We Were In A Race To Grow Up

I don’t know if you noticed, but the Leon that we see in Requiem is different.

At 21, Leon starts off as a greenhorn kid whose whole entire life took a turn. He was in the wrong place on the wrong night — the desperate need to do the right thing as an officer accidentally roping him into years of involuntary federal service.

Unlock this cell, and I’ll give you this. Sorry, I can’t do that. I have to talk to the chief first. (RE2make)

At 27, Leon has 6 years of USSTRATCOM training under his belt. He’s weary, slowly climbing the ladder of distrust for those around him, but he isn’t fully there. The RE4make does an incredibly good job at this characterization. Although he’s less trusting of those around him, he still exhibits that “Scouts Honour” moral code.

Major! You’re not thinking straight! You’re still a kid, holding onto fantasies of what’s right and wrong. […] You can’t save her, you can’t save anyone. Give it up, Krauser! (RE4make)

At 49, something’s changed.

During his perspective of pathing through the care center, he comes off as deeply jaded. Not only are his voice lines strikingly apathetic in comparison to the past, but his combat style is brutal and bloody in a way we’ve never seen before.

This place is infested. […] What a fuckin’ shame. (RE9)

This Leon fights and kicks to destroy, in comparison to before, where he only kicks to make space so he can reload.

This Leon sneaks behind zombies to shoot them in the back of the head and looks angry while doing so, in comparison to before, where he only does reactionary takedowns and grapples.

He’s aggressive. The way Leon fights — meticulous, crushing, straight for the kill — feels like he’s running out of time. And he is.

Yesterday, Through Today, Until Tomorrow

Earlier, it was revealed that Leon is fighting an illness, one that has already killed 6 different survivors of the Raccoon City incident. It’s T-Virus — the remnants of the infection initially dormant in the bodies of those exposed to outbreaks. Over time, the virus mutates after building an immunity to natural antibodies.

Leon has embarked on one final personal search for a potential cure. It's likely that he's operating without explicit permission from the DSO, as his usual handler Ingrid Hunnigan is absent. Instead Sherry, having been pulled from field work due to the progression of her own infection, acts as his FOS.

This led him to the Chronic Care Center, which has been run by T-Virus researcher Victor Gideon since the dissolvement and bankruptcy of Umbrella. At the Care Center, Leon doesn’t find the cure he's hoping for.

Instead he finds an inconclusive report, a photograph of Grace, and a redacted file containing the word “Elpis”. With what we’re given at this point in the game, we’re to assume that both Raccoon City and Grace herself have something to do with this mystery word.

Leon, at this point, is in stage 2 of this latent T-Virus infection. The virus has spread to multiple extremities, notably his hands and his neck.

He doesn’t know how long he has left. Stage 3 is next, and it's terminal. So, Leon’s goal naturally shifts. If he can’t find a cure, he’ll go to Raccoon City instead, and try to look for an answer to everything he's just found.

Gathering everything I’ve said just now, we as the players come to the conclusion that Leon is in genuine pain, and bone-tired of his war. He’s fought too hard for too long, and this time, the stakes are too high.

So, he gets in his car, and heads to the center of Raccoon City.

Effective at this exact moment, Leon has gone AWOL to die.

But When The Plant Blew Up/1998, Forever And A Day

Once in Raccoon City, we walk alongside Leon as he works to get to the city center. And once we do, we see the RPD.

At the precinct doors, Leon can barely bring himself to look up and meet the ruins. He has brief flashbacks of the people he met that night, specifically his Lieutenant Marvin Branagh, who died saving him.

This confirms something crucial. In Requiem, the Leon we see is built off this emotional development. He is the one who formed a bond with his lieutenant in his dying moments, and the one who carried that loss forward with him.

In RE4make, Leon bringing Marvin’s knife with him to Spain isn’t just a detail — it establishes a throughline. It confirms we’re following Leon A, someone who has carried the loss of that night for years.

Later, Leon — having run into his welcome banner, and a taunt of 'you can’t save anyone' written on a piece of paper — has little to no reaction to what he’s seeing in front of him.

