rallamajoop

[rallamajoop]

Kingdom Come: Deliverance, aka Ultimate Medieval Herb-Picking Simulator 3000

For anyone who missed that other post, I spent a couple of months this year playing the shit out of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and I have a million things I want to say about it. But we've got to start somewhere, so let's start with gameplay.

Not that 'gameplay' really narrows it down much, because how do you even discuss the mechanics of a game like KCD?

(Ooh, herbs! ...what?)

It's an open world RPG, in that you can wander a huge map with unlimited opportunities to take time out from your Critically Important Mission for a side-quest to find a missing horse for some local peasant. But it's invested in old-fashioned RPG mechanics like skill-checks and stat levelling in a way most modern open world RPGs really aren't. It's an immersive sim, in that many problems can be solved by negotiation or stealth or just charging in like Leeroy Jenkins, if you really must. It has survival mechanics, in that you have to remember to eat and sleep and can find food in the wilderness by hunting or foraging. It features first-person melee combat, because that always works so well. It's a remarkably involved medieval simulator, set in real-world history without supernatural elements, and will make you intensely aware of the number of different layers that go into a full suit of armour, and how fucked you are in combat if your opponent is wearing one and you aren't. And it looks half the modern tropes of AAA games-that-play-themselves square in the eye and says, "okay, but what if we didn't?"

And if you buy the DLC, you also get a dog, who will help you in combat, lead you to treasure, ignore many of your commands, sit outside and howl if you go into a building without him, and generally get in the way in authentic canine fashion. (10/10 doggo, but NGL, I have notes!)

Oh, and it was, somehow, made by a Czechian startup with kickstarter money. And it's explicitly set during a medieval Bohemian conflict that most anglosphere gamers will have never heard of. 'Ludicrously ambitious' doesn't even begin cover it.

Even 7 years after its (inevitably horrific) initial release, with most of the worst bugs fixed, KCD is a mess of jank and ideas that don't quite seem to have figured out what they're doing here. Inventory management alone is a nightmare, and I say that as someone who likes the absurd 20-piece-equipment-slots that have been dutifully included on your character. But goddamn, is this game engrossing at its best. And having gotten so ridiculously sucked into this thing, I cannot resist the urge to pick apart why.

In brief, you play as Henry, peasant son of a blacksmith, who sees his village razed and his parents killed by an invading army in our prologue. A few major plot beats later, he's found himself working for the suspiciously accommodating local lord as a kind of roaming investigator and undercover operative, trying to track down those responsible before the next hapless peasant village goes the same way.

Along the way, you will learn to swing a mace, pick a lock, shoot a hare, poison an arrow, brew an antidote, ride a horse, repair a gambeson, scull a jug of moonshine, identify a single belladonna plant in the passing forest undergrowth (HOW is this so goddamn satisfying??), pull off a stealth takedown, and ‒ hopefully ‒ read a book. I mean, I hear it's possible to finish the game without learning to read, picking a single lock, killing a single opponent, or even plucking a single herb, but I don't really see the appeal. So much of what makes this game engrossing is that there's so much to do.

And the game really does incentivise you to do all of it! Henry has a nominal 'main' character level, but it's not that important compared to his levels in his various stats and skills, and you level those by doing them (or reading a book, or paying someone to train you, but such handy shortcuts will only get you so far).

Many activities level multiple stats at once. Shoot a hare, and you'll level your bow weapon skill, agility, vitality and hunting (plus houndmaster, if you call Mutt to fetch it for you afterwards). But leveling a skill doesn't just mean meeting higher skill checks or that your hands will shake less using a lockpick or a bow ‒ you also unlock perks relating to that skill. Repair enough of your gear yourself, and you'll be able to deal more damage with hand-sharpened swords and get stealth bonuses in self-repaired outfits. There are some terrifically useful perks available in this game.

