sacrifical lamb

parasitize ⸻  to infest or live on or with as a parasite.

unaffiliated, semi-selective roleplay blog for ᴀsʜʟᴇʏ ɢʀᴀʜᴀᴍ of ʀᴇsɪᴅᴇɴᴛ ᴇᴠɪʟ 4 ( original + remake ).

⸻ memes, verses, headcanons. ( links tbd! )

rules under cut!

how foolish she must look amongst men twice her size, hobbyists and soldiers who look at her ( her shoes too clean, her jewellery worth more than their rusting pickup trucks baking in the parking lot sun, silk scarf knotted around her wrists like an ostentatious bandage ). hope rekindled in the wake of spain ⸻ no smile can shirk the gnawing in her bones each time she walks alone, each time a single car passes too slowly, each time she wakes up in the dead of night slick with sweat and the rattling of heart; caged bird it is. her hands tremble on the gun. they always do.

"oh," tension washed away by mild relief ⸻ it does not free her from the sedimentary awkwardness of a young woman out of place in this shooting range. nonetheless, a single offer from another woman does not feel as patronizing as it would from any other. she smiles, quivering hands pulling the gun back into her space. self defence, she imagines, is an easier task to master when you are certain it is your finger pulling the trigger.

those two women ( once-women, parasitized women, she will never know ) sit at the gate of her nightmares, the opalescent fabric that covers their head ruined by the slow crawl of blood. in her resistance she killed them ⸻ in her inability to resist she almost killed him.

"too long." perhaps her tone is ill-fitting ⸻ spoke with all the displeasure of a all-night study session dragging on into the midday haze, beyond the precipice of exhaustion and into the second wind of invigoration, a temporary boon. she cannot gauge how many hours ( or days ) have passed, as if her metamorphosis into nothing but cargo had transported her not only across oceans but realities into a realm of permanent dusk unable to evolve into dawn. the sun itself has abandoned this rural piece of the world, the overcast sky smothering out all but the fires: those atop wooden torches, the pyres of bodies mangled into iconography, the burning wreckage of cannon fire.

should she stay still too long she is certain her legs will fail her, as if the tide of exhaustion will finally reach her, seizing each ankle with the pain she has managed to stave off ( or worse, the puppetmaster pulling at her limbs, a prisoner not in reinforced steel but the unholy cathedral of flesh and bone ) ⸻ survival, she finds, is exhilarating but the cost is sure to decimate. this is not her life. this is not what she was built for. she lacks the training, the natural talent. irregardless, she is trying her best.

replaying the original so i can get my picks of what to take from each game as my 'canon' and regardless of opinions on the originals writing / dialogue ( which is very 2000s and certainly regarding ash is inappropriate half the time ) i do think the remake fails when it comes to capturing the comedy of the original. part of the charm is l.eon thinking he's very funny and witty ( he's not ) - it's supposed to be a dumb american action movie that's why all these characters fit the tropes and stereotypes you would expect. i spoke briefly about how whilst i like s.addler in the remake, i think his og counterpart is just more interesting - they feel like two different characters instead of an improved one. characters like r.amón especially lose a lot of their flavour when all the comms scenes are removed. it's the one issue i have with all the remakes - they lack that campy charm by opting for serious 'realism'. l.eon still makes jokes but none of them land because he's so much more serious and whilst his jokes were bad in the og, i think him deflecting / coping with humour is an interesting trait.

