Hi! I adore your blog and all of your Mia and Ethan content so much. You genuinely articulate yourself so well. I wanted to ask: do you think Mia’s tape chase scene with Marguerite in Re7 and Ethan’s chase scene with the Baby in Re8 are meant to parallel each other in some way? I found it interesting how both chasers are deeply related to parenthood and what that might mean for both characters. Have a great day!
Hey, thanks! But to answer your question: I'd say those two moments "parallel" each other only in that 1) family is basically THE biggest theme saturating everything in those two games, and, 2) modern Resi (if not horror gaming in general) really does love a good stalker-monster, and especially loves leaving you powerless to deal with a good stalker-monster. Marguerite and the baby are just two of many examples.
The far more obvious parallel to Mia's chase sequence with Marguerite would be Ethan's chase sequence with Jack ‒ which the player may well still be in the middle of at the point they find and watch that tape (Sup Dawg, we heard you like chase sequences...). Both Bakers are angry with the Winters for refusing their generous invitation to join the family, and are expressing it with... let's say similar verve.
The Beneviento house in RE8 as a whole is an obvious callback to the many disempowering escape-room sequences of RE7 (which themselves probably owe a lot to P.T. ‒ screaming nightmare fetus and all!) And I suppose it is notable that both the tape and the Beneviento basement are among the few times we hear from Mia, but otherwise, I don't see any particular connection. You could just as easily compare Marguerite to the sequence where Dimitrescu hunts you through her castle in RE8 (both mothers, both very displeased with the PC for escaping their cell/meathooks), or where Rose flees from the living Mia-dolls in her DLC. Heck, even Sturm is Thing You Run Away From for his first two appearances!
The two sequences are doing pretty different things narratively-speaking too. Mia's tape is wholly optional: you don't have to play it all the way to the end, or at all, and most of the important information in it comes in Mia's monologue in the opening seconds. But it does give us a very important glimpse of the real Mia, who's just as much a prisoner in the property as Ethan, and it gives us perhaps our first real glimpse of Eveline as Mia hallucinates her. The tape is also is packed with foreshadowing ‒ of Ethan's own descent into Marguerite's territory to come, and of the longer tanker sequence where we'll be playing as Mia much later.
The final bit of foreshadowing is the photo of Mia and Eveline you can find at the very end of the tape, though its actual significance is only likely to be obvious to the player on a replay. In that context, the time Mia spends fleeing Marguerite is largely narrative padding, making the player wait for the final reveal of the photo at the end. But the whole sequence does make abundantly clear that the Mia we met at the start of the game wasn't just an act: when not possessed, Mia is very much a prisoner here.
By contrast, there's no skipping the Beneviento mansion sequence. You will have to flee that monster-baby if you want to beat the game. Though the baby does talk (sort of), it's much less a character than Marguerite, and it's a much less constant presence. Half the sequence is simply build-up to its first appearance.
The sequence as a whole is very much about Ethan being forced to acknowledge the unspoken subtext in his own marriage, about himself and Rose, what Mia knew that he didn't. It's pretty easy to read the baby itself as symbolic of everything that's lurking in his own bloodstream (and thus Rose's) that he won't face (and perhaps is, in his way, on the run from? Look, it's not that much of a stretch!) It's a twisted, monstrous version of the baby girl he's trying to save ‒ a worst-case scenario version of the offspring of two people corrupted by black mould. There's a ton of room for interpretation here, but it's hard to miss the implication that the baby represents the secrets lurking in Ethan's marriage and his own body ‒ not to mention the truth behind why Rose was ever taken to begin with. It represents all the infection and corruption that Ethan has unknowingly passed on.
Marguerite doesn't come with any of that same symbolism. Also, she's real, while the baby is almost certainly a hallucination (and all the more ripe with metaphor because of it). Unlike Ethan in the Beneviento basement, being chased by Marguerite isn't one of the worst moments on the worst day of Mia's life, this is just one more day of three years imprisoned on the Baker's property. Very likely, she's escaped and been tracked down like this before.
(Not that the tapes should be taken completely literally, mind. How a camera manages to record hallucinations of Eveline, why Mia and Clancy would keep on recording right through some of their worst experiences, and how on earth those tapes end up in old-fashioned video format in places Ethan can find them are not questions to lose sleep over. Much like we probably shouldn't worry too much about why a woman with a mould infection and a fixation on dolls should have been given the power to make plants give people hallucinations of walking fetuses (try saying all that three times fast!) These are two of the more surreal sequences in two gloriously surreal games, and I love them for that.)
