This post by @salazarsrighthand put into words part of a frustration I’ve had for a while, and I wanted to expand on it.
I’ve said this before, but I really do feel like the remakes were used to gradually overwrite the older balance of the series.
What I mean is: Resident Evil did not originally build itself around one singular untouchable hero. Its foundation was multiple protagonists, and very often that meant a man and a woman, both capable, both important, both treated like actual leads. That was part of the identity of the series.
And yet post-RE4, Capcom has increasingly felt like a company that wishes it had always built Resident Evil around one marketable central guy. Like they wish they had their own Link or Mario and could just make Leon games forever. RE4 (2005) was so massively successful that they have been living off that high for years, and now with RE9 selling so well, from a business standpoint they probably feel vindicated. Fine. I get why they want that. But fans of Jill, Claire, and the other leads are not going anywhere. Se chingaron, as they say in Spanish. They set the foundation of this series themselves.
That is why the remake order has always stood out to me. They did not start with RE1, which would have made the most sense if the goal was simply to modernize the series from the beginning. They started with RE2. Then they did RE3, which very obviously did not get the same care, scale, or prestige treatment that RE2 got. How convenient. Then they did RE4, Leon’s most mythic entry, the one Capcom treats like sacred text. And now here we are at RE9 in the present day, where once again Leon is elevated into the central heroic position. At a certain point it stops feeling random.
I’m not even saying there had to be some grand master plan from day one where every move was made solely to lead to RE9. I’m saying the effect is clear. The remake era has helped recenter the franchise around Leon while moving it further away from the older model where the women stood beside the men as genuine co-leads.
And what makes it especially irritating is that this shift has not happened in a neutral way. The women have increasingly been made less capable, less agentic, less central. It is one thing for Capcom to have a favorite. Lots of companies do that. It is another thing to keep preserving the men as action heroes while the women are pushed more and more—as @salazarsrighthand said—into fear, vulnerability, kidnapping, support roles, trauma, symbolic importance, or being used as pawns in somebody else’s story.
So when people say fans are demanding too much by wanting Jill or Claire or other women to matter in the same way they used to, I really do not buy that. We are not inventing that expectation out of nowhere. Capcom created it. Resident Evil trained its audience to expect dual protagonists, often male and female, both competent. That is the tone the series set. If Capcom now seems annoyed that people still want that, then again: that is their own doing.
It reminds me a little of Alien. People are not unreasonable for expecting a Ripley-like figure from that franchise, because the series itself taught them to. After Aliens, there were ideas about continuing with Ripley, Hicks, and Newt, but Alien 3’s development also produced early versions that pushed Ripley to the margins, including William Gibson’s draft where Hicks and Newt were much more central while Ripley was mostly sidelined in cryosleep. What annoys me is the pattern: a franchise builds an iconic woman lead, then later people start trying to steer away from her or treat her centrality like something optional. Which is especially absurd in Aliens, a movie that practically proves Ripley is the indispensable one.
So yeah, it’s not just “ugh, Leon again.” It is the larger feeling that Capcom has spent years trying to reshape Resident Evil into a franchise it was never originally built to be: one central male legend, with everyone else orbiting around him. And for those of us who actually liked Resident Evil as an ensemble series, and especially liked that it gave its women real weight, that shift feels cheap, revisionist, and honestly a little insulting.
ETA: I also think Code: Veronica will be the test, if Capcom ever remakes it. Because that game is basically Claire’s RE4. And by then the pattern would already be sitting right in front of us: Jill’s RE3, arguably her most mythic game, did not get the same care or prestige Leon’s RE4 did. So if Capcom also fumbles Code: Veronica, then I do not really want to hear excuses anymore. At that point the pattern is the point.
