So, I’ve lately fallen a bit in love with a wonderful and underappreciated little horror game called In Sound Mind. And given that it’s currently 90% off on Steam until June 2nd, this is clearly the ideal time to try and get more people to give it a go.
So what is In Sound Mind? In brief, it’s surrealist psychological horror at its twisty, dreamlike best, built from a thick stack of classic horror tropes. It is gorgeously colourful (literally and metaphorically), wonderfully atmospheric, and full of interesting mechanics – and gay enough to leave me wanting to write fic about it, which never hurts.
It has a great little sense of humour too. If most of the ideas here are stuff you’ll have seen before, this is still the kind of game with the guts to ask, "yeah, but what if the creepy faceless mannequins that move only when you’re not looking at them were friendly and helpful for a change?"
It is, in even briefer, a whole lot of what RE8 left me wanting more of from this genre, and which RE9 sadly didn't seem that interested in delivering.
Plotwise, well, it’s 1997, and you are mild-mannered therapist Desmond Wales, trying desperately to piece together the truth behind the tragic deaths of three of his patients in time to save himself from the same fate, all while trapped in a twisted little psychological mindscape of his own, and while being stalked and threatened by the most helpful tsundere of a charismatic weirdo in a sinister trenchcoat imaginable (see cover image). From the hubworld of Desmond’s apartment building, you’ll find your way into separate worlds representing each of his patients, gradually accumulating weapons and tools as you go. Gameplay is largely exploration and puzzle-based with some gun combat – and for a game this indy, all those aspects hold up impressively well.
I owe my own discovery of this game to a random youtube video from a relative newbie of a creator. He covers the whole plot in pretty decent detail, though personally, I only got about fifteen minutes in before pausing the video, because I'd realised I wanted to play this thing for real.
The visuals and the game's sense of humour were major parts of what won me over, but I cannot lie: Desmond’s weird-ass stalker would have to be my favourite thing about this game.
He is a little tricky to talk about without dropping spoilers – even his name is a spoiler, though most people will probably have figured out exactly what his deal is long before the game spells it out. Regardless, he’s on Desmond’s tail from the opening moments, and will spend the rest of our playthrough regularly leaving us colourful notes to find, and phoning us up to drop hints and leave threatening messages (look, this is a horror game, text documents and audio logs are its native language).
At least when he’s not actively dropping you into a deathtrap, that is. Or just walking up behind you to scare you out of your socks, drop a one-liner, and disappear in a haze of smoke.
The very first phone message he ever leaves you is...suggestive, to say the least.
What makes this dude so much fun is that, despite his loudly-stated goal of killing Desmond, he's also the game’s official clue-delivery-system. Seldom will you encounter a real puzzle without him leaving you a note or calling you up to deliver the most passive-aggressively cryptic hint as to what you need to be doing. He won’t even let you enter the first major level if you haven’t found all three pieces the gun you can assemble in the hubworld (and if you’ve found some but not assembled them yet, he’s got more dialogue to mock you for that).
This guy is a full wheel of pure, smokey cheese, and the “Not that I’m trying to help you or anything, baka!” vibes are off the planet.
So yes, I was shipping the fuck out of it before I’d hardly started the game. Do you people even know me? This shit is like, the definition of my jam!
But the charms of In Sound Mind certainly do not end with my personal weird lady-boner for a good monster stalker. It's also beautifully creepy (when it's not just being plain beautiful), surprisingly well-paced and plotted, and fun. Though the game has some of that classic low-budget jank, level and puzzle design is surprisingly solid throughout. Like, lands right in that Goldilocks-range between "too easy" and "I am never solving this without googling" kind of solid, which so many games miss completely. Even after solving every single puzzle, I have now gone back to replay this thing through three more times, including twice on the highest difficulty, because I genuinely find the world and gameplay that compelling. Almost all the tools you'll receive have multiple uses, some of which won't even be obvious (I'm looking at you, radio!), and there are some genuinely clever mechanics mixed in.
Combat did take a little time to get my head around – enemies in this thing are fast, and take fuck-all damage if you aren't hitting them in their glowing weakpoints. They're aggressive too, and will come charging at you and force you to stay on the move. But by the time I'd figured out that a reliable strat is to just run straight back at them and watch them breeze past and lose me for a handy few seconds, combat had become a lot more fun. I still don't think I've nailed it, but maximum difficulty has become a fun challenge.
I'm not sure the game really deserves the 'survival horror' flag it has on Steam. It’s horror, certainly, but even on higher difficulties, the game is mostly pretty generous with health and ammunition, and there’s no real inventory management. Even more questionable is the one review I saw that called it an immersive sim. Nominally, stealth is an option, but the ‘stealth’ in this title is painfully rudimentary (enemiesWILLspot you if you give them more than a distant glance at you), and you can’t even stack boxes, so ‘immersive sim’ does not feel particularly cromulent. That said, there are enough interesting mechanics in this thing that it did genuinely have me reloading saves right before some encounters, just to try out different ways of tackling them, which means it was getting me in the same exact corner of my brain that finds immersive sims so terribly addictive. So, immersive sim, no, not really, but I can see where that reviewer got the idea.
Writing and voice acting is... well, solid, but not entirely top-tier. Characters are pretty broadly written, and some of the dialogue does get a little cringy. I don’t love that Desmond’s one female patient is a former child beauty pageant contestant with crushing anxiety about her mild facial scars, for one – that feels just a little bit lazy. And for all the hints that Desmond might be just as damaged as his patients, his actual baggage turns out to be relatively pedestrian (minus the recent crushing self-doubt that comes from rapidly losing three patients, at least). There is a very Ethan Winters quality to the guy, at least his general oblivious mild-mannered everyman character, but that’s certainly no negative for me.
As well-trodden as the subject of mental health can be in this genre, it’s hard not to be a little charmed by how it’s used here. Desmond may be a pretty mediocre therapist, but his need to find answers for three patients he feels like he failed is as earnest as motivations come, and for once, the answers involve no evil doctors or asylums, no crushing nihilism about the human condition. The villains are explicitly the forces of capitalism and government corruption. Regular people have their problems, but are mostly just doing their best. And it’s so damn refreshing to play something where the whole world of toxic masculinity is represented by exactly one guy (a patient), and not only is he not the hero, he’s a disaster that even Agent Trenchcoat thinks he’s nothing but hot air and bullshit.
To summarise then: the gameplay hooked me hard, there are characters who got me right in the id, the plot hangs together impressively well, and the horror vibes of this thing are truly delightful. And there’s enough humour in this thing to forgive it for many more flaws than I ever found in it. And did I mention it’s 90% off on Steam right now?
This is a game that’s been our for years now without really gaining a major audience, but there is some truly excellent fanart of it out there on tumblr already, and the least I can do is encourage more people to give the game a shot, and then go check it out. Four playthroughs in and I am still finding new stuff in this thing, it is so very much worth your time.
NC-17, 6603 words (this part), 95,220 words (so far)
"Taking your time in here," drawls Heisenberg, eyes raking up and down Ethan's body as he leans in the doorway. "Thought I'd come see if you needed any help."
And get himself a good eyeful of Ethan, naked and wet. The impulse rises to bristle, roll his eyes, and ask Heisenberg if he can't have fifteen minutes to himself before getting back on the horse again—but that impulse gets stuck somewhere around his stomach, a little butterfly-feeling that has the side of his mouth quirking upwards instead. "Offering to scrub my back for me?"
"If that's what you need. Or we could start a little... lower down." Heisenberg's eyes settle hungrily on the semi Ethan's sporting, which has lost no enthusiasm during his brief mental foray into the future, and certainly has no complaints about the company. "Why, Ethan! Thinking about me?"
Read from start
In which there are shower thoughts, shower sex, and also an autopsy, because this is a fic about Heisenberg just getting live his best life while Ethan has all the crises.
Somehow, this one grew into the longest single chapter of this whole fic yet. Or at least that's my excuse for why it took me until the very end of May to get it finished.
Since getting into the franchise via RE8 (and to a lesser extent, RE7 and RE2R as well), I've found a lot to love about the modern Resi games. I've experienced some of the most satisfying stories and some of the most memorable characters I've seen anywhere since getting back into gaming. I love the way the the franchise has expanded from it's original zombie roots and into new horror genres, from hillbilly slasher to gothic fairytale, and into exploring intensely surreal and psychological experiences. I adore their dysfunctional families of charismatic villains, and morally complicated characters like Mia, Ada and Heisenberg. And I love so damn much that the women of the Resi world have been consistently portrayed as just as physically competent ‒ and sometimes just as magnificently evil ‒ as their male counterparts.
I really did not imagine how much I was going to love the immersive horror experience created by use of a tight first-person perspective, or the fantastic sense of place, history and environmental storytelling created as you explore the game's central location. I don't mind that they've had a parallel stream of old-school Umbrella zombie shit via the remakes – but I got into RE for of the joy of seeing a franchise that’s been kicking around since the early 90‘s finally try something new, revitalising the property with RE7 and 8.
Aaaand then RE9 came out, a game set largely in Raccoon City, all about how some Wesker-clone thinks he can use Umbrella zombie viruses to create the ~next step in human evolution~ because apparently that hadn't already been done to death and back a good 20 years ago.
Battlefield options in RE9 are suddenly gendered in a way this franchise has never made me suffer through before; locations come and go too fast to let any of the evil feel properly resident, and the only surrealism is the dissonance you'll experience trying to follow the incoherent mess of the plot. We get two villains total (both male), no really memorable dynamic between them, barely any supporting cast, no experimentation with genre, and tight first-person-perspective is no longer even an option anymore, because cutscenes are almost all in 3rd person. Immersion? HA.
But, y'know, Leon is back, for the very first time since the last new RE title they released. And he’s kicking zombie heads off, having Feelings about all little girls he didn't save in the past, and generally proving that men will absolutely run off to die alone rather than go to therapy. And if the reviews are anything to go by, apparently that's all anyone else in this fandom ever wanted.
Seldom have I felt so out of step with a fandom I loved so much. If you did love this game for what it was, you may not want to read the post below. Spoilers to follow, plus the major disclaimer that all my thoughts come from watching online playthroughs – I have not played this game myself, and do not intend to. My interest in pouring through every hidden text document in this thing for explanations for the plot issues raised below is pretty negligible: if I have to work that hard to follow the internal logic of a story, it’s already failed.
My problems with this game could probably stretch to a whole mini series of rants. But let's start with the big one: gender. Because this one goes all the way back to my first impressions, and I’ve been sitting on my hands over this one far too long.
Back when I wrote about my reaction to the trailer, the part I was really biting my tongue over was Grace's own portrayal. We're in the offices of the FBI, actively discussing a murder investigation ‒ so why the fuck am I watching our new heroine shyly adjust her glasses, stammer over a basic conversation with her boss, and generally portray all the body language of someone's moe waifu? Is this seriously meant to be a professional crime scene investigator?
