Star Road

🌙 He's homeless and hasn't had a home since the colonies were still a thing. He's a wanderer, never in the same place for more than a few days so he doesn't bring too much attention towards himself. That being said, he finds a good deal of comfort in your home. It actually feels nice to sleep in an actual bed for once - granted, you make him shower first before he lays down.

🌙 He's not a fan of strong scents, often saying that the modern world smells a whole lot worse than the times of old with the perfumes and scented lotions and toxic factories. He craves your natural scent, loving the smell of you so much he'll lose himself to your sheets when you aren't home. You've learned to not wear any scents when he comes around.

🌙 He often leaves for a couple of weeks at a time here and there. You were worried at first, but it's yet another quirk that Drifter has. When he comes back, it's always the same man but with different clothes and a new set of stories- And some gifts for you, their origins something you don't want to know about.

🌙 Speaking of returning, he fucking sucks at announcing himself when he is back inside of your apartment. You can't count how many times you walk through your home only to jump and scream at a large and dark figure in the shadows of your bedroom. He gets a kick out of it though.

🌙 Because of his vampiric nature, any "dates" have to be after the sun sets. They often involve long walks in the night whether they're in parks or through the woods where there's barely any people around. The less people around, the better.

🌙 Drifter actually asks to feed from you which shocked you the first time. You'd expected him to just take, but you were shocked when he purred the question in your ear while kissing at your neck. He actually makes you comfortable when he feeds; Laying you down, propping your neck and head up on some pillows, biting into you slowly so it hurts less.

🌙 You gave him a pleasant shock when he came back one time to see your whole apartment had been refitted with blackout curtains, especially the bedroom. He was actually a little touched that you would go through the trouble for him so he wouldn't have to sleep in a closet or your bathtub to avoid the sun.

🌙 He's careful with his claws around you, being sure not to dig his black nails too deep. He's not a fan of bringing you any harm if he can't help it. You pretend like you don't notice it, but you're touched by his actions.

🌙 When you end up cutting yourself by accident or knicking your finger with a knife while cooking, Drifter likes to lick the blood from the wound. He says he'd hate to let such sweet tasting blood go to waste, but the reality is that he's stopping the bleeding with his saliva. You don't understand the whole vampire thing, but you know that's what he's doing.

🌙 Horrible with the whole jealousy thing, especially if it's around another vampire. Drifter doesn't do the whole lay low thing like all of the other vampires do, obviously, or he wouldn't have those massive talons on his hands amongst other things. Because he doesn't hide it, the poor soul who was just harassing you for a hookup is now about to wet themselves at the sight of him all tall and broad and evil-looking.

🌙 He found himself stunned when he returned at another occassion to see you had patched one of his favorite jackets he had left behind from where it was torn at the shoulders. Such a small gesture for a monster like him made him feel strangely human once again.

🌙 He doesn't really talk about his life before he was turned, often saying it was a depressing time for him. He prefers not to bring up times when he was human, often getting cold and harsh when the topic is brought up.

🌙 He may act like he's not listening or he doesn't care, but Drifter actually remembers all of the little details about you. He's the type to seem like he doesn't care, but in reality, he really does. A lot. And you're one of the few humans he actually doesn't feel the need to snuff out.

🌙 It's best if you don't have lit candles in your apartment. You've come to figure out that he has a horrible fear of fires, the reason you still don't know about. He won't enter unless you put every single flame out. He's very suspicious about wax and oil warmers, not understanding how they actually work.

🌙 Kissing Drifter is something of its own category. He kisses like it's the last time he'll see you, and the horrifying part is that you never know if that's true. He kisses like he's starving, like if he lets go then you'll fade from existence, like you're suddenly the only thing in his world that's right. The red glow in his eyes often dims to the point where you can almost see his natural eyes, but you can never make out the color.

🌙 He's a sucker for having his back scratched. He won't ever admit it, his "pride" too loud, but he's not very subtle when he wants you to scratch his back. Always shirtless, always with his back to you, and when you playfully ignore him he lets out a deep grunt to get your attention.

🌙 Speaking of Drifter being shirtless, he totally has a dad bod. He's tall and lumbering and a force to be reckoned with, all with bad posture like he fell off a five story building and a gut. You would think he would be warm, but he's not unless he's fed well. When he is, he's honestly the best thing to cuddle up to: Soft yet firm and very warm.

