Honestly pretty controversial but I like the idea that only Leon raised Sherry.
I think it adds something bittersweet to how Sherry views being rescued by Claire if Claire doesn’t stick around.
Like when Claire chose to leave, she was saying goodbye to being a present and active member in both of their lives. Like it takes years before Leon is stable enough as a military pawn to have a home with Sherry that isn’t a military base. It took years for him to convince Adam she wasn’t dangerous and of her being in a lab.
Like she’s 16 when she sees Claire again and before that it was emails Leon let her read from the Redfields.
Claire being an absent but important part of Sherry feels right to me and I don’t co-sign to the co parents thing.
I really don’t care for the file slapped into RE6 which suggests that Claire was some kind of major figure in Sherry’s life post RC, because it’s hard for me to square with Claire’s actual actions as we know them. I know Claire is supposed to be very devoted to her brother, but it’s hard to see her decision to leave Leon and Sherry, whose need was immediate and self evident, for her missing brother, who was a big boy who was not in any known immediate danger, as the decision of someone who is emotionally and psychologically equipped at that time to adopt a child.
Which is completely fine, by the way. It’s fine to not be ready to care for a child at 19 years old.
And I do think it makes sense for Sherry to cling to the idea of Claire as a mother in place of her own terrible mother, but I don’t think that Claire could have actually filled the role for her in any way *but* as a distant idea. For all that that specific RE6 file wants to describe Claire as “motherly,” Claire feels less like she’s interested in being the mother of a child than she is interested in using her compassion to help as many as she can. That’s why terrasave, that’s why she is seemingly constantly on the move, that’s why she couldn’t stay and make sure Leon and Sherry were okay before going on to the next thing.
Anyway. I love Claire, but I just… don’t like how she gets pigeonholed as this mother figure because at 19, she couldn’t sit and watch a little girl get eaten alive by zombies. What Claire did was exceptional, yes. And it changed the course of her life. But honestly, I struggle to see Claire being willing to set her own ambitions aside for a child in the long term. The difference between her and Annette is that Claire is responsible enough to not have one of her own.
Sometimes canon is bad and I don’t accept a lot of what came out of 6. There is a blink and you will miss it note in Sherrys campaign that says Claire is her mother figure but I don’t agree with it so not canon to me especially since her actions in infinite darkness suggests she wasn’t even thinking of Sherry.
Like I can read Leon’s actions as him thinking of her not wanting to muddy the waters with the government that barely gives them freedom but Claire never acts like she’s aware of that.
I see that as capcom propaganda into seeing the Redfields as responsible parents but I do not see them as that.
Especially Chris but honestly I don’t think Claire’s actions read as she stuck around in Sherrys life either.
#anyway i am not trying to say that claire doesn’t have a strong emotional attachment to sherry#but that it was never in the cards for claire to be the one who took care of the day to day labor of being a parent#i think the only thing that stopped leon from the day to day labor of being a parent was circumstance
Don't usually do the previous-previous tag train thing but I hope you don't mind me putting them here. I was initially going to just put my thoughts in the tags but it's gotten long and I like a lot of what you both have said so I'm just putting everything below here.
I totally think that while Claire and Sherry's relationship is important to the both of them, it makes more sense and is more interesting for their relationship to go this route.
From my own perspective, I got into RE as a kid through The Darkside Chronicles. I saw a little girl be protected by a badass biker chick and some guy and, as a little girl myself, fell head over heels for Claire's character. I put myself in Sherry's shoes and found her heroic for looking after a kid like me but at the same time, she was also as a protagonist I could look up to in the game's verison of Code Veronica where she takes front and center. The cutscene of Claire taking point while Leon carries Sherry is particularly imprinted in my brain and I still love Claire's character to this day. Honestly the RE2 crew in general are some of my favorite characters in the series.
But also, having revisited that game around the time the RE2 remake came out and thinking again about Sherry and Leon's situation made me look at his character in a different way. Aside from being like “Claire and Leon should've been at the club now that I'm in their 19-21 age range” it made me fully register and appreciate Leon's long-term commitment to Sherry since their situation isn't something capcom's ever committed to explicitly exploring. That's what I found interesting about him as a character on his own, not the generic "white man action hero who wants to help people in an abstract sense (and thought that being a cop would be a way to do that)" characterization that Capcom favors, particularly in the remakes.