He pauses to take it all in, plucks the note to read it, and immediately crumples it to toss it aside. This phrase is something that used to be such a core trigger for his character, and now, it’s brushed off almost as quickly as we read it.

We continue on through the West Office, where Leon finds Marvin’s name plate and the party plans they made for his first day as an officer. Here, we get a voice line from Leon – a gruff and clipped:

Hey, Lieutenant Branagh. Kennedy… reporting for duty.

But what strikes me the most about this moment at the nameplate — and the few moments of interaction with key photographs and puzzles scattered around — is that all of these are optional.

These interactable moments don’t lock us in cutscenes. They are things we choose to engage with as the player.

It shows us a lot about Leon’s hesitance. Even when he’s walking through the RPD and directly facing the remnants of his past that are all around him, he’s restrained. He chooses to parse through it all one at a time, not fully ready to face exactly what he will find in front of him.

A Piece of Shrapnel Flew and Slowed That Part of You

However, when we get to the back door of Kendo’s shop just past the RPD, that changes.

Leon loses the choice he had before. Here, he’s forced to pass through a door he’s never walked behind, and forced to confront what happened there 30 years ago.

Leon pauses well before the threshold, and we get another flashback. But it's not of Robert, it’s of Emma. It’s a standalone shot of his daughter.

Notably, this standalone shot lingers longer than it does in the original scene from the RE2make. Here, the memory of Emma in that doorway is not just passing. It’s being dwelled on by Leon.

A beat passes, and hesitantly, Leon opens the door that Robert took Emma behind. The first voice line that rings in his head is heartbreaking.

Terminate? That’s my fucking daughter.

What’s interesting, though, is that this is not the first thing Robert says to Leon in that original scene. This happens midway through the original scene, and is actually a direct response to something that Ada says. She tells Kendo to:

Step aside. We need to terminate her before she turns. (RE2make)

Here, Leon isn’t just remembering Robert and his words — he’s remembering an exchange. The clinical language used to refer to an infected daughter, and the immediate visceral rejection of it from her father.

In these moments, Leon’s entire demeanour shifts. He drops to one knee to face Robert’s bones, the words said that night continuing to ring through his head. And as he looks around the small room, his eyes catch something new — something Requiem introduces to this sequence.

It’s an Umbrella prescription that Robert filled for Emma. It lingers on a single detail.

Relation to Patient: Father.

And where this token of protection lies on the floor, evidence of a father's need to heal and give life, the shotgun Robert used that night is high on a shelf behind him — with Leon caught right in between the two.

It’s only after he reads over the prescription that Leon speaks for the first time.

I am so sorry.

He apologizes, his voice soft and barely held together — caught somewhere in his throat, and his chest. It’s shaken, an involuntary whisper meant for nobody other than the bones of a father before him.

But then, a rupture from outside shakes the ground, and something in him reignites.

Anger, and an anguished vow of never again.

This is strikingly different from how Leon has not only processed the entirety of the RPD, but also different to how he processes this moment in RE2make. There, he initially frames Robert and Emma through his role as an officer.

Helping people like them, that’s why I joined the force. (RE2make)

It’s broad, and principled. It’s rooted in his duty.

But here, that framing is secondary. Leon, at this exact moment in time, is not just seeing another failure as an officer.

His first instinct is to see a daughter, and then her father.

His flashback of Emma alone and Robert’s accompanying voice line, and his reaction to the prescription read less like a memory. It's more like something long repressed finally resurfacing. It’s as if he pushed their familial dynamic aside, like he didn’t fully understand the weight of it at the time. But he has to now, 30 years later. It is inescapable.

We do see more of Marvin after the RPD, but it's not through flashbacks or voice lines. It's through letters left behind scattered all across Raccoon City.

But the letters aren’t left behind by Marvin himself — they’re left behind by his daughter, Meryl.