But maybe, thought I, this wasn't wholly fair. Obviously, the game isn't going to make us spend the whole runtime as a shy little stuttering girl; Grace is going to have to take enough levels in badass to tackle the final boss with a shotgun and a grenade launcher eventually, right?
Aha. Ahahahaha. Ha. Oh, the more fool me!
No, we will never see Grace wielding a grenade launcher. We will never see her wield anything heavier than a handgun. We’ve got Leon to do that for her!
Now, I do want to say here, if you liked Grace, if you saw yourself in her, or if she spoke to you in any way, this post is not an attack on you. You are allowed to enjoy a character whose portrayal bothered me.
For all my issues with this thing, there are still major scenes in Grace’s story that worked better than they had any right to. Her big climactic moment of getting to announce the truth about Spencer is pretty damn satisfying. The scene where she has to take a scared, disabled little girl, out of the (relative, and questionable) safety of her cell to try and get them both out of the building alive has all the right tension. Her freak-out at Emily’s horrific death, that has her lash out at Leon and run off to give the villains a chance to talk her around – well, fuck me, but I actually pretty much bought where Grace was coming from in that moment. There are stories in which a character like Grace would probably have worked fine for me.
RE9 was not that story.
I would like to be able to give Grace some credit here as a solid portrait someone who has never recovered from horrific childhood trauma. Faced with the horrors of RE9, I’d venture that, most of us wouldn’t do much better than Grace, realistically speaking. But it’s hard for me to give that excuse much weight when Ethan is our obvious comparison point, and everything in her background suggests that Grace should be so much more capable than Ethan, not less. She’s introduced to us an FBI crime scene analyst! She arrives on scene carrying a gun! (Buried at the bottom of her backpack, for some reason, but she must have some training with it.) Even if she’s not a field agent, dealing with grisly murder investigations is supposed to be her day job!
Meanwhile, Ethan remains the card-carrying archtype of every middle-class white-person stumbling cluelessly into a horror movie scenario. His total relevant background experience ends at ‘might have lived in Texas for some of his life.’ And yet even he has more fucking chill in the face of danger than poor Grace does. Fuck, Ashley had more chill than this, and she's a teenage girl!
And on the subject of Grace’s day-job, I have to ask, why exactly is she an FBI agent? I’m asking this both for in-universe logic and why-do-this on a meta level: why would someone like Grace choose that career path, and what plot role does it serve? Nominally, investigating a recent crime scene is the reason she’s sent to the hotel where her mother was killed all those years before, but we could’ve just as easily achieved the same with an anonymous phone call from her stalker promising the ‘truth’ about her mother’s death. Being FBI means she arrives carrying a gun, but RE has plenty of other ways to get those to you, and an American who saw their mother murdered as a child (and who is about to enter a shady location) might well have bought a gun without the career excuse.
Maybe Grace’s job is meant to contextualise how she has the skills to use all that convenient biotech equipment that lets her craft bullets and shit out of infected blood (...somehow?) But if so, I hate to break it to you, Capcom, but that’s a whole other job, done by lab techs, who won’t usually visit crime scenes at all. There’s also some very vague suggestion that her work for the FBI is what it made it so hard for the villains to get to her, but come the fuck on – Grace was an orphaned teenager for years before she joined the FBI. That answer doesn’t hold any water at all.
So if Grace’s FBI status plays no role in the plot, why would Grace, the character, join the FBI? The obvious answer – and the one I assumed based on first impressions – was that she was motivated by a desire to find the truth about her mother’s death. But the Grace we get in game shows insultingly little awareness that there’s any mystery there to investigate, let alone any active interest in solving it. The fact she’s being sent to a new crime scene at the location of her mother’s murder seems to be important only in that going back there will be a traumatic experience. The idea that Grace might even volunteer for the job, so she could investigate whether the two incidents are linked, seems to have occurred only to the villains, who are using the location to bait her out.
Not until she’s locked in the hotel does Grace even remember that her mother left ‘something important’ (THE ultimate MacGuffin that solves the whole plot) behind a portrait shortly before her death. If Grace had the least interest in the truth, what’s kept her from going back for it years ago? For most of the scenes we spend with her, Grace is too damaged and traumatised to ask the obvious questions that we, the audience, have been screaming at the screen. This is some real Ethan Winters level of obliviousness, only without most of the privileged-middle-class-white-man excuses. How on earth does this poor, fragile woman even do a job that involves looking a photos of dead bodies at all?
(The irony of this, for anyone who read my first impressions post, was that it’s not even like I was enthusiastic about a “discover the truth about your dead parent’s death!” back when I thought that was what the story was going to be. Well, joke’s on me again, I suppose: it turns out that spending this much time with a character with all the reasons and resources to go looking for answers, but who’s too passive to actually do so, is infinitely more frustrating. It’s the elephant in the room of the plot that you keep expecting to see addressed, but which never actually is.)
If Capcom really were determined to give us a protagonist this damaged, I have to ask, why on earth did they make Grace a nominal FBI agent at all? Like, which came first, the idea of Grace as a professional crime scene investigator, or Grace as so fragile and traumatised she can barely speak to people without staring at the floor and stuttering? Because good god, do those features not dovetail into a coherent character portrait. Is this really what RE thinks a professional woman with an emotionally demanding job looks like? Why am I sudden reminded of old B-movies where the one female ‘scientist’ ends up with a role limited to doing the cooking and lounging around in a bikini? It’s that level of sexist claptrap. Fucking hell, RE, you are usually so much better than this! No way in fuck would we ever see this kind of characterisation with a man in Grace’s role, and you know why not.
It’s not even as though Grace is just one female character out of many better examples. The one other female character you will (very briefly) play in this game is an even tinier, even more helpless little-blonde-girl, in a flashback horror sequence without a happy ending. In non-playable characters, we have the even more helpless Emily: a little girl who is blind, and whose story also ends with her horrific, violent death (the manner in which she’s miraculously brought back in the finale is too much of a joke to take seriously).
Even Sherry has been wheeled out of storage, only to be demoted from field agent to the new Hunnigan, trusted only to take Leon’s calls and look things up for him: now in her 30s, and still being infantalised. The one woman who actually gets portrayed as assertive and confident is Grace’s mother, and she appears only in flashback, fridged in her first scene.
And though Grace does feel like a well-realised character in many respects, as a portrait of someone living with trauma, she’s also frustratingly safe. Grace does not have trust issues, she’s not paranoid about strangers, she doesn’t lash out until the moment she’s just watched a little girl die in front of her. She doesn’t resent her mother for keeping secrets from her. She doesn’t have a substance abuse problem, or any other maladaptive coping mechanisms. And she’s never done a single wrong thing in her life. Grace is as unthreatening as a woman could possibly be. She’s here to milk the protective instincts of the White Knights of the world for all they’re worth, and take no risks in doing it.
It doesn't help that with the switch to a new female protag, cutscenes have dropped the tight 1st person POV that made RE7-8 so wonderfully immersive. When we're playing as Ethan, we're playing as Ethan ‒ seeing the world through his eyes. We are Ethan, through every cutscene in the game.
Now we've got a female protag, however, from the earliest trailers, we're looking at her instead. We're a 3rd person observer watching her be delicate and nervous and shy. We’re watching her get violently thrown around and dragged away by horrific monsters, before Leon comes bursting in to save her. I’m not fucking here for that, okay? I’m just not.
Now, I know in writing this that there’s probably already someone frothing at the mouth to tell me I’m not allowed to call Resident Evil sexist, because they gave us Jill, and Claire, and maybe even Ada – all women who are allowed to use grenade launchers (while sporting the physiques of supermodels, because women who tot heavy weaponry around professionally don’t have muscles, silly!)
To which I can only respond, so where are Claire, Jill and Ada lately? Because Leon’s whole Big Angst is that he’s dying of post-Raccoon-City-itis – as is Sherry, and apparently most everyone else who survived that whole kerfuffle. So you know who else may well be dying of post-Raccoon-City-itis? Claire. Jill. And Ada. (Also Barry, but when was the last time anyone remembered he exists?) All of whom should logically be pretty invested in all the events we’re watching unfold, and whom Leon might want to make sure get a dose of that convenient cure-all from the end of the game.
So it’s pretty interesting that none of those major iconic women even get mentioned in this game. Not even to assure us they got lucky somehow, and aren’t desperately in need of a cure themselves.
So why not? Why is Sherry, who was only a child at Raccoon City, the only one worth remembering and putting up there on screen? Well, I’d hardly be the first to point out that Claire, Ada and Jill would all logically be just as old as Leon is now. And old women don’t get to appear in video games. Definitely not old women who used to be young and hot! Gamers can’t fap to that!
Also before anyone gets the idea all my problems with this particular RE title involve nitpicking every female character who gets any screentime (and even those who don’t) ‒ well, guess what: this is the game that made me kind of hate Leon too. And I do say this as someone who loved the guy in previous titles!
Leon comes to RE9 in full knowledge he probably has only a day or two at most left to live, and he’s using those hours to hunt down a former Umbrella dude called Victor Gideon. Why this is how he’s spending his final hours is a mystery I never did get an answer to, not even when Gideon ties Leon to a chair and asks him that question under threat of violence.
Initially, I had the impression Leon had reason to think Gideon had the key to a cure that would save his life. But, much like the idea Grace had any interest in solving her mother’s murder, this is an assumption based on what a rational person in Leon’s position might be doing, not on anything that actually happens in the story. Throughout RE9, Leon displays no interest in or expectation of finding a cure, for himself or anyone else who’s dying of the same condition, and ultimately stumbles onto one entirely by accident. Why is a dying man wasting his final hours on the trail of a criminal he doesn’t seem to have any existing connection to, and who he may not live long enough to apprehend? Why doesn’t Leon have any backup? Why is Sherry enabling him? Why does it take until the final scenes for the game to remember that people like Chris and Team Dog-Dog exist, and could definitely be helping, rather than leaving a task apparently this important to a single, dying man?
This is not me nitpicking here, this is me noticing that the game itself asked this question out loud, via Gideon, and then never bothered to supply an answer. Do I really have to go hunting down missable text documents to find out why the story is happening at all?
Having seen the story to its conclusion, my best guess at an answer is this: Leon is out there chasing this random villain alone because he’s going to die, and he’s decided the Manly Thing To Do is to die doing something meaningful. And he hasn’t told anyone but Sherry about it, because Sherry is the one person without the authority to tell him he’s being a fucking moron. If nabbing Gideon is important enough to die over, it’s important enough to call in backup over, you stupid git.
