as both a skilled gunfighter and a world-class pilot, her personality exudes confidence, and she's presumably known and beloved by enough of the general public that even children are able to joyfully identify her upon sight. The still from Are You With Us? of her and the others at a UN ceremony would also suggest that somewhere in the two-year span between Uprising and Overwatch's collapse, she went from a rookie cadet to someone credible enough to warrant recognition while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders. All of this in time for her 21st birthday. And if you consider the in-game emotes to be canon, she's a nifty little dancer, too. As part of the playing card-themed sprays for the Anniversary event, she's even represented by the Ace of Diamonds.
• Ace Pilot: According to her backstory, she was inducted into Overwatch for her stellar flying skills, and she only joined the combat unit later. It's given a slight nod in game, as loitering near the front of Orca dropships seen in Control Maps indicates Tracer still owns and flies them.
• Achilles' Heel:
  • Tracer is completely dependent on the chronal accelerator to stabilize herself in time, and any excessive damage to it risks returning her to her unsynced, ghost-like existence. Doomfist was able to rip the Accelerator off her body during their confrontation and briefly but effectively erased her from existence.
  • In-game, Tracer is an extreme Fragile Speedster, so any way to immobilize Tracer for a moment will make her an easy kill.
• Action Girl: Even before she picked up her pistols, she had caught Overwatch's eye for her skill as an expert fighter pilot. Instead of sitting around when an accident left her grounded, she endured and took the chance to adopt an even more hands-on approach, reinventing herself as an elite field operative specializing in precise, high-speed encounters with an emphasis on hit-and-run tactics.
• Anime Hair: Her hair is incredibly spiky. Amusingly enough, its spikiness in the final game is actually toned down from the cinematic trailer.◊
• Apologetic Attacker: To Ana and to Winston should she eliminate either of them.
• Appropriated Appellation: According to "Uprising," her "Cheers luv, the cavalry's here!" catchphrase came from Torbjörn, whose first reaction to seeing her joining the squad for her first mission was "Hmph. Looks like the cavalry's here." Tracer herself noted before boarding the aircraft that it's got a nice ring to it, and by the time she became a respected hero in her own right, she's made it her own.
• Arrested for Heroism: Downplayed in the London Calling comic's second issue (which gives more context to the "Alive" short). Nobody thinks for a minute she had anything to do with the assassination, but the omnics think that she deliberately blinked out of the way of the bullet (her chrono accelorator was malfunctioning), which destroys her standing with them.
• The Baby of the Bunch: The "bunch" being the strike team sent to King's Row to fight Null Sector 7 years prior to the present-day game. She's both the youngest (~19 years old at the time) and the least experienced member.
• Badass Adorable: Many people find her definitely cute, but make no mistake: she can tear the enemy team a new one if they don't know what they're doing.
• Badass Biker: She's skilled enough at riding a motorcycle to go after Maximillien and his bodyguards in a car chase in Storm Rising's opening cutscene.
• Badass Bystander: Judging by the comments Mondatta’s bodyguards make when she tries to contact them, Tracer was just attending the speech and not officially on assignment. She still doesn’t hesitate for a moment to jump in and help once she notices that something’s wrong and realizes the monk’s life is at risk. Tragically, the only difference her involvement made was getting herself hurt.
• Becoming the Costume:
  • While equipped with the "Punk" or "Ultraviolet skin", she might say "Tosser!" or "Heh, wanker!" upon getting a kill.
  • With "T.Racer" or "Mach.T", the voice line her team hears upon switching to her is replaced with "Here comes Teee-racer!"
  • She has quite a few extra lines with her "Track and Field" or "Sprinter" skins, such as saying "And she's back in the race!" upon respawning or "False start!" while using Recall.
  • Her "Jingle" skin also has a few extra lines, such as singing "Dashing through the snow!" while using Blink and saying "I think I heard some "slay" bells!" while landing a final blow.
  • Her "Adventurer" skin has her portray the knight she plays in the Questwatch campaign Emily cooked up for the Overwatch team, gaining plenty of added fantasy and RPG-themed lingo to her voiceover, including changing her spawning line to "Cheers, squire! It's time to save the realm!" Some of her ability callouts also recharacterize their nature as being more fantastical: she uses a "triple dash", she's able to dodge out using a "second wind", and landing her Pulse Bomb involves a "true strike".
• Being Good Sucks: She's one of the kindest, most helpful, and unambiguously good characters on the roster, which has an unfortunate tendency to work against her benefit. Her decision to join Overwatch and help the world was short-lived due to its collapse and left her stuck with a debilitating condition that she'll likely carry for the rest of her life, and all her intervention with the Mondatta assassination got her was pain and misery. All in all, the only tangible net gain she has to show for her years of work and sacrifice is a girlfriend and a place to stay^note and we don't know how long they've been together, so maybe not even that. Not bad, but hardly an equivalent exchange. She's held onto her smile, but maintaining it must take a lot of work.
• Beware the Nice Ones: While Tracer is a Nice Girl inside and out, she's capable of being very cold, especially if the person she's talking to is a straight-up Card-Carrying Villain. This pre-game interaction with Sombra says it all:
  Sombra: Sometimes I get these headaches after using my translocator... You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?
  Tracer: Wouldn't be a problem if you just disappear forever.
  • As cheerful and sunny as she is, her role on a team is still target elimination, and she carries out this task with the same chipper demeanor as anything else. Of course, the characters tend to be a bit more heightened in gameplay, and even Mercy has a chance to crack a joke if she scores an elimination.
• Bond One-Liner:
  Tracer: You need a time-out!
• Borrowed Catchphrase:
  • One of her interactions with Junkrat has him saying "Cheers, mate! Cavalry's here", to which Tracer's answer is Hey, That's My Line!.
  • Sombra will sometimes say a sarcastic "Cheers, love!" while translocating, possibly referencing the fact that her Translocator was based off of tech stolen from Tracer.
  • At the end of the Alive short, Widowmaker exits with "Adieu, Cherie", which translates to "Goodbye, Love", borrowing Tracer's catchphrase while mocking her failure.