The letters detail Meryl leaving a safe house and heading deeper into the infected city, all because she wants to see her father again. The second letter appears right after Kendo’s shop, in the windshield of a decrepit car. It's only here that Leon realizes who the author of these letters actually is.

This girl… it can’t be.

They continue through the alleyway behind the shop, where we find Meryl’s shoes, and a charm that she dropped presumably before she died. The charm was initially Marvin’s, and the tooltip describes it as a gift he gave to his daughter.

In the ruins of the city, immediately after these two moments, Leon has one final showdown with the Tyrant — someone that terrorized him that night, a fight that he was unprepared for at the end.

He’s not unprepared now.

Right before shooting out a rocket that Tyrant is holding, Leon says something we’ve heard before.

I couldn’t save them. But I can stop bastards like you.

You'll Go Fight A War

It takes this version of Leon a long time to get here.

And later, when he’s laid bare and actively dying of stage 3 T-Virus infection, the theme comes back full force.

Grace asks him why he’s even in Raccoon City if he was so sick. Leon responds, and he’s incredibly emotional. It sounds like he’s surrendering. He tells her this is where it all began for him, that he couldn’t make a difference in saving people’s lives no matter how hard he tried. So he is here now. He is chasing Elpis — seeking to destroy it before it can be unleashed.

The good ending of this game, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, shows us something important. Leon finally has a life outside of his job. He made a vow to his spouse — for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.

But in the grief of his terminal infection, he broke that vow.

He takes his ring off, puts his gloves on, and pre-emptively accepts an unknown outcome. In doing so, he’s trying to shed every emotional reminder to the life that he is actively leaving behind.

But Leon, conducting this mission outside of the DSO, needed an operations support — someone in his life that he trusts with everything he has. And over the course of the game, we see Leon try to push that fact aside. He only speaks when necessary, and he chooses to hide the full scope of his progressing infection from her.

But now, after being forced to reminisce on the fathers and daughters of Raccoon City, after coming face to face with two broken families that are defined by that relationship — he can’t forget anymore.

Leon can walk through the RPD and remain composed, because the loss there is scattered — it's spread across people, across an entire building that we don't even get full access to. He can choose to engage with everything on his own terms.

But at Kendo’s, he can’t. It’s one room, one father, and one daughter.

It forces him to truly remember Emma. And after he does, he reads the letters he sees and understands something that he didn't before. He finally saw what he missed that night, when he had no emotional connection pulling him towards those family dynamics, because he now has a reason to.

Leon has something he didn’t have back when he was a rookie on his own journey through the city.

Leon has Sherry.

Pathing through the city, now as a surrogate father to Sherry, has unconsciously forced Leon to remember the life he was leaving behind. He saw an infected daughter and a girl searching only to face the worst, and the memories of the life he was supposed to have come back — the protector he was supposed to be to Sherry after so long apart.

And what’s tragic is that the breakdown of their dynamic is not for the reasons we’d assume, like their gruelling job, or endless years of war. The true answer is a lot simpler.

It’s because they got infected the day they met.

He realizes now that he is just like Marvin, and he is just like Robert — fathers that are forced to lose their daughters to bioterror.

He makes Grace vow to destroy Elpis if he can’t, and makes her promise that another outbreak like this will never happen again.

Leon will die, and right after him will Sherry — he is hours away from his body fully shutting down. And if it must happen to him, if it must happen to his daughter, he will use his last dying breath to make sure that it doesn’t happen to another family ever again.

I'll Go Missing

Sherry Birkin is the daughter of William Birkin, a long-time Umbrella researcher. During the Raccoon City incident, William injected himself with the G-Virus to save his own life. The G-Virus duplicates by embryo implants to a suitable host.

Sherry shared his genetic makeup by blood, so he started to search for her across the entirety of NEST — a blind rampage spurred by the progression of the virus in his body.

Sherry, at only ten years old, was forced to watch her father die in front of her alone — she had to watch his mind get taken over by his own creation. She tries to hide, but eventually is found by him and implanted with a G-Embryo.

