Welcome To The Bin

I have a Call of Duty × Resident Evil brainworm. His name is Steve. Please be nice to Steve.

[thismightbecrazy]

Soap's Journal Part 2

BONUS PAGE:

Art collection done for Chapter 8 of "Heat Lamp".

Soap's Journal Part 1

[thismightbecrazy]

lets talk about re9 ouo

Hey there! Pull up a stool!

Yeah, I definitely feel some of your frustration with re9, but I'm also kinda getting used to big media companies not meeting my personal expectations when it comes to plot. At the end of the day, Capcom is in it to make money and a huge part of the fanbase seems to be enjoying it, so mission accomplished on their part.

My last post about Grace was actually springboarded by your comment over on AO3, I just didn't want to talk your ear off over there. I think you were actually the first one to point out that Grace didn't have her own boss fight. While I might've tried to defend the choice (since the developers were fairly up front with Grace's gameplay being "survival" and Leon's being "action") it still feels like there should've been a better way to play that out.

I'm all ears, though. Anything particularly heavy weighing on your heart?

[possessionisamyth]

(pulls up a stool)

Absolutely talk my ear off. I had a whole gripes session with two friends in VC and I'm kinda sad I didn't type those things out so I could copy and paste them. Thankfully after the thing that was Death Island, my standards were already pretty low for this game and it's writing. I just didn't expect them to grab a shovel and start digging! The lack of banter, the retcons, the whiteness of it all via dropping Hunnigan!

I need someone who isn't me to do a 1:1 comparison of how they treated Grace versus how they treated Ethan. Both characters who were out of their depth when it came to handling bioweapons but Ethan was allowed to face the demons stalking him and Grace wasn't. Why? HMMM A MYSTERY REASON PERHAPS.

I've only gone through the one playthrough, but I'm lowkey terrified of going through it a second time because I'll catch every single detail in the latter half of the game that would've pointed to Jill being the better choice. I already have the NA BSAA working on their own and it resulting in a lot of squads being sent to RC going dark. The Wesker clone. THE FUCKING "a nemesis" BULLSHIT????? UGH.

The issues I had with Grace being in that hotel I already highlighted in a post where she's kinda the only one in the situation of her own volition. By which I mean, there's nothing being held over her head, there's no sudden "oh shit guess im here now", theres no missing relative to look for, but it was a job she could've said no to, and her gun wasn't even holstered going into this building. Screw bioweapons. Girl you don't know if there's crack den in that abandoned building in the middle of the city. Why isn't your gun holstered???????

And Leon. God Leon. I'm putting my head into my hands with him. As my friend Crow said, "he's become such a parody of himself the coolness has faded". And she's lowkey right. The wonder of RE4 still gave Leon someone to bounce all his stupid commentary off of. It was a dialogue. It was banter. It was camp before RE4 remake killed a lot of the camp vibe by being more serious. He was literally talking to Sherry and every conversation with her was really...flat. Uninteresting. We know the history these two have with RE2 and RE6. It seems like they've been talking a lot more since RE6. There's no real familiarity in their conversations, and it's disappointing. I just needed one line. A few silly lines between them if anything. Even a "You know your comms are on, right?" from Sherry after Leon drops another bad one-liner would've been cute. But Capcom hasn't given me what I want since Vendetta so fuck me I guess.

I remember precisely 2 weeks after this game dropped that people were talking about how it was so easy to get the good ending because the hints were obvious. They were not obvious. Not in the slightest. We've spent 8 mainline games, 5 side games, several CG movies, and multiple novelizations going "Viruses and Parasites are Bad :(", and you expect me to believe those lackluster notes and shitty video recordings are supposed to be clear? With Spencer? The guy we saw prostrating about how he could never become a god in the beginning of RE5 before Wesker killed him? Don't piss me off!!!!!!!

And that DAMN BRAILLE PUZZLE. The issue isn't the braille puzzle. The issue is that it's a LOAD BEARING puzzle. They know their audience is smart enough to solve it, but because two segments and several cut scenes hinge on Emily being with you, they don't even let you try. You could theoretically keep Emily safe in her room the whole game until healing her in the end, but they won't have that because you're not allowed to just do what you have been doing for the past 8 mainline games, which is solving the puzzles on your own via context clues, hints, and answers previously provided in game.

