test that assumption at your earliest convenience

Seldom have I felt so out of step with a fandom I loved so much. If you did love this game for what it was, you may not want to read the post below. Spoilers to follow, plus the major disclaimer that all my thoughts come from watching online playthroughs – I have not played this game myself, and do not intend to. My interest in pouring through every hidden text document in this thing for explanations for the plot issues raised below is pretty negligible: if I have to work that hard to follow the internal logic of a story, it’s already failed.

My problems with this game could probably stretch to a whole mini series of rants. But let's start with the big one: gender. Because this one goes all the way back to my first impressions, and I’ve been sitting on my hands over this one far too long.

Back when I wrote about my reaction to the trailer, the part I was really biting my tongue over was Grace's own portrayal. We're in the offices of the FBI, actively discussing a murder investigation ‒ so why the fuck am I watching our new heroine shyly adjust her glasses, stammer over a basic conversation with her boss, and generally portray all the body language of someone's moe waifu? Is this seriously meant to be a professional crime scene investigator?

But maybe, thought I, this wasn't wholly fair. Obviously, the game isn't going to make us spend the whole runtime as a shy little stuttering girl; Grace is going to have to take enough levels in badass to tackle the final boss with a shotgun and a grenade launcher eventually, right?

Aha. Ahahahaha. Ha. Oh, the more fool me!

No, we will never see Grace wielding a grenade launcher. We will never see her wield anything heavier than a handgun. We’ve got Leon to do that for her!

Now, I do want to say here, if you liked Grace, if you saw yourself in her, or if she spoke to you in any way, this post is not an attack on you. You are allowed to enjoy a character whose portrayal bothered me.

For all my issues with this thing, there are still major scenes in Grace’s story that worked better than they had any right to. Her big climactic moment of getting to announce the truth about Spencer is pretty damn satisfying. The scene where she has to take a scared, disabled little girl, out of the (relative, and questionable) safety of her cell to try and get them both out of the building alive has all the right tension. Her freak-out at Emily’s horrific death, that has her lash out at Leon and run off to give the villains a chance to talk her around – well, fuck me, but I actually pretty much bought where Grace was coming from in that moment. There are stories in which a character like Grace would probably have worked fine for me.

RE9 was not that story.

I would like to be able to give Grace some credit here as a solid portrait someone who has never recovered from horrific childhood trauma. Faced with the horrors of RE9, I’d venture that, most of us wouldn’t do much better than Grace, realistically speaking. But it’s hard for me to give that excuse much weight when Ethan is our obvious comparison point, and everything in her background suggests that Grace should be so much more capable than Ethan, not less. She’s introduced to us an FBI crime scene analyst! She arrives on scene carrying a gun! (Buried at the bottom of her backpack, for some reason, but she must have some training with it.) Even if she’s not a field agent, dealing with grisly murder investigations is supposed to be her day job!

Meanwhile, Ethan remains the card-carrying archtype of every middle-class white-person stumbling cluelessly into a horror movie scenario. His total relevant background experience ends at ‘might have lived in Texas for some of his life.’ And yet even he has more fucking chill in the face of danger than poor Grace does. Fuck, Ashley had more chill than this, and she's a teenage girl!

And on the subject of Grace’s day-job, I have to ask, why exactly is she an FBI agent? I’m asking this both for in-universe logic and why-do-this on a meta level: why would someone like Grace choose that career path, and what plot role does it serve? Nominally, investigating a recent crime scene is the reason she’s sent to the hotel where her mother was killed all those years before, but we could’ve just as easily achieved the same with an anonymous phone call from her stalker promising the ‘truth’ about her mother’s death. Being FBI means she arrives carrying a gun, but RE has plenty of other ways to get those to you, and an American who saw their mother murdered as a child (and who is about to enter a shady location) might well have bought a gun without the career excuse.

Maybe Grace’s job is meant to contextualise how she has the skills to use all that convenient biotech equipment that lets her craft bullets and shit out of infected blood (...somehow?) But if so, I hate to break it to you, Capcom, but that’s a whole other job, done by lab techs, who won’t usually visit crime scenes at all. There’s also some very vague suggestion that her work for the FBI is what it made it so hard for the villains to get to her, but come the fuck on – Grace was an orphaned teenager for years before she joined the FBI. That answer doesn’t hold any water at all.

So if Grace’s FBI status plays no role in the plot, why would Grace, the character, join the FBI? The obvious answer – and the one I assumed based on first impressions – was that she was motivated by a desire to find the truth about her mother’s death. But the Grace we get in game shows insultingly little awareness that there’s any mystery there to investigate, let alone any active interest in solving it. The fact she’s being sent to a new crime scene at the location of her mother’s murder seems to be important only in that going back there will be a traumatic experience. The idea that Grace might even volunteer for the job, so she could investigate whether the two incidents are linked, seems to have occurred only to the villains, who are using the location to bait her out.

