Thinking back on the music asks I did recently, I think Jill going New Order while Ashley went Joy Division, despite Ashley being the more stereotypical "girly girl" who has a tendency to come across as a walking Valley Girl cliché, says a lot about who they really are.
I didn't plan it out like this, but it came out through the writing and I think it's a really elegant little character study of the two of them in miniature. It's not quite 'silk vs. steel' - both ladies are titanium if they're anything - but it's a lovely negative image effect that I find fun to explore in dynamics like this.
In canon, it's established that Jill has a signature stance when defending herself with a knife: She stands ready and quickly and rapidly stabs upward, zeroing-in on a B.O.W.'s weak spots in its head and neck [not every game holds to this - notably Resident Evil (2002) doesn't - but it's largely a constant].
In Resident Evil 4 (2023), there's a scene where Ashley unlocks a door for Leon and calls herself "The Master of Unlocking". If you mod the game so that she's fully playable in all modes, she will also adopt Jill's stance when you equip her with the knife and put her into aim mode.
It's completely coincidental, of course, but I like to think that, in my verse, Ashley picked up those skills because Jill taught her when they were surviving in the wilderness together.
"Ashley is velvet covering steel. She's an absolute sweetheart but she can't be broken, no matter what she's been put through. She's always there for you, and you always know how she's feeling because she's not afraid to tell you."
"I love how peppy and outgoing she gets when she's happy: She's like a ray of sunshine, and being around her makes you happy too. She's got this weird and super endearing sense of humor that always makes me laugh! Ash navigates high society like an expert, has an absolutely killer sense of style and is a deceptively sharp diplomat and negotiator: She's gotten us out of a few tense situations both on and off the battlefield."
I feel like Jill is at least a little demisexual/romantic, especially once she's older.
She had a bit of a wild youth (it's an open secret, but she won't volunteer the information) and probably got around a fair bit in those days: Being a groupie in the Los Angeles rock scene of the 1980s with a sister in an up-and-coming local band will do that to you.
But she works an unusual and demanding job, and the longer she's in S.T.A.R.S. the harder it gets for her to meet people who really understand her. She hasn't really had any serious, long term romantic prospects: When she was younger Melody got all the attention (not that Jill is resentful/blames her for this, but it is what it is), and when she's older it's a challenge to meet someone she truly connects with.
The people she's naturally drawn to are the people she's already close with and she's known for a long time. It's why, I think, her two "Great Loves" are Chris and Ashley: The two people who she shared the most desperate moments of her life with, and the two people who see her for every bit of who she is. She trusts both implicitly and feels utterly, completely safe "letting her hair down" and being vulnerable with them (Well...Ash, at least, and any verse where Chris has his shit together). Any AU relationship she has with someone else is necessarily going to have to be a long, smouldering slow burn.
K, I guess I need a headcanons tag 'cause I can't shut up.
I just had a thought about the two potential love interests I've given Jill in her primary verse, and how those dynamics have changed and crystallized as I've been writing.
In canon I'm pretty much a hardcore Valenfield shipper (that's Chris, not Claire, but I can totally see Jill/Claire too!) and I initially expected that to carry over to my reimagined verse. But my verse isn't canon, and just a few minor backstory alterations completely changed the context of Jill's personal relationships.
Which I guess is how it works in real life: Just think about how every little decision in your life, no matter how minor it may appear on the surface, could affect whether you do or don't meet a certain person, or if your relationship with someone you already know ends up going in a dramatically different direction.
I think that's what happened with my Jill and Chris: Basing my version of The Mansion Incident on Jill's campaign in the original Resident Evil (more the 2002 version) meant that Chris spends the entire night locked in a cell and Jill is completely on her own. Meanwhile canon seems to take Umbrella Chronicles as...canon...and has Chris with Jill the entire mission (RE5 in fact does not work as well IMO if that version of events isn't what happened, though I can see that story working with Chris' path too).
If Jill is a recent transfer to Raccoon City and Chris is locked up the entire Mansion Incident, not to mention the fact they had very different (though still traumatic) experiences from each other that night, would they really have had the time to build up such a close bond before everything goes to hell? Friends, yeah, but anything more intimate? Especially given how Chris' trauma manifests? I actually don't know. Though I don't talk about them as much in Jill's bio, I have a lot of headcanons about the "supporting cast", if you will, especially Rebecca and Billy: It is they who ended up having the kind of relationship in my verse that Valenfield is (arguably) in canon.
The other big one was making Ashley a composite of herself, Fiona from Haunting Ground, Rachael from Revelations and even Leon as well as what I thought at the time was an innocent and harmless thought experiment about what Jill would be doing if she was involved in the events of RE4. Eventually Jill ended up being the one rescuing Ashley and, much to my surprise, something clicked with the two of them. An entirely new story I hadn't anticipated or planned for suddenly seemed to write itself (any writer will know that this is not an uncommon occurrence), and this has only continued to evolve through the threads I've had.
I think Jill and Ashley are incredibly similar, as strange as that may sound, especially the way I've written them. Ash sees Jill as an inspiring, comforting female presence and Jill sees in Ash a younger version of herself. She immediately empathizes with Ashley's plight, because the way Ash acts externally is how Jill saw herself internally during The Mansion Incident: To Jill, the only thing that separates younger her from Ash is Jill's spec ops training. The other Jill/Ash shippers I've read - all two of them! - make the same or similar argument(s), and they're actually who sold me on this idea. Furthermore, spending the amount of time together an RE4-style plot demands is naturally going to force them to bond to some degree.
There's also the fact that Canon!Jill in a sense becomes an Ashley in RE5, and this is made even clearer in what I understand to be the earlier drafts of the game's plot. As many issues as I have with that (and there are many...), my Jill wound up drawing a ton from RE5!Jill (...much to my chagrin), and that fact pushes them closer too.
I get the sense that part of the reason my Chris is so possessive and overprotective of my Jill is in part due to feelings of insecurity, inadequacy and guilt. He feels he let Jill down by "making" her rescue him and sees himself as having failed in his role because of that. Chris also sort of subconsciously feels like he can't compare to Jill and doesn't really deserve her. So due to that, as well as because he believes he owes her a debt and she's basically the only thing keeping him sane and sort-of stable, he shows his love for her by protecting her. Even, and especially, when she doesn't need it.
Ashley, effectively, gives Jill what Jill gives Chris: Someone who understands her, supports her, is emotionally available for her and stays by her side. Ashley and Jill soothe and calm each other, and help each other feel safe.
“ i didn’t think you were going to make me ask about it, ” axel murmured, taking another sip of his drink as he glanced over at the brunette. she was usually quite willingly speaking up about what was bothering her, however ashley hadn’t seemed eager to tell him about the tweets she had sent earlier. “ want to tell me what those tweets were about ? those came out of nowhere. ” @ashleyhmu.