But on the off-chance it has somehow passed you by, I really can't overstate how much family is a core theme of these games ‒ and that's "family" in all its most twisted interpretations, to blur the lines between family and cult. Ethan is just an ordinary man trying to save his family ‒ his wife and then his daughter. Eveline is a little girl who thinks she wants a family of her own, but she's far too twisted to understand family as anything much more than a new set of dolls to play with. The Bakers were a normal family (give or take Lucas), and Jack will even beg you to save his family when you meet his mutamycete ghost ‒ but now they've become Eveline's puppets, eager to absorb new members into their 'family' by force.
Over in RE8, Miranda is driven by the desire to resurrect her lost daughter, and has forced or brainwashed a number of people into joining her own 'family' (ie: cult) as her 'children' ‒ Rose her latest victim. Dimitrescu's only humanising quality is her very real love for her three daughters. Moreau is horrified by the thought of being replaced by a new, younger sibling. Donna was adopted after her parents' tragic deaths. And Heisenberg, a grown man, is driven by his fury over being trapped and infantalised into the role of Miranda's 'son'. Finally, Rose's DLC is all about her finally getting to meet the father who died before she was old enough to remember him (while Miranda makes one last attempt to claim Rose as her own).
There's nothing nurturing about either Miranda's or the Bakers' families. Jack is willing to do Eveline's bidding, but privately, he's not at all happy about having to share the father-role with another man. Miranda chooses her 'children' only from those who survive enough abuse that they can be useful to her, and will readily abandon and destroy them all to have her personal golden-child-of-a-baby back. The games are a basically a paean to anyone who's ever chosen to go no-contact with abusive parents. But not all familial relationships are negative here: Ethan and Mia chose one another, and love Rose more than anything.
I could probably go on, but you get the idea.
So, in the end, no, I don't think those two sequences parallel each other in any particular sense. But they sure as fuck pick up on all the same themes that you will find everywhere else in these two games.
hellooo i love ur re analysis posts theyre very cool! i dunno what your stance is on random asks but i figured why not.
why does the epilogue of re8 have such heavy moon symbolism attached to rosemary? with the mother-daughter reading a storybook about a boy wanting to reach the moon and the "moon girl" design on rose's shoe.
i mean i have some surface inklings like the moon's association with werewolves and witches and such.
Hey, look around ‒ I answer lots of random asks! There's a whole tag for it.
Gotta say though, you do need to raise your standards on what qualifies as "heavy symbolism" or even "deliberate symbolism." All we've got is a crescent moon on a brand label on the inside of Rose's shoe, visible for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, plus a mother reading a storybook about a boy trying to touch the moon. The same noun appearing twice in passing does not equal symbolism. The moon isn't even visible in the sky, which is like, lunar symbolism 101. But for the sake of the argument, let's look at what both moments are actually doing in the scene.
The boy in the story wants to touch the moon because that's the kind of whimsical thing that happens in stories for kids. Rose is going to visit her father's grave, with the storybook that foretold his death sitting on her lap ‒ she's just finished reading it as the scene begins. And here, right across from her on the bus, is a parent reading to a little girl from a storybook that is full of meaningless nonsense, that foretells nothing of importance, and is exactly the kind of innocent little family moment Rose never got to have with her dad. She watches them with a wistful smile. If the moon in the story did mean anything, the scene becomes less poignant.
The crescent moon design on Rose's shoe is a detail that apparently meant enough to the RE team that it appears in the concept art, but there, what they focus on is the colour, saying they included green to give the impression of Eveline's influence. If they wanted the audience to pick up on that, though, I'd have to say they failed miserably. I didn't even notice the logo until I saw it in the concept art, and if anyone had told me "There's a tiiiny bit of green on Rose's shoe, and a picture of a little girl ‒ that means Eveline!" I'd have rolled my eyes at them. Eveline is, yes, the only character in these games with green eyes, but they're not that shade of green, and I will bet good money most people who've played these games couldn't tell you what colour her eyes are at all. It's just not a memorable part of her. (In fairness here, it is very normal for creators to add elements to a design for reasons that sound meaningful to them, but which no-one else is ever going to pick up on, and it's still interesting to hear about them.)
But taking a step beyond the official answer, does the design symbolise anything? Mostly, it just adds to the rest of Rose's neutral, understated gender presentation. Rose is a girl with long, flowing blonde hair (feminine) who dresses in jeans, a plain cap, and her father's old, oversized jacket (not feminine). Her shoes have a girly little logo that appears to read "moon girl", with a picture of a little girl reaching out for a bird in front of a crescent moon (and if you're really determined for the moon to mean something, it's right there in "moon girl" ‒ the moon is widely associated with femininity). The logo evokes all kinds of girly marketing kitsch (generic off-brand Sailor Moon merch, anyone?) but it's still hidden on the inside of a pair of off-white converse-style sneakers ‒ more feminine and not-so-feminine in one place.