And this all could've been fixed by simply having us find the missing tiles with the pictures on them, and they could say one of them was with Emily. But whoops! You've unlocked her room to dangers so now you gotta watch her. Bam. Done. It's less stupid now and more in line with inventory management by finding the missing pieces like all the other RE games. How did the piece get in there? The corpse of the dude who's office you need to get into is in the same room as her. Connect the dots. Don't get me wrong, I do think Blue Prince skyrocketed my standards for game puzzle creation but we're going to pretend I'm not a biased party. Let's pretend, yeah? Yeah! Yay!

It's the fact you can skip every cut scene and not know who the fuck Zeno is. You can't do that with Gideon, but that's specifically because you have two actual fight encounters with him. One on the rails with a less interesting version of the cerberus. Sorry. The ones in RE4 looked a lot cooler. What did these guys have other than being big? Hm? Hm? Where's the flavor. I promise I'm not biased because I also enjoy Bloodbourne. And the other being that sad excuse for a Nemesis fight. And the Tyrant fight sucked. And "The Commander" fight sucked. It wasn't even that they were bad. They just have the crime of being boring! They were boring! I was bored! I already fought plant 43! You've changed nothing about it's tactics despite it being so huge and having to deal with people getting around it for over 20 years! It hasn't evolved once!? No venus fly trap methods?! NOTHING? I GET NOTHING???? YOU PUT NOTHING IN MY NOTHING?!??!?!?!

(takes a breath) So those are my main gripes. I have tonnes more like how it's all nostalgia bait that falls flat, but I've been typing for a while. What else do you think?

[thismightbecrazy]

Man there's so much to unpack here (in a good way) but I think I'll start with my favorite bit you said.

You are so right that this should've been Jill's story. For all intents and purposes, RE2 ended on a high note. Yes Raccoon was destroyed, but Claire, Sherry, and Leon were well outside of the city by then. Yeah, it was Leon's genesis, but he has no more claim over the outbreak than any other character from RE0-3, both Outbreak Files games, or Operation Raccoon City. Out of all those people, it was only Jill and Carlos in RE3 who were doing anything to stop the bombing of Raccoon City (yes, that was in the remake, but Capcom was using the RE2 remake to try to justify Leon's RE9 trauma, so let chaos reign, I guess.) Leon lost a few basic strangers, but Jill lived there. And while I'm pretty sure we already knew the bombing was supposed to be a coverup, it would've meant so much more having Jill find out that the guilt she carried for not being able to save her city (which was far more hers than it ever was Leon's) only to feel the full weight of the futility of everything. Not to mention how Zeno-not-Wesker was wasted on Leon. I know people like to talk about Chris seeing Wesker again but God for Jill to be faced with the ghost of her abuser? One she never really got any actual closure on? Man, that would've been so much more cathartic.

Good-ending wise, I did think it felt obvious, but only because they were so gung-ho about Elpis being a mysterious, snake oil salesman super virus that it felt like nobody (including the developers) knew what it was actually supposed to do. It just kinda screamed “red herring” to me, but I'm insane and not to be trusted.Spencer's whole shtick does stick in my craw, a bit. The only way I've even managed to get a wink of sleep over it is that even when doing something decent, he's still 1) only undoing his own vile actions and 2) is continuing to fixate on his legacy above all else.

Leon's a whole mess on his own. I could rant a lot about him, but I think you pretty much said most of it. (Not to fluff you up, but you have such a talent for dialogue that feels truly lived in and lets you instantly take the temperature of the world beyond your writing, and they really could've used some of that skill in the writers room because goddamn is it stale.) If Leon is dying, convince me that he's human first. Humans are stupid and clumsy and don't always nail the one-liners. Humans are unreliable narrators of their own stories. I liked that they let Leon cry about it, but I wanted Capcom to earn it a little more. He clearly doesn't give a shit about himself and I think I really just needed Sherry to ask him, “If you were the only one sick, would you even be trying to fix it?” I think Claire should've gotten to call him out on his shit. Hell, bring Hunnigan back. Please! (I think she quit because she's tired of his shit.) There's an illusion of loneliness surrounding Leon in this game that feels far too artificial and feeds into the narrative of male loneliness in a truly unhealthy way. We know for sure Leon has people in his life. I need an acknowledgement that his isolation is of his own making and even they're stupid and irrational reasons, I need human reasons.