  • If Genji deflects one of Tracer's Pulse Bombs, he'll give a quick, chirpy "Cheers, Tracer!"
  • She'll do it herself, too. When she kills Reaper, she'll mock him with his catchphrase "Death comes!" in a deliberate imitation of Reaper's raspy growl.
• Boyish Short Hair:
  • One of her most immediately distinguishing features. Whether by nature or design, Tracer sports a short but impressively spiky ‘do that would make any shonen protagonist proud to go along with her sporty, rambunctious personality.
  • Her "Lightning" skin gives her a shorter, less drastic, but still-spiky fauxhawk.
• Break the Cutie: Her plucky demeanor belies an adulthood that has been characterized by hardship. Alive sees her deteriorate to her most emotionally distressed point seen thus far after failing to prevent something that carried dire consequences for her home. Fortunately, being called back into service by Winston seems to have helped her bounce back by the time of the cinematic trailer, but, offscreen, she's also had to deal with being nearly wiped from existence following the accident with the Slipstream, witnessed the initial collapse of Overwatch, an organization she clearly loved and admired, and seen much of the good she's fought to bring into the world undone by forces beyond her control. For all her cheerful behavior, she's been through a lot, and unfortunately, her defining ability to stay positive would be pointless if she never had reason to use it.
• Butch Lesbian: Heavily downplayed, as she doesn't have the personality normally associated with this trope, and her tomboyish qualities seem designed to be appealing; she still hews closer to this than the more overtly feminine Lipstick Lesbian, and her more casual fashion sense fits neatly into the "Soft Butch" aesthetic popular with many lesbians. Her "Punk", "Ultraviolet", and especially "Lightning" skins, however, play this to the hilt.
• The Cameo: At the end of Recall, she’s the first agent to respond to Winston, and she does so within a minute. She also appeared in some scenes in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One.
• Catchphrase: Says "Cheers, luv! The cavalry's here!" when a match starts. She got it from Torbjörn back in her cadet days after he referred to her as such.
• The Cavalry: It's in her catchphrase, for heaven's sake. Tracer has a reputation for being quick on her feet to respond to a crisis, and she never passes up an opportunity to offer help where it's needed most. Sadly and ironically, this hasn't been reflected in most of the story materials, wherein her attempts to get involved by and large tend to, sooner or later, not make a difference or end against her favor.
• Cherry Tapping: Getting a "Stuck" kill with her Pulse Bomb counts as this, as it does a measly 5 points of damage when planted onto an enemy. Otherwise, scoring a lucky snipe finisher with her pistols would do as well.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: In general, she seems incapable of just standing by when people need help. In Alive, she doesn't hesitate for a moment to contact Mondatta's bodyguards and leap into action once she realizes something's wrong. And her last-minute shopping spree in Reflections would probably have gone better if she didn't regularly sacrifice her own time and effort to help complete strangers she encounters along the way, but she just wouldn't be Tracer otherwise. She briefly considers leaving a robbery she witnesses to the police, only to resign herself to her own nature seconds later by turning right around and handling it herself.
• Close-Range Combatant: Her Pulse Pistols do rather low damage in long-range combat due to falloff. At close range, however, she can melt down heroes with average health in moments and her Blink definitely helps in dodging point-blank shots. And because of the short range at which she tosses her Pulse Bomb, she would need to be close.
• Cool Shades: Her Origins skin reveals that back when she was a former test pilot, she wore a pair of aviator glasses. Nowadays, she wears her iconic orange goggles. In "Zero Hour", her new look instead sports a pair of futuristic orange shades.
• Combat Parkour: Her primary means of taking on the enemy involves staying on the move while using the terrain and her own capabilities to run interference and create a disorienting whirlwind around her opponent, guns blazing all the while.
• Corpsing: In-Universe. In one of her intros, she tries to strike a heroic pose, but starts laughing.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: "Moron" is being a bit harsh (she is a trained pilot, after all), but she is undeniably goofy. However, she's also a fast, agile, and highly skilled acrobatic fighter with time manipulation abilities who was one of Overwatch's most effective agents before its collapse.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: One of the perks of being the poster girl of the franchise is that you get to make a lot of appearances. Unfortunately, in this world, that goes hand-in-hand with exposing yourself to more opportunities to be trampled^note and probably because the writers know you can afford it more.
  • Ultimately, she's on the losing end of one in Alive. Despite a fair showing, at the end of the night, Widowmaker stays in control of their fight, pulls off the assassination without a hitch, and walks away without a scratch while Tracer ends the night injured and incapacitated as her home descends into chaos. To be fair, that last detail only happened because Widowmaker got the drop on her while she was under a lot of stress; up until that point, she had done a decent job of holding her own. Still, not what you'd call a stellar first solo outing.
  • And another one in Doomfist's origin trailer. Her bullets can't even get through his barrier, and after a moment of observing her blinking about, Doomfist grabs her mid-blink by the back of her chronal accelerator and rips it off, causing her disability to rapidly overtake her. She only has time for two uncontrolled blinks as she desperately reaches out to Winston for help before she fades from the flow of time again. At least this time, she was otherwise able to avoid being physically injured.
• Cursed with Awesome: The accident with the Slipstream left her as the world's only known sufferer of "temporal displacement", which causes her to uncontrollably flicker in and out of time at unpredictable intervals, with some presumably horrifying implications if left unchecked. But checked they were, and now all she has to do to live normally is to keep wearing her Chronal Accelerator harness^note Reflections reveals that it has a range of effect that allows her to set it up in some kind of "generator" mode to afford herself some comfort in a contained area, such as her flat, which also allows her to use her own condition to her advantage by granting her a degree of manipulation over her own time stream.
• Cute, but Cacophonic: She's a kind, chipper, and very lovable person. But in the midst of a fight, she's also a giggling hellion whose fighting style revolves around causing as much grief and harassment as possible (practical or otherwise) for the enemy.