Over the final hours of the game, Leon’s objectives crystalise even further. He just wants to save one more sad little blonde girl before he croaks! Nothing else matters, because saving helpless little blonde girls is this guy’s life mission ‒ and he’s just met the blondest little stuttering mess he’s seen in years.
God, this game works so fucking hard to pull every possible heartstring where Leon is concerned, lookit all his trauma! Lookit all these gratuitous Raccoon City callbacks! Look how much he caaaaaarerrres about saaaaavvviiing people! Y’know, as long as those people are sad little blonde girls. If those people are the many innocent civilians killed in the street after Victor Gideon spots Leon following him, and triggers a spontaneous zombie outbreak to delay him? Yeah, he’ll maybe mention that to Sherry in passing. We all know biohazard outbreaks in crowded streets basically take care of themselves, after all! Leon can’t waste any time making sure none of those zombies got away, he’s got a badguy to pursue to a whole new location, where said badguy will trigger another fucking outbreak as a distraction (indoors this time, at least), with dozens more victims, because Leon goes and walks right in through the front door with no backup, no intelligence, no change in strategy whatsoever. Our hero!
Besides, as we all know from a few thousand police shootings, the only thing that matters in these situations is catching the badguy! And the only way to approach them is to bust in the front door with no plan. Civilian casualties? Psh, they’re not people, they’re just NPCs! Leon hasn’t had any chance to get to know those people, and most of them aren’t girls, and aren’t helpless, and aren’t even blonde! And I’m sure he made sure not to hit any of their vital points when he shot them all down, since that’s apparently a thing he can do.
Does this sound harsh? Look, I have a fucking thing about civilian casualties being treated as not-a-big-deal as long as our main protagonists make it out alive. I have a thing about "rescue missions" that kill twice as many people as they rescue. I call that thing "basic human empathy." It’s just nice when characters can at least take a fucking moment to acknowledge that all that collateral is, y’know, fucking awful. (Ethan does, watching the massacre in the village that culminates with Elena’s death. Heck, the fact the Leon of RE2R did such a good job of convincing me he does actually care about regular people in a crisis is why I used to love him so much to begin with.)
This is so much of the same shit that made RE6 so viscerally fucking unpleasant for me. People are dying in the fucking street, not from a tragic accident, or even a motivated terror attack, but because regular humans are so utterly expendable to the villains of this universe that dozens or even thousands of lives can be thrown away as no more than a fucking distraction. A whole infected city is not longer a setting worth multiple games of material, it’s Chapter 1 of Campaign B – an inconvenience for our hero to elbow his way through to make his next extraction point, pausing barely long enough to pretend like they give a shit. A million deaths is no longer a tragedy, or even a statistic, it’s fucking background noise. Jesus, even back in RE6, Leon managed to convince me he cared more than this!
It does not help that RE9 is again trying to sell the idea that Leon’s grand tragedy in RE2 was not being able to save people, something that was already giving me major record scratch confusion back in RE4R. This time, we’re even making a token attempt to justify it, by giving Leon a significant flashback to the RE2R scene with Kendo the gunstore owner and his tragically infected daughter. That was a genuinely great scene, one of my favourites in this whole franchise to date – but trying to recontextualise it into “a time Leon failed to save a little girl” does not work on any level. That poor kid was doomed long before Leon and Ada ever walk in; the tension of that scene is about a poor father having to accept the reality of the situation, and in Leon’s burning need to be able to offer victims like Kendo real answers and some kind of justice. The attempt to reframe all Leon’s angst into “if I could’ve save just one truly helpless person from a mass casualty event!” is all kinds of gross.
Realistically, there is not a single person in RE2 who Leon could have saved, but didn’t. His plotline is not about saving people, it’s about trying to prove himself under the worst possible circumstances, and trying to bring Umbrella to justice. The whole reason Claire’s story didn’t work for me is how fast she ditches all her original goals in favour of saving this one little girl she briefly met about five minutes ago. Even if doing so means convincing Sherry’s mother to take time out from trying to save the city to save just this one little girl instead. Metaphorically wading through the bodies of NPCs to save just one top-billed character isn’t really better than elbowing aside the dying masses between our hero and the villain. The Leon of RE2R did not need to fixate on saving any one person for how much he obviously cares about people to come through.
...So help me, but I’m starting to think maybe the writers have decided that Leon’s Great Raccoon City Tragedy is that Claire got to save the helpless little blonde girl, instead of him.
You may also note that even here and now, Sherry is basically still a helpless little girl to Leon. Never mind that RE6 makes her a professional field agent with Wolverine-level healing powers – when Leon runs into her in that game, he’s still got to tell her new partner how important it is to keep Sherry safe. And now, in RE9, little miss once-walked-away-from-a-plane-crash is kept safely back in the office to answer the phone, while a dying old man with a savior complex goes out and does the real man’s work. Leon does not even have the fucking decency to tell her the truth and say goodbye when he’s sure he’s about to die, which is the least respect you’d think she was owed. Such an afterthought is Sherry to this plot that she doesn’t even get to appear in person in the finale, or receive the cure that will presumably save her life on screen.
Not long after the game came out, my dash was briefly aflame with excitement over the discovery that Leon was supposed to be wearing a wedding ring in this game. Myself, I really hope that detail isn’t canonical, not because of any shipper investment, but because that makes RE9 a story in which Leon reached a point where he genuinely thought he was about to die, and did not even try to contact his spouse to say goodbye. This used to be one of my favourite RE characters, why the fuck is this game working so hard to make him into a toxic asshole?
The knots this game ties it in to torture yet more helpless blonde girls are absurd. The whole plot hinges on the idea that Umbrella has spent more than 30 years cloning an endless series of helpless little blonde girls, as vessels in which to implant the memories of their long-dead founder, Spencer. Grace is one of those girls, Emily another. It never actually worked, but hot damn, did they kept trying!
You’d think maybe, at some point since the goddamn nineteen nineties, someone on this project might have pointed out they sure don’t seem to have produced much beyond a whole graveyard full of little dead girls. Maybe someone could’ve suggested that, just maybe, the memories of a dead man just might take a little more easily if they were being implanted in the body of someone with the same general body plan as Spencer himself. Fuck, why not clone Spencer wholesale? We know they’ve got tech for weird cloning shit!
This is not a minor plot problem: that Grace is even supposed to be a Spencer-memory-vessel is never stated aloud, and incredibly easy to miss if you’re not pouring through every document you find. Expecting your audience to pick up from context that Umbrella have been trying to implant their dead founder’s memories into a new vessel is that much more obscure when the vessel bears no resemblance to the original Spencer. But if Umbrella were cloning Spencer wholesale, then Grace and Emily would’ve had to be boys – and who’s gonna fap to that?
What made this game such a frustrating watch for me does not end with the two main characters and the stark gender split between suicidally-toxic-masculine and fragile-traumatised-feminine. I have barely touched on the problems I had even following the plot, the hilarity of a Wesker clone no-one ever actually recognises as Wesker, or so much else. The burned out crater that was Raccoon City may still have some evil willing to crawl out of the dust for us, but it hasn’t been a residence in years: no location in this game has a fraction of the staying power or personality of the Bakers’ mansion or Miranda’s village. There's a wonderful down-the-rabbit-hole vein of surrealism to those settings that made it so much easier to handwave the odd plothole. These were games that left me genuinely excited to see where the franchise might be headed next.
Turns out the answer was back to the same old shit they were doing 20 years ago, only now no-one with boobs gets to use a rocket launcher anymore. C’est la vie.
Is this really what the rest of Resi fandom wants out of this franchise? IDEK.
Do you have any freecam images of Heisenberg's headquarters/board room? (I forgot the name sorry)
If possible, a little bit more lit up since a lot of areas are dark o(-(
Thank you so much in advance!! And all good if you don't
So, thing about how you ‘forgot the name’ is that Heisenberg has neither a boardroom, nor a headquarters. I have no idea which room you're thinking of, let alone what kind of caps you actually want of it. And even if I could guess, I rather feel that "can you take me lighting-enhanced screenshots of some room" is where I need to draw the "c'mon, dude, you can do that yourself"-line.
Freecam pics are great for getting high-angle shots of large spaces or close-ups of things Ethan can’t actually get close to, but most of the rooms in the factory that you might be talking about are cramped, interior spaces. You can capture most of those features perfectly well with the standard in-game camera mode. You want them lightened up? Adjust the game’s light/dark settings, it’s not hard to do! Or mess with the camera-mode's own settings! Or even save the image, and then adjust it in image editing software. Hell, you could even screencap some pics from someone else’s stream of the game and edit them the same way, if loading up the game again seems like too much work.
I'm happy to field trivia questions about this game if they flag something interesting, but I can't read your mind, and most of the caps and info I post about RE8 are really just as accessible to everyone else as they are to me.
Hello! I've read a lot of theories on yours on RE8 and the various characters, especially the Heisenberg ones, and I wanted to ask your opinion/ideas on something
In Heisenberg's Diary, at some point it is read:
Miranda didn't just change my body, she took my dignity.
And the first time I read it, the choice of the word "dignity" definitely surprised me
While it is true that it was probably meant in a "she took my humanity" way, but still, it was a choice of words that left up probably a more open interpretation than planned
What's your though on it? Please tell me that I am not the only one who received a hit to the heart when I read thar
I'd actually call that line very straightforward, and I don't think it has anything to do with making him less human. Miranda took his dignity by forcing him to kowtow to her regime ‒ to play the dutiful "son" to his dear "mother". She didn't just violate his body, she forced him to profess to be grateful for it ‒ loudly and publicly, even when it's the furthest possible thing from how he really feels. It's all straight from the classic abuser playbook: it's not enough that they hurt you and make your life miserable, it's that they trap you in a bubble where the only way to avoid worse hurt is to reassure them (and anyone else who might question it) that you deserve it. That's what Heisenberg means about having his dignity taken away.
Want some supporting evidence? Have a quote from one of his rants to Ethan over the loudspeaker in the factory:
She took me. Took us. To be her children. She locked us away in the village. Decades of being forced to serve her. Can you even understand that humiliation?
Hell, look at the lines from his diary immediately before and after:
She can't see a difference between "experiment" and "family."
Miranda didn't just change my body, she took my dignity.
If I don't kill her then my life will never be my own.
I think the overall story is pretty clear, no? He's not happy about being experimented on, but he's just as furious about the insult of being trapped in her cult, with no way to escape. About having to tell people he's happy to be there, that he loves and supports a monster of a cult leader, that he hates more than anyone.
(Naturally, I did also check the original Japanese for the line about dignity, but as far as I can see, the English is pretty close to a word-for-word translation. The term for "dignity" they use (尊厳 or 'songen'), isn't familiar to me, but seems to be used in very much the same sense you get from the English version. So, no new information from that angle, but there it is for completeness.)