Gameplay wise, I am the worst person to ask (someone once thought it'd be funny to have me try to play Darksouls and only realised their mistake by the third time I died in the damn tutorial. I AM NOT THE ONE!) So I'm gonna have to trust you on that. I will say Zeno's end was… what it was… I guess. And Victor's boss fight was underwhelming. Puzzles are meant to be solved, surely there was a better way to implement Emily? Like braille on machinery but all the text has worn off? Something like that.

I remember when I first saw the short “Evil Has Always Had a Name”, I remember getting really excited about the possibility of Capcom really digging into the trajedy of how the “Evil” is not some faceless horror. The idea that some clandestined bullshit can make an enemy out of the people who were once your neighbors just really appealed to me. Now, I'm not sure if I feel the relevance of it to RE9. I understand the brass ring of dramatic theming the developers were reaching for about hope and “breaking the cycle”, but it kinda just slipped through their fingers. There were so few moments of genuine human connection compared to the runtime and given just how robust the world of Resident Evil is, the stakes felt so impersonal for just how lived-in this universe is...

(Also, please tell me I'm not the only one who hated Chloe's level? Clearly it was a “Grace” level in the sense that it was first person survival horror, but could we not have had more actual Grace level instead of a Flashback that adds nothing? The pacing could've been so much better if we only got to the Elpis room once and Zeno monologued at them there so Grace doesn't have to go along with Zeno for fuck-knows-why for way-too-long.)

[thismightbecrazy]

lets talk about re9 ouo

Hey there! Pull up a stool!

Yeah, I definitely feel some of your frustration with re9, but I'm also kinda getting used to big media companies not meeting my personal expectations when it comes to plot. At the end of the day, Capcom is in it to make money and a huge part of the fanbase seems to be enjoying it, so mission accomplished on their part.

My last post about Grace was actually springboarded by your comment over on AO3, I just didn't want to talk your ear off over there. I think you were actually the first one to point out that Grace didn't have her own boss fight. While I might've tried to defend the choice (since the developers were fairly up front with Grace's gameplay being "survival" and Leon's being "action") it still feels like there should've been a better way to play that out.

I'm all ears, though. Anything particularly heavy weighing on your heart?

[thismightbecrazy]

HOT TAKE: RE9 would have been much better if Grace got a little more agency as a character.

Why did Grace's boss pull a Jack Crawford and order Grace to take an assignment that she would be emotionally compromised on? Instead: Have Grace explicitly forbidden to go but she decides to go anyways to find out the truth. Establish her early on as wanting to know the truth about her past and motivations for doing so.

Why does Grace decide to go with Victor and Zeno? Instead: Keep Emily alive a little longer and have Victor promise Grace that Elpis is the key to saving her.

Why doesn't Grace have any boss fights? Instead: Make Grace either fight Victor at the end (and maybe give Leon the dose after/partway so the final boss has two stages) and/or have her fight Emily. I reaaaaaaaaaally think Grace should've been forced into a situation where she has to choose if she was going to kill Emily (or at least make it so if you choose killing shots, the fight is easier but Emily dies vs. doing non-lethal shots that make the fight harder, but you can save Emily in the end.)

This last one isn't really a matter of Grace's agency but since we're here, Why was Grace assumed to be linked to Elpis? Instead (and maybe this was the point, but it didn't feel super clear if so): Grace was one of the Series 60/70s clones like Chloe. She would've eventually succumbed to the t-Virus mutations however, Spencer tested Elpis on Grace as an infant. So when Spencer describes her as a “just an average child needing a home”, she was made ordinary by design.

There's some messy mistranslations, apparently, but it seems that Emily and Marie are genetic matches to Grace, and Chloe is identical to the 2026 clones. Given that the Series 60/70 clones were part of Spencer's obsession with memory transfer experiments and eternal life, it would've been symbolically and thematically nice to see Spencer's version of “legacy” pivot towards a child that was patient 0 for the cure that would unravel his life's work. Would that undercut the idea that Grace is “no one special”? Kinda. But in that sense, Grace isn't expected to save the world, just an example of possibility for the world to heal. She would literally represent hope for a future without bioterrorism and if that's the case, I think that could've been pretty neat.