Not until she’s locked in the hotel does Grace even remember that her mother left ‘something important’ (THE ultimate MacGuffin that solves the whole plot) behind a portrait shortly before her death. If Grace had the least interest in the truth, what’s kept her from going back for it years ago? For most of the scenes we spend with her, Grace is too damaged and traumatised to ask the obvious questions that we, the audience, have been screaming at the screen. This is some real Ethan Winters level of obliviousness, only without most of the privileged-middle-class-white-man excuses. How on earth does this poor, fragile woman even do a job that involves looking a photos of dead bodies at all?

(The irony of this, for anyone who read my first impressions post, was that it’s not even like I was enthusiastic about a “discover the truth about your dead parent’s death!” back when I thought that was what the story was going to be. Well, joke’s on me again, I suppose: it turns out that spending this much time with a character with all the reasons and resources to go looking for answers, but who’s too passive to actually do so, is infinitely more frustrating. It’s the elephant in the room of the plot that you keep expecting to see addressed, but which never actually is.)

If Capcom really were determined to give us a protagonist this damaged, I have to ask, why on earth did they make Grace a nominal FBI agent at all? Like, which came first, the idea of Grace as a professional crime scene investigator, or Grace as so fragile and traumatised she can barely speak to people without staring at the floor and stuttering? Because good god, do those features not dovetail into a coherent character portrait. Is this really what RE thinks a professional woman with an emotionally demanding job looks like? Why am I sudden reminded of old B-movies where the one female ‘scientist’ ends up with a role limited to doing the cooking and lounging around in a bikini? It’s that level of sexist claptrap. Fucking hell, RE, you are usually so much better than this! No way in fuck would we ever see this kind of characterisation with a man in Grace’s role, and you know why not.

It’s not even as though Grace is just one female character out of many better examples. The one other female character you will (very briefly) play in this game is an even tinier, even more helpless little-blonde-girl, in a flashback horror sequence without a happy ending. In non-playable characters, we have the even more helpless Emily: a little girl who is blind, and whose story also ends with her horrific, violent death (the manner in which she’s miraculously brought back in the finale is too much of a joke to take seriously).

Even Sherry has been wheeled out of storage, only to be demoted from field agent to the new Hunnigan, trusted only to take Leon’s calls and look things up for him: now in her 30s, and still being infantalised. The one woman who actually gets portrayed as assertive and confident is Grace’s mother, and she appears only in flashback, fridged in her first scene.

And though Grace does feel like a well-realised character in many respects, as a portrait of someone living with trauma, she’s also frustratingly safe. Grace does not have trust issues, she’s not paranoid about strangers, she doesn’t lash out until the moment she’s just watched a little girl die in front of her. She doesn’t resent her mother for keeping secrets from her. She doesn’t have a substance abuse problem, or any other maladaptive coping mechanisms. And she’s never done a single wrong thing in her life. Grace is as unthreatening as a woman could possibly be. She’s here to milk the protective instincts of the White Knights of the world for all they’re worth, and take no risks in doing it.

It doesn't help that with the switch to a new female protag, cutscenes have dropped the tight 1st person POV that made RE7-8 so wonderfully immersive. When we're playing as Ethan, we're playing as Ethan ‒ seeing the world through his eyes. We are Ethan, through every cutscene in the game.

Now we've got a female protag, however, from the earliest trailers, we're looking at her instead. We're a 3rd person observer watching her be delicate and nervous and shy. We’re watching her get violently thrown around and dragged away by horrific monsters, before Leon comes bursting in to save her. I’m not fucking here for that, okay? I’m just not.

Now, I know in writing this that there’s probably already someone frothing at the mouth to tell me I’m not allowed to call Resident Evil sexist, because they gave us Jill, and Claire, and maybe even Ada – all women who are allowed to use grenade launchers (while sporting the physiques of supermodels, because women who tot heavy weaponry around professionally don’t have muscles, silly!)

To which I can only respond, so where are Claire, Jill and Ada lately? Because Leon’s whole Big Angst is that he’s dying of post-Raccoon-City-itis – as is Sherry, and apparently most everyone else who survived that whole kerfuffle. So you know who else may well be dying of post-Raccoon-City-itis? Claire. Jill. And Ada. (Also Barry, but when was the last time anyone remembered he exists?) All of whom should logically be pretty invested in all the events we’re watching unfold, and whom Leon might want to make sure get a dose of that convenient cure-all from the end of the game.

So it’s pretty interesting that none of those major iconic women even get mentioned in this game. Not even to assure us they got lucky somehow, and aren’t desperately in need of a cure themselves.

So why not? Why is Sherry, who was only a child at Raccoon City, the only one worth remembering and putting up there on screen? Well, I’d hardly be the first to point out that Claire, Ada and Jill would all logically be just as old as Leon is now. And old women don’t get to appear in video games. Definitely not old women who used to be young and hot! Gamers can’t fap to that!