Claire comes across Sherry later, with her infection slowly taking over her body. Claire fought to protect and save her, and eventually Sherry had the DEVIL antigen administered to her.

Claire, Leon and Sherry reunite and escape the city. They vow to work together and stop Umbrella once and for all. In the remake, as they’re walking into the sunset — finally free and hand-in-hand — Sherry says something to the two of them.

Hey! You guys can adopt me! We can get a puppy! (RE2make)

This heartfelt scene cements their found-family dynamic. Sherry, a young girl with parents who spent more of their lives at Umbrella than they did with her, was saved due to the heroic actions of Claire and Leon.

But keeping her protected, administering the antigen to prevent mutations, and ensuring her safe escape from the city — none of that was enough.

The G had taken over the cells in Sherry’s body and mutated alongside her, altering her biology permanently. She was cured of the progression of the disease, but will have it in stasis in her body for the rest of her life. This made her blood a target for research.

In the aftermath of that night, Sherry was taken into protective custody by the US government.

Here, Leon was given an ultimatum – either he joins USSTRATCOM and fights against bioterror, or the government will take Sherry’s blood for their own anti-bioterror program, and she will die due to these experiments.

And Leon chooses to fight to protect her. Sherry is the last survivor of Raccoon City that Leon has the opportunity to save — something he desperately wanted to do to anyone he came across that night, something he failed at over and over again.

A file in RE6 proves this. Leon said he was close to giving up, but he remembered that Sherry needed him. She was his reason to keep fighting this war.

To tell you the truth, I even thought about ending it — several times, actually — with just a quick bullet to the head. But I didn’t give up. Sherry needed me. […] She was our reason for not giving up — especially for Claire. (Leon and the Raccoon City Incident, RE6)

But even though Leon accepted the ultimatum that ensured the safety of Sherry, she was still forced to live her life in federal confinement. One of the official reasons was to keep her safe from bioterrorists — more specifically, to keep her safe from Albert Wesker.

Wesker, after the Raccoon City incident and now in possession of superhuman powers, was on the hunt for viral samples with the intention of his spearheading Spencer’s now defunct vision of a new world order.

The reason the U.S. government took Sherry Birkin into custody is twofold: one, they had hoped to study the G-Virus that remained in her blood, and two, they sought to protect her from Albert Wesker, who wanted to possess a sample of the G-Virus. (A Deal With The United States, RE6)

That Picture On The Wall You're Scared Of

Grace Ashcroft is the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft, journalist and Resident Evil Outbreak character. Grace, an F.B.I analyst, is persuaded into exploring the Wrenwood Hotel — a federal mission that is revealed to have been helmed by rival company The Connections, and the place where she watched her mother die.

The trauma of her mother's death forced her to become very reclusive. She folded herself inward, and stopped trying to reach out to others. It’s a form of self-protection, a way to parse through her past.

On her federal mission at the hotel, she is kidnapped by Victor Gideon — a key member of The Connections — and taken to the Rhodes Hill Care Center. Here, Grace wakes up upside down and strapped to a medical gurney, and it’s revealed that Victor has set up an IV to drain her blood.

As Grace tries to escape the Care Center, she meets a little girl named Emily who is being kept in a glass room locked away under the center itself.

Although lacking the natural inclination, Grace vows to protect Emily and escape with her. Through this, she is forced to confront her fear of emotion and her fear of touch. And in doing so, she gains something.

She now has someone who she can make sense of this mess with — a reason to keep going.

I wanted it to be clear that when she meets Emily, this is the moment in the story where she is finally connecting to another human being properly. (Angela Sant’Albano, Vice)

It is later revealed that Emily is a clone. The Connections, for decades, have been running a blood-memory program using the mutated T-Virus in order to gain access to the password that locked Elpis. They have been administering it to all of the girls in the care center, including Emily, to dire results.

After suffering excessive blood loss, Grace can do nothing but watch as the T-Virus mutates Emily.

It Looks Just Like You

Leon has lived this before. We have lived this before. A daughter, hunted, stalked, and taken. A girl watching someone change right before her — the shadow of a person she loves, gone like that.

