#with chris.

[safvdie]

"Tenía mejores planes que limpiar..." ( @medchris ) ( @csaylk )

" creo que todos lo teníamos ... " no lo dice de mala manera, sino realmente la apena que todos hayan tenido que cambiar sus planes por un suceso así. es como si hubiera habido una inundación, pero con menos explicaciones lógicas. " ¿cuáles eran los tuyos? " pregunta, en lo que agrupa los cuerpos de algunos pájaros con desagrado.

[mystalwartheart]

Jill and Chris! He'll always have her back💖

Taken by me using a modded Resident Evil 3 (2020)!

[mystalwartheart]

Something else I think about a lot when it comes to Jill and romance is reciprocity.

In a healthy relationship, all parties involved should be willing and able to take care of each other equally. We all have our old wounds and we all need TLC, but if we find ourselves in a situation where we're spending most of our time attending to someone else's pain while they're doing nothing or very little about our own, that's a lopsided and destructive dynamic.

I have to say it. It's almost a cliché at this point to reiterate how it's not a woman's job to fix a broken man (and any additional genderfluid permutations of this), but it does need to be said.

There is a trend I've noticed in some (not all, and maybe not even most) portrayals of the Jill/Chris relationship that Chris is a shattered man barely holding on because of what he's been through over his life, but Jill is the one who can soothe and heal him and remind him of his humanity. It's enough of a theme that when Death Island tried to invert it the result felt weird and out of character for them both.

Jill's been through the ringer just as much as Chris has, if not more so, regardless of whether or not you follow canon or my divergent biography for her. And the portrayals of Jill I gravitate to, and that I've based mine on, show her handling it in a far healthier way: She has her wounds and her scars, but she's still alive. She keeps coming back to do what she's devoted to, and more or less takes life in stride.

But that doesn't mean she doesn't need love and softness. Even the strongest of us still need a safe space to be vulnerable. She has her own needs that must be met, and I have healthy doubts that most portrayals of Chris I come across in canon or fandom would be capable of meeting them. And that just wouldn't be fair to Jill.

That's also partly, I think, why my story has ended up the way it has. Chris certainly could be the person Jill needs: He absolutely has it in him, and I'm always down to ship my Jill with any Chris who recognizes this. But that self-destructiveness has unfortunately become a huge part of the canon character and derived portrayals over the years, even if the endings of neither Resident Evil (1996) nor Resident Evil (2002) necessarily imply that's the road he's destined to go down.

This is something that's built into Ashley's character by default though: It's simply part of who she is as a person that's established as early as Resident Evil 4 (2005), and Resident Evil 4 (2023) more or less makes it her entire character arc. Her relationship with Leon is almost the complete opposite of the unhealthy Valenfield takes: Ashley spends the entire game practically throwing herself at Leon, begging him to let her help him and take care of him. She's afraid she can't do much, because she's a scared and traumatized kid, but she recognizes the severity and desperation of the situation they're in and still wants to do what she can.

She knows what she has to do when the chips are down, and that's what makes her a true Survivor.

Leon though, brushes her off at almost every opportunity, only relenting in the emotional climax where she saves them both from Las Plagas (and again, this is elabourated on in RE4make when there are a number of puzzles Leon and Ashley have to solve together). Leon has his own special cocktail of self-destructive traits, but I'm going off on a tangent: The point is, Ashley would do the same for Jill if she were in that situation with her, and Jill would immediately pick up on and be receptive to that.

It might even be novel and unexpected enough for Jill to momentarily wrongfoot her: She likely wouldn't have been used to that kind of treatment, at least on this team. Ashley's pure care, concern and affection takes a decidedly different tone to Chris' overprotectiveness or the professional camaraderie and loyalty of O'Brian, Billy and Rebecca.

[mystalwartheart]

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.

[mystalwartheart]

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.

[hall1wells]

WITH @nothingleftofyou ⸼ CHRIS

HER STOMACH ROLLED AND SHE FELT IT COMING. Not with a breath but a BANG of a hiccup, causing what appeared to be energized hearts to escape her mouth. She didn't understand it. Why was the indigestion always some form of magical nonsense? Even better, she wasn't aware she'd go through it again some time in the future. She sat down, crouched over, hiccupping up a nasty storm. "Please tell me you have water or mustard on you?" she asked the person approaching, more out of curiosity to try to get her hiccups under control.