• Cute Ghost Girl: Her Will-O-Wisp skin from the 2019 Halloween Terror event turns her into this. She might be a spirit trapped between worlds (as per Reinhardt's story), but she's still as much of a Badass Adorable as ever.
• The Cutie: She's an beautiful and lovable sweetheart with a energetic personality, and is almost always portrayed as enthusiastically playful and youthful.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Her Blink can only move her on a horizontal plane, and her Recall rewinds her position by three seconds. In the original cinematic trailer, she's shown to be able to blink upwards a great distance, and in Alive, she can recall about ten seconds into the past.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: A single shot from one of her pistols will barely make a scratch. Thing is, they can fire off about forty shots in a second^note in fact, the rate of fire is so intense that firing off just a single shot is actually pretty hard and requires you to be very gentle with the controls, and her reload is just as fast, which means all that scratching adds up really quickly.
• Determinator: The theatrical "We Are Overwatch" teaser takes a selection of heroes and pairs each of them with an appropriate virtue ("honor" for Reinhardt, "compassion" for Mercy, et cetera). Tracer gets paired with "determination”, and for good reason. You can't keep the girl down. Her attitude and ideals have proven remarkably resilient in spite of everything life has thrown at her, from nearly being erased from time to witnessing the initial collapse of Overwatch to the entire incident in London. She always manages to recover and come back for more, with her dedication to doing the right thing holding as strong as ever. Once she's cleared for active duty after recovering from the Slipstream accident in Uprising, Commander Morrison tells her point-blank that he would expect most people in her situation to have given up. Lena's having none of that.
  "I fought to survive, and I'm willing to fight for the world, too."
• Difficult, but Awesome: Tracer's very low HP and short range mean she has to take a lot of risks to do her job, and she can be two-shotted by many of the other playable characters. Her Blink is also tricky to master, especially if you plan to use it for dodging stuff. But if you get a handle on her, Tracer is easily the most maneuverable character in the game, hurts a lot, and can leave the enemy team tearing their hair out in frustration.
• Disability Superpower: In inventing the chronal accelerator, Winston took Tracer's troubles with time and tangibility and weaponized them, transforming her from a helpless ghost to an elite operative.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: She helped to save King's Row on her very first mission, is recognized across the planet as a former Overwatch agent, and regularly goes out of her way to inconvenience or even endanger herself if it means she can help someone else. And yet some shopkeeper still looks her right in the face through a closed door as he hangs up a big "closed" sign in Reflections. He may not have recognized her, but, really, how many spiky-haired, goggle-wearing acrobatic runners in bright yellow pants with glowing blue devices on their chests could there possibly be in one neighborhood?
• Emergency Temporal Shift: Tracer's time travel abilities make her an evasive Fragile Speedster in combat. Her Blink ability has her skip forward in time, appearing to cross distances in seconds. Her other ability Recall lets her jump back in time to where she was 3 seconds ago, allowing her to avoid danger and undo damage. She makes use of these in the short "Alive" in her duel against Widowmaker, rapidly avoiding the assassin's shots with Blink and using Recall to save herself from a tripped mine.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Even without her time powers, she would still be an Olympics-quality runner capable of great feats of speed and acrobatics with an apparently inexhaustible supply of stamina, and her reflexes are almost superhumanly fast, to say nothing of her mental fortitude to hold onto her ideals despite so much in her life going wrong.
• Endearingly Dorky: She goes about the business of saving the world with all of the enthusiasm of an excitable puppy.
  • She tries to strike a serious, heroic pose in her Serious Business highlight intro,… and has some trouble pulling it off.
  • In Uprising, she shows up to the strike team's embarkation in full uniform and beaming like a high schooler looking to make a good impression on her first day. As they depart, she can be seen smiling from ear to ear as she sits among her teammates.
  Mercy: We've invested a great deal in your career. Think [Commander Morrison] likes you.
  Tracer: (pointing at herself in disbelief) Me?
• Establishing Character Moment: How does she make her entrance into the franchise? By blinking in out of nowhere right next to an unaware Widowmaker and making her presence known by whispering "Psst! What ya lookin’ at?" to her as she’s staring through her scope. Then they start fighting, with Widowmaker firing off round after round as Tracer leaps, flips, and blinks out of the way, all while giggling like she’s having the time of her life. Fewer than ten seconds, and it's still a perfect demonstration of just who she is. Less bombastically, her interactions with the two boys establish her compassionate side and willingness to care for the innocent.
• Explosive Stupidity: Tracer is susceptible to being blown up by her own Pulse Bomb, so once you drop it, get out of the radius immediately. Interestingly, if a Genji deflects a Pulse Bomb (thus making it "friendly," per se), not only will he still be susceptible to it, but it also stacks against an enemy team if they deflect it, leading to strange interactions like this.
  • An easy way to remember it is that the bomb becomes "owned" by the last person to "fire" it and all characters can be killed by their own explosives (even if they don't actually have any explosives of their own). In the gif linked above, that's the Genji on the right by the point of detonation (according to the kill-feed). Since the two other players in the blast were enemies of the Genji on the right, they got killed. The Genji also died because the bomb was "his." If the Tracer recording it had been within the blast, she would have been untouched as the bomb no longer "belonged" to her.

F-N

• Fastball Special: During the cinematic trailer, Tracer teleports into Winston's hand so that he can throw her across the room at Reaper and Widowmaker.
• Fictional Disability: Tracer was displaced in time by an experimental aircraft she was test-piloting. She must wear (or at least be nearby) a device called a chronal accelerator to avoid simply fading out of existence. While this leaves her Cursed with Awesome (since it gives her the ability to teleport around or reverse time), it leaves her with a glaring weakness (as Doomfist demonstrated in his trailer, and the London Calling comic confirmed happened in the "Alive" short).
• Five Rounds Rapid: While her attacks are more than effective enough in the game (a single magazine delivered point-blank can kill most non-tanks), her shooting has had no discernible effect in any cinematic so far.
• Finger Gun: Her "Finger Guns" emote.
• Finger Wag: In her "Having a Laugh" emote.