Here, Leon desperately tries to reason with her. Tells her he understands how she feels, but she has to keep going — we have to keep going. To this, Grace throws the Requiem down to the floor, effectively refusing the protection he offered her earlier.

Leon tries to head after her, but is paralyzed by his own body — stuck in place to stare at her refusal, his infection continuing to spread.

This is a crucial moment. Where Sherry was protected by Leon, Grace leaves. And where Leon seeks to reach out, his body fails him.

And Leon is the only one who can see both outcomes at once.

Held Close All The Time

Before getting the chance to do anything drastic, Grace stumbles into Victor again, and he introduces her to someone we’ve seen before — a clone of Albert Wesker, Zeno.

They interject at the perfect time, and subtly pick up the role of 'protectors'. They tell her it’s okay that she feels lost, because she’s right where she needs to be.

Her and Zeno eventually end up at RPD, where he tells her she is one of Spencer’s projects — one that he favoured over the others. Zeno tells Grace that The Connections have used her blood to try to clone her memory to no avail. They reveal here that Elpis, a powerful mind-control virus, is locked behind a password only she must know.

And because she was made by Spencer, her life's purpose is to release it.

She asks about her mother, if everything that happened to Alyssa truly was her fault — if the people she loved were just collateral in a larger plan, pawns in a pre-determined outcome.

Zeno doesn't give her an answer. He dismisses it all — tells her the death of her mother isn’t the focus here, nor are her failures.

Selfishly, he reduces her entire life to one single purpose, and calls it a 'reason'.

To him, Grace's role as a daughter is reduced to something that's measured by usefulness, and not by loss.

It is only when Grace becomes overwhelmed with this realization that Leon, who has overheard everything, interjects to try to take control of the situation.

Knowing I'm Half Of You

Hey Leon, do you still think about what happened there? […] That night, I was just a kid. Scared and confused… I imagine Grace must feel the same right now.

It is here, in this exact moment, that the game presents Grace and Sherry as mirrored outcomes of the same cycle.

Where Sherry had Leon and Claire to guide her through that night — the good guys who swore above everything to keep her safe — Grace does not.

Grace’s ‘protector’ is now Zeno — the spearhead of The Connections, and a clone of the exact man that Leon’s service protected Sherry from.

And it’s here, after he hears the exchange between Zeno and Grace, that it all clicks for Leon.

In real time, he is seeing history repeat itself — a daughter, freshly faced with loss, being hunted for her blood.

And what does Grace say when she sees Leon for the first time since the water treatment plant?

… Mom?

Subtly, we are seeing another outcome of what would have happened to Sherry if Leon had let her go — if he refused the ultimatum that was given to him all those years ago.

And overtly, the game supplements this protective familial dynamic by having Grace mistake Leon for her mother.

Here, they split. Leon, thinking of Sherry, is forced to go to Kendo’s. Grace, thinking of Alyssa, is forced to go to PANDORA. Two mirrors of the same cycle.

But the RPD isn’t the only time this game does this.

In ARK, the game splits Leon and Grace apart again — and it’s here that these parallels become unavoidable.

Suffering The While, To Lie A Time Or Two

In the elevator up to PANDORA, Leon makes one last attempt to talk to Sherry. He knows he’s going to die, but he wants to reach out to his daughter one last time before he does — talk to her, update her, hear her voice before he can’t anymore.

The connection is static. He has lost his chance. The last thing he hears before he collapses due to pain and exhaustion is Sherry.

But on the other hand, Grace comes across somewhere to inject a magnetic disk into, one that her mother left her the night that she died. As Grace puts the disk in, she is met with countless videos that detail interviews her mother did with Ozwell E. Spencer, the founder of Umbrella.

Grace, in her office in the F.B.I, does not have any pictures of Alyssa around. The last time we see her confronting pictures of her mother is incredibly traumatic. This leads us to believe this is the first time in a long time that she’s seeing her mother in motion, hearing her voice again.