I was wondering if it would be possible to find the texture in the files of RE8 of Dulvey Beer? I think it would be a cool thing to wrap onto a real bottle but idk if it is possible to find something so obscure in the files LOL
Not only is it possible, the texture is already in my post about Dulvey Beer! (Which I'm assuming you've already found, given the question.) Finding obscure stuff in these files is basically what I do to relax these days. :P But here it is again, if you really want it.
Like all texture assets, it's not particularly high-res (or certainly no higher res than the minimum it needs to be to render a tiny asset few players will ever look at up close), so may not look great when printed out. But given I've seen bottles of 'Dulvey beer' for sale on Etsy, you're not the first to have the idea!
Hello! I’ve always enjoyed reading your posts about RE8 game files. I’ve recently tried looking into them myself, but I still haven’t figured out how to match specific in-game objects or models with their corresponding names in the files. Could you share the process you use to find them? Sorry to bother 🙏🏻🙏🏻
Probably not the best question to ask anonymously ‒ or not without a lot more context about how far into the process you actually are. Maybe you've got everything extracted into the complete folder structure, with all the individual files correctly named, and you're just trying to figure out where the game stores the mesh for character models? Or maybe you're looking at a bunch of disorganised files with filenames made entirely out of numbers? (Can happen, if you haven't extracted with the right list file!) Do you have tools installed to actually let you convert or view textures and model meshes, once you can find them? (I mostly use Noesis, but I'm pretty sure there are others out there). Have you figured out how to load a .scn file? (That one took me a while, okay!) Do you need me to point out where the 'props' folder is, or are you looking at it already?
Assuming you do have everything extracted correctly, and you have a way to actually view things, and are just trying to figure out how to find a particular prop from the game in the roughly one-millionty different objects in the props folder (and that's already assuming kind of a lot), then you're probably discovering there is no way to figure out what an asset you've seen in game will be called in the files. This is a game where most files relating to Donna are prefixed 'ghost', most files relating to Heisenberg are prefixed 'geek', and where the name for a syringe asset may be 'serumtypee'. No-one's actually meant to be viewing the files in this format, and whatever scheme the dev team used to navigate their asset list wasn't shipped with the game. We've basically cracked this thing open with a screwdriver and are trying to guess which coloured wire is safe to cut.
Basically, even if you've got everything looking the way it does to me, there's no real "process" for finding a particular asset. But here are some things that occasionally work.
Scroll through the list of props, pick one with an interesting name, and view it. If you're lucky, maybe you'll recognise it from the game! If you don't recognise it, congrats: now you get to spend your next playthrough scanning all the corners for that particular weird pile of slime/that one tapestry with a nude hoplite/a weird box that might have recipes in it or something?/etc
Think of a couple of names the object might have, and plug them into Agent Ransack, pointing at the top folder of the tree. This generally won't work, because it turns out the security camera you were looking for was actually called 'monitoring sensor', and the village speaker system is called 'memo'. But maybe you'll find something else interesting in the process.
Install that one mod that lets you dump a complete list of every asset the game has loaded into a text file, load up the scene that one asset is in, and then check to see what's been dumped in the text file! Oh, wait, turns out there are a millionty other assets in this one scene in here too. Never mind.
Discover REasy.exe, use it to open the .scn file that (you think) the asset appears in, expand all the subheadings with lists of assets that are part of the scene, and look for anything with a name that looks promising. It's a shorter list than what you get with a full file dump, so maybe you'll have more luck there, IDEK. (This may actually the most workable method, but does require getting your head around another program, and yet more of RE8 file structure.)
You get the idea. The answer, as best I can give it to you, is "learn to love digging!" There is some internal logic to how files are named and structured, but most of my more interesting discoveries have just come from browsing through the many, many subfolders of the props directory, and clicking on things to see what they look like. If that doesn't sound like a way to find your next minor hyperfixation, I doubt I can help you very much.
Do you possibly have some assets of the general nature and plant life in the re 8 village? I can’t really find people talking about it and I’d like to know so that I can try and figure out the general ecosystem of the village and how it would look like in other seasons.
Kinda depends what you mean by 'assets'. Textures? Models? Filenames that mention an actual species? Because if the latter, the majority of 'nature' assets from around the village are called things like 'vine', 'shrub' or 'villagetree' ‒ not very specific.
Only three trees get specific names: 'oak' (of which Europe apparently has over 100 species, so 'specific' is still pretty relative here), 'black alder' (a specific species, but most of what I get on an image search looks nothing like what's in the game) ‒ and 'silver fir'. That last is at least an identifiable species that occurs only in mountainous regions, including Romania (ie. Transylvania), so would be the strongest suggestion they might've had a real biome in mind. Still doesn't really tell us much more than you could get from just looking for a list of mountain forest trees of Eastern Europe, though. Even a glimpse at the game should tell you we're in the middle of a huge pine forest ‒ though for what's growing inside the village that isn't a pine or an oak, we're still down to 'villagetree' as our only descriptors.
There's one other named plant in this game, and it's one I've been meaning to make a proper post on for ages, because they are, specifically, Donna's flowers. According to the filenames, however, they're actually wolfsbane.
They look about right for it too ‒ yellow is one of the colours Wolfsbane naturally occurs in (there are a number of sub-species), and the shape of the flowers is about right. Also notable: wolfsbane is a powerful hallucinogen, and an ingredient in witch's ointments (none of which will actually make you fly, but oh boy could they have you tripping hard enough to make you think you were). Its association with werewolves is (I'm sorry to tell you), 100% invented by modern pop culture, but the association is still there. (These are some serious get-me-started-at-your-peril topics, FTR ‒ witchcraft superstitions and werewolf folklore are topics I know far too much about.) And considering there's even a gun called the Wolfsbane in RE8, so there's no way that was an accident.
Which begs the question: were these flowers going to be used in some anti-werewolf capacity in an earlier draft of the game, or were they just a convenient model for Donna's weird-ass powers? I'd guess probably the latter, but we'll never know for sure. It's a neat little detail either way.
You do have to be a little careful in pulling assets out of a game like this, because a few of vegetation assets only appear in Rose's visit to the graveyard during the closing credits (set in a different country in a completely different season), and so can't be taken as village natives (other assets are reused freely across both locations, because who's really paying that much attention to the local biome?) So I've tried to exclude those from what I looked at.
Anyhow, on the off-chance you really are looking for texture-assets, I'll dump a few more under the cut. Gonna be pretty long and ugly, because tumblr still limits how you can place images in ask response posts.
Oak tree assets:
Black alder assets ‒ these ones only appear as clumps of smaller stalks like in the pics below
Silver fir assets (a big category ‒ there are many of these ones)
Hello !! I dunno if you already have a post about this hiding somewhere, but I recently stumbled upon your posts (recently as in like, an hour ago LMAO) about RE8 cut content/concept art and your theories and stuff and I was wondering if you had any thoughts or opinions on some of Moreau's concept art (such as the one where his 'lover' is fused into his back (ew?) and the TV scene where he was originally planned to be watching a romantic movie, for example (forgive me if that first one is wrong, I got it from the wiki))
I personally feel that Moreau's entire section and character is kind of... unfinished? I haven't seen many people talk about him or really care for him at all, but I'm quite fond of him because I feel like he has a LOT of missing potential, or lore that was planned but never implemented (like in the concept art I mentioned) and it makes me upset because he could've definitely been (and is!) a really interesting character to me, blah blah blah yap yap yap
Basically I'm asking. Do you have any thoughts on Moreau lore and what could've been because I'm REALLY interested to hear about it
I'm super sorry if my wording is poor or this ask is really nonspecific or you're not taking asks like this at all but I hope I at least got the point across 😭
(also side note, I LOVE your Heisenberg posts I love Heisenberg he's so awesome)
Ooh, a real Moreau-appreciator? Welcome! I take it you've found my post about his romantic movie fixation then? I've got some more on what we do and don't know about him in my post on the four lords, but that one post on his romantic side covers most of my thoughts, and I'm still a little fascinated by how close it came to the finished game. And I think we all know what his favourite more recent movie is.
But it's always nice to see Moreau getting some love, because I do think he deserves more appreciation! Sure, he's the ugly duckling of the family, but part of what works so well about the four lords is how they each serve to illustrate a different response to Miranda's corruption and cultic abuse. Dimitrescu revels in the power Miranda has given her ‒ she's right up in the top echelons, benefiting without remorse. Heisenberg rebels against it (though he may not ultimately be much more noble than Miranda herself). Donna's own world is broken and twisted to where we can barely speculate about what's going on in her head anymore.
But Moreau represents perhaps the most honest picture of what Miranda does to her followers: a man broken in body and spirit, so slavishly indoctrinated he goes on worshipping her even as his body rots. Moreau is only as ugly as Miranda's regime should be truly understood to be.
(He's no better a person than any of the other four, though ‒ victimhood alone doesn't make you noble. There's no level of abuse that someone, somewhere, won't internalise.)
The idea that he had a tragic former lover fused into his back is some A-grade body-horror, but it's hard to say much more about it, because a couple of words attached to one piece of concept art is literally all we know. Though the fact you can see her face and hand hanging out of his back in that one concept pic will sure fucking stay with you.
My best guess is that this idea probably dates to back when Miranda was still going to be a foreign researcher, rather than the centre of the village cult. Once Mother Miranda was locked in, the position of Moreau's Greatest Love is already filled (see also: commentary in that other post about who Moreau is very, very clearly casting as co-lead in his own film-inspired fantasy).
There are a couple more pieces of concept art featuring Moreau that you may or may not have encountered. One talks about how his section was originally supposed to be a fishing village, but this was cut because it would've been too difficult to fully implement (instead, we're left with just a few flooded houses).
Another shows Ethan glimpsing him in the village, while Moreau is out searching for corpses to experiment on. The Moreau of the finished game seems more invested in live subjects than dead ones (that's become Heisenberg's territory), but that's a minor detail. I'd guess this may have been cut because it doesn't make a lot of sense for him to be out looking for new research material when Miranda's plans have already reached their culmination, but it's a great image for a spooky little scene.
The original trial scene seems to have him referring to himself as part of his own little household or family, much as Heisenberg (who does likewise) had multiple family members in earlier drafts. But for all we know, that 'household' might've consisted entirely of him, and the weird lump on his back that he still calls his girlfriend, so it may not be worth reading more into.
You're not the first person I've heard from that felt Moreau's section of the game feels unfinished ‒ but can't say I feel like much is lacking there personally. His and Donna's domains are far smaller than the big event areas of Dimitrescu's castle and Heisenberg's factory, but I'd say that only works in the game's favour. Instead of 4 big areas in a row, we get big area, horror escape room, small area, big area, and I think it does a lot for the pacing to break things up that way.