Better yet, perks earned on one skill can help you with others! Take the Leg Day perk and picking herbs will also earn you strength exp. Level your Hunting skill enough, and you can earn stealth bonuses in forested areas that will help you sneak up on enemy camps. Learn to read, and you can improve your skills by reading books on them (and your reading at the same time!) Improve your drinking, and get a perk that makes you pick locks better while tipsy. You don't have to learn everything, but god is it satisfying to do so.

If that wasn't enough to keep you trying different things, there's the whole matter of timekeeping. KCD splits your time into a regular day/night cycle, and NPCs all keep to their own routines, so shops will be open during the day, but stealth (and theft) will be easier at night. Sleeping allows Henry to heal, save, and recover energy, but scull enough potions or nap during the day, and how much sleep Henry actually 'needs' is up to you.

Is the NPC you need to advance your quest sleeping? Is it too early in the morning for the tailor to be open yet? You can skip time, but Henry always has so much to do that wasting even a minute of the day feels sacrilegious. So why not spend an hour reading one of your unfinished books instead? Drop into the alchemist's lab around the corner and brew some potions while you wait? Or pick some nettles from the churchyard? You can NEVER have too many nettles! (Note: you can absolutely have too many nettles, they will eventually chew up your entire inventory weight limit if you let them, I am not kidding.)

Is it too dark to go hunting? Well, darkness is the perfect time for CRIME! Or sneaking into a bandit camp and knifing half of them in their sleep. Or for a more wholesome alternative, you can always do some gambling down at the nearest tavern.

…did I mention I even got into the fucking dice minigame in KCD? Like, back in my Witcher 3 days, you could not pay me to waste a single minute on Gwent, but give me a handful of loaded dice and an interesting scoring system, and I am entertained for hours. Though it helps that obviously, the real objective isn't to win money, it's to find out if your opponent has any weighted dice of their own, which you can pick their pocket for later! (I don't even care if you have shit loaded dice, I am collecting them all!)

No skill synergises with all your other skills so well as alchemy, KCD's one real crafting mechanic, which ditches all claims to realism in favour of giving you functional Witcher-potions ‒ complete with the one that lets you see in the dark! There's a potion to boost most every stat that may not be quite high enough otherwise. Want to level pickpocketing without the elevated beginner-level risk of being caught? Scull a padfoot potion! Wanna go hunting, but your archery skill is so low you can hardly aim straight? Bowman's brew is here to help! And don't even think about stepping to battle without chugging a hefty potion cocktail first! Drugs are always the solution. Picked up a new skillbook, but your level isn't high enough for you to read it yet? Take some drugs, and get studying! (I can still hardly believe this works.)

If all the drugs and gambling weren't bad enough, good god, does this game turn me into a violent kleptomaniac. I am honestly a little disturbed by how often I find myself furiously chasing down enemies who try to flee from battle, because GDI, that's good loot and combat EXP getting away! EXP is a distressingly effective motivator for this sort of thing.

On which note, KCD's combat is… perhaps an acquired taste? Melee in first person is never the most comfortable thing, and the jank is hard to ignore. In theory, the focus is on shifting your stance between five zones to attack from the left/right/top/etc, to get in a strike where your enemy is least prepared to defend. But in practice, the enemy will generally manage to block from every direction, and you'll mostly rely on the quick attack/forward stab button for everything, in between frantically mashing the block button in hope of pulling off a master strike (read: high-damage parry/counter attack). Combos are supposed to be a big mechanic, but introduced so badly it took me until my second time through the game to figure them out at all.

But combat never feels trite, because mashing stab and block are the least of it. Tactics you'll use in a 1v1 duel, where you can afford to bait out a master strike opening, vary wildly from combat against enemy groups, where you'll want to stay constantly on the move to keep anyone from getting behind you for free hits. Charging blindly into the midst of a well-armed bandit camp will reliably get you killed, but with a little patience, you can quietly trim down the sentries with stealth kills, then fire off a couple of dollmaker-laced arrows to slow your targets down, and then let whoever is fastest come running to you ahead of the pack ‒ and suddenly clearing out that whole camp solo is very doable. Get good enough at hit-and-run tactics to bait out a few at a time, and you can empty the entire dozens-strong Pribyslavitz camp all on your own! (They will have all respawned for the plot beat that follows, but honestly, that makes it no less satisfying to pull off).