Also before anyone gets the idea all my problems with this particular RE title involve nitpicking every female character who gets any screentime (and even those who don’t) ‒ well, guess what: this is the game that made me kind of hate Leon too. And I do say this as someone who loved the guy in previous titles!

Leon comes to RE9 in full knowledge he probably has only a day or two at most left to live, and he’s using those hours to hunt down a former Umbrella dude called Victor Gideon. Why this is how he’s spending his final hours is a mystery I never did get an answer to, not even when Gideon ties Leon to a chair and asks him that question under threat of violence.

Initially, I had the impression Leon had reason to think Gideon had the key to a cure that would save his life. But, much like the idea Grace had any interest in solving her mother’s murder, this is an assumption based on what a rational person in Leon’s position might be doing, not on anything that actually happens in the story. Throughout RE9, Leon displays no interest in or expectation of finding a cure, for himself or anyone else who’s dying of the same condition, and ultimately stumbles onto one entirely by accident. Why is a dying man wasting his final hours on the trail of a criminal he doesn’t seem to have any existing connection to, and who he may not live long enough to apprehend? Why doesn’t Leon have any backup? Why is Sherry enabling him? Why does it take until the final scenes for the game to remember that people like Chris and Team Dog-Dog exist, and could definitely be helping, rather than leaving a task apparently this important to a single, dying man?

This is not me nitpicking here, this is me noticing that the game itself asked this question out loud, via Gideon, and then never bothered to supply an answer. Do I really have to go hunting down missable text documents to find out why the story is happening at all?

Having seen the story to its conclusion, my best guess at an answer is this: Leon is out there chasing this random villain alone because he’s going to die, and he’s decided the Manly Thing To Do is to die doing something meaningful. And he hasn’t told anyone but Sherry about it, because Sherry is the one person without the authority to tell him he’s being a fucking moron. If nabbing Gideon is important enough to die over, it’s important enough to call in backup over, you stupid git.

Over the final hours of the game, Leon’s objectives crystalise even further. He just wants to save one more sad little blonde girl before he croaks! Nothing else matters, because saving helpless little blonde girls is this guy’s life mission ‒ and he’s just met the blondest little stuttering mess he’s seen in years.

God, this game works so fucking hard to pull every possible heartstring where Leon is concerned, lookit all his trauma! Lookit all these gratuitous Raccoon City callbacks! Look how much he caaaaaarerrres about saaaaavvviiing people! Y’know, as long as those people are sad little blonde girls. If those people are the many innocent civilians killed in the street after Victor Gideon spots Leon following him, and triggers a spontaneous zombie outbreak to delay him? Yeah, he’ll maybe mention that to Sherry in passing. We all know biohazard outbreaks in crowded streets basically take care of themselves, after all! Leon can’t waste any time making sure none of those zombies got away, he’s got a badguy to pursue to a whole new location, where said badguy will trigger another fucking outbreak as a distraction (indoors this time, at least), with dozens more victims, because Leon goes and walks right in through the front door with no backup, no intelligence, no change in strategy whatsoever. Our hero!

Besides, as we all know from a few thousand police shootings, the only thing that matters in these situations is catching the badguy! And the only way to approach them is to bust in the front door with no plan. Civilian casualties? Psh, they’re not people, they’re just NPCs! Leon hasn’t had any chance to get to know those people, and most of them aren’t girls, and aren’t helpless, and aren’t even blonde! And I’m sure he made sure not to hit any of their vital points when he shot them all down, since that’s apparently a thing he can do.

Does this sound harsh? Look, I have a fucking thing about civilian casualties being treated as not-a-big-deal as long as our main protagonists make it out alive. I have a thing about "rescue missions" that kill twice as many people as they rescue. I call that thing "basic human empathy." It’s just nice when characters can at least take a fucking moment to acknowledge that all that collateral is, y’know, fucking awful. (Ethan does, watching the massacre in the village that culminates with Elena’s death. Heck, the fact the Leon of RE2R did such a good job of convincing me he does actually care about regular people in a crisis is why I used to love him so much to begin with.)

This is so much of the same shit that made RE6 so viscerally fucking unpleasant for me. People are dying in the fucking street, not from a tragic accident, or even a motivated terror attack, but because regular humans are so utterly expendable to the villains of this universe that dozens or even thousands of lives can be thrown away as no more than a fucking distraction. A whole infected city is not longer a setting worth multiple games of material, it’s Chapter 1 of Campaign B – an inconvenience for our hero to elbow his way through to make his next extraction point, pausing barely long enough to pretend like they give a shit. A million deaths is no longer a tragedy, or even a statistic, it’s fucking background noise. Jesus, even back in RE6, Leon managed to convince me he cared more than this!

