Dumpster.Dean

boobies

We got a nice surprise this morning with Capcom dropping the next RE9 trailer at the Nintendo event! For sake of not rehashing things I've already covered in previous posts, I'm only going to be talking about the new things we saw.

And right off the bat, one of most intriguing things to me is the scene of Grace walking down the street in the rain. When we saw this scene in the original trailer, there were all sorts of theories about who the people on the street could be-- Leon, Ada, Chris, Jill, Claire, pretty much every RE character-- but it turns out they were just random people on the street and the main focus was Grace walking through.

We then get to see Grace doing a little investigating. It looks like these were the murders discussed in the first trailer we saw for the investigation Grace got assigned to.

We get to see a bit more of Grace and her mom from the gameplay footage we saw a few weeks ago, but the the notable edition of Alyssa slipping a folder behind a painting on the wall while they were running. I suspect whatever is in that folder is the reason she was killed. And since we later see adult Grace looking at the painting, I think she's gonna retrieve the folder and find out what her mother was "hiding" from her. We do see a sequence immediately after this of Grace grabbing some kind of folder thing, but it's too dark to tell where she's grabbing it from-- it almost seems like out of box or something to me, so I think its a bit of suggestive editing there.

Coming up on the end of the trailer, we get a cool sequence showing what I think may be the exterior of either the Wrenwood or the psychiatric center while some creep-- probably 'Viktor'-- narrates about how he's been watching someone (presumably Grace) and she's not like other people, she's unique.

And perhaps the most interesting part of the trailer is that we finally get to see more of 'Viktor'/the hooded guy. It's intermixed with some interesting shots of various enemies, some of which appear to be some form of zombie. And an Umbrella logo shot!

And then a close-up shot of this guy! Based on the cracked lips and skin, it appears this is also 'Viktor'/the hooded guy. He's wearing some kind of specialized eyewear set that looks similar to the sort to of loupes a surgeon might wear, granted this has a lot more lenses and seems simultaneously more makeshift and medieval.

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With a lot of new fans coming into the franchise and dudebro fans being upset about Leon's rather feminine appearance with the release of RE4R, I wanted to do a deep dive into the history of his character design and Capcom's intentions with his character. In short, Leon has always been more feminine because that's how he was designed, that's what Capcom wanted. And despite this being a well-documented fact when looking into that history, dudebro fans will continue to bitch and complain. But, these complaints of Leon being too pretty, too feminine, too "gay," or these "new fans" trying to "pretend Leon is gay" etc. have been going on for decades.

Some of the earliest concept art for Leon depicts him in a crop top with various necklaces-- a choker and a pendant specifically. When designing his character, it was stated that they wanted him to be a foil to Chris and had actually ditched some concept art because they believed he looked to similar to Chris. Hideki Kamiya, Leon's original creator, gave similar statements. Now, keep in mind that while Chris wasn't originally designed to look like he did in RE5, he was still designed to look like the all-American military macho-man. Leon was... not.

Additionally, when creating Leon, they drew inspiration for his appearance from River Phoenix in the 90s. During that time, River was one of Hollywood's pretty boys and was very well-known during that time for playing Mike, a queer sex worker, in the film My Own Private Idaho (1991).

In the notes for the characters and designs for the original RE2, the Research on Biohazard 2: Final Edition made reference to the fact that Leon retained his "boyish appearance" seemingly despite his age. I'll let this screenshot from the dictionary for "boyish" speak for itself.

This isn't the only time this has been acknowledged, however. In the Vendetta novelization, which came out in 2017, Leon is described as being pretty, akin to that of a model. For comparison, Chris was described as looking like he was built from stone.

In RE4R, Krauser refers to Leon as "pretty boy," which at the time was a usually-derogatory term for gay men, or men that were perceived as more feminine. It's a similar story for the original game. If the player returns to the cop cars after Leon exits the vehicle, one of the cops will sarcastically ask if Leon forgot his makeup. Futhermore, in Degeneration, Greg comments on the fact that Leon doesn't "look" military.

This is far from the first time these sorts of comments and debates have been held, either. Looking through old forum posts, LiveJournal posts, and archived comments sections from teaser pictures, people within the fandom were well aware of Leon's appearance and were rather vocal about it at times for better or for worse.

Now, a lot of the comments point to him being gay specifically, but bear in mind that while within the queer community, we all understand that feminine men doesn't equal gay/queer men, straight people do not see things that way, and especially not in the 2000s. The reasoning sites for a lot of these instances was that he "looks gay".

"Fans" weren't the only ones who complained about this, however. In a 2011 interview about casting Leon in the live action RE movies, Anderson (the director) complained about how difficult it was to find someone who could both be an "action hero" and have "floppy" hair like Leon does, since the top action heroes all have buzzcuts.