Grace is watching a video of her and her mother meeting for the first time, of her mother holding her as an infant. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Leon collapse.

Leon’s connection is present, but static — Sherry says his name for the last time, and he’s too late. Grace’s connection is clear, suspended in time long past — Alyssa says her name for the first time, and she’s still too late.

Grace rushes to meet Leon at the door, and desperately tries to wake him.

Leon, it’s me, it’s Grace. Please wake up. Hey, you. I was just resting my eyes.

Leon’s lines, in their surrender, are incredibly dismissive. It’s something he says to downplay the severity of the situation — to turn the attention away from himself.

The girl he wants to protect, the one who reminds him of his daughter, is now the one protecting him. She’s pulling him up to his feet, helping him walk alongside her. His service couldn’t save Sherry, and now, he almost died before saving Grace.

And for Grace, this moment means something else entirely. She is watching a different cycle conclude right in front of her eyes.

Her gestures are careful, and her voice is pleading. If Leon doesn’t wake up, she has to watch another protector fall victim to a pre-determined outcome — and just like last time, she’s powerless to stop it.

These last moments in PANDORA make the non-canon ending so much more devastating.

Leon dies without ever having truly saved Sherry, and without being able to properly say goodbye. But he can’t fail another person like her again. So he lifts Grace up, pushes her to safety, and stays down.

And Grace doesn’t leave. She watches from the catwalk as the building self-destructs, and pleads with Leon to come with her. She loses the ability to change this outcome again. Paralyzed, she watches as another person tries to fight for her — as they die for her.

Their final words are said facing each other.

At least I was able to save you. I wish I could have saved you, Leon.

In the canon ending, however, Grace releases Elpis. She is the one to put an end to Progenitor-based viruses after decades of endless carnage. I theorized more on Elpis here.

Elpis, hope itself, restores Grace's agency. It tells her that her role a daughter matters, and she wasn't created to be a tool. She was born, taken in, and loved by Alyssa. Elpis gives her a choice, and that choice is what defines her.

And by releasing it to the world, it cures Leon, and saves Emily. And most importantly, it frees Sherry from the cage she has been in her whole life.

This Was All For You

For a long time, Leon believed that nobody remembers that boy he used to be that night in 1998. He believed that he changed too much, that he has been forced to become an entirely different person to cope with everything.

Raccoon City. You know, after the incident. The world changed. I guess I changed, too. (RE4make)

But that isn’t true.

Sherry remembers.

When Leon was 21, a fresh faced rookie with a strong moral compass, he believed that he was a critical failure. He believed that he couldn’t save anyone he came across that night.

When Leon is 49, he finally does.

After an entire lifetime together, Elpis gives Leon a way to truly save Sherry. The last daughter of Raccoon City — the only person he’s wanted to save for the last 30 years.

And for a long time, Grace believed she wouldn't be able to have a world again.

She shut herself out for years, never learned how to trust someone other than her mom. And the first person she met and she connected with after that trauma got taken away from her in an instant.

But now, Elpis gives Grace a way to save Emily, too. We get this mirrored closure touched on in the post-credits cutscene where she's on the phone with Leon, asking about Sherry.

That last scene can be read as a symbolic passing of the torch.

Leon's fight is over. But, he’s still in touch and talks regularly with Grace. He asks her how she is and how Emily is doing, and in turn, Grace does the same about Sherry. They talk about their daughters together.

Leon gets to watch Grace keep her safe and live simply — raise her gently, and teach her to read.

He gets to watch her have a normal life with her daughter after Raccoon City, something he didn't manage to get the first time around.

Grace leaves that night with two new friends and a surrogate daughter who all get to live because of her strength.

She starts the game off as meek, and shy. But ultimately, her relentless courage prevails. She single-handedly shapes the lives of those around her.

After 30 years of grating service, endless war, and unimaginable loss, Leon can lay his arms down. And in doing so, he gets to have a front row seat in watching the next generation of survivors live peacefully.

And Grace? She frames the pictures of her mother, and of Emily. They’re on her desk, for the world to see.