And there are some lovely ideas mixed in. There's the way blood drips visibly through your vision when you take a head wound. Or how losing health actively depletes your maximum stamina too. And then there's that one perk that boosts healing potions at the cost of them getting you drunk, so that Henry is always staggering out of combat encounters with the whole world swaying around him. What can I say, it works!

Look, I will not lie to you: combat in this game has problems, and just getting Henry to draw his fucking sword can be a big one. The animation is absurdly long, and will be interrupted by anything that hits you, and the joy of first person view is that you can't even tell when you've succeeded, so that Henry will fucking sheath his sword again because you mashed the button one too many times. Switching targets is absurdly difficult: Henry will end up locked onto whichever bastard happens to be closest to the centre of the screen, even if he's far out of range and some other git is actively stabbing him in the kidney. But the long and short of it is that it didn't take me long to start looking forward to combat, I was enjoying it so much.

By KCD standards, though, Henry's crusade against the local bandit enclaves is relatively wholesome. What gets you in far more trouble ‒ and can ultimately send the whole game's economy right off the rails ‒ is theft. Lockpicking and stealth mechanics are introduced early, and once you've leveled them enough, you'll be able to pick any lock in the game stone-cold-sober. Most merchants won't buy goods that are recently stolen, but your key words there are 'most' and 'recently', and you can wear (or wield, or eat) stolen goods just fine without being caught. And leveling your stealth skills pays off, because do you know how many bandit camps have a big chest of loot in the middle that none of them seem to have actual keys for? Before long, you'll be good enough to break into a merchant's storeroom and take his entire inventory and all his money… and fuck, how is this so easy to do? What's going on here? What do I even need money for at this point?

Lockpicking isn't even your only option, maybe you'd find it easier to pickpocket the key from the trader directly! Or break into his house at night, choke him into unconsciousness, and then take the key from his body! And while you're at it, why not steal his pants too?

Look, the joy of watching annoying NPCs wander the streets in the morning sans pants should not be underestimated. On my second time through the monastery mission, I stole the robes of almost every monk in the building, leaving them all wandering the halls the next day in their underwear. Then, for bonus hilarity, you can de-equip your own robe, and watch them all lose their minds at the utter scandal of seeing a man wandering the hall in his undershirt!

Ah, the shameless hypocrisy of organised religion!

The endgame economy of KCD is a bonkers place to hang out. At a certain point, the theft slows down only because you have nothing left to spend money on anyway. You do need to pay skill trainers if you want that easy boost to your EXP, and for repairs to armour too damaged for you to repair yourself, and for a decent horse that won't wander off when left unattended, but precious little else actually needs to be paid for. Which is probably one of the reasons why there's a whole DLC about rebuilding a town, just to give you something to spend all that spare groshen on.

Just getting dressed in this game is a whole complex nest of mechanics ‒ and not even just because you have so many different equipment slots to deal with. This is not a game where an experienced souls-veteran can realistically expect to saunter into battle wearing nothing but a loincloth and a comic helmet. Challenge a man in armour while wearing none of your own, and you cannot expect to walk away. Challenge a small group of unarmoured bandits while armoured yourself, and you'll probably come out on top ‒ but even in the endgame, with Henry cruising around like a human tank, that one encounter where you get swarmed by a gang of peasants in thin tunics could and did send me direct to the game-over screen multiple times. The best helmets available come with visors that will cut off most of your vision in combat, and in first-person view, you will notice it. Is that trade off worth it? (To me, hell no, but the word is that's not universal.) There's a realism to it all that I adore.

