Victor and Grace's Childhood
Another misconception regarding Gideon is that he has been stalking Grace for a very long time, likely since her childhood. I don’t know why the fandom collectively decided this. Maybe people find the trope of a stalker who has been watching her for ages and knows everything about her life highly appealing. But if you look at the game's canon and read the files carefully, it becomes clear that no, Victor did not stalk Grace since childhood. It wouldn't make any sense within the context of the game's plot. The exact reason Victor was creating clones of Grace was that he couldn't find the original. All he had at the time were the records of her genetic data, provided to him by the Organization back in 2004. From that year onward, he dedicated himself to recreating a perfect copy of Grace.
December 8, 2004
The organization was able to get me the child's medical records. It was lacking in certain areas, but did have her genetic information. I can use this.
Until 2018, Victor didn’t even know where Grace was or where to look for her. Most likely, The Connections stumbled upon her by accident while planning an assassination attempt on Alyssa, and in the process, he became intrigued: who is this girl the journalist keeps dragging along with her? Is she her biological daughter? And since Victor had spent his entire life working with these clones, he instantly recognized Grace as one of Spencer's experiments.
“It took forever to find you.”
"Forever" is right. First, for 14 years, he didn’t even know where to look for her, and then he lost her for another 8 years.
After the Wrenwood Hotel incident in 2018, Grace vanishes into thin air again for another 8 years. Don’t ask how a powerful organization that has the country's government by the balls and is capable of bombing an entire city couldn't find one specific girl for eight years – especially when they already knew her name and what she looked like. The game doesn't give a clear answer. Maybe Grace came under someone's protection (like Chris's, for instance). Well, let's assume she really is just extremely low-profile, and thanks to her shut-in lifestyle, she managed to fly under The Connections' radar all these years.
This went on until September 2026, when Zeno visited Rhodes Hill and pressured Victor, saying that the Raccoon City blockade had been extended until 2040 and that they needed to hurry up with securing Elpis. After that, Victor immediately scrambled and hired a private investigator, M. D. Birdie, who instantly tracked down the girl, including her workplace and residential address. The question is, what stopped them from doing that from the very beginning?
I have my own headcanon regarding this. I personally think that Victor actually knew where Grace was and had been secretly watching her for the past 8 years. But just to spite The Connections, he kept it to himself and simply continued to milk them for money to fund his pointless clone experiments. And he put off kidnapping Grace, perhaps because he felt she was still too young and not ready to fulfill her destiny. But that’s just my headcanon.
To sum it up: if Victor had been watching Grace since childhood, there would have been no point in creating copies of her. He could have just taken the original right away.
This post was supposed to come out later, but since I keep seeing posts claiming that Victor supposedly knew Grace from infancy and watched her grow up, I have to publish it early. It feels like people made up their own headcanons and then got offended by the pairing because of them. If you like to think that Victor was attracted to an underage Grace, that’s not a Gidcroft problem.
