Overwatch community comes together to troll Overwatch League analyst

The Overwatch community has come together to collectively troll Overwatch League analyst Joshua ‘Sideshow’ Wilkinson.

It began when Sideshow decided to take part in the “10 year challenge”, which saw people posting photos of themselves in 2009 and 2019 to show how much (or little) they’d changed in 10 years.

The photo of young Sideshow immediately caught the attention of the Overwatch community, with many making comparisons to the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings movies, while others suggested the photo looked like the album art for an indie band.

Despite the jokes, the image might have been forgotten shortly if it hadn’t been for Overwatch talk show “Tactical Crouch” using it to promote Sideshow’s appearance on the show. Sideshow then made the fatal error of claiming that “this pic is NOT gonna become my online presence.”

Naturally, the internet responded by immediately doing everything in its power to contradict him, spurred on by Sideshow’s former co-worker and room mate Jonathan ‘Reinforce’ Larsson, who began a campaign to spread the photo with the intention of making it the first thing that appears when anyone googles “Sideshow Overwatch”.

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The current results of such a search are already rather amusing, with the primary result in fact being a picture of fellow British Overwatch League analyst Brennon ‘Bren’ Hook. This isn’t the only instance of Bren being mistaken for another member of the Overwatch League talent team, with the Esports Awards using a clip featuring him instead of nominee Mitch ‘Uber’ Leslie.

The Overwatch community has rallied behind the cause. On the Competitive Overwatch subreddit, a post of the photo simply titled “Sideshow Overwatch” has hit nearly 3000 upvotes, and everyone from community figures to Overwatch League teams have been sharing the image on social media.

Sideshow has tried in vain to prevent the movement, but in doing so is likely to have only spurred on efforts to increase the photo’s prevalence.