You could call Rose's outfit boyish if you really wanted, but to me, it reads mostly as chosen for comfort and practicality. The jacket honours the father whose absence has left a gaping void in her life. The shoes match nothing else in the outfit ‒ she most likely chose them because they're comfortable and neutral enough that they don't obviously clash. She's lonely, has trouble making friends, and has no-one to dress up for. Her world is full of monsters who want her dead and peers who don't like her. Maybe her hair's only that long because she doesn't feel invested enough to get it cut. The hair and shoes make pretty clear she's not trying to make any statement out of not being girly. Why put more effort into her presentation than that?
Basically, there's a cohesive character portrait in how Rose dresses, and the moon is really the least of it. Ironically, the moon probably takes away from what the creators' apparently intend to symbolise with that element. And there's plenty going on with that story on the bus too, and the moon is even less of that. Sometimes the moon is just a moon.
"Hello!" calls a familiar voice, tinny and distorted through the receiver. "You've reached the existential crisis hotline! Unfortunately, right now all our staff are busy helping people with real problems. But we want to assure you..."
It is so typical, Desmond thinks—as he juggles one gun, two variously filled clips, and a phone receiver with no more than the two hands he was born with—that this would be one of those calls, where his stalker phones him up purely to taunt him. (At least he's not pretending to be Desmond's aunt this time. If that bastard says one more nasty thing about Tonia, so help him-)
Could not help it, went and wrote some fic for my fave-horror-game-of-the-moment. I do not care if this fandom consists of like 3 people and a couple of suspicious store mannequins, the dynamic between these two is too much fun not to play with.
For regular readers here: FWIW, this thing was written with the hope of turning out something that would be reasonably intelligible when read canon-blind (if only because my beta knows this game only from what I've told her about it), so if you're willing to give it a shot, be my guest! Intro post is still up here, and it is on sale on Steam again right now! (If not, trust me ‒ no pressure, and I promise the next part of FMH is still very much in the works, even if I am running behind this month.)
I can only assume someone had a absolute ball making all the food/health pickup items of In Sound Mind, because having extracted all the texture assets (and how could I not?), you can only conclude it's criminal the in-game objects are rendered so unreadably small.
For example: Feeling judged? Now you can take the day off with Sugar Free Gummy Bear Cereal!
They've even added Cleanse your Stomach! and Spend your day in the toilet! for the benefit of the last few people reading this who've never encountered the (many) infamous reviews of real sugar-free gummy bears. (These things will restore 10 whole hit points, though god knows if they're actually worth it.)
Or how about some El Woof Dog Food with the unbeatable tagline: Did you know? Your dog is happier if you give him food!
(Yes, dog food is a consumable pick-up in this game. It restores exactly 1HP, and if you're lucky, you may hear Desmond exclaim "Oh god" after you've fed it to him.)
Looking for an alternative to cow's milk? Have you tried... Hen Milk?
(Yes, it does come in an old-fashioned carton, complete with missing child. Erasmus James Jr, last seen trying to milk a hen.)
Ever felt like the real problem with dark chocolate is that it's just not sinister enough? Get ready for It Knows
The closer you get, the more you feel it
As a card-carrying chocoholic, never have I so wanted a bar of chocolate to stay the fuck away. How about some candy instead?
Presumably, they're just shaped like bugs, but sticking the word 'roach' on the label of your food item is... bold.
Now Ogre, honestly, I can see on a real cereal packet marketed at children, but you can't say it doesn't have personality.
Even some of the cleaning products have the same vibe! (No, you cannot eat these. Do not try.)
Or we've got the vending machine with the cheery subtitle So cold it'll make you shit bricks! Not to mention the moment I got to spent spend several seconds of my life going "Is there a pun here? So the trash bags are 'white' branded, that's not... oh, oh noooo."
Beer and other drinks mostly aren't consumable, but they've still made and effort. Why settle for some generic, off-brand Coqe when you could be drinking DOTY (Drink Of The Year!) or a nice bottle of Hennen (Just good beer, ya know) or Wowzers (Drink it, Forget it, Go!)
There are a bunch of other consumable food items in the game that aren't (for my money) quite up to the same level of hilarity, but I'd still happily give them all at least a solid B for effort.
