Blizzard offered a first look at new hero Anran in Overwatch following the Overwatch Spotlight, initially in a trailer and then during a weekend-long hero trial in which players could actually play as her. Folks were less than pleased with what they saw. Not with how she plays — but with how she looks.
In August 2025, Blizzard introduced Wuyang in a cinematic trailer called “Elemental Kin” that teased his sister Anran as a playable character. People were excited about the prospect of elemental siblings and thought Anran looked like a “cool older sister,” a look she also had in a tie-in comic and even in Overwatch concept art. But her in-game model drastically reduces her nose size, narrows her cheek bones, and includes a sharp taper at her jaw so her chin ends in a dramatic point. It’s also very similar to Kiriko’s in-game model.
Character models, particularly female characters, sharing features is not a new phenomenon for Overwatch. If you gave Freja purple skin, for example, you’d be hard-pressed to tell her and Widowmaker apart. And as several people on Reddit pointed out, Anran, Kiriko, and Juno share an awful lot of facial features in common. It’s not just collateral damage in the changeover from animated character to 3D model, either. Wuyang’s in-game model looks slightly different, with a noticeably smaller mouth and slightly smaller nose, but he still resembles the version of him in “Elemental Kin.”
Polygon asked Blizzard about the reason Anran’s model looks the way it does and whether the team plans to change it after season 1 launches, but didn’t hear back in time for publication.
Fans started posting their “fixed” versions of Anran on social media, alongside fan art asking Blizzard to “let the phoenix out,” a reference to Anran’s ultimate where she can rise from the dead.
The mock-ups included jokes, of course, like superimposing the Chad-meme head on Anran, but most of them were trying to find some kind of middle ground between what’s in the game and what’s in the cinematic. One from a Chinese fan kept the model’s smaller nose, but adjusted the set of Anran’s eyes and reduced the sharply tucked-in angle of her chin to give her what they believed was a more authoritative, less cutesy appearance. The issue, so the consensus says, isn’t so much that her features are too different from her introduction or too similar to someone else’s. It’s that she looks like someone with a completely different personality.
The disappointment isn’t fading in the lead-up to the new season. If anything, it’s growing. The “Elemental Kin” cinematic filled up with new comments over the weekend, as people went to see just how noticeable the differences were. And on Sunday, Fareeha Andersen, Anran’s voice actor posted a video asking the Overwatch team to live up to its reputation of challenging social norms and do right by their players.
“I got to mourn Anran between the design I had hoped for her and the design we ended up with, because I think in her comic and her cinematic, there was a precedent set by it,” Andersen said. “There was an unspoken promise that said, ‘We’re going to challenge the beauty standards plaguing, ransacking media these days.’ Because of that precedent, people feel understandably let down.”
“Overwatch is a trailblazer at challenging those molds and explore the bounds of what it looks like to be heroic. And I think the result we got says something else. It… leaves a bad taste.”
Andersen said the look is out of keeping with Anran’s character as well, making her “more docile” seeming than even the most laid-back support characters, and encouraged those who feel the same to keep making their dissatisfaction known. She also said that she shared her thoughts with the Overwatch dev team and was encouraged to be as open and honest as possible about the topic.
“This concern is important,” Andersen continued. “This is a hill worth dying on, because I believe the more we speak up about the things that truly matter to us, the more we’ll see ourselves and our values reflected in the world around us.”
