That Ring isn’t about shipping
I think people are misunderstanding the ring scene at the end of RE9.
And I say that as someone who has done an absurd amount of research on wedding ceremonies.
When I got married I wrote my own vows and ceremony script. Which meant I spent a stupid amount of time studying the structure of weddings — why we say what we say, why rings are used, what they symbolize, where that moment sits in the ceremony.
And almost every ceremony includes some variation of this explanation:
It represents a promise that is meant to endure beyond whatever the present moment looks like.
Here’s a piece from my own ceremony:
These rings represent the vows and promises you’ve willingly exchanged. They reflect the commitment those words inspire and all your hopes and dreams for the future.
That’s the word that matters.
So when Leon S. Kennedy — a man pushing fifty, who has spent the last thirty years fighting bioterrorism, drowning himself in alcohol, flirting with death on a near-annual basis, carrying the weight of entire cities on his conscience — quietly puts on a wedding ring…
The moment isn’t actually about who he married.
The moment is about the fact that he did.
Because if you step back and look at Leon as a character, that’s the real miracle.
This is a man whose life has been defined by survival, sacrifice, and loss. Raccoon City. Spain. Endless missions. Watching people die. Being ordered to do things he never wanted to do. Living inside systems that grind people down.
Leon has always been written as someone who doesn’t expect a future. He lives mission to mission. Crisis to crisis.
So the symbolism of the ring is almost aggressively simple.
It means at some point he chose something outside the war.
A future he intends to live long enough to see.
And that’s why the ring is powerful.
Not because it confirms a ship. Not because it resolves thirty years of fandom arguments.
But because it quietly says something about Leon Kennedy that the series rarely lets him have:
He survived long enough to build a life.
And more importantly, it’s a choice.
Someone stood in front of him and said I choose you.
And Leon — the guy who spent decades believing he was disposable — said it back.
The ring is the physical symbol of that exchange.
And for a character like Leon?
That might be the biggest victory he’s ever had.
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