And for all that we spend so little time with him, I'm not sure we actually know much less about Moreau than we really do about Heisenberg. For Donna and Dimitrescu, I could rattle off a ton of important autobiographical facts ‒ whether they were born in the village, who their real families were, how old they were when they joined Miranda's family, roughly when they did ‒ even why they might have agreed to be experimented on. For Moreau and Heisenberg, I've got nothing remotely concrete on any of those questions (seriously, the gender split in this family is surprisingly stark!) But we do spend more time with Heisenberg, so he probably feels better known, rightly or otherwise.
What can I tell you about Moreau? Well, mostly just what I already covered in my post on the four lords. He seems to have nautical tattoos, but that may just be a basic fish man = sailor gag that doesn't really mean much. He may (or may not) have had a real past career as a doctor, and he did experiment on human subjects for Miranda post-transformation. He once had an assistant, and created the first Varcolac by injecting wolf blood into a lycan (and then he abruptly didn't have an assistant anymore for Varcolac-reasons). He drinks Dulvey beer (The World's Only Beer Brand, Accept No Substitutes!) which I'm 99% sure none of the other lords do. And I've speculated that Heisenberg may have a soft spot for him, though this is well into speculation territory.
Side-note, because I keep seeing it in fic and it bugs me: no-one, but no-one, calls Moreau 'Salvatore'. Donna is the only of the four whose first name is ever spoken aloud, and Alcina the only one whose Ethan even sees written down. The name 'Salvatore' appears only once anywhere in the game, in the book Chris finds in Miranda's lab (ditto 'Karl').
Heisenberg calls him Moreau (and that's when he's being polite), even in the same sentence where he calls Donna by her first name. The Duke calls him Moreau. Mother Miranda is perfectly happy calling her dear 'children' by their last names. Ethan, as of the time of his death, has no fucking clue who either 'Karl' or 'Salvatore' even are. Even the official puppet show calls him 'Moro-kun'. Look, I'm not saying no-one can ever call him by his first name in fanworks, but if it's happening, it should be treated as a big deal. Not the default.
Oh, and did you know his actor (Jesse Pimentel) is the same guy who played Lucas in RE7? I would not have picked that one! Dude's talent for playing revolting sacks of shit is unparalleled!
Who was Moreau, pre-Miranda? You could make a case that he was a real doctor, running 'Moreau's clinic', and his tattoos are just a shallow fishman gag. Or you could make just as valid a case that 'Moreau's clinic' is just a shallow Island of Doctor Moreau reference, or that it was only established when he started his inept experiments with Miranda's victims. Maybe Moreau did get those tattoos as a real sailor or fisherman. Either works! Heck, maybe he was a ship's doctor at some point (or a ship's doctor's assistant ‒ look, the Igor vibes are strong with this guy, and the servility is well baked in). He's fucked up enough to be the one lord I could almost buy as having been under Miranda's thumb since childhood, though given all the evidence that cadou-implantation stops you aging, I doubt he was really a kid when it began. (Unless his distorted appearance is a side-effect of Miranda's attempts to age him artificially? Anything's possible!)
My one other theory ‒ which I originally brought up on the four lords post, and haven't quite gotten out of my head since ‒ is to speculate that he might just be the oldest of the four lords. Evidence for this is scant (we're literally going just by the order in which Chris finds the books lying on a table in Miranda's lab), but he's by far the most disfigured of Miranda's "children" ‒ mentally and physically ‒ so the idea he was one of her earlier attempts would track. If you'd already created Dimitrescu or Heisenberg, would you bother keeping a thing like Moreau around and calling it a 'lord'? Or maybe he's been growing progressively more mutated gradually as the years went by. Either way, there's something very tragic in imagining him as Miranda's first 'son', supplanted and outdone by every new 'sibling' to come after him, while his mind slowly withered away.
It's hard to come up with much beyond that, and the clues we've got don't necessarily add up. Thematically, he's a wonderful mashup of Doctor Moreau, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein's Igor, and maybe even the Hunchback of Notre Dame (not to mention visual elements that had to be inspired by 2006's The Host, for a more recent horror reference!) But how do you square the man who once had a respectably-signed medical clinic with the man who gleefully describes his work on some of Miranda's victims with the words, "I made them sleep with some liquid and then I put Cadou in their tummies"? For me, that goes beyond "severe brain damage" and hits "the writers were never all on the same page to begin with."
I don't even really think the game suffers from this ‒ most of the classic horror cinema it draws from was at least that inconsistent on a good day (and I say this as a card-carrying fan of plenty of horror classics). But by the same logic, I can't say I see Moreau as a character with a ton of missed potential myself. I think he's more a concept where what you see is what you get, and what you get is basically the Igor to Miranda's Doctor Frankenstein. Only worse, because this is a Frankenstein with no remorse, who got to keep right on making monsters and acquiring new "assistants" to replace her devoted Igor for a hundred more long years.
And he is, with all the generosity in the world, pretty hard to like. Even when you're on the verge of feeling sorry for him, after Ethan's snagged that flask, Moreau just turns right around and starts sniggering about how you've walked right into his trap, and it's properly repulsive (she says, affectionately). He's genuinely vile, but so magnificently broken and pitiful that it's hard not to feel some sympathy for him. And his performance really walks that line between sympathy and revulsion perfectly.
The reality of poor Moreau is that even in fandom, he's doomed to be the least appreciated of the four lords, purely because he's the least sexy (I will never forget the time I received a comment from someone who wanted to tell me how excited they were I was writing fic about Heisenberg, their "favourite of the four, lords, along with Dimitrescu and Donna!" So apparently this person's 'favourite' was literally everyone but Moreau. Poor guy!) But lord knows I've no desire to see him woobified into a ~poor innocent baby~ either (seen than enough of that from this fandom directed at Eveline to last me a lifetime, thanks). The horror of both characters is having to look them in the eye, fully aware of just how much abuse they've suffered, and still recognise that there's nothing in there you can save. Moreau's devotion to his own abuser is pretty much all he's got, and even he knows it's doomed.
But like I said up top, I'm always happy to see the guy get some appreciation, and I think what he brings to Miranda's family deserves a lot more recognition. Without Moreau, her regime gets to look a whole lot sexier. But once you've seen Moreau, there's no looking away. He might be the realest thing in the whole room. And he deserves as much respect as any of them.
Got an ask recently relating to Moreau and his semi-canonical thing for romantic movies. It deserves a longer response (still coming), but it got me reflecting that, no matter what poster was supposed to be up in his room, we all know his real favourite movie is The Shape of Water, right?
Actually, hang on, lemme fix that screenshot real quick...
Though it's possible to get a halfway-decent pic of Ethan's actual modelled face, it was never really meant to be seen, and it's always pretty inexpressive. But like the rest of the cast, Ethan's face does come from a real person ‒ a professional model called Ryan "Yaya" Chamki.
The upshot of his being a pro is there are actually a ton of great photos of him to be found online. And since I'm sure some fanartist would love to have them available for reference, here, have a bunch of my faves!
Having now looked at this guy's face all evening, all I can say is, 1) man, Ethan should definitely try the scruffy-half-shaven look sometime, and 2) damn, Mia Winters, you're a lucky woman!
Still want more? Well, you can try his Japanese agency profile, or the two different instagram accounts full of his photos. He has an old twitter account you can still find on nitter, and he does briefly appear in a very short Japanese watch commercial that I found on his agency profile too.
Like the rest of the game's face models, he probably had no idea what his face was going to be used for when it was scanned (very likely even the people doing the scan didn't know which would end up being used for what), and "face model for a guy whose face the player never really sees" would be an odd item on any resume. But you don't have to look hard to see the resemblance at all.
It’s now been a couple of years since I lost my paternal grandfather. He was 98, it was no tragedy; we’d all known it was coming for a long time – but years of knowing it was coming doesn’t make him any less keenly missed now he’s gone. Though I'm out of the habit of sharing much that's personal online, I still meant to write something about it at the time ‒ much as I wrote about losing both my grandmothers, way back in my days on livejournal. But with Granddad, when I first sat down to try and write about him, I found myself crying too hard to finish it.
But Grandad deserves to have his story told, so many more times than I can offer him. ANZAC day would have been as good an excuse as any – the history of both world wars is tangled up in Grandad’s own story over and over again. But since I didn't quite have this post ready for Saturday, this year’s Monday ANZAC day public holiday will have to do.
Either way, I don't want to reduce Grandad’s history to a war story, because that's not who he was. He truly was one of the sweetest old men you could ever hope to meet. At his funeral, my uncle called him, not just a gentleman, but a gentle man, who lived a life of privilege, in that all who met him were privileged to do so. I don’t think I could really do better.
Still, knowing the kind of audience you can expect here on tumblr, here’s just one story to give you a sense of the sort of man he was.
I realised in my twenties that I liked girls, but I put off coming out as bi to my parents until I actually started dating my first girlfriend – why make it into an announcement when I knew it was going to be a non-issue? All the same, I was just a little apprehensive about how Grandad might react – not because he’d given me any real reason to, but as a man who grew up before WWII, he could be forgiven for having some trouble getting his head around a thing like, ‘my granddaughter is dating another girl.’
I needn’t have worried. Grandad’s only reaction was to tell me how happy he was for me, that I’d found someone, right before hugging me goodbye that night. He meant it, too.
But that’s just the kind of man Grandad always was.
Grandad grew up in the 1920s and 30s on the grounds of a castle in southern Scotland. He wasn’t nobility: his own father was the castle’s head gardener, his mother formerly a teacher. When they met, however, she was working as a nurse in WWI, in the same hospital where he was sent to recuperate after receiving a shrapnel wound (a ‘Blighty’ wound, as Grandad called it – serious enough to see you sent safely home, and keep you there. There were worse ways to survive the war).
The castle grounds where my Grandad grew up featured freshwater lochs, walled gardens, and both the ‘New’ castle that house the the Laird and family, and an ‘Old’ castle – now an ancient ruin. Stories of Grandad’s childhood would’ve sounded quaint even when I was a child – today, they truly come from a bygone era. His memoirs share stories of getting the buttons of his shorts caught on the fishing nets used to protect the strawberry plot, of Christmas parties in the new castle surrounded by suits of armour and tiger skin rugs, of how summer haymaking would remake the banks between their house and the loch, where you could catch roach with kneaded knobs of bread.
I remember him telling us about occasions when his father would bring home a couple of rabbits for supper, only much later clicking that they’d almost certainly been poached from the castle grounds. In those days, even a simple family car trip to the beach came with a backstory about how his father had to travel all the way to London to acquire his first car from a friend called ‘Uncle Tom’, and then had to drive it hundreds of miles home after only the briefest instruction (how you’d plan where and how to stop for fuel in those days, I can only imagine).
