Welcome! I'm a 21 year old art student who plays games, listens to music, watches movies, reads books, and draws! My posts will mainly focus on my original projects, along with whatever other silly franchise I adore! BA arts is the tag I use for my art, and BA asks will be used for asks I receive!
Ranting about Craig Burnatowski's Wesker, and Wesker as an abuser and manipulator.
TLDR: Wesker is a piece of shit, not just in the "evil supervillain" way but in the "gets a sick, perverse pleasure from exploiting and abusing vulnerable women, subordinates, and people he's hurt" kind of way, and it makes him a really interesting villain; Craig Burnatowski nails this part of him perfectly.
I am talking about, like, abuse and grooming and shit here, so fair warning.
I just wanna say I absolutely love Craig Burnatowski's Wesker and it makes me very excited to see him in a Code Veronica remake.
I miss the accent, right? But this Wesker brings a level of realism and fear to him that I really like. It's very easy to portray Wesker as a supervillain - CV and 5 did that, and he's great in those. But 4R takes a different approach. We don't even see his powers here, but we hear a lot of what he's like.
"Change of plans. Of course, you're free to refuse..."
He says while holding a gun to Ada. This isn't even, like, a subtle or clever move - it's a very blatant and deliberate show of power over this woman, and something that Wesker does like Leon rolls off one-liners. It's his whole thing, really - exercising power over people "weaker" than him. Ada isn't a contractor or a partner or whatever - she's not hired. Maybe on paper she is, but in reality she's a tool Wesker gets to throw around how he pleases. He doesn't have partners, or friends, or allies. Everyone is either a tool or an enemy.
Luis: "Hey, who are you working for anyway?"
Ada: "You're better off not knowing. Trust me."
Separate Ways gives off a very scary view of him is what I'm saying, not RE5 scary where he's a big bad supervillain trying to end the world, but a "holy fuck I don't want me or my friends or my family alone with this man" kind of scary.
You know. Like an abuser.
Because like, that's what he is, you know? Wesker loves exercising power over people, he does it constantly. He groomed Excella in RE5 from a young age to be dependent on him in basically all of her business ventures and career, and manipulated her infatuation with him to keep her loyal - but to him she was just a tool. The way he touches her is genuinely unsettling - yeah, sure, she's evil too and all that obviously, but the way he treats her makes it clear that he is very much enjoying casual displays of control and power over this woman. It's just fucked up.
(Side note: Like, this is kind of how I see the Rebecca photo thing. It's the only way to see it that doesn't make me roll my eyes. Some people joke about it like "haha get it Rebecca's hot," which is gross, and others think it's just not canon, which I think they've focused on it enough that it probably is. My take is just that Wesker is a creepy piece of shit, and as the youngest rookie of S.T.A.R.S., Rebecca was the most vulnerable person under his authority, and thus he would have a perverse interest in her. A showing of Wesker's awful personality is how I see it.)
I think there's an argument to be made that some of this shit is gendered, which, you know, makes sense, but I think Chris is a shining example of it too. I do kind of see Chris/Wesker as a dynamic eerily similar to Leon/Ada* and with a not insignificant amount of homoerotic undertones to it, but it's not, like, Cool and Sexy. I think Wesker has the same kind of obsession with Chris as the kind of obsession that led him to have a weird picture of a freshly-18-year-old subordinate in his desk. It's just not an age thing with Chris - rather, it's the fact he knows he haunts Chris's mind, and he gets a kick out of it.
"Let's just say I'm a ghost... coming back to haunt your dear brother."
(A reminder: REmake deliberately has a detail that shows Wesker frowning when Jill meets him in the Old Residence. But when you play as Chris instead, he explicitly smiles to himself before turning.)
I don't think it's a strictly sexual thing (though I do think that's an element of it). But I do think it's the closest thing he can have to a "crush." I think Wesker is incapable of having any sort of close interpersonal relationship, sexual, romantic, or otherwise, that doesn't involve him hurting or wielding power over them. In CV he reminds Chris several times of their past dynamic pre-RE1.
"Chris! Since you're one of my best men... I'll let you handle this."
I'm getting off topic, my point is: Wesker's one of the best characters in RE, and IMO that's not just because he's, like, a badass villain or whatever, but because he genuinely has a lot of presence as a villain, in the narrative itself - Chris especially, but with 4R we get this huge vibe of just how uncomfortable he seems to make Ada, and Ada's pretty fucking hardened - if she's that freaked out by him, there's a fucking reason for it. He's a scary fucking guy, to everyone around him, no matter how bad they are.
Burnatowski's voice for Wesker captures this side of him a lot more than D.C. Douglas or Richard Waugh. Theirs are more on the supervillain side, which I also love, but I am ready to hear more of this Wesker... being on his good side gets you threatened at gunpoint. Imagine being on his bad side.
Wesker's treatment of Excella and Chris is vile - but his voice was more lofty and cartoonishly evil, and you could separate them. Burnatowski's Wesker feels exactly like the man in those scenes.
He's a manipulative, scary, blatantly abusive man whose actions and words show a complete lack of compassion, cordiality, or empathy. We see how he wields that power over other individuals, and then we see how he aspires to wield that power over everything else on the planet.
So yeah anyway I just was thinking of this while playing RE4R, hope I'm not posting cringe or whatever. I just like good character writing, and Wesker is one of the more well-done RE characters I feel.
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Honestly, Ivy is much more of a minor character so this isn't as strong of a file I feel, but I still like including her with the other more major characters because I think she's fun to draw!
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