It does not help that RE9 is again trying to sell the idea that Leon’s grand tragedy in RE2 was not being able to save people, something that was already giving me major record scratch confusion back in RE4R. This time, we’re even making a token attempt to justify it, by giving Leon a significant flashback to the RE2R scene with Kendo the gunstore owner and his tragically infected daughter. That was a genuinely great scene, one of my favourites in this whole franchise to date – but trying to recontextualise it into “a time Leon failed to save a little girl” does not work on any level. That poor kid was doomed long before Leon and Ada ever walk in; the tension of that scene is about a poor father having to accept the reality of the situation, and in Leon’s burning need to be able to offer victims like Kendo real answers and some kind of justice. The attempt to reframe all Leon’s angst into “if I could’ve save just one truly helpless person from a mass casualty event!” is all kinds of gross.

Realistically, there is not a single person in RE2 who Leon could have saved, but didn’t. His plotline is not about saving people, it’s about trying to prove himself under the worst possible circumstances, and trying to bring Umbrella to justice. The whole reason Claire’s story didn’t work for me is how fast she ditches all her original goals in favour of saving this one little girl she briefly met about five minutes ago. Even if doing so means convincing Sherry’s mother to take time out from trying to save the city to save just this one little girl instead. Metaphorically wading through the bodies of NPCs to save just one top-billed character isn’t really better than elbowing aside the dying masses between our hero and the villain. The Leon of RE2R did not need to fixate on saving any one person for how much he obviously cares about people to come through.

...So help me, but I’m starting to think maybe the writers have decided that Leon’s Great Raccoon City Tragedy is that Claire got to save the helpless little blonde girl, instead of him.

You may also note that even here and now, Sherry is basically still a helpless little girl to Leon. Never mind that RE6 makes her a professional field agent with Wolverine-level healing powers – when Leon runs into her in that game, he’s still got to tell her new partner how important it is to keep Sherry safe. And now, in RE9, little miss once-walked-away-from-a-plane-crash is kept safely back in the office to answer the phone, while a dying old man with a savior complex goes out and does the real man’s work. Leon does not even have the fucking decency to tell her the truth and say goodbye when he’s sure he’s about to die, which is the least respect you’d think she was owed. Such an afterthought is Sherry to this plot that she doesn’t even get to appear in person in the finale, or receive the cure that will presumably save her life on screen.

Not long after the game came out, my dash was briefly aflame with excitement over the discovery that Leon was supposed to be wearing a wedding ring in this game. Myself, I really hope that detail isn’t canonical, not because of any shipper investment, but because that makes RE9 a story in which Leon reached a point where he genuinely thought he was about to die, and did not even try to contact his spouse to say goodbye. This used to be one of my favourite RE characters, why the fuck is this game working so hard to make him into a toxic asshole?

The knots this game ties it in to torture yet more helpless blonde girls are absurd. The whole plot hinges on the idea that Umbrella has spent more than 30 years cloning an endless series of helpless little blonde girls, as vessels in which to implant the memories of their long-dead founder, Spencer. Grace is one of those girls, Emily another. It never actually worked, but hot damn, did they kept trying!

You’d think maybe, at some point since the goddamn nineteen nineties, someone on this project might have pointed out they sure don’t seem to have produced much beyond a whole graveyard full of little dead girls. Maybe someone could’ve suggested that, just maybe, the memories of a dead man just might take a little more easily if they were being implanted in the body of someone with the same general body plan as Spencer himself. Fuck, why not clone Spencer wholesale? We know they’ve got tech for weird cloning shit!

This is not a minor plot problem: that Grace is even supposed to be a Spencer-memory-vessel is never stated aloud, and incredibly easy to miss if you’re not pouring through every document you find. Expecting your audience to pick up from context that Umbrella have been trying to implant their dead founder’s memories into a new vessel is that much more obscure when the vessel bears no resemblance to the original Spencer. But if Umbrella were cloning Spencer wholesale, then Grace and Emily would’ve had to be boys – and who’s gonna fap to that?

What made this game such a frustrating watch for me does not end with the two main characters and the stark gender split between suicidally-toxic-masculine and fragile-traumatised-feminine. I have barely touched on the problems I had even following the plot,  the hilarity of a Wesker clone no-one ever actually recognises as Wesker, or so much else. The burned out crater that was Raccoon City may still have some evil willing to crawl out of the dust for us, but it hasn’t been a residence in years: no location in this game has a fraction of the staying power or personality of the Bakers’ mansion or Miranda’s village. There's a wonderful down-the-rabbit-hole vein of surrealism to those settings that made it so much easier to handwave the odd plothole. These were games that left me genuinely excited to see where the franchise might be headed next.

Turns out the answer was back to the same old shit they were doing 20 years ago, only now no-one with boobs gets to use a rocket launcher anymore. C’est la vie.