i think operation j.avier suffers the worst from it though. they had the chance to add it in-game, even in just a cutscene, to finally give context and backstory and instead they changed it entirely to remove any mention of m.anuela ( even j.avier himself ), the virus ( though i understand many people new to the series due to the remakes won't know what t v.eronica is ), j.ack's infection and dismissal ( him working for s.addler and not w.esker is an odd change, but if they committed to it could have really worked - a disabled, disgruntled, isolated war veteran let down by the government is the perfect target for a cult ) but not to mention that the 'you can't save anyone' / 'this time it has to be different' makes far more sense when you consider m.anuela ( especially as l.eon could have no impact on saving m.arvin and by this point he already knows a.da is alive ) - especially if they canonized the 'bad' ending where she turns to ash ( as we never see / hear from her again, which is fine - personal take that not every one-time character has to return, even if i like them ). the parallel of a young innocent woman, infected, under l.eon's protection, would have worked much better than 'the government killed all these men for...reasons?' ( why were they killed? did s.immons have something to do with it, showing more of his corruption prior to six? were they infected with the virus they don't mention? as the series progresses this happens more and more, and l.eon himself aids in the coverups of rc etc etc, which could have added more context to the issues between him and j.ack but instead it just comes across for people who have are new that j.ack's blaming l.eon for...reasons? ). they could have sown the seeds of future events whilst bringing in the important things that get missed because it's in a railshooter side game and it's a missed opportunity! also i think if they did acknowledge the canon of m.anuela's survival that her and ash could have gotten on really well ) even if it's unlikely they'd meet.

ash definitely 'won' in terms of improvement ( though i never found her annoying, fandom just was outrageously sexist / harsh on her - whilst it's better now, her being relegated to the 'braincell haver' or the 'daughter / sister / niece' of l.eon ( and usually l.uis) when she's an adult woman not that much younger or the rampant over sexualisation of modders which is a plague upon every modding scene is still... not great. god forbid we treat women as more than accessories ) but i do wish they kept in a litte of her sharpness. it's been a long time since i've played the og so i'll have more thoughts but definitely the scene where she runs away / they get separated is a huge improvement. i've seen people say before the og ash was 'bitchy' but her shoving l.eon away always felt like panic - she's frightened! the remake definitely did a better job of showing it ( and the effects of the p.laga in general, although i do think they should have kept in the scene with l.eon and a.da, even if they changed it so he doesn't choke her, to show how it's effecting him too - especially as iirc he isn't given a dominant p.laga like ash is so he should be suffering far less control, although i suppose maybe that is shown in how he's rendered immobile repeatedly whereas she is controlled? who knows ). either way, the relationship between them two of them is vastly improved and though i wish we'd gotten to see more of her interactions with the rest of the cast ( though i do find her 'for l.uis' a nice touch - i'd like to explore their relationship but definitely the revelation that he's partly responsible because whilst l.eon knows, she doesn't ). it would have been nice to get a gauge on her relationship with her father, for her to talk about her experience being kidnapped and growing to trust l.eon ( especially as her security failed to protect her / were in on it and the subsequent distrust it would form in the government ).

"okay, yeah. okay, i can do that." of all the things they've endured, a wayward scrape, a cut, a collage of purple and yellow bruises mottling her skin, all of it seems like background noise. hazy and unobtrusive, unworthy of recognition. she sits atop an overturned locker, focusing on the reflections of the flickering lights against the metal and not the long needle of whatever that thing was jutting out her thigh ( at this point, she may as well forgo her tights altogether, dotted with holes where pale skin peeks through like stars ). "go for it."

it's her own fault, she knows; too slow, too slow. more than anything she wants him to hold her hand and lead her through the maze of this island, to cling to a shirt that fits him all too well as if it is her single lifeline out of here ⸻ isn't it? she braces herself for the barb to be removed, staunch in her refusal to cry. she can be brave. she is brave.

even now she is afraid to look at her own hands as if, between blinks, they will be black veins spiderwebbing across her pale skin ⸻ the urge, then and now, to dig, to scratch, to tear the pieces of it's carapace out of her chest, a replacement for the idle doodling on her notes, picking at the flaking varnish on her nails. in the low light of dusk she had seen luis's scar, an ugly thing she expected to share, a lifetime of planning outfits around the covering of it in her future but neither of them were opened up in that little laboratory ( thank god, how could she had preformed a surgery like that? a little know-how, luis had said, and she lacked it ) and it sits, festering, in the back of her mind that a piece of the puzzle was missing, a vital step in the process they had stumbled past.

he's not the type to have a heart-to-heart, she had thought ( still does, on occasion ) but he had been gentle with her. supportive. encouraging. she likes to think she knows him and worries, silently, that it's all just work to him. the gesture is appreciated ⸻ who else could she talk to about it? who else would understand? anyone else who could is dead.