🌙 You've been with him long enough to know that something in him changed. He's not the same vicious monster you met one night, but he's now something else entirely. He's still not a good man, that's for sure, but you seemed to have brought something out of him that hasn't been seen in centuries.

Let's start by going back to the dog tag. The inevitable problem is that the act of wearing one after the war ‒ regardless of whose it was or what country they fought for ‒ is that it kind of loudly signals pride in your military service. The tag may not be from WWII. It may not even be German. But Heisenberg is a character with a German name, who names his creations in German, and who's lived in the village under Miranda's thumb for decades. Statistically, most Germans who ever carried a dog tag that looked like that probably fought in WWII. And he carries that fecking Wehrmacht signal light to go with it. At that point, trying to argue that "maybe he just scavenged the signal light" or "maybe it was his Dad who was so proud of his Nazi service that he passed his dog tag on to his son to remember him by" starts to feel a lot like someone's protesting too much. You don't have to interpret Heisenberg as a proud Nazi soldier, but the costuming clues don't look great.

i dont think its mentioned anywhere in the game, but rather implied, that karl scavenged that stuff from a battlefield? for example, the tank used in his boss fight is a combination of a nazi gun tractor, combined with an american tank. the two guns mounted on it are also a german recoilless rifle and an american machine gun.

Uh, look, do you have a source for any of this beyond "someone wrote it in the wiki"? Because anyone can add anything to the wiki, that doesn't mean it's more than some military nerd's headcanon. Even if part of the vehicle looks like an actual American tank, all that means is that someone working on the game used one as a reference, maybe.

Meanwhile, the one genuinely plot-critical thing we're told about that tank is that it's made of metal-polymer composites, strongly implying that all the components were custom-made in the same place. The idea it's tacked together from salvaged components just doesn't hold water.

So how would Heisenberg have made those parts? Simple: his factory used to make tanks.

I'm sure it's possible to miss the half-dozen partially-wrecked tanks in the front yard outside the building ‒ there's a bunch of other scrap metal out there too, they kind of blend in. But when you've spent as much time as I have digging through the game files, it's much harder to miss how many files relating to the factory are explicitly labeled 'tankfactory' (...at least when they're not labeled 'geek'). There's even an asset for a pile of tank cannons. I don't know if or where that particular asset actually appears in the game, but no-one has that many tank parts lying in a pile unless they're building the things. Heisenberg's obviously re-purposed the factory for soldats now, but it plainly used to make tanks.

i think he scavenged that stuff bc of germany invading romania during ww2

I really hate to keep jumping on you here, but you can easily google this stuff. I am no-one's expert on the history of Romania in WWII, but even a cursory read up on the subject tells me that a fascist political party took power in Romania in 1940, and voluntarily allied with the Germans. Romania was itself an Axis power. How they were actually treated by their new 'allies' looks like it might be a thornier subject, but goddamn it I do not have time to fall down yet another research rabbit hole right now (my apologies on that front to any actual Romanians, god knows there is a lot of WWII history that us Westerners do not get taught about in school).

But now that I've had to look that up, I can pretty confidently state that if Heisenberg's factory was functioning during the war, it would have been manufacturing tanks for the Nazis. And if Germany did set up a tank factory in Romania, it's not implausible they'd have assigned a German to take charge (say, a former soldier who excelled on the battlefield, and is proud enough to keep wearing his dog tag?), so that all adds up uncomfortably well.

If anything, the more ambiguous part is whether the game is even set in Romania. Most people assume that was the intent, but the only location we're ever given is 'a county in Eastern Europe'. God knows if anyone at Capcom ever bothered to google Romania's involvement in WWII either, so I can't speak to their intent. But "maybe the German wearing the WWII era dog tag and the Nazi signal lamp wasn't personally responsible for manufacturing tanks for the Nazis with the tank factory in Nazi territory that he apparently lived in" is not an argument I'm prepared to build my house on. Let's at least allow that it does not look good. It'd hardly be the first time a piece of Japanese media has stuck its foot in its mouth over Nazi shit either.

to me heisenberg probably wouldve outright mentioned being a soldier or something in at least a diary entry or note if he was old enough during ww2 to remember it

Earnestly, why? Heisenberg's diary tells us nothing about his background whatsoever. We don't know what country he was born, how long he's lived in the village, how he became one of Miranda's experiments, how many decades he's been part of her family ‒ anything. Why would military service rank a special mention, when even clarifying whether he's a village native doesn't?