I Forgive It All As It Comes Back To Me

Horror games have a penchant for using daughters negatively. We see that not only across this series, but in other franchises, like Silent Hill and The Evil Within.

Daughters carry blood and babies, and in becoming wives, often lose their names. They are easily forgotten and easily targeted — innocent, young lives that are broken purely for shock value.

Grace, however, shatters this mold. She has her own arc, and works wonderfully as not only a mirror for Sherry and Leon, but as an important co-protagonist who saves Leon’s life with her agency multiple times.

She starts this game off as closed off, afraid of touch and of emotion. She's a girl with little to no friends who is still reeling over a core trauma that she doesn’t understand – the death of her mother, the death of her whole world.

Over the runtime of this game, we watch her become strong. She ends the game knowing what happened to her mother, figuring out where she came from, and leaving it all with someone she can trust again. She fights for her life, for Emily’s life, for Leon’s life, for Sherry’s life.

Without Grace putting her foot down, and telling Leon that she’s going to fight for what’s right alongside him if it’s the last thing she ever does, him and Sherry would have died.

Without her holding a gun to her own head, Leon would have died the first time he walked into PANDORA.

Without her trusting her gut, and going against Leon’s wishes, the war that she ended would have continued. Emily would have died in the water treatment plant all alone.

She’s first introduced as Alyssa’s daughter, then as Spencer’s daughter. And yet, she loses no importance.

A girl we see repeatedly re-emphasized as a daughter above all else, strikingly normal and unimportant, still becomes the main emotional crux of the game.

It is through Grace that we realize a daughter’s choice matters, the lives of millions hinging on it.

Requiem gives us this – a girl, breaking a generational cycle. A daughter, tied seamlessly into the theme of hope and revival.

It represents the psychic and social structures imposed on marginalized people, where there are only three options:

Suicide/Death

Accepting your fate

Escaping the prison

In Mezoamerican mithology, Camazotz is a god or spirit associated with darkness, the underworld and sacrifice. It represents both the terror of death and the ability to heal and spiritual transformation, acting as a bridge between life and death.

Through Vecna’s Camazotz, trauma is made inescapable, identity is reduced to wounds, and memory replaces possibility. Henry traps his victims into who they were hurt into being but Max manages to heal her grief and shame and escapes, she crosses the bridge/portal/exit/gate/door and comes back to life.

And that’s when Max awakening through her connection with Lucas makes sense: “All I needed was you.” By putting Lumax back together, the story is saying that love and connection are the only escape. The only exit.

Therefore, Henry using Will and the other children (trapped in Camazotz) represents thematic repetition: trauma reproduces when it goes unbroken. Henry does not invent the cycle, but he perpetuates it. He becomes both victim and enforcer.

Holly, for her part, represents the new generation that can open new portals/possibilities, the one that finds the key to escape Camazotz, to break the cycle: M marks the spot.

And Mike is the key (path to freedom/exit) for both Will and Eleven, because El is not only an allegorical character, she’s also her own person/agent. That’s why Eleven being the perfect copy of Henry, and refusing to be used like him to perpetuate the cycle is so important. But then, does that mean she has to die?

Well, that’s where Kali (the illusion of the trickster) comes in.

Under this framework, it becomes clear that the “choice” between Kali’s suicidal mission and Mike’s “childish,” waterfall-filled future is not really about Eleven choosing Mike or dying. Instead, it mirrors two familiar traditions in queer storytelling (ones we recognize immediately because we’ve seen them over and over again):

Kali represents the tragic queer narrative: the belief that queer love can never be free, will always be oppressed, and therefore the only way to reclaim control is through sacrifice, by making death “mean something,” by becoming a warning. “See, Michael? See what happens?”. This is the kind of story where queerness is allowed to be visible only to demonstrate the cruelty of the system that oppresses it. Assimilate or perish. Tragedy makes queers palatable. Kali may believe she is fighting the system, but she is a trickster. It’s an illusion caused by despair. In reality, she is forced conformity itself because tragedy only reinforces the same structures of oppression.