• Flashback to Catchphrase: In Uprising, it turns out that "The cavalry's here!" was first uttered by Torbjörn, as a sarcastic quip in response to the rookie Tracer working with him on her first official mission with Overwatch. Tracer decided to put a positive spin on it and make the phrase her own.
• Flash Step: Her Blink ability, which lets her dash short distances near-instantaneously, effectively the bread and butter of her high-speed and carefully-positioned gameplay.
• Former Teen Rebel: She was a punk in her youth. Personality wise, she hasn't changed much (and still loves rock and punk music), but she's far more disciplined if her quotes from the skin are anything to go by.
• Fragile Speedster: At 150, she has the fewest hit points of any hero (tied with D.Va when she's on foot, but even she starts out with a mech that has 600), with no independent way to supplement her defense via armor or shields. Fortunately for her, she has a higher-than-average movement speed, and her abilities are geared toward keeping her mobile and maneuverable and helping her quickly bail out of bad situations. Learning to master her skills and apply them on the fly is crucial to being effective with her, and she's consequently considered to be one of the higher skill cap characters.
• Freak Lab Accident: The teleportation device in the experimental jet she was testing malfunctioned, dislocating her from time and forcing Winston to build the chronal accelerator to stabilize her, with the side effect of giving Tracer her abilities.
• Friendly Rivalry: Has a minor one with Lúcio over who's the fastest.
• Friend to All Children: Kids are apparently quite fond of her. The younger brother in the cinematic trailer gushes about how she’s his favorite hero, and she tries to keep them both calm during the fight when she winds up taking cover with them behind a display, much to his delight when she says her catchphrase. At the end, she smiles warmly at them and salutes them before going on her way, earning even the more jaded older brother’s admiration. In Alive, a little girl in the crowd reacts with excitement and reaches out to her when she sees Tracer attending the speech, and another one in Reflections cheerfully gives her a gift as thanks after she had helped her family from a robbery.
• The Gadfly: Of a more cheerful sort; she is very prone to screwing around with her opponents and being an annoyance just because she can (and it keeps them distracted to boot). Her gameplay style also encourages this, since she can't take a lot of hits, but can zip around ridiculously fast and has weapons and abilities that can make her a right pain in the ass for the enemy team to deal with, as well as opening them up for more powerful Heroes to deal with more effectively than she can.
• Gangsta Style: Downplayed. She holds her guns at an angle.
• Genki Girl: She is always constantly giggling and zipping from place to place. Her first appearance is her popping up behind Widowmaker who's trying to line up a shot through her scope, and grinning, saying, "Psst, what'cha lookin' at?"
• Goggles Do Nothing: In her backstory, Tracer wore the goggles as a pilot presumably to protect her eyes. The goggles themselves don't really have much of a purpose in the actual game. Since she's an avid runner and most of her combat philosophy revolves around staying mobile at high speeds, they may just serve to keep the wind out of her eyes so she can focus. It isn't clear if the shades she sports in her 2 look have any functions either, aside from possibly containing a heads-up display.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Played straight in the Alive animated short, when Tekhartha Mondatta is assassinated. Tracer pins Widowmaker to the ground, but doesn't go for the kill. She simply pleads to understand why anyone would do such a horrible thing. It's one of the few moments shown so far where Tracer is being something completely different than her usual cheerful self.
• Goth: Her "Ultraviolet" skin. Doubles as Perky Goth due to her personality.
• Gun Twirling: Does this when she reloads and for one of her emotes.
• Guns Akimbo: Wields a pair of pulse pistols that have an insane firing rate and a quick reload time.
• Handicapped Badass: Tracer was never "cured" of her temporal displacement, and the condition itself is so bizarre and unique that she likely never will be. Instead, she has to rely on a form of treatment provided by her accelerator, which stabilizes her in time, and she risks severe danger to herself if it is ever compromised or she leaves its range of effect. The parallels to a disability are not hard to draw, but she was still able to become one of Overwatch's most effective and recognized agents by working around her limitations and making use of the abilities her condition granted her, and as long as she keeps her accelerator secure, she can be an absolute nightmare to deal with.
• Hartman Hips: Not as blatantly as the Trope Namer, but her hips are noticeably wider than her waist (particularly visible with her "Sprinter" and "Track And Field" skins, which put her in runner's wear, and her "Cadet Oxton" skin, which trades out her jacket and harness for a plated bodysuit). Must be all that cardio.
• Heal Thyself: Recall restores her to whatever state she was in three seconds prior, including her physical position and her health, so in a roundabout way, it can be used as a self-heal if you're fast enough on the draw after an attack.
• The Heart: Tracer is known in and out of story for her kind, likable demeanor and unshakable dedication to the common good, and she seems to have a talent for bringing these same qualities out in those around her. The cynical older brother from the cinematic trailer is visibly more hopeful after their encounter, and a brief conversation with her is all it takes for Commander Morrison to reaffirm himself and authorize a mission when the London Uprising leaves him struggling with protocol. He, Mercy, and especially Winston have all been shown to be very protective of her^note in fact, Uprising heavily implies that Morrison himself has taken a personal interest in her career and that he privately instructed Mercy to keep an eye on her; in the event proper, she's also the only member of the strike team he specifically goes out of his way to encourage to stay safe, and any time she's hurt or abused is always Played for Drama.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: One of her skins, appropriately titled "Punk", gives her a studded black Schott-Perfecto leather jacket. Its recolor, "Ultraviolet", has the same jacket.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Averted with her "T. Racer" and "Mach T." legendary skins, which turn her into a Formula One-style auto racer with a big, bulky, face-obscuring racing helmet to match.
• Hero Antagonist: Her role in the Alive animated short is trying to prevent Widowmaker from assassinating a peaceful religious leader.
• Hidden Buxom: Between her jacket and chronal accelerator, her chest is pretty covered, and her pose on the hero gallery has her thrusting her waist out a bit, but Tracer is actually fairly busty if you look. Most notable in her origin video.