But defense is not everything, and no-one is doing their best stealth-work in plate armour. Before long, Henry had a whole alternative outfit optimised for stealth, and it didn't hurt that it made him look so much like a ninja. Other tasks may have you equipping for charisma (read: mostly looking wealthy). The downside is that with all those equipment slots to juggle, switching between outfits is a nightmare. But believe me, the joys of inventory management in this monster is a whole other topic.

There are some wonderfully unique quirks to this game. There's the fact the consumable item for saving your game (already one ballsy fucking choice for a game which was so notoriously unstable at release) is alcoholic, so if you save too often, and Henry will get slightly drunk, and occasionally be told he's just taken a new level in his Drinking skill. It also means that the few occasions when Henry has his inventory taken from him, the player can't even save (or at least, not without closing the game ‒ that's always possible as a backup option, but does mean waiting for the game to load again, which is a solid deterrent).

Then there's the weirdness of the economy and reputation mechanics. Shopkeepers may not always have enough cash to buy all your loot, but it may be worth giving them the lot anyway as a 'tip', because nothing raises your reputation faster than generosity! Besides, within a couple of days they'll have sold all that extra loot, and may suddenly have many thousands of groshen worth of extra money to spend on the next batch you bring them! Better yet, break into their storeroom, steal almost-but-not-quite-all-their-money (prices WILL go up if you take all of it for some reason) ‒ and then 'gift' them all the loot you were about to sell to them for 'free', for maximum reputation boost! I can't believe this ridiculous scam works, but here we are.

KCD is available on consoles, but lockpicking is notoriously bad on a controller. For myself though, melee combat with a mouse is more than I've ever come around to. As a compromise, KCD is now the one game I've ever played which regularly has me switching to the mouse for lockpicking and archery, but back to the controller for everything else. Janky, sure, but something about it fits. This is a game where Henry can learn to do so many different things: why shouldn't I switch my own favoured tools to get it done? If Henry is dropping his bow and reaching for his mace, I'm dropping the mouse and reaching for the controller. There's a resonance in there I can't help but be charmed by.

But maybe my favourite thing about KCD is how willing it is to just leave you the fuck alone to figure shit out honestly. Your bow does not have a targeting reticule, and you often won't know until you run up to check whether that distant blur of motion was you hitting the hare or it running off. There is no Witcher-vison to helpfully highlight everything Geralt needs to notice when he's tracking a monster. If Henry is following a trail of blood, you'll be expected to look for blood on the ground and follow it. Reading a treasure maps will not generate a quest marker for you to follow, it'll show you a messy collection of scribbles you have to compare to the game map yourself. And multiple quests will hand you a book and expect you to actually read the fucking text over several pages to diagnose a mystery illness, or identify which of the novice monks has a suspicious background. There's even a guy you can meet on the road whose only role is to tell you silly riddles that you can solve for a few groshen, a nice lump of speech EXP, and the opportunity to pick his pockets for some neat dice as he walks away.

To be clear, none of these mechanics are flawless. Many of the treasure maps are so obscure that you will resort to googling the answer. The woman I was supposed to talk to while trying to track that lost horse would not even come out of her house, and I was flagged as an intruder if I entered. You will still depend on objective markers to find many a mission-critical NPC. And I'm sorry, but that horse race that expects the player to manually figure out and navigate the fastest route from Talmberg to Uzhitz while racing a horse that will slow down every time you check the map, across terrain filled with obstacles, on the slowest horse in the game, without even the decency to let the player know where the race checkpoints are before it starts? I have no words. It's a joke. A joke which presumably starts "so this start-up decides to make this open-world game with KICKSTARTER MONEY…" and hope its audience will find it in their hearts to forgive.

But it turns out I do have the heart to forgive a lot when the bulk of the experience still sucks me in this hard.

