I have a Famitsu article, and I’ll be commenting based on that.
Regarding Mikami’s statement that “the twins kiss off-screen,” I originally assumed he was referring to that music box scene. (I thought people were deliberately exaggerating what he meant.)
However, in context, it seemed to suggest that they actually do kiss, but the footage was cut (or censored). After reading that, I came to think that the developers likely included the music box to complement what happens after the cut.
The article also mentions a contrast between the two sibling relationships: the affection between the Redfield siblings is portrayed as normal, whereas the affection between the Ashford twins is portrayed as abnormal.
On a slightly different note, I’m generally not fond of defining human emotions in fixed terms.
I tend to think of emotions as a kind of mixture, generated through the interplay of a person’s nature, individual experiences, and environment. Moreover, the emotions a person—or a character—expresses can change depending on the situation.
I also believe that as long as there’s a consistent, plausible theory based on a character’s personality and experiences, it doesn’t have to be one-dimensional.
(For example, people don’t always act purely out of romantic feelings. Even without personal emotion, they can act based on self-interest or conscience.)
That said, whenever I see people adding disclaimers like “incest shouldn’t be fetishized” or “I don’t see them as being in a sexual relationship,” I tend to become a bit stubborn and want to say, “No! Alexia Ashford and Alfred Ashford are officially portrayed as being in an incestuous relationship, and that shouldn’t be denied!” 😂
From here on, these are entirely my personal views.
I feel uncomfortable with the tendency to automatically treat incest as a “symbol of evil,” just as I am cautious about reducing historical concepts such as Nazism into fixed moral symbols.
Of course, what happened in history was a serious wrongdoing, and it is often harmful in practice. However, even the actions of so-called “ordinary people” who are not villains are not necessarily free from harm.
What matters more than labels or categories is the context in which human actions arise. In that sense, reducing things to “this is evil because it belongs to this category” has its limits.
The reason the twins’ relationship is portrayed in such a gray, ambiguous way is, in my view, to reflect this complexity rather than to fit it into a simple moral framework.
What Resident Evil presents is not something limited to exceptional “others,” but rather the idea that these tendencies can exist in anyone. That is why the characters are arranged like mirrors of each other.
At the very least, the villains in the series are not merely devices meant to reassure the player with the thought, “I’m on the other side, so I’m safe.”