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GamesRadar
Technology
Ashley Bardhan

Overwatch streamer lost her voice for a year then reclaimed it just in time to be the actor for Anran: "Thank you for being the reason I play dps now lol"

Screenshot of Overwatch's Anran hero, a woman dressed in orange holding a flaming fan, smirking into the camera.

New Overwatch hero Anran got an official reveal during Blizzard's recent Overwatch Spotlight livestream, and it seems no one is happier about it than her voice actor, Fareeha Andersen.

Best known as a longtime Overwatch community member and streamer, Andersen is thrilled to be immortalized in the shooter – and maybe it was meant to be, since she had to recover her lost voice with perfect timing to play the firebrand character.

Andersen shares the moment Blizzard announced Anran during its February 4 Spotlight stream from her perspective, in a short video she posted to Twitter on February 11. She says, "I called my girlfriend the moment Anran was revealed at OW Spotlight. I love you @lynnunlimited, thank you for supporting me when I was so sick I lost my voice."

During her call with Lynn, a cosplayer and fellow Twitch streamer, Andersen thanks her girlfriend for "cheering me on as they rehabbed my voice all last year. Thanks for driving me to that callback. Helping me warm up and stuff."

"I couldn't have done it without you," she says. Overwatch fans seem similarly grateful to Andersen, who recently agreed with Blizzard's decision to redesign Anran and make her, as Andersen says in a video posted to Twitter, "challenge the beauty standards plaguing and ransacking media these days – the Ozempic chic."

"Thank you for being the reason I play dps now lol," one Overwatch player tells Andersen.

New Overwatch actor addresses the "elephant in the room," says she had to "mourn" her character's redesign: "Let's keep rooting for the version of her that could be."

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