And again, it isn't hard to come up with theories where Heisenberg isn't a Nazi. Maybe he was a deserter, who still carries that dog tag because 'Karl Heisenberg' is really just a sham name Miranda gave him to match one of those four founding houses, and that tag is the only proof he's got left of his real name. Or maybe it's the only thing he's got left with his Dad's name on it, even though his Dad always said the war was bullshit, sure. Maybe the factory really was run by Nazis who left shit like that signal lamp lying around (to be repurposed into a handy electronics case like I suggested in that last post), and Heisenberg only moved into it more recently, because at least he speaks enough German to read all the shit they left around the place. Or maybe he only moved in because he found out someone was using it to build that polymer composite tank to kill him (why remains a much bigger dangling question than how), after which he figured he should probably stick around to make sure no-one else tried the same thing. These are all perfectly valid interpretations, and no-one is wrong for preferring them to having to deal with all that Nazi bullshit (though most still depend on some awkward German-nationality-coincidences). The fact that Heisenberg runs a tank factory and carries Nazi paraphernalia is really easy to miss, and no-one's less of a fan for not spotting it.

What little we do know is that Heisenberg's family got rewritten repeatedly during development. He was a twin at one point, his mother may have been used for experiments, his father was variously Sturm, Heisenberg's monster form, the village mayor, and maybe even Urias ‒ it's all over the place (all this comes from notes on the concept art that comes with the game, if anyone wants to fact-check me on it). Heisenberg probably wasn't originally meant to be Ethan's pseudo-ally either ‒ it's Ada rather than Heisenberg who gives him the chance to escape his trial in that early storyboard. Fuck, maybe at some point he (or his dad) really was going to be a goddamn Nazi mad scientist who fled to Romania and hid up a mountain somewhere, or whatever (though I can't easily imagine any Nazi scientist would be wearing that dog tag ‒ that's an accessory for the expendable rank-and-file of the military machine).

But possibly (and I'm really just speculating here), as Heisenberg became a more likable, ambiguously-grey character during development, Capcom may have decided it would be a good idea to tone down the Nazi stuff. They just accidentally left in the dog tag, the signal lamp, and the goddamn tank factory in presumably-Nazi territory, and had to quickly deny all Nazi associations when people made the obvious connections. If the official word from Capcom is that Heisenberg isn't a Nazi (or at least, that we aren't intended to read Heisenberg-the-fictional-character as having any Nazi sympathies or affiliations), I should be pretty happy to take that as official.

If you really want textual "evidence" that Heisenberg wasn't a Nazi, the best I can offer is the fact Dimitrescu dismisses him as 'a child', which suggests to me that he's much younger than her, and possibly even younger than her daughters (though I still can't buy he was a child when he first met Dimitrescu or Miranda). We don't actually know how old she or her daughters are, of course (they were in already the castle in 1952, but whether they'd just moved in or whether they'd been there for decades we don't know), but dismissing someone who was old enough to have served in WWII as 'a child' strikes me as a bit of a stretch even for Lady D. But that's not much more than interpretation, and one can easily be a Nazi sympathiser without personally having taken part in the war.

I still love Heisenberg as a character, flaws and all. I'm definitely not going to stop writing about him being his terrible, ridiculous self. I'll gladly go on ignoring all this nazi shit as much as I can get away with. I'm absolutely not here to tell you that RE8 is now #problematic and can only be addressed after adequate hand-wringing. That shit helps no-one.

But back in the real world, where fascism is on the rise again across the globe, and where the internet would have me believe that coded references to shit as vague as the date of Hitler's birthday is apparently a popular cryptofascist dogwhistle or some shit, do I have to waste mental energy on whether it means something serious that there are surprise Nazis popping up in my innocent little zombie-horror-game? Like, if a character isn't a Nazi, is it so damn hard not to include two different bits of Nazi memorabilia directly on their character model? The horrors of capitalism I signed up for; the horrors of People You Never Realised Were Secretly A Nazi is one I could have done without here, kthx.