Mike’s option of “running away together to a better place where no one can find us” belongs to a different but equally limiting tradition: queer exile. In the “we can live, but only somewhere else” ending, love survives, but invisible, silenced, off-camera, unnamed. It’s safer than martyrdom but still treating queer love as something that cannot exist openly without consequences. This choice is even more forced conformity if you read Eleven as an allegorical character. If Mike is repressing his feelings for Will, then Eleven functions as a substitute: a socially acceptable container for feelings he cannot yet name and will never be able to act on.

Now, to talk about naming that love, we have to talk about Will.

As we see at the beginning of Season 5, Will is the survivor. He survives the violation that Henry could not transcend, but he refuses to become the system that hurt him, even when Henry uses him again and again for that purpose. By accepting himself and finding love, Will can reframe his pain and fear.

When Will takes power from Vecna to save his loved ones, he stops being “Zombie Boy,” as Henry wants him to be, and becomes his rebuttal. In Shock Jock Will manipulates Vecna, he uses him back!

Will becoming the master of puppets is him becoming the author. “It’s our story and it starts with getting Will back”. Will then escapes the hive mind with the help of Eleven and then refuses to be used by Vecna again by coming out to… half of Hawkings, I guess. (But it’s thematic guys! I think… honesty and all that). In volume one we see Will reframing his own memories as strength to become the Sorcerer. (That’s why it matters. His ability to love in spite of his pain is innate – insert Harry Potter reference here – ).

Of course, we also know, from basic narrative structure, that this alone won’t be enough to defeat Vecna. Because accepting ourselves and speaking our truth is not enough: the systems of oppression are still in place.

That’s where Byler comes in.

Mike accepting and reciprocating Will’s feelings is not a romantic twist: it is the moment when the story finally rejects conformity as survival and replaces it with truth as freedom. (Real queer representation. God I can only hope.)

Truth as freedom.

With Jancy’s breakup, we see the same logic at work: they are honest with themselves and with each other, and that honesty stabilizes reality. The lab stops melting! Accepting themselves fully, despite the fear of loss and the pressure to conform into a miserable marriage, is what saves them. The same logic applies to Dustin asking for connection from Steve instead of pushing him away. Again: leaving trauma behind and choosing connection and love, just not romantic love.

If Mike is indeed a gay boy with internalized homophobia, then his relationship with Eleven is an attempt to be normal, to follow the script (text). Eleven is used once again to carry displaced feelings; Will carries longing alone; Mike lives split between truth and performance.

Mike choosing Will, and Will defeating Vecna through an overload of power (‘it overloads the system’… electrifies it… you see?), marks the end of instrumentalization. Queer love is no longer hidden inside a heteronormative structure. Love and connection allow the children to escape Camazotz by stopping the repetition of repression and abuse.

That’s why you cannot face Vecna while carrying self-hatred or self-doubt. You have to be honest first. Honesty with oneself to be able to love and connect with others is the show’s ultimate counter-force to Vecna’s ideology. Vecna thrives on repression, abuse, memory loops, denial, and the belief that love is weakness or danger. Mike naming his love breaks all of it.

This is about choosing truth over conformity, where, for Mike, love is truth.

So if Mike accepts that he is in love with Will, and this becomes the key to defeating Vecna (severing the connection to the Abyss and causing Eleven, Will, and Kali to lose their powers, as we suspect will happen), then Eleven no longer has to carry the symbolic weight of being an instrument for every authority figure in her life. Dr. Kay and her faction of the government can be destroyed alongside Dr. Brenner’s files on how to create the wormhole.

Then Eleven, Will, and Kali losing their powers is not a loss at all. It is liberation! It’s the exit!

The three of them stop being useful to systems that exploit their difference. They become ordinary. Human. Free. Symbolically, queer love is no longer treated as a Stranger Thing.

That is the real non-conformity here: not dying for love, not fleeing/hiding for it, but refusing the idea that queer love must either die or exist only in the margins.

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