i truly believe that leon's time in the special forces was more traumatic than raccoon city.
it's one thing to have to be in the mental space to shoot and kill reanimated people and monsters that are trying to eat you, but it's another thing to be subjected to physical, mental and psychological torture by fully cognisant human beings, ALL BECAUSE you managed to survive a biohazard and wanted to protect a child.
like we see leon come out of raccoon city all cheery with sherry and claire, so wth happened to him in the military for him to be so hardened in re4r? obviously he's still the same leon who cares and wants to help, but he's so emotionally detached to the violence of it all that i'm concerned 😭
i think raccoon city was a shock to his system that he could never shake off, but the military broke him into a shell of a person to be rebuilt into that emotionally devoid, depressed, alcoholic (ik he liked to drink before re2 but it's on another level after re2). it hurts to imagine, but i'm genuinely fascinated by what he could've possibly been subjected to that wouldn't make him blink twice when facing all the las plagas shit in re4.
he had to have been bullied. relentlessly. i mean he wasn't even supposed to be in the special forces in the first place, so i can imagine the other military guys would haze tf out of him for being a rookie and skipping through basic training and all the years of hard work they would've put in to get to the place they were at. and every time he would get better, bigger, earn his place amongst the rest of the men, they would double down; abuse tf out of him and never allow him to fully belong. and you KNOW that they would get away with it too because the government is obviously corrupt.
meanwhile leon was literally blackmailed into joining. like join and ensure sherry was protected, or be killed with all his knowledge of the outbreak and sherry gets tortured. not much of a choice for him.
leon says that krauser was always an asshole, but he never expected him to turn on him the way he did, so it seems krauser was sort of his safe space in the special forces? and yeah they did operation javier together so they had a good level of trust and cooperation before re4, but i wanna know what it was like for them in trainingggg
anyway i’m writing about it on ao3 😁 read Resident Evil - Operation: Collapsed Canopy to find out what happens to leon in the military!
sincerely, melancholy