Some of the best moments in a game this rich aren't scripted at all, but emerge diagetically from all these mechanics working together. Like that time I realised that the only way to make it back across most of the map for a timed event starring Henry's mate the Rattay executioner was to give up on fast travel and manually race my horse there, taking every shortcut that wouldn't end with a low hanging branch (and I made it!) Or the two different battles where I charged in way too hot, ran into trouble, took a bleeding head wound, and had to somehow survive with health draining away and blood actively dripping through Henry's vision, watching as both of his last-gasp perks activated, one after the other, knowing that if I didn't win this quickly and bandage him up, he was going to bleed out. (I won both, and it was so totally worth it!)

Or that one speech-check I was very deliberately trying to fail (look, Henry was ordered to try to negotiate, but everyone else in the team wanted to see some action), only to not only pass, but stumble onto a better solution than any I would've guessed was possible. Let alone how long I'd been lugging around a very-slow-but-very-powerful bow just in case a moment turned up where being able to one-shot someone from a moderate distance became important, only to finally hit the mission where I needed it…

One of the most memorable fights of my first playthrough came when I ran from a group of bandits who were well beyond my level, and managed to bait just one into following me alone. We were both armoured, both wielding swords, and that fight turned into maybe the longest of the whole game. Well, I thought afterwards, I guess it's past time Henry learned to use a mace, because swords just aren't cutting it anymore...

But at the end of the day, some of my best times with this game came out of simply finding a path in the forest ‒ perhaps one too small to even show up on the map ‒ and just following it to see what I might find. The game world is littered with locations the map will flag as simply 'accidents' or 'interesting places' that may be no more than an abandoned camp site, or may tell little stories of their own ‒ like that one crashed wagon surrounded by escaped chickens. Or the perfect mushroom ring with a body lying in the centre. Some graves you can dig up contain no loot, but just a skeleton with another smaller skeleton lying inside it. Everywhere, you'll stumble onto little tragedies, fairy tale references, bits of ancient pre-Christian archeology (some of which even show evidence people have left recent offerings), and many without even any real loot to reward you for finding them. The reward is just in seeing what's out there to find.

I love that this game exists, and I haven't even got to how much I love its handling of history nerd material and its treatment of the medieval church or the joy of every mission you spend with Hans Capon. It will not be for everyone, but god did it suck me right in.

[rallamajoop]

So (not that I'm remotely done with RE fandom, never fear) I've spent too much time over the last few months discovering all the ways in which Kingdom Come: Deliverance feels like a game made just for me.

When I say "made just for me," I need you to understand that every part of this thing feels like a labor of love by a group of ridiculous history nerds. That it's an immersive sim where a determined player can take out entire enemy camps with guerilla tactics, but failing at stealth still feels rewarding enough that I do not care when it happens. That there's a minigame where you have stare at horrible medieval Latin text and try to figure out if it says 'munur' or 'tumun' or 'nnnn' or wtf else, and it does not even matter if you get it wrong. That your PC (Henry) can very easily become basically the same smooth-talking kleptomaniac charlatan I wound up with playing BG3, but this time he is an actual voiced character with a real character arc and everything! I need you to understand that this is a game with jokes about the multiple-popes period, and a sidequest where you can help a group of Waldenesian heretics escape persecution! And that it left me wanting to write whole essays on its relative success of solving the Open World Narrative problem, and too many others beside.

Oh, and did I mention there was a sequel already out with gay romance possibilities? Because NGL, that's the biggest single thing that seriously put this game on my radar (thank YOU to all the angry fanboys yelling about it online, you have got these games an extra sale!) I just had no idea how much else I was going to love.

It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a perfect game. It is janky as FUCK. The story in this first installment is… basically fine. The roles available to female characters are… not horribly offensive, I guess? But I don't think I can summarise my overall reaction to this game better than to tell you that the first thing I did after finishing it was to go back and buy ALL of the DLC, mostly just because I felt the burning need to give the developers more money.