[thismightbecrazy]

POC comrades to friends to enemies to lovers lesbians? In this economy?

[thismightbecrazy]

Staring at my drafts, hands on hips like a disappointed coach: Okay. Which disaster thruple fic are we working on today?

[thismightbecrazy]

RE × COD Masterpost

This is just a masterpost for my Resident Evil × Modern Warfare crossover writing. If you're interested in how the two canons overlap, I've written a few mini essays covering the crossover potential HERE.

Heat Lamp

   (WIP currently at ~95k words)

A slow burn character deep-dive disguised as a crossover covering most of the RE × MW reboot timelines. Focuses on the interpersonal relationships of Ghost, Soap, and Carlos Oliveira. If you're a fan of complicated situationships and heavy world building, this one's for you.

Whichever Way the Wind Blows

   (Completed. 11,515 words)

Old west meets subtle horror in an alternate timeline where Carlos is living under an assumed identity in Coahuila, Mexico when Ghost (freshly escaped from Roba) shows up in his life. Caretaking and asexual romance ensues. There are Spanish translations coded into it so if you are using a screen reader, you may want to read it HERE on Tumblr. (This will probably become a series.)

Six Feet and Double Deep

   (Completed. 1,613 words)

Bite-sized short story between Ghost and Jill bonding over their respective traumas in an abandoned waiting room at the BSAA. If you're craving male/female friendships, I hope you'll enjoy their snarky banter.

Don't See Your Name Anywhere

    (Completed. 6,954 words)

The elusive Gaz POV. A run-in between the 141 and BSAA means Chris Redfield finally finds out where Carlos has been all this time. He reacts how you'd expect. Featuring the "Alone" Ghost skin. As a treat.

[thismightbecrazy]

It's you!!!!!!! I saw your notes on my post! Hi! If you're wondering, I did lock my fic for AI reasons, but that's not out of nowhere. Before I started writing for RE and before the AI boom, I had multiple fics get popular enough that they were actually scraped by bots, put on dummy websites, and placed behind literal paywalls multiple times. The AI scraping was less of the first straw and more like the last straw when it came to locking my fics unfortunately TToTT

Ay!!! Nice to see ya!

Damn, really sorry to hear about that. I get how that level of theft could really rip the soul out of something you put so much time, dedication, and heart into. It makes sense to protect what you love after that.

I'll be honest, I'm pretty technology illiterate, so I don't really know how you can best share your work while also protecting it? (It's already a pretty underrated ship, with an underrated character that people like to flood the tags of by erroneously tagging him for a single line of dialogue… so your work already isn't getting the attention I personally think it deserves.) General inquiry, are you comfortable with people discussing your AO3 work outside of the platform? Or do you prefer to keep it altogether separate?

[possessionisamyth]

I'm perfectly fine with my stories being discussed outside of ao3! I've still let it out on a public platform even with the user only lock on them, so conversation, engagement, and even criticism is absolutely welcome. I figured conversation happens about it in random discord servers I'll never have the opportunity to hear from based on my posting in previous fandoms, and people commenting to tell me they got a recc from someone who's already read my stuff lol.

I've been a hater (primary around leon posting) in the RE tags for a while on this tumblr account though, so I haven't really done anyone any favors. ^^;

[thismightbecrazy]

Good to know! I hope you enjoy RE9 when you get to it. I know I've got some opinions around it, so it'll be interesting to your take on it. Good on you for missing out on a lot of the hysteria surrounding this ring business, which I'm theorizing people took in the complete wrong direction, but we'll see.

[thismightbecrazy]

It's you!!!!!!! I saw your notes on my post! Hi! If you're wondering, I did lock my fic for AI reasons, but that's not out of nowhere. Before I started writing for RE and before the AI boom, I had multiple fics get popular enough that they were actually scraped by bots, put on dummy websites, and placed behind literal paywalls multiple times. The AI scraping was less of the first straw and more like the last straw when it came to locking my fics unfortunately TToTT

Ay!!! Nice to see ya!

Damn, really sorry to hear about that. I get how that level of theft could really rip the soul out of something you put so much time, dedication, and heart into. It makes sense to protect what you love after that.