• Hidden Depths:
  • She has a tendency, especially in-game, to come across like a giggling, showboating goofball, such that it's easy to forget sometimes that she's an accomplished pilot who was initially brought onto Overwatch for her flying skills. The comics show her behavior outside of a fight is noticeably more mature and thoughtful: Reflections reveals that she's capable of maintaining a healthy, adult relationship with her girlfriend, and her little speech in Uprising demonstrates that her ideals aren't just an idealist's fantasies, but a deeply held personal commitment that she takes very seriously. Her citations of Mei and the Shambali order as personal inspirations in some of the pre-fight conversations also suggest she places substantial value on the issues of peace, spirituality, social equity, and the environment, showing that her worldview is more informed than what her mannerisms would indicate, and her concept of heroism is more complex and nuanced than just grabbing a gun and fighting the bad guys.
    "Mei, you're the real hero."
  • In "London Calling", it's revealed that she's a huge fan of old rock and punk bands like The Beatles and The Clash.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: Her Pulse Bomb is extremely powerful, but she will get hurt if she's in the blast radius from splash damage and, at low enough health, can even be killed by her own ultimate if she doesn't hightail it outta there. Luckily, her entire kit is tailor-made for hightailing it outta there.
• Hope Bringer: Under favorable conditions, she has the effect of brightening up the place wherever she goes. Her words to Commander Morrison in Uprising about her commitment to helping those in need are enough to snap him out of his dilemma and convince him to authorize a mission to intervene in the London crisis, despite how it would conflict with protocol. Years later, her participation in foiling Talon's museum heist leaves two young boys — one of whom is established to already be pretty jaded — visibly awestruck. The in-story news article that covers the event even makes note of the hopeful looks on their faces and muses that maybe this unexpected display of heroism means the world has a chance of improving after all.
• Humble Heroine: She's likely a household name from her career in Overwatch, yet she still abides by regular business hours just like everyone else in Reflections, routinely lends aid to bystanders and expects no reward, lives with her girlfriend in fairly modest accommodations, and defers to Mei as "the real hero" despite her own credentials and the former being more of a scientist than a field agent.
• The Hyena: "Lena the Hyena" is quite the jovial gal, and she giggles almost constantly, even in the midst of a fight. To the point that it's a default sound clip for some of her emotes and abilities and even bleeds into one of her highlight intros. She is capable of being serious, but if she’s ever outright frowning, it’s a sign that something is seriously wrong.
• Impossible Hourglass Figure: Not as extreme as most examples, but she has a slim waist which is further complimented by her hips and a fairly pronounced bust beneath her jacket and harness, indicating that she's curvier under all that gear than she might appear at first glance.
• Improbable Age: The Slipstream accident happened seven or eight years before the events of the game. That would mean that, by the time she was eighteen, she was an accomplished test pilot, believed to be skilled enough to fly an experimental fighter jet. She was also a member of Overwatch and went on her first mission when she was around 19 years old.
• Incoming Ham: More through action than dialogue. Her first ten seconds of screen time involve her giggling and weaving through gunfire before backflipping about twenty feet into the air, pulling out a pair of pistols, and leaping right into the fray. Her first line might as well have been "Cheers, love! The ham's here!"
• Irony: Sweet, compassionate, and likely forward-thinking Tracer hails from King's Row, a racially tense and oppressive district of London which, by all appearances, is a dingy, dirty, polluted urban mess scrawled with hateful, intolerant graffiti. No wonder she thinks the world needs more heroes.
• Jumped at the Call: Within a few seconds upon receiving Winston's message at the end of the Recall short, she was the first to call him back.
• Just Like Robin Hood: Her Hong Gildong skin, who is based of the Tale of Hong Gildong, the illegitimate son of a nobleman who went around stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Bonus points for giving this to the character who comes from England, the origin of Robin Hood.
• Kid-Appeal Character: Her kind, cheerful demeanor and friendly interactions with children seem to indicate that she is intended to appeal to younger fans, and her compassionate nature, diverse skillset, and capacity to never give up or lose hope in spite of adversity mark her as one of the game's more obvious role models. Of course, she also has plenty of adult fans, and even the developers are on record for taking a shine to her. Ironically, her use of some pretty harsh British English phrases and her utterance of a "Dammit" in Reflections technically make her, by default, one of the game's more foul-mouthed characters.
• Large Ham: Why wade into a fight when you can backflip into the air and come down guns blazing? Lena is an exuberant girl, and everything about her identity and mannerisms radiates with charisma, energy, and enthusiasm. She comes across like the kind of person who has so much passion inside her that she can't help but spread it around.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Of the positive variety in Reflections. After spending the evening dashing about London looking for a gift for her girlfriend and coming away at every turn empty-handed due to constantly getting distracted, a family she had helped earlier tracks her down and lets her have one of their gifts as thanks, which just so happens to contain a scarf just like the one she had let a stranger have earlier.
• Le Parkour: Not that it translates much into gameplay, but she has a tendency in the story materials to make use of the battlefield's terrain and elevation to pull off some impressive leaps and vaults to either reach the fight more quickly, get herself to a better position, run circles around the opposition, or do her Christmas shopping, and a fair amount of the official artwork depicts her enthusiastically in mid-leap. In the French version of the game, it's even made its way into her name (see Meaningful Name below).
• Leet Speak: Her "Sprinter" and "Track and Field" skins feature a stopwatch set to the time "13:37". The number 1337 is Leet Speak for "leet" ("elite").
• Like Brother and Sister: Following the accident with the Slipstream, Winston saved her life by developing her accelerator when no one else could figure out how to help her. They've been close ever since and share one of the strongest bonds of any two playable characters, including the ones who are literal family. In the photo of the ceremony celebrating Winston becoming a full agent, she can be seen jumping with joy right by his side, and seeing her fade out of time after her accelerator is destroyed by Doomfist is enough to activate Winston's berserker state. Considering we've otherwise only seen him do that when Reaper stepped on his glasses, which belonged to his father figure, this would indicate he also thinks of her like family.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Her bright attire and brighter personality mark her as the warm and amiable Light to Widowmaker's aloof and reserved Dark.