I will have so much more to say on this one (let alone the sequel), but for once, I'm going to keep it short: I loved the fuck out of this game. It will not be for everyone, but hot damn, was it for me ‒ and the fact it got enough success for a sequel at all brings me so much joy.

[rallamajoop]

NC-17, 3257 words (this part), 50,755 words (so far)

Has he really got it into his head that Heisenberg, of all people, needs backup? So badly that there's not even time to stop for a jacket and shoes, let alone the loaded shotgun under the sink? Ethan may be hard to kill these days, but that doesn't make him untouchable. Or is it just the thought of trusting the safety of his house and home to anyone without 'Winters' in their name that has him suddenly pissing all caution into the wind? Fuck knows the wind out here tonight is unpleasant enough already. Then again, after all the compounded stressors of the last four days (and how has it only been four days?)—the nights of constantly interrupted sleep, the preceding weeks of mindless waiting—maybe Ethan's just too eager to throw himself at any problem he can solve just by shooting it in the head until it stops twitching.

Read from start

Been an interesting couple of chapters from the writer's side, knowing that we're well into a countdown to a couple of this thing's Big Reveals. But while that ticks away, I can at least offer some resolution to last chapter's horrific cliffhanger.

[rallamajoop]

NC-17, 3100 words (this part), 47,500 words (so far)

Ethan sleeps that night, but not easily. Once more, the monster from the Beneviento basement crawls out of its dark well to haunt his dreams. Once more, he flees, down a maze of dark corridors that loop in on themselves without end. Tonight though, one thing is different: Heisenberg is with him.

Read from start

Alright, enough of Ethan getting real sleep and actual answers, back to our regularly scheduled program of overly-telling, evil nightmares about monsters and/or Heisenberg.

[rallamajoop]

Follow Me Home chapter 14 preview

Off to the beta after being very-nearly-done for rather too long, so with luck, should be up later this week! In the meantime, have a quick preview of the latest of Ethan weird-monster-dreams-staring-Heisenberg.

Ethan sleeps that night, but not easily. Once more, the monster from the Beneviento basement crawls out of its dark well to haunt his dreams. Once more, he flees down a maze of dark corridors that loop in on themselves without end. Tonight though, one thing is different: Heisenberg is with him. Perhaps that was inevitable, now that he knows they’ve shared these dreams before. He’s never been aware of Heisenberg’s presence in this particular nightmare before though, and it’s far from certain that this Heisenberg is anything more than a dream now. Maybe it’s just his subconscious responding to suggestion in the obvious way. Ethan’s pretty sure he remembers the real Heisenberg expressing the intent to stay up tonight, to see what the camera feed might catch, so he’s probably not even asleep. They can’t share dreams if one of them is awake, surely. More likely then, the Heisenberg in Ethan’s dream is a facsimile of the man created by his own imagination, no more real than the monster chasing them. Ethan will have to ask tomorrow, whether he remembers being here. If his dreams may never be private again, he at least needs to figure out how to tell the difference. (Assuming he wakes up tomorrow at all. The monsters in Ethan’s dreams always felt too real for comfort, and if Heisenberg has been in his head, who knows what else the megamycete’s network might have connected him to…) But real or no, Heisenberg know how to make an entrance. Tonight, he makes it as a dark shape that lurches from the shadows to grab Ethan in mid-flight, dragging him bodily aside and flattening him into a blind corner, the light dying behind them. “Shhh,” the dark shape whispers to him, thick leather glove pressed over his mouth, while Ethan’s heart does its damn best to keep right on fleeing, with or without the rest of him. “You don’t want it to hear us, do you?”

(I promise you, it only gets worse from here.)