Is there some greater takeaway to be found here regarding In Sound Mind's broader themes about evil corporations, and how that new big chain grocery store is secretly storing evil toxic sludge for their sinister corporate overlords? Are any of these 'real', or are they all just a product of Desmond being trapped in his own twisted dreamscape? Who knows! But they made me smile, and ISM remains a game that will absolutely reward you for stopping to read the text on things, right down to the minimum resolution available.
Um... hi... i wanna write smut but I've never done it before, I've read it, countless times but never written it. How do I write smut for a character who has a bad self image with a partner who loves them very dearly?
Not planning on starting your smut-writing adventures at the shallow end of the difficulty pool, huh? Most of my general advice about writing smut can be found in this old ask, but for anything specific, “how do you write [x]” for me almost always goes something like, “I have an idea for smut that works for those characters, and it nags at me until I write it.”
Possibly you've already got a scenario in mind, but what advice I could give you really depends on what scenario (and what characters) this is. Is this an established relationship, or is this their first time? Is this happening spontaneously, or is it something they've been building towards for some time ‒ maybe have even talked about? Have they tried to have sex before, only for the anxiety to ruin it? Whose POV are we following? If it isn't something they've talked about explicitly, how aware is the other party of their partner's nerves ‒ are they being hyper-careful about everything, or does it not even register that someone they love so much could even have anything to be nervous about? Etc. All of that will affect how the shy character's nerves impact the scene.
For example, the one time I've written smut with a similar dynamic myself was my old Cable/Deadpool high school AU, which came with the additional whammy where Wade is a teen with no sexual experience, and their first time together is psychic sex through a shared fantasy. There, moving to ‘real’ sex, with Wade's physical body on display, is the difficult part for him. Bodily anxiety comes up briefly in a couple of my other stories (one other cablepool and one nandermo come to mind), but there it's more of a quick “are you sure you find me attractive?/why wouldn't I?” type exchange, before we move past it ‒ it really depends how big an issue you want to make of it. (The detailed exploration of slightly-unusual-bodies with in scars/tattoos/freakish healing powers/cyborg enhancements is another theme I seem to keep coming back to in different fandoms, if you're looking for ideas on that front, though that may or may not be relevant).
If been seen naked is the main issue for the character with bad self-image and you want to try a more creative solution, they could try having sex in the dark, or with a blindfold, or mostly clothed (as happens in my cablepool fic), or in a position that doesn't put the more nervous party's body on display (maybe they're penetrating their partner from behind, for example). Maybe they're more comfortable trying something like phone sex (psychic sex plays that role in my old fic). Maybe the two of them have talked about it and decided on an option that might work, or maybe someone will suggest one of those options or maneuver them in that direction when their partner gets nervous. Heck, maybe they're huddling for warmth during a blackout, and the nervier party realises on the spur of the moment that this could be their one chance to try something without the self-consciousness getting the better of them. Obviously, hiding your body from your partner during sex isn't much of a long-term strategy for a couple, but as a way to get past someone's initial nerves on their first time, it's an option worth considering.
But if you're not into trying that kind of shortcut, well, my advice would be to show us that they're both sufficiently into what's happening to get past the nerves. Sell me on how attractive their partner finds them! Show me that the nervous partner is turned on enough that the nerves are taking a back seat! You can do a lot of this explicitly, out loud ‒ the supportive partner reassuring the nervous character they love them, that they do find them attractive ‒ but showing is often going to beat telling in this kind of scenario (for both audience and characters). You could show us the nervous party being made to feel desired and beautiful for the first time. You could focus on the POV of the other party, and everything they love about their partner's body. Or maybe they're less focused on bodies than their love for the person inside it, and the rush of physical intimacy with someone they care about, or the chance to make their partner feel good ‒ that's an option too.
The plus for working with characters like these is that the scene comes with inbuilt tension to tackled or resolved as we progress - I am a big believer that smut that also develops the plot and characters is the best smut. The downside is that leaning too hard on “no, you really are beautiful!” reassurances can come across a little trite and sappy for the reader (we're presumably here for smut, not a positive-affirmations-therapy-session), or can edge into uncomfortably fetishistic territory (like I said up top, this is kinda jumping in the deep end for a first time writing smut). You could do a hell of a lot with a scenario like this with the characters barely talking at all, all the nerves and excitement coming through in how they act and feel, but that may not be the easiest angle to sell.
As with all smut, what often makes the biggest difference is that you've chosen a scenario you, the writer, find really hot, and that you can sell it as such to the reader. Do you like the idea of the nervous character being made to feel beautiful? Go with that! Are you more into the idea of keeping all that tension buried in simmering, unspoken subtext? That could work too! Would you rather just bang out a quick scene where they fuck after both getting so high that neither of them are worrying about anything? No shame in that! Is it hotter for you if we don't take any real steps to resolve that tension ‒ if the insecure character spends the whole scene silently telling themselves it's just pity sex, or thinking it's so kind of their partner to pretend they aren't just ignoring the massive turn-off that is their body? Look, that could be amazing in the right hands! But if it's not the story you wanna tell, there's nothing to be gained trying to force it.
