Lynn

I think people are misunderstanding the ring scene at the end of RE9.

And I say that as someone who has done an absurd amount of research on wedding ceremonies.

When I got married I wrote my own vows and ceremony script. Which meant I spent a stupid amount of time studying the structure of weddings — why we say what we say, why rings are used, what they symbolize, where that moment sits in the ceremony.

And almost every ceremony includes some variation of this explanation:

The ring is circular.

No beginning. No end.

Infinite.

It represents a promise that is meant to endure beyond whatever the present moment looks like.

Here’s a piece from my own ceremony:

These rings represent the vows and promises you’ve willingly exchanged. They reflect the commitment those words inspire and all your hopes and dreams for the future.

Hope.

That’s the word that matters.

So when Leon S. Kennedy — a man pushing fifty, who has spent the last thirty years fighting bioterrorism, drowning himself in alcohol, flirting with death on a near-annual basis, carrying the weight of entire cities on his conscience — quietly puts on a wedding ring…

The moment isn’t actually about who he married.

The moment is about the fact that he did.

Because if you step back and look at Leon as a character, that’s the real miracle.

This is a man whose life has been defined by survival, sacrifice, and loss. Raccoon City. Spain. Endless missions. Watching people die. Being ordered to do things he never wanted to do. Living inside systems that grind people down.

Leon has always been written as someone who doesn’t expect a future. He lives mission to mission. Crisis to crisis.

So the symbolism of the ring is almost aggressively simple.

It means at some point he chose something outside the war.

A life.

A commitment.

A future he intends to live long enough to see.

And that’s why the ring is powerful.

Not because it confirms a ship. Not because it resolves thirty years of fandom arguments.

But because it quietly says something about Leon Kennedy that the series rarely lets him have:

He survived long enough to build a life.

It’s a promise.

And more importantly, it’s a choice.

Someone stood in front of him and said I choose you.

And Leon — the guy who spent decades believing he was disposable — said it back.

The ring is the physical symbol of that exchange.

Hope for the future.

And for a character like Leon?

Anyway, the more I stare at this pic, the more I'm convinced that it's not AI.

So I ran it through my new best friend ChatGPT for a more detailed analysis:

JJ from RoE is personal friends with Dusk Golem and has been for years. He used this image as the thumbnail for a video about DG's leaks, which included information that DG hadn't even put on Twitter at that point and only told JJ in DMs.

I'm thinking that mfer Dusk Golem slipped his pal a real image of Leon from RE9 to use for his video -- and since RoE has used AI slop in the past, people got rused into thinking this was AI slop also as well.

Fellas.

FELLAS.

I think this pic is real.

And since Grace's official promo photo looks like this:

As someone who's about to get a degree in psychology the Damnation novelization is honestly like a fucking goldmine for Leon's mental state because it gives us a lot of info on how he deals (or rather doesn't deal) with trauma, specifically as it relates to his job.

Realistically, a lot of what Leon does in the novel (and the movie but I honestly like the novel better because then we're privy to Leon's inner dialogue) is very much rooted in PTSD and depression. I've made several posts about it before, but he's got a lot of survivor's guilt stemming from RC. He very strongly believes that it was his job to save everyone-- regardless of the fact that that was impossible and not his job-- so he feels guilty for his own survival and constantly tries to "make up for" that with the things he does afterward. There's even a part in the novelization during the scene where he's drinking from the flask where he mentions how even though he wants to kill himself, he can't go through with it because he feels like it would dishonor the memory of those who died "because of him" so he has to keep fighting to make up for his failures. It's also why he becomes so obsessive about saving people in RE6, even to the point of delusion where Helena has to tell him that it's not possible.

And as far as him not being himself anymore, I think he definitely thinks that, even wayyyy before Damnation. It's even directly brought up in the "I've changed" scene from 4R, and hints toward Leon thinking he's become cold and a "monster," when in actuality he's still the same person he was before Raccoon City (which is what Ada essentially tells him), just... traumatized.

I think him viewing himself as a monster and a demon is both connected to his mental health issues as well as his perception of morality. He never wanted to do this, he never wanted to become a government agent and have to do the government's dirty work especially since he knows that the government very much had a hand in a lot of this. From the novelization of OG4, it's even touched upon that he doesn't like having to kill the ganados because he knows that, on some level, they're still human and that they were forced to become monsters against their will. So essentially, even though he was forced into it, he still blames himself and sees himself as a bad person because of the things he's been forced to do. And that idea was probably reinforced by the government and higher-ups which would celebrate his kills, labeling him their "best weapon" against bioterrorism.