I really do think that a vast majority of the fandom doesn’t fully grasp how weird Hanzo is from a Japanese standpoint. It really is a shame that Mccree gets the brunt of the weirdo reputation, especially since it’s not nearly as strange to dress as a cowboy when looking at it from a different context. Hint, Mexican people dress like vanqueros in modern day. It’s not strange.
Hanzo, on the other hand, is. Such a completely different bag than any of the other characters. First there’s his name, which is completely archiac, and not in the “old people understand” strange, I mean centuries back levels of fucking bizarre. It’s like naming your kid Achilles, Agamemnon, or Hrothgar.
Next, his style of dress is again, completely based off of ancient samurais, save for that cursed left tit. So, not only is this guy named Hanzo, but he dresses like someone who would have been called Hanzo, basically the equivelent to a man named Agamemnon running around dressed like an Ancient Greek warrior, using Ancient Greek weapons, speaking phrases in Ancient Greek.
Finally, his… values. I don’t know how Japan would be in the future, but first, it probably has a higher population of minorities (hopefully the rampant xenophobia would have gone down), I don’t doubt the society would be more progressive, and ideas like honor, stoicism, there’d be more awareness towards it, so people are becoming more aware. Hanzo “I must reclaim my honor” Shimada?? His ideals are crusty, old, and gathering dust in cemetaries that have a couple centuries on them.
Mccree was not fucking around when he called Hanzo “a little old fashioned”. Hanzo would defend anachronisms, the man is an anachronism embodied, distilled into one smelly, grumpy, half nude little man. To recap, imagine some magical angry alcoholic dude named Agamemnon, dressed like an Ancient Greek with Ancient Greek weapons, with the values of an Ancient Greek warrior, carrying around two inexplicable spirit beasts of infinite power inside of his fucking tattoo in a world that’s more focused on sci-fi, whereas these dragons are clearly magic.
I just need to reiterate one more time, yes the other characters have their quirks, but Hanzo is a fucking freak of nature. A cryptid. He is absolutely a meme in Japan if anyone has ever caught a glimpse of this astronomically confusing motherfucker.
I like Hanzo more now.
This is hilarious but also reaffirms my suspicion that the Shimada family aren’t just yakuza, they’re a cult.
Similarly, Genji also has a name that’s Really Fucking Weird. It’d be like naming your kid Endymion or Orpheus or something. But Genji is interesting in that he seems more normal – his clothes on his Young Genji skin are still a little weird, but it’s mostly a normal martial arts gi worn over some sort of cyber armor. So it’d be like wearing your gym clothes or your fencing uniform over a bulletproof vest, which given the situations Genji would be wearing that in, actually kinda makes sense!
His Hanamura lines also point to him being a more normal person, since Hanzo is all angsty and serious but Genji talks about how he misses ramen (which in japan is like… greasy delicious comfort food) and how he used to play videogames at the arcade.
Which all just serves to highlight just how weird Hanzo really is. Genji’s a little weird but he’s not nearly THAT weird, and a lot of his more spiritual weirdness seems to come from AFTER he became a cyborg. So yeah. Hanzo is really fucking weird.