Reunion short + Ashe thoughts

The Good

• Cowboy! Cowboy! Cowboy!
• Seriously love the start and all the leaning heavily on western tropes imagery for mccree and route66 in general (on point cinematography)
• Pale rider
• Jesse walking out of the smoke
• Stand off
• The shooting someone without looking thing
• Riding off into the sunset
• Etc
• That bit where one of the deadlock grunts looks round like ‘wtf he missed’ and no he didn’t he hit exactly what he wanted to it was just the train not you.
• Jesse gave them the tip cause he needed to bring the train down to get echo but this would be very hard as a single person.
• Ashe looks right up my alley to actually play
• Edit: as of the post credit scene I hadn’t seen earlier, I love how kind of childish stealing her bike then driving past her is + that with Jesse not really seeing her and deadlock as that much of a threat anymore (bigger fish etc) which is why he gets them to take down the train – he knows he can take her and the res t pretty easy
• Echo has some interesting implications (but also I have other thoughts on her)
• I like the implications that Jesse is pulling some strings around new overwatch and if very aware of what’s going on but…

The Bad

• It’s yet another thing that raises more questions and new things than it does answers and pay offs to old ones.
• I hate that this starts as ‘this is a Jesse short’ and isn’t and uses him as vehical to do something else about other people. Retribution was cool cause we see him for the first time being his own character not like primarily in something to support someone else’s story and this feels like back to that. Like introduction vehical + Jesse straight up sending another character to recall instead of himself.
• Echo part feels tacked on in a lot of ways and like it (and her herself) comes out of nowhere.
• She has too little actual stuff for a (important sounding) character introduction to actually work and therefore feels introduced a bit prematurely if anything.
• The addressing of recall was kinda vague in an unsatisfying way (again raises new questions without answering old ones I think)
• Similarly kind of want to see more on Jesse’s existing relationships with people before introducing a bunch of new ones – it sort of gives him too much stuff to get through (again more questions than answers)
• Look I don’t know how to phrase this other than Jesse comes off as too cool-tm and this isn’t exactly what I mean but it’s the best I’ve got (particularly in the very last bit).
• Relatedly character depth feels a little lacking in basically all parties in this short. (We know from previous things Jesse at least has a lot of it and there’s like a lot of stuff to work with post fall of overwatch/etc?
• Ashe, Jesse (presumably) and two other people can’t have been the founding members of deadlock and it have been founded in 1976? I could plausibly see the number not being a year or like them claiming to be a much older group or something…but they’ve fucked up stuff like this before so idk.
• Founding gang and becoming notorious enough that overwatch decides to deal with you by 17/19 is a bit out there
• Similarly Jesse being founding member/leader of deadlock seems a bit off with the rest of his backstory (unless blackwatch didn’t know this) idk idk, it definitely changes how it reads a lot (@segadores-y-soldados has some posts that make more sense on this…bizarre choice to reframe deadlock from the obvious interpretation of what we’ve already seen and the timeline stuff – I’m on mobile it’s late linking is hard there are several posts)
• I hate the ethnically ambiguous (fine blizz I’ll play ball with this) kid leads white girl into life of crime implication from Ashe’s bio.

The Ugly

• Animation beautiful overall but that pie looked really really weird