Basically, there are a million different ways to write smut between characters like these. A little character-based tension just helps sets the stage. It's more to worry about if you're not that confident writing smut yourself, but hell ‒ maybe that just helps you get into the mindset of someone who's nervous about sex. There's no one right way to do it, but best of luck if you do give it a try!
Hi, I love your blog! I admire your attention to detail. I am confused about whether the visual and auditory hallucinations Ethan experiences in the House Beneviento is the reflection of Ethan's own fears and anxieties or Mia's. Of course they share similar fears regarding their trauma, loss, nature of their child, etc.
When I was watching the House Beneviento part, I thought Mia's private thoughts were being used against Ethan since Mia' presence and voice were used to convey them. But Ethan's own fear and suspicions could be narrated through Mia here.
Anyways, I just wanted to hear your take on this. Maybe I'm overthinking this since I really want to get more detail on Ethan's character.
Thank you <3
Oh boy, you people don't bother hitting me with the easy ones do you? (You know I love it!)
So, this is one of those places where I don't think there's any simple, definitive answer. Even the writers themselves were probably more concerned with overall atmosphere than any particular internal logic. There's a lot of space for interpretation, and intentionally so. What's below is my own take, but you're free (and encouraged) to form your own. And in light of that, have a link to a cutscene compilation of that part of the game, if you'd like to hear all these lines spoken aloud.
On the face of it, the obvious answer is that Ethan's the one having the trip, so logically it's his anxieties we're seeing reflected through his hallucinations. On another hand, there are a few lines (particularly when we're hearing Mia's voice through the radio) which I could very easily believe were things Mia might have said herself, and specifically when Ethan wasn't listening (most notably, “I can't tell Ethan. Anything but this.”)
And on a third hand, there are a lot of lines that don't really make much sense at all ‒ especially those you hear as Ethan's hallucinations are just beginning. You could even theorise that some of what Ethan hears could be messages from Donna, speaking through an image of Mia to manipulate him.
For example, the very first thing hallucinatory!Mia says is: “Ethan! Come with me. There's something I have to tell you.” That could be a hint at Mia's secrets, but tonally? To me, that reads less "Mia has chosen this moment to come clean", and more "a spectre of Mia is trying to tempt you into am ambush."
Doesn't help that this one gets echoed back to us not long after, in the message we see in the elevator after the lights come back on.
That one's as loudly Donna as any message we get from this point on.
The same vibe continues through Ethan's next two visions. "Rose feels different. Ethan, you have to fix her…" ‒ what's that about? Rose's powers have presumably existed since birth, she didn't suddenly become 'different' later, and Mia certainly wouldn't be asking Ethan to fix her (Ethan, as usual, is the most clueless person involved).
"Everyone leaves me… even Rose… I don't want to be alone…" doesn't make a lot of sense either. You could argue it's some kind of flash-forward to Ethan's death and Rose being taken from her by the government (if that's even what happened), but that feels like reaching. Everything in this area comes across as vague, unspecific anxieties. At most, maybe this is Ethan processing the fear that there's something about Mia and Rose that he doesn't know, that he's let them down (or this is just Donna showing Ethan images of his family to lead him further in).
This changes once we get into the mansion proper ‒ or more specifically, into the basement. What Ethan hears from that point on suddenly gets a lot more specific.
So perhaps it's notable that these are the hallucinations that come after Ethan has reached the gateway that asks you to ‘Give up your memories’, and has to give away a family photo to progress ‒ is this the point where Ethan's actual memories start to direct what he hears and sees?
Also no coincidence that our next batch of hallucinations happen in a room with a doll version of Mia. That Ethan is forced to take apart in order to progress. So the possibility that what we're hearing comes from within Mia's herself is a very obvious interpretation.
Either way, the radio in the central room gives Mia four lines of dialogue, delivered one at a time as you progress with the puzzle. Those four lines might just chart her gradual realisation that Rose isn't going to be born normal, and Ethan is the reason why.
First up, we've got: “Whoa, that's a kick! Can you believe it? S-She's so energetic, it's crazy!”
This one sounds like something Mia may well have actually said to Ethan out loud during her pregnancy. Perhaps this is him remembering this moment word-for-word.