If car-ownership was still out of the ordinary in Grandad’s childhood, the aeroplane was still something truly magical. As a child, he recalls watching airshows at a nearby airfield with his big brother Bob, hearing the roar of the engines, even once getting a chance to fly a circuit around the field himself in a two-seater (probably a gipsy-moth) – and the experience would leave a lasting impression. Both boys would go on to sign up with the RAF, once they were old enough to do so ‒ Bob first, being the elder. Grandad signed up just a few days after his 15th birthday, as an apprentice engine fitter.
It was then August, 1939. Just a month later, Britain would be at war. Grandad’s chosen profession was about to become very important.
What was originally meant to be three years of training was soon cut down to two (by the time my grandmother signed up in 1942, ‘training’ was even shorter). One memorable night during training, Grandad recalled sneaking out with a couple of friends to watch the bombing of London in the distance, some tens of miles away. According to him, one fleeing plane passed almost directly overhead, and suddenly there were bombs going off around them as the pilot decided to jettison his remaining load (none landed close enough to harm them, thank god).
Service in the RAF saw Grandad moved all over the country, and then around the world. Most of his stories came from his time in Burma, where his work centred on cargo planes used for supply drops – well down the logistics chain from the front lines. His favourite stories were the little moments – bathing naked in the ocean with his fellow engineers on an island posting, only to be sent running for their clothes in a hurry the one time a group of nurses came wandering by – or that one night he went walking in the dark with a glass of gin, only to fall straight down into an unseen well, where he was amused to discover he still had a little of his gin left in the glass at the bottom (one of the men who came out to find him apparently managed to fall down the well too).
Grandad did once volunteer to transfer to the bomber crews as a flight engineer, but was knocked back (maybe none of my family would be here today otherwise). But perhaps the most important thing to happen to him in all his days in the RAF involved meeting a young Geordie WAAF just a couple of years his senior, in the few months he was stationed in the north of England.
The youngest of eight children, my Nanna signed up to serve in 1942. Like so many women of the time, she was eager to support the war effort, though she made a point of declining to mention that she worked as a dressmaker – the idea of spending the rest of the war sewing uniforms held no appeal for her. When they tested her, however, she showed strong aptitude for mathematics, and so she was trained up as a WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) mechanic and engine fitter. Without the war, she’d never have had the chance.
When Grandad met her, Nanna was the only woman in her squad (Dad says that you can tell from the old squad photos that she was the life of the party, and I’d like to think he was right).
Her own favourite ‘war story’ was the day she built up a huge pile of snowballs and camped around a corner, waiting to clobber her fellows with them as they came around the corner (by Grandad’s account, they got her back with their own pranks in return). I have a vivid memory of her describing an incident where she very nearly lost a thumb – two pieces of I-forget-what-contraption came slamming together unexpectedly while she was working on it, and she ran outside crying ‘My thumb! My thumb!’ Fortunately, it was stitched back together and made a full recovery. But no-one else in the family seems to have ever heard that story. Did I imagine it? Did I hear it from someone else altogether? I’ll never know.
Either way, in the end, she and Grandad had only a couple of months there together before he was posted overseas. But they kept in touch throughout the war, and would be joyfully reunited when Grandad finally made it home in 1946. They were married in 1947, in the local church near his family home.
But the RAF’s habit of posting him away as soon as he’d got settled anywhere didn’t end with the war. They and their two young sons would be moved to a posting in Germany (“They were just people,” he told us, in describing his time living alongside civilian Germans), and then to the far north of Scotland. By the time Grandad’s original 15 year contract with the RAF was up, he was more than ready for a job that would let him put down roots, and didn’t require him to turn up for a blue uniform parade on Saturday mornings, even after working to the small hours of the morning before.
His brother Bob had found civilian aviation work after leaving the RAF, but Grandad had trouble finding anything within the UK. His ‘baby sister’ Joyce, meanwhile, had married an Australian – a soldier who’d been rescued from a prison camp, and spent some time living with Grandad’s parents while he recovered. Word was there were airfields in need of engine fitters down in Australia, where Grandad already had family. So Nanna and Grandad emigrated down here as ten-pound-poms – and at last, the world wars were more or less done shaping my family history.
Grandad found work in Australia before too long, and would spend most of the rest of his career working on light aircraft, used for crop dusting and short haul flights – but as long as he could keep working on his ‘beloved aircraft’, he was happy. The work was frequently more rough-and-ready than really technical, at times sending him far out into the bush with a spare engine or a drum of aviation fuel in the back of a ute, to do repairs on some downed plane. One of his stories involves a light aircraft that made an emergency landing in the paddock beside a school, which was pushed back up the slope to reach an improvised engine hoist only thanks to the help of “a gleeful crowd of little ones and a million little hands” that showed up at playtime to help.
Another story involves finding not-yet-critical fatigue cracks in the wing of a Cessna he’d been ferried out to a distant station to inspect. Rather than fly the whole plane back to base for repairs, his solution was to mine the conveniently-identical Cessna he’d arrived in for spare parts – where ‘spare parts’ meant ‘a whole wing’. The inspected plane got its (relatively) new wing, while the damaged wing served for one last trip to get Grandad home.
Grandad was still working when I was born, though he retired while I was still in school. Even then, he was far from done with aviation though. He and Nanna continued to volunteer at the Aviation Museum for as long as they were able, and Grandad would paint the mural you can still see around the inside wall. Even into his eighties, he was still regularly playing golf, and even welding together a custom helicopter exhibit (the ‘Bitza’) assembled from various parts, still with some working controls for kids to mess around with. Oh yeah – we all hope we’ve inherited those genes.
Nanna, however, wouldn’t be there to see it. By the time I was old enough to understand what breast cancer was, she’d already beaten it once (real modern medicine works, kids!) After fifteen years of remission, however, the cancer came back. She was now in her eighties. This time, I was old enough to understand just how bad this might be. It didn’t help: losing her still hit me so much harder than I was ready for.
As children, our grandparents were seldom more than a short car trip away. We’d visit them for Sunday dinners – almost always a roast followed by chocolate cake, often followed by Nanna apologising for how the cake had turned out so much better last time she made it (we couldn’t tell, the cake was always excellent). They’d come to ours for Christmas day almost without fail. As we grew older, we’d spend days, then weekends, then sometimes a whole week at Nanna and Grandad’s, every school holidays. Nanna sewed, and made elaborate little paper flowers, and did pottery too (Grandad had naturally built her her own kiln). Grandad painted, and was always happy to mess around with woodworking tools out in the shed, or show us what was really inside a golf ball – visits to theirs were filled with so many weird little craft projects. Or they’d take us down to the zoo, or off on other adventures. There’s no shortage of happy memories from Nanna and Grandad’s place.
And then Nanna passed, and suddenly their place was Grandad’s alone. To me, they’d been Nanna and Grandad for as long as they’d been anything, and it was hard to mistake that she’d always been the one who wore the pants in that relationship. How he was expected to go on without her was hard to picture.
But he’d do it, for almost another twenty years.
After Nanna’s funeral, my dad told him in no uncertain terms that he was expected to join us for dinner that Sunday, and every Sunday thereafter. Sunday family dinners (or sometimes Saturday, or even Friday – Dad was never above moving things around to make them easier for someone) became such a family tradition thereafter, as I and my sisters grew up and moved out of home ourselves, that I honestly forgot they’d been for Grandad to begin with. They haven’t been nearly so regular a feature for us since we lost him, and I do sometimes miss them.
Even as a widower, Grandad went on. He kept golfing, kept driving, kept volunteering at the museum – even welding helicopters together. For years, he ran the museum youth group, teaching kids about aviation, and showing them how to disassemble and reassemble an engine. If you ever needed a lift back from the airport on some day when Mum and Dad weren’t available, he’d be only too happy to help. He took up making regular visits to what he jokingly called ‘his girlfriends’ – other elderly folk from nursing homes who were no longer able to get out and about themselves (some of them actually younger than he). And he kept right on coming to Sunday dinners, whether we actually held on Sunday or not. He made sure we knew he always looked forward to them, even as his hearing began to fail, and he had increasing trouble following the conversation with the rest of us (he’d thank me more than once for making the effort to speak slow and clearly, so he could still follow the conversation). He never left without a hug from each of us on his way out.
We hosted a big birthday get together for him on his 90th birthday. At the end, Dad cheerfully told everyone they were expected back again in 10 years. We all thought he’d make it to a hundred.
As the years went on, though, the survivor’s guilt only grew. His older brother Bob died of a heart condition in his 70’s, his ‘baby sister’ Joyce began fading with dementia, and he’d have to see so many people years his junior succumb to old age. He’d admit aloud to us that he sometimes wondered why he should be still here while they weren’t. (What could we say, but to assure him how lucky we knew we were, to still have him here?)
But age was taking its toll. As the years went on, he’d downsize from the house he and Nanna shared to a small flat on the aviation estate, near the museum. His hearing was failing, and he was notably slowing down. By the time he finally lost his driver’s license, he was well into his 90’s, and we were all quietly much relieved. For Grandad, however, it was a painful blow – that loss of freedom was something he felt keenly.
Finally, he had to give up golfing. He was moved to a new, downstairs flat at the aviation estate, but the trouble of setting up his new space led to a fall that landed him in hospital – and then another one. Finally, space opened up in the nursing home facility on the estate, and Grandad was moved there, now barely mobile without a wheelchair (Dad was not much impressed by the wait – he semi-joked that after all those years of volunteering, he should go right to the front of the queue).
In so many ways, Grandad’s was a textbook decline: slow enough to give the rest of us time to adjust at each stage, but fast enough that few stages had much chance to linger. I think I’m grateful that he was still alive for the first Christmas Day we had to spend without him, when he wasn’t well enough to visit. It made his absence that day easier, and his subsequent absence at Christmases we’ve experienced since less hard to bear. We did get to do one last proper family outing with him, not so long before, though – we had to organise wheelchair transport, but we got to take him down to the foreshore with the whole family. It was a lovely sunny day.
The day after Christmas, I got to visit him on the estate with my parents. It was difficult to talk to him now – his hearing was poor and speech was difficult – but I’ll remember how tightly he held my hand as I was saying goodbye. Even then, he was glad to see us.
The night before my twin nephews' birthday, my parents got the news that he’d taken a bad turn. I think we all knew what the news would be in the morning.
Honestly, in some ways, it might have been the kindest possible timing. My nephews were far too young to understand the passing of a great-grandparent, and they still had a birthday to enjoy. And for the rest of us, we had a reason to spend the day surrounded by family, distracted by a celebration for our youngest members while quietly mourning the loss of our eldest.
