Fortnite Gave Tracer a Bigger Butt Than Overwatch Did

Ten years. A whole decade since Blizzard removed a victory pose from Overwatch's beta because a player complained it was too suggestive for Tracer's character. That was 2016, the discourse was inescapable, and the studio quietly swapped the pose for a slightly different one. Most people moved on. Then Fortnite happened.

The Overwatch collaboration that landed in Fortnite on May 14 brought Tracer, D.Va, Mercy, and Genji into the battle royale as purchasable skins. Players could pick up Tracer's pistols and Mercy's staff as in-game items. Multiple Overwatch maps got represented on the island. None of that is what anyone is talking about. What people are talking about, across every social media feed I've scrolled through in the last 48 hours, is that Epic Games appears to have given Tracer a noticeably larger rear end than Blizzard's own model.

Content creator Muselk put it bluntly on X: "NO SHOT THEY UN-NERFED TRACERS BUTT! Finally @Fortnite with the courage to do what @Blizzard_Ent wouldn't. The world needs heroes." Other posts from users like YogurtCap, Klarque_Clint, and eshenta flooded timelines with side-by-side comparisons and screenshots, all arriving at the same conclusion: Fortnite's Tracer is built different.

A Decade-Old Loop

The original 2016 controversy was about whether a fictional character's pose was too sexualised. Blizzard's response was to tone things down, and that decision became a flashpoint in a much larger culture war about character design, creative intent, and who games are for. I'm not relitigating that argument here. What I find funny is the irony of the situation: Blizzard spent years carefully managing Tracer's presentation, and then a licensing deal with Epic apparently undid all of it in a single patch. Whether that was a deliberate creative choice by Epic, a difference in how Fortnite's engine handles character models, or just the result of Fortnite's art team eyeballing the proportions, nobody from either studio has commented.

The timing makes it sting a little more for Blizzard. Overwatch's 10th anniversary event is running right now, and as I wrote earlier this week, the in-game celebration has been underwhelming compared to what Fortnite put together for the collab. Now the anniversary discourse has been completely hijacked by butt jokes. The 4,200 V-Bucks bundle containing all four Overwatch skins is currently the top seller in Fortnite's Item Shop, and Tracer alone costs 1,600 V-Bucks. Players are voting with their wallets, and the thing they're voting for is clear.

I think there's poetic about this whole cycle. Blizzard tried to move past the Tracer discourse a decade ago, and a collaboration meant to celebrate Overwatch's legacy is the thing that dragged it right back. Serinide's post on X summed up the general vibe with a simple "it's For You dawg it's lit," and honestly, that energy captures the community response better than any analysis could. Nobody's angry. People are just amused that Fortnite, of all games, quietly gave players the version of Tracer that Blizzard decided the world wasn't ready for.

Neither Epic nor Blizzard has acknowledged the model differences publicly. The Overwatch collaboration is live in Fortnite now, with individual skins and the full bundle available in the Item Shop.