Next, we have maybe the most interesting line, which I've already brought up once: “Oh god, no… I, I can't tell Ethan. Anything but this.” To me, this sounds a lot like it could be the moment the truth hit Mia for the first time. Maybe it's even something Ethan half-heard or half-remembered actually hearing her say.
Whether Mia did ever speak those words aloud, the sentiment is almost certainly genuine. That line is actually a big part of my personal theory that Mia probably didn't even realise until very recently that Ethan was still infected – like, post-Rose-recently (look, I do still have this whole second chapter of Quarantine planned to go into this, if I ever get around to finishing it!) It's worth remembering that Mia's own memory was a mess when Ethan found her in RE7, and she was directly under mind control a lot of the time. So it tracks for me that she might've spent a long time after escaping the Bakers' mansion unsure how much of what she thought she remembered was true.
The third line is just Mia weeping, before sobbing Rose's name, and the fourth is her just repeating “It'll be fine. It'll be fine," over and over in a panicked voice. At this point, we're in T-minus to the moment the monster-fetus shows up, and we're drumming up the atmosphere, so it's harder to know how ‘real’ these lines might be. Someone having a difficult pregnancy or post-partum depression might well have had these moments for real – especially given how very ‘not-normal’ Rose is going to turn out to be. Hell, maybe the monster fetus represents all Mia's worst fears about what she might have been about to give birth to, at her lowest moments. (Something mentioned in the notes in the gallery is the intent that the fetus is actually born from the puppet body of Mia, which is missing from the table when it first appears.)
Obviously, Rose is not a monster on par with that thing, and Mia loves her baby girl just as much as Ethan does. At this point in Beneviento Mansion, everything is getting rapidly deeper into abstract-trip-land, so it's more questionable how literally we should take things. But damn, does it set an atmosphere!
Sandwiched in the middle of those four lines, however, we get our single most direct message from Mia in the form of the the phone call.
Mia: Please Ethan, listen to me. I didn't want to keep it from you.
Ethan: Mia?
Mia: I didn't want to lose you again—I didn't want to destroy this family.
Ethan: Mia, what are you talking about?
Mia: I love you both so much I had to. I had to do it.
Like Mia's previous dialogue about what she can't tell Ethan, I do like how this highlights just how horribly conflicted Mia must have been about whether to tell Ethan the truth. It's the same general vibe I got from their conversation about Rose's test results (previously discussed in the context of the pre-game timeline ‒ though there, Mia seems like she's reached the point of trying to get Ethan to face the truth about himself, and Rose, and is becoming increasingly frustrated that she can't get through to him). Likely, she's scared stupid that telling the truth will end with Ethan being wheeled off to a lab somewhere.
The last line, “I had to, I had to do it” confuses me, though (and makes it sound a lot like Mia might have done something even worse than what we know). I assume what she 'had to do' was 'keep the truth a secret', but it's an odd way to phrase a negative. "I couldn't do it" would feel more natural to me. Maybe it works better in Japanese.
But again, maybe this should be taken as a semi-confession being filtered through Ethan's own sense that Mia's keeping something from him (again), without really knowing what, or how Mia would talk about it. Either way, on the pure level of vibes, it all works.
So here we are back with the original question: how much of Mia's dialogue in this section was really her own words or thoughts (that Ethan may or may not have heard or half-heard at some point), and how much is just Ethan's own anxieties speaking with her voice? How much has been twisted still further by Donna's powers, intentionally or otherwise? Anything is possible!
The visions are Ethan's, but Mia is in the village, and was once infected herself, and the mutamycete network does, canonically, allow Ethan to see some of Rose's memories directly. Could he be seeing some of Mia's too? If so, how much of it came from her? Fuck, is there even any point in analysing what's plausible to this degree, when the whole game is set in a surrealist gothic fairytale, where events have been fictionalised into a children's book before the story even really begins?
tl;dr: there's really no single ‘right’ answer here, nor should there be. But gosh, there is food for thought in plenty! Interpret at will!
Hiiii, have you seen the Code Veronica remake announcement and the trailer thingy? If so, what are your thoughts on it? 😊
In all earnestness, my thoughts are “er… have you read any of my reviews of other RE games?” It sounds like you're excited and looking for hype here, and I hate to disappoint you, but I don't think I can overstate how much you're barking up the wrong tree if you're hoping for enthusiasm on this one.
At this point, I'm really only in this fandom for RE7-8. I'm not a fan with any nostalgia for the old RE games, and my interest in the remakes was pretty limited even before the latest RE installment killed all my confidence in the franchise. Leon's the only one of the old RE heroes who strikes me as having so much as a real personality, and even my interest in him has been on a steady downwards slide with his every new appearance since RE2R. I'll probably track down some cutscenes from the new Code Veronica on youtube at some point out of general curiosity, but I'm not planning on buying or playing it when it comes out. I'm just not in any way the target market for this thing.
