‘Overwatch’ fans think it looks like Moira shoots magic pee from her hands

Millions of people play Blizzard Entertainment’s wildly popular multiplayer shooter Overwatch — so, needless to say, lots of people are hyped to try out its 26th hero, Moira, who’s going to be released very soon.

First revealed at BlizzCon on Friday, Moira is a geneticist (who just so happens to be a David Bowie lookalike) who eschews any sense of morality in her pursuit of scientific discovery, including joining up with covert terrorist organizations.

In the game itself, Moira uses this research to power magical-looking gauntlets that can drain the life force from her enemies via her right hand — and then bestow that life force upon her allies to heal their wounds via her left, like so:

Blizzard Entertainment

Here’s the thing: A lot of Overwatch fans think it looks like Moira’s cutting-edge, sci-fi healing technology just kinda looks like a glowing beam of urine.

Unfortunately, the reason Moira’s healing beam looks the way it does has to do with the way Blizzard visually communicates various in-game effects to make it easier to tell what’s happening at a glance. In this case, the visual language for two different things are overlapping — and the result is decidedly urinary in nature.

The first factor is that Overwatch denotes healing abilities with the color yellow. Mercy’s healing beams, Ana’s healing darts and Zenyatta’s orbs of harmony are all yellow so players understand that yellow = healing.

Blizzard Entertainment

The second problem is that Moira’s healing beam shoots from her hand in a cone-like shape, affecting every ally who falls within its range. To communicate this, Blizzard gave the beam a fluid, spray-like appearance resembling Mei’s ice gun. Mei is another Overwatch hero who affects enemies in a similar cone-like shape. Put those together and you get something that looks a lot like pee.

Blizzard Entertainment

Within just a few hours of Moira’s announcement, social media sites were overflowing with all sorts of off-color jokes about her powers — which is probably unsurprising to anyone who has spent even a fleeting amount of time on the internet.

A few of these jokes trod similar territory, like the two that reference the “Big Bill Hell’s” car commercial parody that offers a “challenge pissing” promotion in which anyone who can “piss 6 feet in the air straight up and not get wet” doesn’t have to pay a down payment.

Others referenced some lesser-known but equally raunchy memes, like these:

Now that Moira is on the public test realm for PC players before she officially comes out on all platforms, fans are taking this joke as far as it’ll go — starting with her alternate appearances.

Somewhat disappointingly, I could not find any memes in which someone claimed to finally find the long-rumored Donald Trump “pee tape,” only to cut to footage of Moira. (Please contact me if you find them.)

Hopefully, like the Overwatch fandom’s tendency to poke fun at Hanzo mains, Blizzard will just learn to take the fandom’s latest juvenile shenanigans in stride.

Until then, continue to let the pee jokes flow freely.