(Also him and Ada's dynamic was something I loved from the jump and Ada has always been my favorite RE character/how I learned of the series in the first place but that's a separate topic)
Saying all this to say, it makes sense for Sherry to get really attached to Claire as the person (or more standout person in DSC's version of events) who actively cared about and protected her during the worst day of her life so far. Sherry having neglectful parents, with emphasis on the neglect from her mother, further affects that attachment to Claire.
However, based on both Claire's personality and Sherry's circumstances, it just doesn't make sense for Claire to become a mother-like figure to Sherry. Sherry had a mother-shaped hole in her life but Claire was a 19 year old who understandably was not thinking about kids and looked after Sherry simply because that was the right thing to do. She also simply had/has different priorities from finding her brother to her work in Terrasave.
Despite capcom's insistence of pairing Claire up with a child to look after in half of her major appearances post Code Veronica in both games and film, the mother role is just not who Claire is, at least not how I see her, even for Sherry. She'd care about Sherry in an older sister/cousin or child of the community kind of way but it's important to emphasize that Claire already has a sibling, is the younger sibling in that relationship and it was that connection that she was seeking out. That was her priority at the end of the day for obvious and understandable reasons. The reason Sherry clung onto Claire and later the idea of her, is in a similar vein of the reason why Claire was so focused on finding Chris in the midst of the traumatic events of Racoon City that they both went through. Because that's their anchor/older person they can rely on and in Claire's case it's also family she already knows and wants to make sure is ok.
And that makes sense. That's more nuanced and interesting to me than the alternative.
Claire also simply doesn't know the truth about Sherry's (and Leon's) situation, a plot point I always feel should've been actively explored in the franchise. So it makes sense why she wouldn't factor in Sherry into her decision at the end of Infinite Darkness the way I see Leon doing. I personally think Sherry and their circumstances was the main reason for his decision, him being afraid how it might backfire if traced back to him and hurt her. It wouldn't be the good/right/moral choice because it upholds the status quo. It would've been a choice made and out fear but that'd make sense for his character as someone who's in a messy situation no else knows about and is out of his depth so of course he's paranoid, compromised and making bad decisions. I think explicitly going about it from that angle, instead of leaving it up to us to speculate, and exploring the tension it creates between Claire and Leon in the long-run would've been interesting. I'm personally fine with Claire trying to check in Sherry, because she canonically intended to go back for them, just not because she fills the role of a mother figure. And even then, she's met with a lot of red tape which gets her suspicious and further adds to that tension between her and Leon when it comes to Sherry's wellbeing and the shadiness of the government. But, again, their entire situation isn't something capcom's committed to exploring which I think is a huge missed opportunity for all the characters involved both in and not in-the-know.
Post-Racoon, Claire couldn't and doesn't think about looking after Sherry long-term, again for understandable reasons, but Leon who doesn't have the objective of "find sibling" or any objective post-Racoon, and who circumstantially got abducted by the government and coerced into service in exchange for Sherry's relative well-being, logistically would. Personality wise, if we're going with the vague canon of him being an orphan with no siblings who presumably aged out of the foster system/never got adopted, that would give him personal motivation to want to look after the newly orphaned Sherry. To be someone definitively in her circle and working in her best interest, someone he didn't have as an orphan (maybe as a kid in general depending on how you wanna fill in those gaps). It's the base angle I like to go with personally and I see him as a brother-mother/parentified older sibling figure than strictly a parental figure cuz he was also still young in RE2. It also just makes more sense for Leon to, even with the limitations placed on them, have had more of an active role in Sherry's life for the sake of the narrative instead of only overhearing???? that she became an agent (that was never a writing a choice I liked from RE6).
But again, so much of RE lore when it comes to in-depth exploration of the characters and their relationships is... well, not as deep as it could be. But that's why we do things like this to speculate because that's how much the characters interest us.
Anyways, that's my two cents and if you read all of this, thanks for listening <3
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