• Meaningful Name:
  • A "Tracer" is a person or object that traces something or by which something may be traced, hence her ability to rewind herself back on old paths and make new ones. It's also a reference to tracer rounds, given her ability to zip in any direction as fast as a bullet, leaving a streak of color in her wake.
  • The French translation of her name (Traceur) is also what you would call a practitioner of Le Parkour. This also happens to be pronounced identically to her English name, suggesting it was a deliberate pun in the first place.
  • The Polish translation of her name (Smuga) actually is a reference to tracer rounds. Makes sense considering the trails her Blink ability leaves.
• Mental Time Travel: What her Recall basically is on a highly localized level, as it "rewinds" her state of being and relative position back to what it was three seconds prior, while still letting Tracer keep all of her current memories.
• Me's a Crowd: In a meta way. While any team can have multiples of each character, if two Tracers are on the same team (which will only happen in "No Limits" or "Mystery Heroes" mode), they will actually acknowledge each other during the pre-fight banter period, attributing each other's presence to the irregularities of her personal timeline. She takes seeing an exact copy of herself in stride rather well, but then again, her best friend is an intelligent, cybernetic ape from the moon.
• More Dakka: Her pistols empty so fast, each 40-round magazine is more like a prolonged shotgun blast.
• Ms. Fanservice: Not as blatantly as the likes of D.Va, Widowmaker, Symmetra, or Mercy, but she has a very athletic figure complimented by some form-hugging leggings, and no opportunity is wasted to draw attention to her long and expertly modeled legs and bum. Her legendary Summer Games skins gives us a very nice view of her midriff, and a lot of her body language seems to have been inspired by World War II pinup posters. Less suggestively, her kindhearted personality coupled with her friendly, pretty face are also seen as very appealing by those who have a preference for wholesomeness.
• Mundane Utility: In "Reflections", Tracer uses her blinking abilities to zip around town to find a Christmas gift before the stores close.
• My Greatest Failure: It's implied she carries a lot of guilt for failing to prevent Tekhartha Mondatta's assassination. London's calling suggested she genuinely attempted a Taking the Bullet, but her accelorator malfunctioned.
  Genji: Do not blame yourself for Mondatta's death. It was not your fault.
  Tracer: You don't understand, Genji, I could have saved him! Maybe the world would have been better off if it was me instead of him...
• New Meat: Takes this role in Uprising, her first mission. Mercy is protective of her, Reinhardt encouraging, Torbjörn dismissive.
• Nice Girl: Gadfly tendencies aside, Tracer is an optimistic, friendly, kind-hearted woman. Still, it's best not to get on her bad side. It's on its best display in Reflections, in which she repeatedly makes her own night harder to make those of strangers' easier, with no expectation of a reward.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: If she had never taken the initiative to enlist into Overwatch to help make a difference, she never would have endured the accident that would leave her afflicted with her condition. And in Alive, she's willing to risk her own well-being to save someone else, and not only does she succumb to the former, she doesn't even succeed in the latter. Had she just minded her own business and not gotten involved, the outcome would have been the same, and she would have spared herself from getting hurt. But that wouldn't have been the right thing to do, so she didn't.

O-Z

• Odd Friendship: With Winston. She's a hyperactive, time-manipulating agent from England whereas he's a reserved, hyper-intelligent gorilla from the moon. They have quite possibly the closest friendship out of all the playable Heroes in the game.
• Official Couple: With Emily as revealed in Reflections. The Zero Hour cinematic for Overwatch 2 shows that they're still together with Tracer taping a picture of Emily on the control panel of the ship she's piloting.
• Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: Inverted with Widowmaker; Tracer is 7 years younger, making her the younger heroine to Widowmaker's older villainess.
• Older Than She Looks: Yes, that sweet, bright-eyed, and baby-faced young lady in the picture above is twenty-six years old, though it's ambiguous as to whether or not her chronal displacement has something to do with it.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Tracer is earnestly committed to helping others and making the world a better place, so her cheerful disposition tends to fade and become more severe when she encounters anything that could endanger innocents, especially if Widowmaker is involved, due to their bitter history together and the latter’s penchant for creating and reveling in such crises.
  • Most notable are the moments immediately following the assassination in London, which showed Tracer at her most distraught and swinging from anger to sorrow as she asks Widowmaker for just an explanation.
  • When she sees a crisis unfolding in London and no one doing anything about it due to red tape in Uprising, she gives Commander Morrison a bit of an earful about how she enlisted to help people, not ignore them when they're in danger, even saying she won't apologize even if she's out of line. She remains respectful through the whole thing, but it's still probably the most forceful we've seen her be with someone who wasn't an enemy.
• Painted-On Pants: The most flattering aspect of her otherwise wholesome design. Tracer's bright yellow leggings cling to every contour of her lower body, presumably to help reduce drag and keep her aerodynamic, but also to give the audience a nice look at the results of what is likely a strenuous cardio regimen.
• The Paragon: It's mostly limited to in-game character interactions, but she's this to certain heroes.
  • Mei outright gushes about how Tracer inspires her. In turn, Tracer calls Mei the real hero.
  • Pharah calls her lucky for having been in Overwatch, while Lena ensures Pharah that she may still get that chance in the future.
  • Orisa questions her on whether it's right or wrong to operate outside the law. Tracer admits it's a difficult question, but then she follows with the belief that she should be doing what she believes is right.
• Pink Is Feminine: She has an alternative skin that colors her suit and tints her goggles pink.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Despite her rather petite frame, she is perfectly capable of holding her own against opponents several times her size through smart application of her kit and abilities.
• Pistol-Whipping: Tracer's melee attack is to strike her target with the handle of one of her pistols. Given how short her bursts of attacks are, melee attacks are particularly useful for Tracer players.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With Winston. They've been said to be the closest of friends ever since he invented her chronal accelerator. Doubles as an Odd Friendship.
• Plucky Girl: It's hard to get much pluckier than "will happily cartwheel through live gunfire while laughing". The girl loves her job.
