My primary Resident Evil OC is Vera Kaplan! I debuted her here back in november 2022 and I mainly write as I'm not an artist! However, so far, I'm still at the re2 era of her journey, unfortunately 💔
This is a yap post so I'm not going to hold back on the spoilers and give things away bc it doesn't seem like I'm getting to write any of it soon and I want to let it all out 😭 so THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS POST THIS WAS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS LOOKIN G FOR !!!!!!!
Vera is a country-wide famous ex-wonder child of Umbrella's whose skillset revolves around tech, engineering and robotics! She's basically the Tony Stark of Resi universe. Her genius was too influential that she got to meet Oswell Spencer a couple times for photos and stuff to accept awards, even. She grew up in the Raccoon City Orphanage and later was "allowed" to be adopted due to her poor performance and depression by Marvin Branagh. He was deemed a safe choice because of his status as an employee of Brian Irons (also Director of the orphanage)
Marvin is the best dad ever, so he let her do whatever she's drawn to (because career and money would never be a problem for her thanks to Umbrella's support. her future was basically guaranteed) and she dabbled in a lot of hobbies and interests. Some of which is music and playing the guitar and joining a local band, and unexpectedly, guns? She "interned" at Kendo's place in her late teens 😭 she is a bit of a "jack of all trades" girlie
It appears as if the reason why she wasn't experimented on like the other children who were the victims of the orphanage was because of her diabetes that made her an unfit subject and the fact that she was a valuable asset for Umbrella PR and would later join their ranks as a researcher, but the real reason is that she was a subject for the later generations of Project W. If Wesker and Alex are like inner circle subjects, think of Vera as an outer circle "last resort" choice, her "undesirable" (non-white) genes pushed her out as unsuitable (she is Turkish-Turkish Romani). but still, albert-alex-vera are the wesker trio and that's supposed to be like the plot twist at the end of the first installment of her fic series 💀
Anyway, Vera does start to unravel the Umbrella conspiracy when she comes across exchanged emails of Irons as she's doing maintenance at RPD, and it all goes downhill from there. Dropping out from college and throwing her Umbrella scholarship down the drain for a private investigator license type madness. she has like hacker in her skillset, so she keeps digging and digging until she can't dig no more and finds out all she can, but physically can't do anything about it and the guilt weighs on her after the outbreak happens.
Vera is someone who’s been through a lot of abuse in her past from Irons, and it shows in how she acts and how she deals with people. On the outside, she comes across as stubborn and rebellious—she doesn’t like being told what to do and often pushes back against authority. But this isn’t just for show; it’s a defense mechanism, something she developed after growing up in an environment where control over HER was everything. Vera doesn’t like feeling powerless, so she resists, sometimes to her own detriment.
Her curiosity is both her strength and her downfall. As a private investigator who can have access to whatever she wants thanks to her technological abilities, her knack for digging deep and piecing things together is invaluable, but it also means she can’t leave well enough alone. She’s nosy—always asking questions, always pushing boundaries—and while this makes her good at her job, it also means she can get herself into trouble. She’s incredibly smart, almost too smart for her own good, and that leads to moments of overconfidence where she thinks she can handle more than she actually can.
Underneath all that bravado, though, Vera is carrying a lot of guilt. She feels responsible for things that aren’t entirely her fault, like her involvement with Umbrella or not being able to save Marvin. This guilt weighs on her, making her more protective of others. She doesn’t always show it, but she cares—deeply—and sometimes that caring turns into recklessness, especially when she feels like she can’t make things right any other way.
To keep herself together, Vera uses humor as a shield maybe way too much in re2. She jokes around, teases people, and acts like things don’t bother her, but it’s all a way to avoid facing the heavy stuff. It’s easier to make light of things than to deal with the pain of losing people or the fear that she’ll lose more. Deep down, she’s terrified of abandonment, of death, of failing the people she cares about—but she hides it behind a grin and a joke.
Despite all her rough edges, she has a good heart is too human, which sets her apart from albert and alex. She’s loyal, especially to the people she loves, and she’ll go to great lengths to protect them, even if it means putting herself in harm’s way. She’s not perfect, and she knows it, but she’s trying—trying to make up for past mistakes, trying to keep the people she cares about safe, even when it feels like everything is falling apart around her. In her own way, she’s doing the best she can, and that’s what makes her so human.
It leads her to get bitten towards the end of re2 and she hides that until the very last moment and manages to traumatize leon. like. REALLY traumatize him for life, it's not a passing remark it follows him even during re4 with ashley (like, re2 with vera is a grotesque parallel to his ashley mission) 😭 they had like a buddycop comedy dynamic going on, you know how it goes, funny confident flirty resourceful girl that doesn't do well with rules LIKES likes the goody-two-shoes, oblivious, sweet dude. leon felt like extremely responsible for her after her dad literally committed suicide to not be seen as a zombie by her and he really liked her as well, vera would literally ask him on a date if none of this would have happened, but you know. tragedy... :(
but she doesn't die die after staying back to end it all on her own. the project w virus brings her back from the dead. in canon people in the project w were distributed the activator pre-outbreak through sneaky means, and what happened to vera was that they switched her insulin medication with this. she got hospitalized and almost died in the e.r. but survived, and when the news reached alex and spencer, it was too late and the city was infested with zombies. so, in addition to the g-virus retrieval, hunk was also given the mission to extract vera from the city. so he does. that's how vera ends up in the hands of umbrella post-raccoon city destruction.
this is TOO LONG ALREADY SO TO SUMMARIZE, something something a lot of traumatizing experimentations that leave vera unable to step inside hospital or laboratory grounds without a ptsd attack and finding out what her "special ability as a wesker" later, which is literally tangled rapunzel blood that has healing attributes, alex and vera team up against spencer in secret to bring umbrella down and take and loot what they can from the wreckage. alex is quite literally in the role of mother gothel keeping vera by her side to keep her virus-induced illness under control and is doing her own thing scamming spencer, meanwhile vera is determined to bring umbrella down from the inside, and is secretly feeding information to the us government as codename "gravedigger" that can be used in the raccoon trials, but she needs the umbrella supercomputer umf-013 that has the secret files (and the red queen AI for herself)
along the way, leon of course gets to find out she's alive, freaks the fuck out that she's with umbrella now, shenanigans happen (the dynamic becomes grumpy x sunshine), albert in the shadows leaves the taking down of umbrella to vera because it's more convenient to his plans, vera gets to blackmail derek simmons (this action will have consequences) into making the bsaa happen, asks leon to come with her to save him from the grubby hands of the govermnent and gets rejected because leon can't let anything happen to her because of him, vera later goes on to become the weaponologist of the bsaa, creates her found family, and settles down in bsaa istanbul base, and one year later they reunite in valdelobos while she's on luis's and saddler's ass in yet another (unauthorized) investigation
good god this is so long im not even gonna attempt talking about re4 anyone reading has to be sick of this girl now. it's not even everything. im sorry i yapped too much DAMN 😭 here are jaw-dropping pieces lovely mutuals and readers have drawn for me that im still using as literal sustenance for my soul!!!!!! (as compensation for the whole wall of text.....)
