Elon Musk asked Amber Heard to cosplay Mercy in true gamer bro cliche

Elon Musk and Amber Heard met at the Met Gala on May 16, 2016, just a couple of weeks before Heard announced her divorce from Johnny Depp. They had first met in the early 2000s, when Heard was on set. Machete Kills, for which Musk had been brought on as a consultant — but it was at the prestigious fashion charity event that the two hit it off as friends. Blizzard released its first game franchise for years in the same month with the colorful shooter. OverwatchThe album would eventually sell more than 50 million copies. These two landmarks in the history of popular culture would later intersect.

The 12th of September is a day to remember. Elon MuskWalter Isaacson released his biography. Isaacson spent two years with the current owner of X (née Twitter), producing a wooden recounting of Musk’s life of entrepreneurship and struggles with family, mental health, and relationships. The two-sentence bombshell that Isaacson casually added to the chapter on Musk’s on-again, off-again relationship with Heard contained no further information.

She reminded him that he loves Mercy from the videogame. OverwatchSo she spent two whole months making a full-body costume to play his part.

This detail was picked out by at least one book review, giving the internet a reason to laugh. Musk was not deterred, and he responded to the comments of an joke post retweeting Dexerto’s coverage to wordlessly post proof in the form of a private picture of Heard in the costume (reportedly without her permission) and, in a separate post, mention how cool it was. The candid photo of the actress in a skimpy, corseted version of the support hero’s armor spread quickly through social media, especially in the Overwatch community. EveryoneThe following is an explanation of how to pronounce the word all too happyGaze at a photoThe way the post is done comes very close to being revenge porn.

The billionaire has been a fan for a very long time. OverwatchIn 2020, he tweeted with the Overwatch official Twitter account. few timesHe revealed that he was a Torbjorn primary.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon

Elon is an atypical sexist bro gamer. In this instance, it’s not even about the money. Overwatch As his preferred game. Him ignoring the privacy of his ex-girlfriend (who has written about having been “sexually assaulted” in the past) in order to prove it happened and win cool points feels no different than any other random dude bragging about something like this, despite Musk having been named one of this year’s most influential people. It was interesting to see how the Overwatch Community jumped in and used the opportunity. mock Mercy mainsIt is also not surprising. The relationship between the two parties and the hero is deeply strange, misogynistic.

Mercy occupies an important place in Overwatch’s culture. This is partly due to the persistent sexist views in the wider gaming community. She is deeply beloved by people who main her, but she’s also considered a uniquely low-skill hero due to her more collaborative play style and decreased emphasis on aiming (even though this characterization is an oversimplification at best). It also fits in with the idea that video games are only for women, and that they’re not very good. Mercy gamers (no matter their gender) are subjected to a lot of sexist bullying, in both text and voice chat.

Despite being so hated, Mercy has an appealing visual design, which makes Elon’s own interest more legible. Mercy is a white woman, who has a blond hair, feminine body type, and is white. This allows her to fit into stereotypes (and white supremacist) about saintliness and purity. It also makes her the perfect tabula rosa to which you can project your sexual fantasies. Overwatch porn is a popular category on Pornhub. However, Mercy’s own searches dominate many of these charts, either in an animated version or as a performer. Some guys would love to have a girlfriend do this private.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon

Image: Blizzard Entertainment via Polygon

It is here that Mercy’s playable character becomes a media item, a performance, or a gendered object. When something is specifically gendered, it is then reproduced in strange and bizarre ways. She’s a low-skill hero, but she’s played at a professional level in esports. She’s mained by “toxic” girls, but men still fantasize about getting their girlfriends to play as her, or about falling in love with their Mercy “pockets.”

It is not a stretch, then, to see why something like a “healsluts” community exists for Overwatch; a lot of Mercy porn frames her as demure and coquettish, or more explicitly submissive. Thus the logical conclusion: Wouldn’t it be great to have a hot, nerdy girlfriend who hung on your every word, obeyed your every command, and unquestionably respected your power? While this is a perfectly fine kink to practice in spaces that are designed for it, this conception of Mercy also has a genesis in the Overwatch community’s weird behavior about her, which can be mapped over the existing heteropatriarchal power dynamics that exist outside of designed kink spaces. Musk’s photo of Amber Heard circulating on social media is the backdrop to all of this.

Musk’s biography spends a lot of time on how he was someone who eventually rose to success out of the hardships of being bullied, and yet he seems to be the biggest bully of them all, especially to the women in his life. For what he described as a “dark vortex” surrounding his time with Heard, Musk still felt emboldened to look cool to other random men online by sharing this private photo. It’s deeply insecure behavior from someone who is already functionally bulletproof due to his wealth and privilege, but it’s also just like a DPS player to need overworked and underappreciated support to keep his self-esteem boosted.