I'll be honest, I'm pretty technology illiterate, so I don't really know how you can best share your work while also protecting it? (It's already a pretty underrated ship, with an underrated character that people like to flood the tags of by erroneously tagging him for a single line of dialogue… so your work already isn't getting the attention I personally think it deserves.) General inquiry, are you comfortable with people discussing your AO3 work outside of the platform? Or do you prefer to keep it altogether separate?

[possessionisamyth]

Just did a double check and oof. Okay, if you're a carleon fan and you don't have an ao3 account then you legit cannot see the 43 fics I've written for the ship due to me locking them to users only. Didn't know the results got nuked from the search results entirely for people not logged in.

[thismightbecrazy]

Finally got around to drawing the Carlos Oliveira "Ghost Mod".

[thismightbecrazy]

bonus:

[livingdeadlogan]

Hey look I finished it :3

[thismightbecrazy]

Finally got around to drawing the Carlos Oliveira "Ghost Mod".

[thismightbecrazy]

At some point, you need to ask yourself if you care about accuracy in your writing, or if your favorite form of procrastination is research. Some of my recent examples:

Cost of coin-op laundry in London in 2012

The evolution of enzymes that correct thymine dimers

The history of the DC-Metro farecard

English translations of Ghada Al-Samman's poetry

Upon not finding any English translations, deciding to try translating it yourself despite having no knowledge of Arabic

Methods of intubation used by emergency responders

Vibroacoustic study of infrasound/The Hum

Pictures of ranchos in Coahuila

Hours of sunset at Hvítárvatn during the first week of December

Reasons for flight cancelations/delays when traveling between Albuquerque and Denver

The temperatures documented around the UK on March 11th 2008

(Generally way too much niche weather nonsense)

Makoko's clean water crisis

Spending hours exploring the Lower Vítkovice industrial district via the virtual tour

Hunting down pre-2023 recordings for clandestine pirate radio station "Radio Ice Cream" (literally how I wasted yesterday afternoon)

I swear it's just research (I tell the case-study skull model of a depressed fracture I refrence for a certain Scotsman's titular head injury.)

[h3lian]

One of these days I’ll actually finish comics with text lmao. A late birthday gift for a friend!

[thismightbecrazy]

I'm not looking at any RE9 leaks, so I have no clue if Capcom is going to surprise us with a Carlos appearance or not, but it just rubs me the wrong way that one of the only POC characters from the main title games has been actively erased from the storyline. (Sheva being the other largely forgotten character, but RE5 just feels largely ignored, while Capcom likes to keep returning to the original Raccoon City outbreak. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Sheva and Linda Baldwin are the only two black women on the roster of playable characters, which is deserving of it's own critique.)

And when I say erasure, I'm talking about the Universal Studios event in Japan where there was a live show depicting the RC outbreak and they replaced Carlos with Chris. I'm talking about him not being on the 30th Anniversary poster with the other Raccoon City Protagonists. I'm talking about how Death Island got the whole RC gang back together with a villian specifically targeting people who survived Raccoon City, and Carlos isn't even mentioned (for the record, neither is Ada and she has her own issues with being perpetually presented as "Leon's Love Interest". But I think she at least gets recognised as one of the franchise's headliners.) The only recent example I can think of is his inclusion in Survival Unit, but any momentum there felt squashed by the Anniversary Showcase.

As a reminder, this is a character who was perpetually exploited and neglected by the systems that were supposed to protect him. He was a child soldier in a people's war, criminalized and hunted by his own government, jailed, and then effectively sold to Umbrella (because you CANNOT tell me that there is a legal, non-shady way that Umbrella recruited convicted felons for units they intended to use as lab rats.) Umbrella wanted people that were disposable. Forgotten. He wasn't supposed to survive RC. He did. And then he disappeared.

To claim that Capcom is being intentionally malicious about this would be shortsighted. Resident Evil is oversaturated with characters, and Capcom wants to back their most popular ones. It just feels really shitty that, especially in times like these, there's a character that (most notably in the RE3 remake) embodies so much community and empathy while also having his lack of visibility as a foreign expat actively being exploited by governments and corporations.

And then Capcom seems to want to forget about him and other POC for a predominantly lighter skinned cast. So... there's that.

[thismightbecrazy]

For sale: Clown Shoes. Never worn.

[milomossy]

Feb 2024

A phantom memory huh