Honestly, I don't feel like the trailer really worked, either. I'm all for first-person when they're willing to commit to it, but using it to mask the fact Claire is our POV character doesn't work. It just leaves her awkwardly and unnaturally silent throughout the scene, and her opening the door despite knowing something fishy is going on just makes her look dumb.
I confess, I am genuinely curious as to whether this game is going to manage to give Chris and Claire actual personalities beyond “basically decent person who is trying to achieve [x] objective,” but I'm not holding my breath (and especially not when the trailer gives Claire less than nothing to work with). Meanwhile, what little character Chris has ever acquired over the decades is mostly about him going gradually off the rails under the weight of compounded trauma, and we're way too early in the timeline for that.
I am also really, really not looking forward to the fanwank we're probably going to get over trans implications in this remake. If there's a way to do “twistedly evil 1%-er who impersonates his dead twin sister because he's just that fucked in the head” in this climate that isn't going to bring out the bigots and/or lead to Discourse, I can't picture it from here.
Also, are we supposed to call this thing called ''Code Veronica' or just 'Veronica'? I'm sure there's some #deeplore (or at least #advancedmarketing) decision in there somewhere, but Capcom are really not making it easy with knowing how to tag things with that.
Obviously, there are plenty of folks out there who are loving RE9 and super excited for this new remake, and that's fine: Capcom do not need my money, and are under no obligation to cater to me, or what I personally liked about the two Resi games where they actually tried doing something new. But until they are interested in trying something new again, my interest in new installments in this franchise is basically 0.
Soo RE9 I am annoyed that despite the information on the Connections in the Baker Incident Report kinda obviously came from Mia they still never said it outright despite making the Road to Requiem video. And I am mad that people keep thinking she was more important in the connections than she was because of that stupid picture with Miranda (and acting like that she wasn't being watched by Ethan and the connections) and the tag has been inundated with idiots again sorry needed to rant
Fffffff, don't even get me started again. My two most controversial opinions in this fandom at the moment are “RE9 was a bland pile of regressive slop” and “Mia Winters is AWESOME actually and I WILL FIGHT YOU!!!” Do you know how close I am to reviving my #Mia Winters Week tag for yet another essay on how much bullshit I still see out there? Don't goddamn tempt me.
Christ, it's amazing how RE9 is making me appreciate all these aspects of RE7-8 that I never even noticed before. Like how refreshingly functional the Connections were as villains! They're literally just some shadowy multi-national corp that thinks they can make money by selling bioweapons to even shadowy-er military ops. We do not know what lousy excuses Mia may have made for herself while working for them, because RE7 dropped the ball complete on ever giving her a single real chance to explain herself, but have you tried getting a job lately in this economy? And they had one project that mattered (Eveline and the mould), that didn't really work, but which they seemed to have sunk-costed themselves into feeding more lives and money into for god knows how many years already. So: straightforward capitalism, big pharma at its fucking worst, and unchecked military profiteering in a nutshell. Solid motivation, solid execution, no notes.
There is no need to expand on that, it does not need backstory. The great thing about the Connections was that I didn't have to piece through 30 years of vague and contradictory canon across multiple mediums to understand how these motherfuckers ever convinced themselves that cannibalistic zombie viruses are somehow the quote-next step in human evolution-unquote. I did not need to know about the motivations of some dude who owned a mansion back in 1992, or how Wesker is a cloned Umbrella superhuman and a loyal company bigwig and was undercover as the leader of a SWAT team for god knows how long before leading said team into said mansion to field test some of those zombies, where he dies, but doesn't, and now he hates Umbrella 5ever and wants to take over the company himself to do the same thing they were doing anyway, because those bastards gave him superpowers! Or something. And then after being The Big Bad for three games running, just when everyone's gearing up to Go Get Umbrella! it turns out they basically just collapsed on their own off-screen between games 3 and 4. And then came back again with Neo- in front of their name, maybe.
I mean, did I get all that right? Ha, trick question: I could not give less of a shit if I got that right. I don't need this shit, okay?
But now, as of RE9, ~It Hath Been Revealed~ that the Connections… are literally just fucking Umbrella again! They're run by Wesker v. 1.1. They're obsessed with the work of Oswald Spencer. They've been after the next step in human evolution since before most of you were even born. FML.