By then, Grandad had been telling us for years that he was ready to go. His quality of life had declined to where we all knew it would be a mercy, though knowing that doesn’t make it easier to say goodbye. Even as you mourn, you’re left reflecting that the person you’re really mourning – the sweet old man who still golfed and volunteered, and took full part in dinner-table conversation – had been slowly dying in stages for years.
The funeral gutted me, of course. They always do.
But the story isn’t quite over there. After the funeral, my Dad told us that he and his brother had discussed the idea of taking Grandad’s ashes back home, to the castle where Grandad’s own father was a groundskeeper, and where Grandad was born. He and my folks had actually gone back up there to visit a few years previously, while Grandad was still well enough to do so. One last journey to say goodbye felt right.
It wasn’t initially framed as a family trip, and in retrospect, I don’t know why I was hesitant about asking if I could come along. I was nothing but welcome, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Because this place wasn’t just where Grandad was born, it was a formative part of my father and uncle’s childhoods too. I’d grown up hearing about the place, but never yet seen it – and having finally been there now, I’m only sorry I didn’t get to spend more time there.
We got to see the old ruined castle, the lochs, the church where my grandparents were married. I got to see the famous knee-high wall that my Dad had remembered as towering over him in his own childhood. We saw the house that Grandad grew up in, though it’s falling into disrepair today. A gardener we talked to in one of the walled flower gardens recognised my great-grandfather’s name, and assured us he’s still known and remembered to this day.
We also visited London, Edinburgh and Inverness on that trip – made a proper holiday of it. But those grounds were honestly the most beautiful place I think I saw, anywhere we went.
We scattered Grandad’s ashes from the bridge between the lochs, and I sniffled a little. I’m still not quite done sniffling as I write this now.
Recently, my family did finally get to hold a 100th birthday party – not for Grandad, but for Great Aunt Joyce, Grandad’s ‘baby sister’. She wasn’t present for the picnic I went to – she’s in nursing home care herself, and isn’t generally in the best state to understand what’s going on around her these days. But I’m told she was still delighted that they brought out the good china for her birthday (even if she did have to put up the mild indignity of receiving her letter from a king, rather than the queen it should have been).
I came home afterwards, and realised I’d never written about Grandad the way I meant to. Given how much I’ve cried tonight in writing this, even after so long, I’d hope I can be forgiven for taking so much time. It took some working up to.
I still miss you, Grandad. I know you were ready to go so long before we lost you, but I can’t begin to tell how lucky we were to have you in our lives for as long as we did.
I saw a tweet that said the unused syringe asset in RE8 can actually be located in the Winter's House in off camera mode (I think it said in a closet) and this tweet also stated there was some kind of either datamined files or scrapped making of unused files about it. Is any of that true?
I love your timing in sending me this, anon ‒ I've actually been playing around with some new tools and mods lately to answer some surprisingly related questions! As I currently understand it, unused assets like that syringe only snuck into the final game because their names are still on the asset-preload-manifest for the scene they were meant to be in. So if you can access those manifests, there are clues to be found about how those assets were meant to be used.
The upshot is that I can tell you that the syringe asset isn't loaded anywhere in the Winters' house. If someone thinks they saw it in a closet in freecam mode, IDEK what they were actually looking at.
So where is that syringe loaded? Only at the very end of the game: in Ethan's final battle with Miranda. Presumably, to kill her.
Not convinced? No problem ‒ I've got supporting evidence!
I've got this whole other post covering unused asset icons from RE8 already, but for the uninitiated: the syringe asset is one of a number recycled from RE7. In RE7, it exists in two variants with different colours: red for the serum to cure the infection, and green for the neurotoxin used to kill Eveline (yes, red is good and green is bad here, just to keep you guessing). The version that got included in the RE8 files is actually the red variety ‒ but since even the serum is established to be fatal to longtime infectees like Jack Baker, odds are high it's here to be used to kill a monster, not save one.
It also comes with inventory icons, so safe to assume it wasn't just some static prop here: we were actually supposed to get to use it for something.
It's not stretch to assume that syringe was meant to be used against Miranda in much the same way that neurotoxin was used against Eveline, right before the final boss battle. My guess would be that Chris was supposed to jump her with that syringe instead of shooting her from somewhere off-screen, as he does in the final game ‒ and that was going to be why Miranda suddenly mutates into a monster (Eveline, too, mutates abruptly after being injected).
Possibly also significant: there's a REAL comparison to be made in how both Eveline and Miranda start bleeding black gunk from their eyes at this point too!
Alternately, it's also possible that Miranda was supposed to be injected earlier in the scene, right before her confusing declaration that her powers are leaving her (which is admittedly where the black eye gunk actually starts appearing). But that would require more substantial changes to the overall scene, and I'm actually pretty sure that there's a whole other deleted plot point behind leaving-powers bit, involving baby Rose and those glowing red-eye assets (there's actually some fascinating concept art of Rose's eyes glowing red in that scene, but that's the kind of material that deserves its own post). It's also possible Ethan was supposed to use the syringe himself at some point, perhaps as a finishing blow.
But I'd still lean towards it being Chris who was supposed to deliver it, instead of shooting Miranda And to explain why, I need to tell you about this other weird asset I finally identified recently.
Meet 'recipebox'! It's another of RE8's intriguing Sirs Not Appearing In This Game, and when I first found it browsing the game files, it mystified me. If you move the camera inside it, you can make out some writing under the lid, so clearly it was meant to open. Here's the text in full:
JOHN ALLEN
Manufacturer of Portable Military Furniture
Portmanteaus & Trunks
No 22 Strand, London
Plate Chests, Waterproof Bags, Writing and Dressing Cases, Cabin Furniture & Every Requisite For The Army & Navy, New & Second Hand
Fun fact: John Allen was apparently a real military outfitter, so the text may have come from a real-world, physical reference case! But what was it supposed to be used for in RE8? My original guess was that maybe it was meant to contain some of the crafting recipes? Or maybe it was meant to be part of the Duke's shop? Very mysterious!
As it turns out, what I should really have been looking at were the files from RE7, because once I did, I realised ‘recipebox’ is actually another recycled asset. It's equipment case from Lucas' lab that Ethan uses to create the neurotoxin in that syringe.
It's not the only of these sinister little pieces of Connections-equipment we find ‒ Alan and Mia have another on board the ship, though it's non-functioning by the time we get to it. There's another variant version of the case on Marguerite's altar, where Ethan finds instructions for making the serum. The asset for that twisted little specimen inside it is called 'recipematerial', FTR ‒ you can see it being consumed as the necrotoxin is created.
(Alas, all versions of the case have covered up the John Allen text with instructions on how to create the serum and/or necrotoxin, so you'll never actually see it in-game.)
So where was this little callback-case actually supposed to appear in RE8? In Miranda's lab, when Chris reaches it right at the very end of the game. And the layer the asset still appears on is the one holding interactable components, so it's not just a prop.
You can see its placement in the render above, relative to the four lords' books, and the cadou-jar and photos you can interact with on the main table (a few other objects on the table aren't interactable in the finished game, but maybe more has been cut there, or they're being used for placement reference). The case is the small, square object at the top.
In fact, I can even tentatively place that case in the finished scene ‒ there's a little round table beside the desk containing Spencer's photos, which looks to be right about the perfect position.
If that case was going to appear anywhere in RE8, then Miranda's lab is a logical place, just a few paces away from all the other evidence that Miranda was working with the Connections herself ‒ the people who must've sent her that neurotoxin synthesisers, much as they gave one to Lucas Baker. And it stands to reason the same serum or neurotoxin would work on Miranda, given the mould of the village and the mould used by Eveline is so closely related.
So, yeah. Putting it all together, I think it's pretty safe to say there was an earlier version of RE8 in which Chris was meant to create the neurotoxin in Miranda's lab, then inject her with it in the final battle, ala Eveline.
Which does beg the question, why would Miranda have that particular piece of equipment lying around, if it could be used to kill her? Isn't that kind of a liability? Unlike Lucas, she's already the queen bee of her little colony, and has other means to control her subjects. But it's still plausible that Miranda would find uses for the neurotoxin on her own research subjects, or even that she was looking for a way to neutralise it. And if she was going to keep this dangerous little MacGuffin anywhere, there's nowhere safer than her Very Secret Lab at the base of the megamycete, guarded by the bonus Urias Chris has to fight on his way down there.
RE7 also tells us that the neurotoxin only works when created with a tissue sample from its intended target, so its use against Miranda wouldn't be trivial, even if someone does get hold of it. Where Chris is supposed to get Miranda's tissue samples himself to use the thing isn't clear ‒ maybe there are some in the lab, or maybe RE8 was happy to handwave that detail, or suggest we're actually making serum instead. I doubt it's the kind of detail the writers are gonna lose sleep over.
Which just leaves us with the final question of why this would have been cut from the final game. Speculation time!
Taking down Miranda by the same means as Eveline does work to emphasise the connections between the game, but given that the neurotoxin isn't so much as mentioned until the final scenes, it risks feeling like a bit of a last-minute ass-pull of a recycled plot point (the final sequences where we explore Lucas and Miranda's respective laboratories are similar enough already). In RE7, the neurotoxin was also established well in advance of when we actually acquire and use it. The fact it looks like Chris rather than our main character Ethan is doing the work there doesn't help with the last-minute ass-pull angle either. Besides, we've already seen Heisenberg conveniently storing the means of his own destruction down in his basement, for Chris to find and use against him. To do the same for Miranda so soon afterwards starts to look suspiciously convenient.
There is something a little poetic about Miranda being brought down by her own links to the Connections, after they caused Ethan and Mia so much misery in the last game. Nothing destroys an aura of ancient gothic mystery like being taken down by a recyled byproduct of a research team you rejected, last seen in a hillbilly slasher title. Still, whether that would come across in the moment is questionable.
Probably, the mere fact the neurotoxin could so easily be cut from the game (and even late enough in development that we have multiple assets leftover) is a good sign that it really didn't need to be there. No point shoehorning in a surplus detail that the scene works without.
All this is still, I emphasise, just speculation. For all I know, the neurotoxin might've been part of some whole other sideplot that got cut entirely, which covered how Chris got hold of Miranda's tissue samples and god knows what else. Maybe there would've been more documents referring to the neurotoxin to set it up, maybe it would've been used on Miranda and failed ‒ or maybe Chris brought the box with him, rather than finding it in the lab, and its location in game is just where it was supposed to be put down.
