Emre is Dead — Theory
I am a sucker for character design and have always loved Overwatch’s designs (although the new ones are not comparable with old-school Ow…), and of course, the lore implications.
When Emre dropped, I, along many others, was very happy that a character that we’ve known for 8/9 years finally dropped in game. Although I wasn’t a fan to see Chernobrog displayed in such an obvious way, it did get me thinking about the design choice.
Emre’s ult is pretty straight-forward, he gets taken over by Chernobrog, changing his entire appearance. Emre states pretty clearly that he cannot control it, and cannot remember a single thing from these episodes. How is that even possible? We have seen the technology in the OW-verse so far, and nothing comes close to this, at all.
I started thinking about other smaller details. Emre has wires coming in and out of his body, Emre has a modulated voice, Emre has a scarf that acts as another pair of limbs, Emre can summon objects in the same manner of hard-light. I mean, hell, Reaper does mention in game that Emre is now more robot than man.
To me, what stuck the most were the second example. If Chernobrog is interested in taking control of Emre, why even bother with a modulated voice? And then I remembered Ana’s second mythic: an Omnic that was implanted with a memory chip and who thus thinks of themselves as Ana. Granted, it’s not canon, but putting all the previous details together, the idea stuck and I could see the original Emre being dead and replaced by what we have now.
We know he doesn’t remember how he got into this predicament to begin with, my theory is that it was probably the period where he got killed and experimented on by Chernobrog or other associates.
It would make sense why he has wires coming in and out of his body, why he has a modulated voice, why he has all the abilities that he has now. Because he is no longer a living human, but an Omnic recreation. Maybe even another shot at creating a second generation of Omnics, one without the need of a recreation of the sacrifice of Aurora, and maybe even one looking to uplift Humanity through this new mean.