what the absence of a team in RE9 tells us about Leon's personal life
part one: leon's thorough rejection of being in a team
throughout RE9, there were multiple moments where leon and grace had to work together to achieve a goal.
before they were interrupted by the church zombies, they had every intention to save emily and get out through the treatment plant together. before grace realised the truth, they were determined to destroy elpis together.
for all intent and purposes, they were a team. and this notion felt so close to being uttered into words, to the point leon would constantly use words like "let's" or "we", and YET...it never was.
in my post about how leon's traits shine through when he's with ashley and proceed to be preserved when he's with grace, the acknowledgement of a "team" is strangely not one of them.
why and how is it strange? well i'll show you.
1 and 2 are the whys, 3 and 4 are the hows.
1. in RE4R, leon went through the process of learning and agreeing to be a team with ashley. he didn't like the idea rightaway, it was only after she removed the plaga in him did he not only warm up to it but also gave her his utmost approval.
by the time RE9 rolls around, he should have been the one to approach grace with the idea of a "team". it's the easiest way to show some character growth, which is his ability to not just work with people, but to do so with trust, loyalty AND intimacy. to work as a team is in many ways the enhanced version of being able to trust someone.
so, it's just bizzare that we saw leon being open with the concept of trust, but did not take it a step further to be open with being a team, especially when this would be so easy to implement considering how many times the game put leon and grace in a situation where they have to work together.
2. the fact that being a team is not some newfound concept he learnt in RE4R makes this feel like an even bigger missed oppotunity.
teaming up with someone, in fact, was not new to him. his rookie self in 1998 came into raccoon city and considered an "fbi agent" he met his teammate....despite EVERY doubt he had about her real identity.
ashley didn't help him build the concept of a teamwork in RE4R; she mended it after it broke in RE2R. so it's odd that he did not carry that into RE9 with grace, because this could have been a really strong, identifiable overarching theme, where it went from:
losing faith in people and rejecting any sorts of cooperation -> getting his worldview mended -> applying the lesson he re-learnt in real life.
then again, this did not happen, even though it SHOULD HAVE, even though it would have been SO EASY to do.
3. not only did leon never call grace his team, he also considered stop working with her.
this felt like a BIG blow to his development. he thought about things getting harder, how she was too in the dark, and rescinded his proposal at the power plant "we have to keep going".
this is...not good. and you might think "well no he's being very thoughtful and protective of grace" no. he's being doubtful and unsure of grace AND her ability.
at first, he trusted her enough to consider them as working together, even asking her to keep going despite her devastation. he was the first who wished to keep the co-op, while she wanted to pull away.
but when they got to ark, leon flipped. he essentially told her to sit this one out when she wanted to come along because he started to doubt if she really could help him when she was as clueless as he was.
had it not been for grace pushing back, their partnership would have ended right there. in the end, it was grace who convinced leon to keep this co-operation alive, and she only succeeded because she touched his rookie spirit buried somewhere beneath this city's remnants.
4. the severity of his rejection to be a team was overwhelmingly amplified when you realised that he did the exact same thing with sherry.
upon having trouble accessing more data, he wanted sherry to stop and leave all this to him instead, to which she also rejected.
it went very similarly to how it did with grace, them working together until things got hard for her and she might be getting herself into trouble instead of aiding him with more intel.
it's almost as if...leon also doubted sherry can take care of herself and still help him much further, so he told her to exit while she could. and this is sherry, the young girl who impacted the course of his life, whom leon did not consider his teammate. if he could reject someone who was practically his family, then just how far removed was he from the concept of being a team??
by never offering to be a team with grace and sherry, and also rejecting both of their help due to immense doubt, it just seems like leon has concerningly regressed in his ability to let people in his team, an ability he re-learnt in RE4R.
are we supposed to believe he hit rock bottom because he couldn't save RC survivors and just gave up on the power of teamwork altogether...? but, where is the correlation in that??
why would survivors dying make him dislike teamwork? it made him brood and ruthless and violent and scarily determined, sure, but...it cannot affect his hard earned lesson about teams.
does leon just hate people now?
all of this refusals and doubt stemmed from the first "team" he rejected, not on screen, not when he started his investigation, but way, way before it.
the collapse of his team in life.
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part two: the process in which the rejection of "a place to go home to" happened
part three: how ashley fits into leon's character "regression"
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