• The Pollyanna: The contrast between how much love she has for life compared to how it tends to treat her in return could almost draw comparisons to an abusive relationship. Things don't always work out for her, and she's had as many lows as highs, but she always manages to regroup for next time and her can-do attitude remains untarnished. She has problems, but in her view, they do not outweigh the world's; there's always work to be done, and nothing is going to stop her from at least trying to make a difference.
• Power Incontinence: Her temporal distortions were essentially uncontrollable on her own, often firing off randomly and leaving her desynched with normal time. The chronal accelerator Winston built for her helps to stabilize these powers and allows her to manipulate them more to her will.
• Precision F-Strike: In her "Punk" and "Ultraviolet" skins, Tracer becomes slightly more foul-mouthed, calling her enemies "tossers" and "wankers" when she eliminates them; both common (and rather spicy) insults in British slang. Surprising, hearing that from whom is probably the most kid-friendly character in Overwatch.
• Primary-Color Champion: One of the most unambiguously heroic characters on the roster, and she is associated mainly with blue and yellow, with a little red from the Union Jack and her personal decal which both adorn her jacket.
• Punk Rock: Her "Punk" skin seems to be based around the British version of this trope: pink hair, spiky earrings and leather jacket. She was one in her youth, and bonds with a group of omnics over a shared love of punk music.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: When she was first introduced, many fans, especially British fans, thought Tracer was voiced by an American doing an exaggerated Cockney accent. They later learned, to their surprise, that she was voiced by British actress Cara Theobold (although Theobold is from Wakefield in Yorkshire, so she's still putting on an accent).
• The Rival: Widowmaker. The Alive trailer goes into more details on how it came about, namely an assassination in Tracer's home turf of King's Row.
• Scarf of Asskicking: Her "Slipstream" skin has a long, white scarf. To a lesser extent, her "T. Racer" and "Mach T." skins also give her a stylish ascot.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
  • At the time of Uprising, Overwatch was forbidden from operating in the UK. When she sees London in chaos and Commander Morrison struggling with deciding what to do, she doesn't hesitate to speak her mind about how standing by while the world burns is not what she enlisted for. Her home and its people are more important than protocol. It works, and she's soon shipped out with a team as a newly-minted field cadet to relieve the situation.
  • In London Calling, she's basically started doing typical superheroine good deeds, like foiling thefts. When she catches an omnic stealing parts the underground need to maintain their infrastructure, she quickly concedes that it's acceptable.
• Series Mascot: Everyone on the development team loved Tracer, which led to her becoming the centerpiece heroine of the franchise. Since she became a favorite right out of the gate, this appears to have been a very good choice. She was even announced to be coming to Heroes of the Storm long before Overwatch's full release. To Blizzard's credit, they've managed a pretty good balancing act so far of keeping her prominent while making it clear she isn't exempt from harsh treatment (look no further than Alive for that), which, for the most part, has kept her on the community's good side and helped her avoid some pitfalls other Blizzard characters in similar positions have fallen into.
• Sexy Santa Dress: Her legendary "Jingle" skin for the 2016 Winter Wonderland event. "Cute Santa Dress" probably fits better, though, since it is no more revealing than her standard outfit.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • Alive is ultimately this from her perspective. She's spent years fighting to safeguard her home, even helping to bring operations back to the UK to resolve a crisis and save Mondatta from a hostage situation as detailed in Uprising. In one night, that's all rendered pointless, and her efforts to save him a second time, though admirable, prove fruitless. In the end, all she's earned is injury, trauma, and a front-row seat to the total collapse of order in her home town.
  • Her entire onscreen career is one giant moot point. Her efforts in safeguarding her home during her tenure in Overwatch have been shot to hell by the assassination, which Masquerade states has brought tensions in London back to Uprising levels. Doomfist's breakout and return has also rendered her success in preventing his gauntlet from falling into Talon's hands during the cinematic trailer meaningless. And despite her enthusiasm in answering the recall of Overwatch agents, the organization itself remains unrestored, and she's still in the same position as before she joined: alone and struggling just to keep order in her own house. All in all, the only observable difference between pre-Overwatch Tracer and post-Overwatch Tracer is that the latter is permanently handicapped and has both seen and endured more hardship.
• Shout-Out:
  • Two of her epic-class skins are called "Posh" and "Sporty".
  • Her origin story as a female pilot who disappeared mid-flight is basically a cyberpunk retelling of the story of Amelia Earhart, but with a much happier ending. Her look is also clearly inspired by Earhart.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Tracer only has two abilities outside her primary weapon and her Ultimate: Blink (a short-cooldown, short-ranged dash) and Recall (essentially a reset button if things go bad). Together, however, those abilities are more than enough to allow her to get behind a team, wreck key targets, and then get out before taking fatal damage.
• Smiting Evil Feels Good: If she eliminates Widowmaker, she'll quip "That felt good!"
• The Squadette: Used to be this in Overwatch, first as a test pilot, later as a field agent. A tomboy in both hairstyle and personality.
• Stealth Pun:
  • She's a pilot with time powers. "Time flies."
  • Reflections, the comic in which her sexuality is revealed and her girlfriend is introduced, takes place around Christmastime. Blizzard "made the yuletide gay."
• Sticky Bomb: Pulse Bomb sticks to any surface or person it lands on.
• Straight Gay: A rare female version of the trope. Beyond her Boyish Short Hair and Action Girl tendencies, Tracer displays none of the usual, often badly-mishandled tropes associated with lesbian characters in fiction. She's a chirpy, energetic young lady who just happens to be gay, and no huge issue is made of it.
• Stock Shōnen Hero: She has the trademark spiky hair, dresses in bright yellow/orange, and has an energetic, happy, and childish personality and a strong sense of justice. Overall, she's the cheeriest character on the roster, making her a great choice for the game mascot like so many shonen heroes are for their series.
• Sucking-In Lines: Pulse Bomb has them before detonation.
• Super-Reflexes: Tracer was able to avoid Widowmaker's sniper round when it was fired from only 30 feet away, while Tracer was in free-fall. It's downplayed in that Tracer needs to know the shot is coming; she didn't avoid Widowmaker smashing her into the side of a building because of emotional distress and surprise.
