I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful
if you're not from the us american south, there's some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can't really describe all of them, because i've lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.
but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.
the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.
Maybe I’m just pessimistic and want to believe the worst of everyone, but I highly doubt Spencer felt remorse or guilt for anything in his life so that redemption part at the end fell really flat for me.
You can’t spend your whole life doing everything he did and then feel guilt and randomly adopt a baby to make amends. In my view he just wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t lose a second of sleep over anything.
As much as I love Requiem, the ending is truly incoherent, even by Resident Evil standards. Spencer's bizarre eleventh-hour redemption is the central issue that makes it fall flat. In RE(R), Spencer is first mentioned in files detailing how he decided to trap and kill the guy he hired to build his spooky mansion because he didn't want anyone to know the layout. He then lured the guy's wife and child to the mansion and did eugenics experiments on them until they died horribly! That hateful bastard was still funding human experimentation in pursuit of his own immortality less than a year before Alyssa interviewed him!! He's simply not a redeemable character!!!
I'm obsessed with RE lore and I've been putting together a coherent timeline that does its best to account for discrepancies between the OG games, spinoffs, remakes, and other media like the CG movies and stage plays. (This is for a fic I'm writing, but also because the hyperfixation is HYPERFIXATING.) So I developed my own interpretation of Requiem's events that still aligns with the canon. It also makes more sense and clears up other nonsensical elements of RE9's ending. It's long and heavy on spoilers, so I'm putting it under the cut. (As if I haven't already yapped enough!)
So, the first thing you have to understand is that Oswald E. Spencer IS NOT A RELIABLE NARRATOR. Even if RE9 really does want you to buy into his redemption, you have to take what he says at face value. Based on literally all of his characterization in the series up to this point, he is a megalomaniac and a liar. There's no real reason for us to trust anything that comes out of his mouth. So right out the gate, Alyssa's videos are not telling the whole story, despite her genuine desire to find the truth. She even makes the observation in her notes that he seems to be hiding something.
It's also important to keep in mind the context of Spencer's life at the time the interviews were recorded. Unfortunately, Capcom has a bad habit of allowing significant plot details to happen off-screen, but based on information from The Umbrella Chronicles and Grace's Report, Alyssa's interview with Spencer probably took place around March 2004. By this point in his life, Spencer was 81 years old. He had just lost a years-long trial which resulted in Umbrella's bankruptcy and closure. While he would secretly continue his work until his death-by-own-petard in 2006, he no longer had access to the resources that allowed him to conduct those experiments on a massive scale. The man who functionally created the bioweapon industry was now excluded from it.
By the conclusion of the Umbrella Trials, Spencer was fully aware of the US government’s collaboration with The Connections, which resulted in the sterilization of Raccoon City. Considering that the United States had been funding his research, he was furious with the cover-up, which cost him everything and primed a major competitor to steal his life’s work.
On top of that, he was nearing the end of his life without ever successfully achieving his primary goal of immortality and godhood. He had nothing left to lose, and very little time left.
It's easy to extrapolate the rest from there. Spencer had always been paranoid and obsessed with control. So he secretly developed Elpis in the mid-90s. Only he knew what it was. He claimed that he completed the anti-viral out of regret, naming it Elpis in reference to the Pandora's Box full of zombies that he blew open with his experiments. I believe that he actually created it for the same reason that he put self-destruct mechanisms in all of his facilities: to stop anyone else from accessing or using his research. Elpis was always intended as a failsafe for Spencer's megalomania.
Victor Gideon even seems to understand this in the climax of Requiem. He suggests that releasing the cure to intentionally destabilize bioweapon developers and world governments had been Spencer's plan all along. But he's so blinded by adoration that he sees it as genius instead of the petty revenge that it actually is.
I think that Spencer accepted the interview in an attempt to set these events in motion. He knew that The Connections were already trying to access Elpis at ARK. During the development of the anti-viral, he had leaked false information about its intended purpose to obfuscate the truth, which is how Gideon came to his original conclusion that it was a mind-control virus. Spencer agreed to be interviewed by Alyssa in particular because she was already a well-known journalist connected to the Raccoon City Incident. In fact, by the time she interviewed him, she had already published an exposé about BOWs in the Daily Advisor. It was reasonable to assume that her reporting would be on his competitors’ radar. I believe Spencer wanted control of the narrative, but more importantly, for Elpis to be released as part of his revenge plot.