But as deleted content goes, there's a surprisingly clear narrative to be dug out of these ones, and even just as a little glimpse behind the scenes, you gotta admit, that's pretty cool!
anon for the previous question you answered about shipping wintersberg ;w; i just wanna say wowww that cheered me up. this sure isn’t my first fandom, and i understand how shipping works, it’s just posting content about wintersberg and seeing those comments that state the obvious flaws presented to us from beginning and end of the game just bring me down BC LIKE IM AWARE BRO but after all like you said this ship isn’t for everyone
…not like it ever stood a chance of becoming canon smh ;( again, doesn’t mean you can’t ship em! there are still *some* textual evidence, riiiiight.. doesn’t matter tbh
also i absolutely hate “soft karl” i fear that man shocks himself if he feels the slightest bit of softness. but i AM a touch starved karl believer, once that man feels touch he’s just gonna want more and more
Hey, glad to oblige! Though, sheesh, are people in this fandom seriously leaving anti-wintersberg comments on random shippy stuff? "Obvious flaws" my arse. You think Ethan/Heisenberg has problems, this is a fandom where people are eagerly writing fic for Leon/Mr T! What do they do for an encore, go into random posts and complain about the ‘obvious flaws’ of telling us a guy like Ethan could ever survive the village with barely any real military training? Newsflash: the "flaws" are what makes it worth telling a story about!
Also, as a Fandom Old (TM), what is it with kids these days letting potential canon recognition get them down? No duh it's not becoming canon, because canonically they're both dead! (What, were you thinking of other "flaws" in this pairing? Because that seems pretty definitive to me!) You think that's ever stopped fandom shipping? HA.
For some ships, becoming canon is the worst thing that could happen. Suddenly you've got an official version looming large over everyone's imaginations, and really bringing down the tone if it ends badly, or if writing romance just turns out to be not the creator's forte. Even if it goes great ‒ and there are great canons out there that are complete and satisfying in their own right, don't get me wrong ‒ often they're just not the canons that inspire big fannish experiences for a lot of us, because the drive to come up with a million ways it could've actually worked out for our OTP isn't there. So much of fandom lives in the territory of "okay, so this canon is an unfinished pile of trash, but think of the potential!" Basically, appreciate your non-canon crack-ships for what they are!
Gotta admit though ‒ and here we are about to hit this post's Official Extended Tangent ‒ the idea of Heisenberg being touch-starved is one of those takes that confuses me.
This is a guy who spends his days reanimating corpses, up to his elbows in guts ‒ safe to say that human bodies are intimately familiar territory. And sure, those bodies are (probably?) dead before he gets started, but he's also plenty handsy with Ethan ‒ shoving him into the chair, grabbing his hand, and I doubt Heisenberg got him into those cuffs entirely by metal-bending. And yes, he's wearing heavy gloves throughout, but he still doesn't strike me the type to deny himself the odd hedonistic impulse (see especially: all those cigars). Yeah, his 'quarters' are pretty spartan, but I'd tend to attribute that to the developers dropping the ball. His domain is full of heat and machinery and shirtless bodies lining the hallways (and a ton of rusty old junk, but this is not a guy who bothers to tidy up). There's a vibe there, y'know?
I also can't see him as a guy who lives his whole life shut off and alone in his factory ‒ from what little we see, he's by far the most mobile of the lords. He follows Ethan into the outskirts of the castle, he drops off his flask in the Stronghold, he clearly has cameras on both the Stronghold and the Reservoir ‒ and he may even own the workshop in the middle of the town. This is a man who thrives in front of an audience! You think he'd be above pulling the odd villager into his workshop for a quickie? Heisenberg really does not strike me as a guy who never had a life before getting trapped in Miranda's cult, and attempts to woobify the same man who live-commentates footage from his own lycan death gauntlet are hard for me to swallow.
He does have that one big 'sorry about that' moment of lovely vulnerability when he finally gets Ethan into his factory, which does make you wonder how much of his general presentation is shallow bluster ‒ dude is plenty damaged, don't get me wrong. And there's definitely territory to explore there. But 'touch-starved' is not the vibe I get from him at all. (I mean, unless we're talking about his monster form. I'm betting most of that body has never been touched.)
Maybe some of this is just my own love of having him blow Ethan's mind the first time they fuck talking here ‒ I've got my own biases, and I'll cop to that. And maybe there's fic out there somewhere that could make a case for this one that could change my mind (and by all means, rec it to me if you think you've got one that might!) But on the face of it, this one's still head-tilt territory for me. YMMV (And That's Okay), but I don't see it myself.
NC-17, 5405 words (this part), 88,621 words (so far)
Ethan's mouth goes a little dry.
It's not as though he hasn't seen his share of Heisenberg's bare chest in the days since he arrived—Ethan's pretty sure the only reason the man ever agreed to the routine of daily showers at all was the excuse to parade his body around in nothing but a towel (if that). But until now, Ethan's made a studious effort not to look any more than he can avoid.
Now? There's nothing left to stop him. There's nothing but the width of the room to stop him from touching.
It's only when his wandering eyes flick back up to Heisenberg's grinning face again that he realises how blatantly he must have been staring.
"Been a while," he tells Ethan, a new note of husk to that always-sinful voice, "since I had anyone look at me like that."
Read from start
Do note: this is one of those chapters that earns that age-rating. God knows they've been building up to this long enough.
So chapter 23 may or may not be up this week, we'll have to see. But it is with my beta now, so you know the drill ‒ have a preview!
****
When Ethan pushes open the back door to find Heisenberg himself sitting cross-legged and casual on the back porch bench, he still doesn’t have the first idea what he’s actually supposed to say. Fortunately, Heisenberg suffers no such uncertainty.
“Ethan!” he drawls, “I’ve just had the most fascinating conversation with your wife.”
Somehow, it helps. Ethan sighs, shutting the door behind him. “Yeah, you and me both.”
“You told her about us.” Heisenberg sounds truly delighted.
“You didn’t give me a whole lot of choice.” Even now, the kneejerk impulse is to tell Heisenberg there’s no ‘us’, never mind how laughably out of date that is. “What else was I gonna do, wait until she figured it out on her own?”
“Ha!” Heisenberg laughs. “Why break a thousand long years of human tradition?”
He might have some kind of point there. Forget human tradition, there’s at least nine long years of established Winters-family tradition of lying to each other, or yourself. The bar really is in hell.
“I knew you had balls, Ethan,” says Heisenberg, “but to ask her permission? Now there, you’ve really impressed me.”
The honest truth is that it was less asking permission and more throwing himself on her mercy, leaving Mia to make the leap on her own, but like fuck is Ethan admitting that out loud. “That’s what people do,these days. We’re trying out this new thing people do nowadays called communication,” he tells Heisenberg instead. “Marriage is a contract. You wanna change the terms later… you go back and... renegotiate.” Okay, maybe that last part sounded better in his head.
The look on Heisenberg’s face suggests a certain skepticism that communication is really that simple. “And when your new terms involve your burning desire for another man?”
Ethan feels the side of his mouth quirk up a little. “Not as controversial as it used to be.” He shrugs.
“No?”
“Well, not ‘another man’ part,” Ethan admits. “It’s trying to tell your wife you want to see other people at all that’s usually where you get told to go take a hike.”
Heisenberg laughs aloud. “Oh, how the world has changed!” He grins, and Ethan can’t help smiling back a little, despite himself.
“Look, I told Mia the truth because it was the right thing to do,” he admits, “not because I seriously thought she was gonna tell me to go ahead. She didn’t have to agree to this, you know.”
“Oh, I know. A remarkable woman, your Mia,” Heisenberg agrees, a note creeping into his voice that Ethan should maybe set aside some time to worry about at some point. “I really must find a way to thank her properly. But for now,” he adds, reaching out a hand, “news like this calls for celebration.”
“Celebration,” Ethan echoes, though he lets Heisenberg take his hand, all the same. The kind of ‘celebration’ that involves a private party for two, presumably.
Heisenberg’s grin promises that’s exactly what he’s thinking of. “Don’t you think you’ve waited for this long enough?” he says, reeling a reluctant Ethan in closer.
Ethan sighs; he knew this would be coming. Heisenberg is a stuck record. “Look, just because I’ve got the okay for this doesn’t mean I’m in the mood right now. Especially after the morning I just had.”
“Ethan, you’ve been holding yourself back on a wish and a prayer since I walked in through the door,” says Heisenberg, who clearly isn’t buying it. “Think I haven’t noticed?”
Ethan winces, uncomfortably aware that no man his age has that many sex dreams in the space of a week without something seriously pent up behind it. This morning’s being only case in point. “Jeez, haven’t you already got me off enough for one day?” he protests, a little weakly.
“Is that why you told her?” Heisenberg asks, with a twinkle in his eye. “Guilty conscience, Ethan?”
“Not anymore.”
“Mm. They do say confession is good for the soul,” Heisenberg muses. If Ethan lets himself be pulled any closer, he’ll be right in the other man’s lap. “I think you deserve a reward.”
He shouldn’t play along, not if he wants to shut this down, but… “Got something in mind?”
Heisenberg’s expression promises he absolutely has something in mind, and Ethan is about to inform him that the piano is not actually made to take human weight when Heisenberg murmurs in his ear, “Still wanna fuck me, Ethan?”
“…what, now?”
“Why not? I don’t make promises I don’t intend to keep.” Heisenberg purrs, making good use of Ethan’s moment of confusion to drag him right down into his lap, straddling his legs on bent knees. “I’m going to have to show you just how serious I am, aren’t I?”
Kissing Heisenberg – not just letting Heisenberg kiss him, but really kissing back – shouldn’t feel so huge, not after everything they’ve already done. It’s not even the first time they’ve kissed just this morning. But kissing him for real, not just in a dream, is so much filthier. The heavy taste of smoke and tobacco, the bristly texture of his beard, even Heisenberg’s less-than-refined ideas about how to use a tongue – all the details your dreaming mind can conveniently gloss over – shouldn’t be able to make it better, shouldn’t leave him tingling like this…
“That’s what I want to hear,” Heisenberg purrs. “Shall we take this upstairs?”
If Ethan goes back in for one more kiss, it’s only to make Heisenberg wait for his answer. He comes away panting a little, foreheads resting together, breathing in that heady aroma of musk and tobacco, even a whiff of Ethan’s own shampoo, thick in every breath he takes.
NC-17, 4,030 words (this part), 12,961 words words (so far)
The sun is rising when they reach the ceremony site, where Ethan sees Miranda in all her glory for the first time. Wave after wave of lycans break against them, but Heisenberg's undead army meets them with matching fury, their master laughing like a mad thing as he launches his screeching nightmare of a body into the fray, throwing aside lycan and soldat alike to cut a path through their midst. For a while, half the battle is just finding a clear shot, or even remembering which of these monsters is on his side. Where is Rose in all this chaos? Are they winning or losing? What does victory even look like on a battlefield like this?
It takes longer than it might have to start going wrong.
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Happy Easter, everyone! Have a new chapter of that fic about Ethan dealing with the knowledge that he came back from the dead, and now the mould wants him and Heisenberg to fuck like bunnies.
