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The Overwatch gang has finally arrived in Fortnite, and you know what that means. That's right, we're talking about Tracer's butt again. Fans are convinced that Tracer's backside got buffed in her Fortnite incarnation, and you know, I think they might be right.

Some quick history, for those who either weren't around 10 years ago, or are fortunate enough to have memory-holed the whole thing: One of the big controversies in the early days of Overwatch (and this is going to sound incredibly stupid, but I swear it's true) was the bodaciousness of Tracer's booty. First, gamers complained that an over-the-shoulder victory pose had too much ass, so Blizzard changed it and then other gamers complained that there was not enough ass.

Ten years later, former Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan said the amount of ass actually "stayed exactly the same"—it was merely the pose itself that changed. As PC Gamer's resident knower-of-Overwatch Elie Gould said, a decade of water under the bridge had turned the whole thing into something of a joke, although there's no doubt in my mind that an undercurrent of resentment and rage continues to flow through some corners of the online world.

Which brings us to today. Just a month after Kaplan's comment, Tracer's caboose is back in the conversation, because some of the folks on the TracerMains suibreddit—and today I learned there is a TracerMains subreddit—seem pretty sure that she's been re-proportioned for the Fortnite crossover.

Tracer has a bigger butt in Fortnite from r/TracerMains

Look, I'm not here to objectify videogame characters or anything, but speaking entirely observationally and clinically, yeah, that's a big dumper. The Unreal Engine's really working overtime to render this one.

For purposes of comparison, here's the original Tracer tush that caused all the uproar a decade ago:

So yeah, maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that one of these things is not like the other.

Another angle:

The way I see it, there are two possibilities at play here—three, I suppose, if you include the possibility that we're all just imagining the maximizing of those glutes: One, the good folks at Epic know what they like and they're not afraid to let their freak flag fly, or two, the Unreal Engine is just naturally back-loaded, so to speak. I have no idea which it might be, but I hope it's the former.

As a conscientious videogame journalism professional, I have reached out to Epic Games to ask if they did indeed give Tracer some newly embiggened ham cakes, because that's the sort of thing I do on a Friday afternoon when everyone just wants to get out of the office and go home. I'll let you know if anyone replies.

While Deadlock's sort-of-launch last year was proof that Valve does, in fact, still make videogames, its immaculate vibes served as a different sort of reminder: That the studio remains among the best in the business of characterful animation. From Meet the Heavy's moments of tender minigun affection to the cyclopean gesticulation of Portal 2's Wheatley, Valve's artists and animators are masters at the subtle craft of imbuing even virtual and inhuman characters with humanity.

Which is why it felt fitting to learn that Valve's house style has Muppet DNA in the mix, thanks to a Jim Henson Company puppeteer that helped the studio bring its characters to life.

I learned about Valve's rainbow connection while doing a regular reappraisal of the studio's lore, as all professional writers on the PC games beat are dutybound to perform. In Geoff Keighley's The Final Hours of Portal 2, an interactive book about the project's closing stages and its developers that was originally released for the iPad in 2011, there's a moment where the nascent Game Awards magnate mentions the presence of "the puppeteer who played the character of Red Fraggle on the 1980s television show Fraggle Rock."

That puppeteer, I soon learned, was Karen Prell. Prell was hired to work at the Jim Henson Company in 1979 at the age of 20, after Muppets creator Jim Henson had watched an audition tape that Prell had made while still a teenager. Henson was impressed enough to invite her to audition for the Company in person in New York City, where she was hired the same day.

During her tenure of working and performing alongside globally-recognized innovators in the crafts of puppetry, animatronics, and practical effects at the company, Prell was asked by Henson in 1982 to puppet Red Fraggle, one of the show's central—and eventually, one of its most popular—characters, when she was just 22. In 1986, she achieved puppetry apotheosis in Henson's Labyrinth, where she was the puppeteer of the worm.

In 1997, Prell entered what she calls on her website her "second career" by entering employment at yet another landmark institution of the visual arts: She signed on as an animator at Pixar, working on films like A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, and Geri's Game—that delightful short of the old man playing chess, which just warped my brain backwards in time by two decades simply by being remembered.

Career number three came for Prell in 2007, when she was convinced by her animator peers and friends to interview at Valve despite never having played a videogame in her life. As you might expect from a studio given the chance to hire someone who boasts experience as both a Jim Henson Company puppeteer and a Pixar animator, Valve didn't pass on the opportunity.

Prell's earliest work at the studio was as an animator and playtester on Left 4 Dead, during which, Keighley writes, "the younger Valve employees got quite a kick out of hearing Karen scream expletives after a Boomer zombie had spit vision-impairing bile on her screen." From there, she'd continue to have a hand in some of Valve's most beloved games, contributing concepting and animation for TF2 and its Meet the Team shorts, in-game animations and mocap cleanup for Left 4 Dead 2, and—her crowning achievement at Valve—Portal 2's Wheatley.

"Wheatley was designed, modelled and rigged by Richard Lord before I tackled his acting," Prell writes on her website. "Wheatley’s animation process involved creating an extensive and intricately planned library of reusable movement and acting components that could be rapidly composited together to create unique actions for each of his hundreds of lines of dialogue. Wheatley’s acting, movements and timing were heavily influenced by the stylized acting I employed while performing hand puppets."

As Wheatley's animator, Prell did the impossible: She bestowed life on an orb. With all his carefully crafted squints, dilations, and emphatic plate flexing, Wheatley manages to seem more lively and emotive in 2011 than some humanoid characters are today. I mean, look at Kliff Crimsondesert. Guy barely seems to register that he's alive. And if that wasn't enough, she also contributed animation work for the co-op bots and GladOS, assisted with localization, and even pitched in on Portal 2 apparel and merchandising design.

After appearing in the credits of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Artifact, Half-Life: Alyx, the latest Valve release that lists Prell's name is 2022's Aperture Desk Job. After making an indelible mark on the studio's visual language, she returned to career number one, reprising her role as Red Fraggle for Apple TV's 2022 reboot of Fraggle Rock.