Which brings us to Grace. Now, admittedly, this next section is more supposition than the rest, but bear with me. Spencer had her brought in during the interview and claimed that she was a perfectly normal child who he took in to atone for all the mass murder and eugenics. He then described her as his “hope,” which is LITERALLY the English translation of Elpis. (Sidebar: that's like making the password for your MacBook “la computadora,” what in the hell Oswald.) This leads me to conclude that Grace is, in fact, one of the cloned children from the experiments, who was treated with the anti-viral making her a “normal” child, albeit one with the literal cure to all Progenitor-type viruses in her bloodstream. She was a contingency plan, in case Elpis was never released from ARK.
This is perhaps the biggest reach in my theory, but we do know that the child cloning experiments continued even after series 60-70 (i.e Chloe and her roommates) were eliminated in 1990. Emily and Marie were the last in a decades-long project, continued by Gideon after Spencer's passing. Canonically, we already know that Sergei Vladimir–genetic base for the Tyrant series, and primary antagonist of The Umbrella Chronicles–was instructed by Spencer to gather backups of his research before the city was destroyed. It's not that much of a stretch to deduce this included two projects that were of particular value to Spencer: a sample of Elpis (as insurance) and clone embryos from ARK (to continue his attempts to gain immortality through blood-memory transfer).
Reframing Requiem from this perspective creates a domino effect where other odd elements of the plot fall into place. Grace being left in the care of Alyssa–a journalist who had already made enemies of bioterrorists–makes more sense if Spencer wanted her to be discovered. The uncanny similarities between Emily and Grace become intentional rather than a plot contrivance designed to keep players from guessing the twist. Zeno is more relevant to the narrative this way, and could even hint at some level of success in Spencer's other research into giving clones the memories of their donor. Gideon seems less inept even though he was incorrect about the purpose of Elpis, because he was not wrong about everything to an absolutely comic degree.
But most importantly, with this reading, Spencer's character continuity remains consistent with earlier entries in the series. To me, this is the most frustrating part of the ending. Capcom has always played fast and loose with both continuity and logic, but redeeming a genocidal monster while we live in a world filled with real-life genocidal monsters is a hard pill to swallow.
If you made it to the end: thanks for reading! I would love to hear your thoughts or even other theories. I don't have any real-life friends who like RE, so this is the only place I get to ramble like this. <3
whump is fun because you see a character and are like “i love you so much that i want to see you sobbing and covered in blood. i need you dying in a hospital bed. i need you cold, wet, and miserable. i love you and want you to suffer unimaginable horrors. then you can have a kiss on the head as a treat”
freak4freak is always so awesome but another character dynamic that i think is really great is freak vs freak. you're the only person who understands me and i'm the only person who understands you. unfortunately this also does not stop either of us from hating each other and in fact it might even make everything significantly worse for everyone involved
i think being able to identify and deconstruct an irrational feeling should make it go away. i literally solved your riddle puzzle master can u let me OUT the damn TORTURE LABYRINTH
Woke up at six am only to immediately learn that in the deluxe edition of Requiem, Leon can find notes written by Marvin Branaugh's young daughter before discovering her remains.
What the fuck, Capcom has this poor man not suffered enough?!
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:
The ring is circular.
No beginning. No end.
Infinite.
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.
Hope.
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 life.
A commitment.
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.
It’s a promise.
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.
Finding it interesting that Chris seems to coincidentally match Wesker's outfits and vibe whenever he's presumed dead.
In Code Veronica he wears a black STARS vest and a green rolled up shirt that resembles Wesker's when he was captain. In a bonus artwork he is even shown wearing a blue shirt similar to Wesker's.
In Death Island he is unusually wearing an blue grey tshirt and using a replica of Wesker's samurai edge.
Then in RE8 he bears an uncanny resemblance to Wesker in The Umbrella Chronicles, even to the point where his eyes are often hidden in shadow as if to resemble 'sunglasses', which Wesker is notoriously known to be wearing almost permanently.
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