The Twitch streamer, Francine “Fran” Vo, has built a team of top players and won a Blizzard tournament in Overwatch . However, she was attacked by fans for being an “E-girl” who is being “carried”. She cannot understand the criticism, as she did the dirty work.
What tournament is it? Recently, Overwatch released the new hero Echo. To celebrate her arrival, Blizzard held the “Flash Ops: Echo Showdown” tournament on April 18 and 19. It was an open tournament for fans, content creators, and professional players.
The semifinals and finals of the tournament were streamed on Sunday on the Overwatch League channel on YouTube. The prize pool was a total of $50,000.
It was not a seriously competitive tournament, but one where players could step into the spotlight and show what they can do.
This is the team: The Twitch streamer Fran (215,000 followers) is a support player. She assembled a strong team for the tournament. As reported by dotesports, Fran had:
- recruited 2 current Overwatch professionals, Park “KariV” Young-seo and Dante “Danteh” Cruz
- brought in 3 former professionals from the 1st and 2nd leagues
- assigned herself the support spot on the team, which she shared with Redshell, another streamer. Fran streamed 903 hours of Overwatch on Twitch last year – Redshell even 2533.
“The E-girl ruins it”
This is the conflict: This “Test Team 1”, which Fran formed, was strong and could decide the tournament in their favor. They took home $10,000 in prize money.
However, the support player had to hear on reddit and Twitter that she did not deserve to be in this team. It was said that she was being carried. Fran should let Redshell play instead.
As reported by dotesports, Fran became the scapegoat for the team: Every time Team 1 was struggling, she was blamed as the support player. The chat was flooded with comments like “The E-girl ruins it” or “Put her on the bench for Redshell already.”
It was noted that other players also made mistakes, but the criticism was always directed at Fran.
I do the dirty work, win, and get flamed for having breasts
In the aftermath of the event, some male players commented on the situation. It was noted that the atmosphere towards Fran was quite hostile.
For instance, Connar “Avast” Prince said: He hadn’t played Overwatch for 2 months and had actually taken a break for a year before that. He was completely out of shape. However, he was asked to join the tournament and did indeed get “carried”.
However, Avast was apparently not criticized, while people specifically targeted the streamer Fran, claiming she was dragging her team down.
Fran then exploded a bit and said: She created the team, did all the dirty work, won every match, and still got flamed just because she has breasts.
I LITERALLY CREATED THE TEAM, DID ALL THE DIRTY WORK, WON EVERY MATCH EVEN WITH REDSHELL, TAKE 1ST PLACE AND STILL GET FLAMED FOR HAVING TITS
— FRAN (@FRANA_OW) April 20, 2020
As is often the case with this subject, there are two currents:
- some say, objectively, Fran is indeed worse than other players – that is just a fact. As a woman, she must also accept criticism
- others say, it’s quite noticeable that a woman is especially being criticized. Some men played terribly in the tournament, yet escaped all criticism.
Women in eSports have been a topic for several years. In LOL there was the first professional female player in 2016, who after only one month left her team and has since tragically passed away.
In the Overwatch League, the Korean Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon is the only woman and a pioneer. She also had a difficult journey into the league. There was a wild bet that she was just cheating.
Overwatch is probably the game where “men and women” encounter each other the most often. Women have repeatedly complained that men behave aggressively towards them.
For example, a female player was confronted with the sentence “Shut up, make sandwiches”.