In all earnestness: why? What does it add to the story of RE9 to throw in this random, meaningless connection to RE7-8? What does it add to RE7 to know that the Connections were led by a perfect clone of that guy who died in Africa of having his boulder punched? How does the mould connect to anything in RE9? Seriously, why not revive Tricell, the company the last Wesker was running. Why not invent something new?
Don't strain yourselves: there is no reason. This is a ‘connection’ that exists solely to make the fans stand up and go “OMG, I recognise that reference! It's all Connected!!" Or, perhaps even more saliently: “Oh boy, now I need to go out and buy those other two games I never got around to before RE9, and give Capcom more money!" You look me in the eye and tell me that wasn't the major goddamn factor here. Linking the Connections to RE9 is great for optimised corporate synergy. It does jack shit for storytelling.
(And while I'm on the subject, is no-one out there posting thirsty fanart for this loser even bothered that RE9 gave us a “new” villain who looks like Wesker and sounds like Wesker and is played by the same actor as Wesker, but we're just randomly calling him ‘Xeno’ now, like thousands of fans didn't all do a huge simultaneous double-take when his name is first thrown out like it's no big deal? How do neither Leon Kennedy nor Sherry Birkin ever look at him and exclaim, “My god, isn't that that fucking Wesker dude Chris is always losing his shit about?” Who wrote that reveal? What fucking happened here? Is “turns out Wesker is just one of like a whole series of clones we never mentioned before lolz” not the kind of plot point some character should react to on screen? Did this game get 99.9% of the way to giving us Yeah Literally Wesker Just Came Back From The Dead Whatevs before someone realised at the last minute that they lost the right to say the name ‘Wesker’ out loud thanks to some in some weird-ass Daleks-rights-issue scenario? Because that is basically my going theory right now! Some of the creative decisions that went into this game break my fucking brain.)
But, y'know, sure. Whatever. Let's all take the reminder that the Connections exists as yet another reason for the media-illiterate masses to slag off Mia Winters, like she personally created Eveline in a test tube herself, and then personally scheduled every event in that kid's busy lifetime of neglect and abuse, from years before she ever got involved in the project at all! Probably while snogging Miranda and planning the Raccoon City Outbreak, and shitting on the American flag. Well, good news, haters! Capcom have heard your complaints, and used RE9 to deliver you a main female character who is suitably demure and unthreatening, a perfectly innocent victim who never did a single bad thing in her life, and who absolutely will not challenge the old white dude you're all really here to play. Have fun!
(Okay, okay, no - look, I honestly have 0 reason to assume Grace is any kind of direct response to the fannish backlash against Mia Winters, even if the contrast bugs me. No-one is served by building one woman up by tearing another down. But Christ, is all the inherent sexism baked into RE9 just completely passing the world by? It's not subtle! Is Sad Girl Who Can't Lift A Shotgun really what people wanted from this franchise?)
...Man. What was your actual question again? I think I got a bit carried away there.
Oh, there's some promo video out there called Road to Requiem, huh? Do I have to watch it? Ten seconds reading what people are saying about it online is suggesting to me it's one long spiel about other games you should totally give Capcom money for if you haven't played them already, so basically: I rest my case.
Seriously, don't get me started on that fucking photo again either, I've done this once already! Yeah, the photo that makes so fucking clear that Mia 1) is NOT part of the science team, and 2) is about 10 seconds away from leaving with Eveline and her partner on an emergency transport to South America, given they're the only people not wearing labcoats, and are even in the same clothes from their journey. You've gotta reach so fucking hard to take it as anything but a “let's get one last snap with the team before we split up for good!” and where ‘the team’ includes two transport agents who probably only met Eveline this morning. I mean, fuck, Luis has the same team snapshot, and that dude was a legit scientist involved in building bioweapons for two different organisations! But he's got a dick, and the game did give him the chance to say ‘whoops’ out loud before he died tragically, so that's cool I guess.
[Deep breath]
Yeah, what can I say. This stuff makes me want to vent too. But FWIW, I do feel like I'm seeing Mia and mithan get more love lately than they used to, and there are definitely other Mia-fans out there! Haters gonna hate, what can you do.
(Obligatory I-Am-Calm-Really Disclaimer: Seriously, you're allowed to like RE9! It's not like any of these games are highbrow material, I just found the writing really lacking, the gender politics questionable, and the retread of ideas from 20 years ago really fucking dull. I'm sure I've loved canons with twice as many obvious problems. I just didn't like this one.
And you're totally allowed to dislike Mia Winters. Really, you are! Could you just maybe stick to disliking her for stuff she's actually done, and not this weird fantasy version of her you've collectively made up to hate? I mean it. The shit people have managed to convince themselves Mia has done in these games is just so fucking bizarre.)
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.