• Supreme Chef: It's a silly little short and obviously not canon, but Trace & Bake shows her able to quickly and efficiently whip up and decorate a cake about three times her own size by herself. She otherwise behaves perfectly in-character, so it's not a stretch to assume being a competent cook is within her canon capabilities. Reaper even sneaks a taste at the end and says it isn't bad.
• Technician Versus Performer: The performer to Widowmaker's technician. Tracer uses her abilities on the fly and tries to be creative and have fun. Widowmaker is brutally efficient. In pre-fight dialogue, Widowmaker states that, despite this, Tracer behaves predictably and uses her powers as a crutch. Tracer scoffs at that.
• Teleport Spam: Her entire playstyle is focused on her dashing around and outmaneuvering her target with her time-jumping powers. This is best shown in Doomfist's origin trailer, where he is unable to touch her for most of the fight.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Her home is in a constant state of chaos, the organization she loved and aspired to join fell apart years ago while most of the good she's helped to accomplish has been for naught, she's addled with a terrible handicap that requires constant monitoring, and judging by the shopkeeper closing the door on her in Reflections, not even her own fellow townsfolk have much gratitude for her. But thanks to Emily, at least she can come home every day to someone who loves and cares about her.
• Time Is Dangerous: When it can threaten your ability to merely exist, it sure is. Especially once you get it under control and learn how to weaponize it.
• Time Master: Her teleporting ability is actually her slowing time down relative to herself and moving to a location, which we perceive as her moving extremely quickly. She can also move backwards 3 seconds in time.
• Time Rewind Mechanic: Tracer can rewind time at any point by a fixed amount. Time only flows backwards for herself, effectively placing her where she was a few seconds ago and healing any damage or status ailments she's taken in that time.
• To Be Lawful or Good: In the first London Calling comic, she catches an omnic stealing parts. She doesn't need much convincing that the omnics are in the right, as nobody will sell them the parts they need to survive legitimately. She's also more than willing to resort to heroics outside the rule of law (like operating as a superheroine after Overwatch is disbanded, and not showing any reluctance in rejoining the new, illegal, Overwatch).
• Tomboy: The short hair and boyish hobbies present her as such.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: She's sporty and rambunctious compared to her more sedate and traditionally feminine partner Emily.
• Totally Radical: A number of her lines come across as anachronistic due to the British stereotyping. In particular, she sometimes says "Wicked!" after using Blink, which hasn't been used by British teenagers for years.
• Trauma Conga Line: Her career began with a nearly fatal accident, and that's not even the worst of it. Left with an unknown condition that could erase her from time, it required every ounce of willpower she had to persevere until a treatment was found (and bear in mind that she was still a teenager at the time), and her encounter with Doomfist literally ripped it away and forced her to relive it all under the most harrowing circumstances possible. Earlier, her tenure as a proper agent began with a trial by fire with her own home at stake no sooner than she had made her initial recovery. But her success was short-lived; Overwatch shortly collapsed, and the events of Alive left her injured and helpless to watch her work be undone and her home descend into turmoil once again while knowing she failed to prevent it. All this roughly in the span of seven years. Just how many times has this girl been forced to confront her own mortality and see her life's work go to ashes around her before she's even thirty?
• Unorthodox Reload: Tracer spins her guns, followed by a blue glow around an apparent power cell. It's possible she uses the "rewind time to when her guns were full" trick seen used by other time manipulators.
• Unstuck in Time: The Slipstream was an experimental aircraft that made use of some form of time travel to rapidly cross great distances. Tracer's credentials got her handpicked to helm its shakedown run, which ended with a malfunction that she survived, but also did something to dislodge her from her own timeline. For months afterward, she effectively existed in limbo, constantly flickering in and out of existence for varying lengths at a time and baffling anyone who tried to help her until Winston successfully engineered her chronal accelerator, a device that reins in her temporal fluctuations to a manageable level and anchors her in time. Without it, she can't maintain a physical form for long and leads an ephemeral existence, but it also allows her to exert control over her own condition and use it to her advantage by rewinding her own timeline and swiftly traversing short distances.
• Vibrant Orange: Fragile Speedster Tracer has an upbeat and optimistic personality, is constantly giggling and zipping from place to place. Her default outfit has her wearing orange goggles and an orange bodysuit.
• Wearing a Flag on Your Head:
  • Her bomber jacket has a Union Jack patch on the right shoulder.
  • Her "Sprinter" skin gives her a backpack with a Union Jack sticking out of it, making it look like she's wearing it like a cape.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: The most prominent example among the cast, which is saying a lot when you consider that includes the likes of Reinhardt and Lúcio. Almost always chipper and upbeat, she seems to be incapable of standing by if someone needs help, has no understanding why someone would willingly commit an evil act, and thinks there's no problem that can't be solved with some good old-fashioned heroism. Uprising shows that even as Overwatch was beginning its decline and attracting protests, up to the point of being barred from operating in her native UK, she remained a firm, wholehearted believer in its capacity to benefit the world. And despite numerous setbacks, her demeanor remains proactive.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: An unfortunate recurring theme with her seems to be that any progress she makes toward her goal of helping the world is doomed to be crippled or undone sooner or later. She enlists into Overwatch? An experiment goes awry and afflicts her with a condition that could erase her from time. She recovers and reinvents herself as a field agent? Overwatch collapses, and she's booted back to square one. She undauntedly continues her work at home? Someone strolls along at the worst possible time and fouls it all up in one night, negating much of what she's fought for in the process. She answers the recall of Overwatch's agents and commits to helping rebuild it? She and Winston are still nearly alone months later, and its return has barely gained momentum. Many characters in Overwatch have their lives defined by a tragedy from which they slowly try to bring themselves back: a plunge followed by a steady climb. Tracer's life is more like a roller coaster that constantly switches between highs and lows so extreme, it's a wonder she hasn't gone mad from the whiplash.
• Youthful Freckles: They're there, just hard to see beneath her goggles.