[rallamajoop]

NC-17, 3100 words (this part), 44,325 words (so far)

Heisenberg places the package on the ground and peels back the outer layer to reveal a stack of smaller boxes, all identical in their modern packaging and labels. The text is in Romanian, but the pictures are perfectly recognisable. "Security cameras?" says Ethan. "Don't know about you, Winters, but I'd like to get a closer look at what goes on around your house at night!" Heisenberg crows. "No, that's... that's actually a good idea." Trust Heisenberg to tackle his problems with surveillance. Ethan may never know how many cameras Heisenberg had secreted around the village, and he isn't sure he wants to, but there were eyes on the reservoir and the stronghold at the very least, and the one on the factory gate was hard to miss. He'd never imagined having cause to be glad for Heisenberg's weird voyeurism-thing, but this could be just what they need.

Read from start

[rallamajoop]

Follow Me Home chapter 12 preview

As so often happens, what was supposed to be chapter 12 of Follow Me Home has gotten away from me a bit, and has been cut in half so I can at least have something to post in a reasonable timeframe. We're getting deeper into territory where I know broadly what needs to happen, but not exactly how or in what order, which never helps with the update schedule.

In the meantime, the trimmed version of chapter 12 is now mostly one long scene without much Heisenberg in it ‒ but if you're up for awkward tension with Ethan & Chris, I have some excellent news for you. Either way, have a preview of the confrontation to come:

“Ethan. There’s a dead body on your porch.” Conversationally accusatory, the Chris Redfield special. Ethan bristles immediately. “I noticed.” “And you have no idea how it got there?” It’s hard to say whether Chris means to sound suspicious, or if this is just his base level of world-weary antipathy, but it wears on Ethan all the same. “He didn’t ring the bell, Chris. He sure wasn’t there yesterday.” Chris nods, maybe. He’s still looking more at the clipboard in his hand than he is at Ethan. “You don’t know the victim? You’ve never seen him before?” Ethan hesitates. “I don’t think so? I don’t know if I’d recognise him now even if I did.” Chris seems to allow that this might not be unreasonable. “And nothing else has happened since we spoke last that you might want to mention? Your friend Heisenberg still hasn’t made contact?”

“You think he did this?” Pretty unlikely, given that he was with Ethan the whole time. “It’s not really his style.” There’s not a single drill bit attached to the body, just for one. The look Chris gives Ethan offers no reassurance that Chris believes him about the Heisenberg situation. “And you still want me to believe you didn’t hear anything suspicious? See anything?” “We weren’t even home!” What good does it do to tell the truth when Chris won’t believe him anyway? “We got home late last night, and there it was.” “Are you sure, Ethan?” The look in Chris’ eyes could make a lesser man doubt his own name. “We both know your car hasn’t moved all night.” Ethan opens his mouth to tell Chris of course he’s sure, but instead he says, “How would you know about our car?” “Just answer the question, Ethan.” Ethan does not answer the question. “Are you tracking our car? Chris, what the hell!” The noise Chris makes is a grunt of pure frustration. “Yes, Ethan, we’re tracking your car! It’s for your own protection.” “You didn’t think that was worth mentioning to me? Where did you think we were going to go?” Breaking into some lab overnight with a wanted criminal? Thank god they took the Duke’s offer of transport. “Have you bugged anything else around here I should know about?” “I do not have time to argue with you about this, Ethan.” The impatient growl of Chris’ voice is less a threat than a promise. “Miranda may be out of the picture, but there may still be threats to your family out there that we don’t even know about yet. You should count yourself lucky you’ve been allowed to return to your own home at all.” Ethan scoffs, even as his heartbeat hammers in his chest. “Well, it was nice while it lasted! I guess it’s your lucky day. You want an excuse to take us all back into ‘protective’ custody? Well, you’ve got it!” He’s probably tempting fate by even saying it aloud, and he’s almost too far gone to care. But Chris has gone back to frowning at his clipboard. “That won’t be necessary at this time.” “What?” “We’re not moving you or your family. Not yet.” Ethan gapes at him. What the hell is Chris smoking? “Why the hell not?” Eye contact from Chris is rarely pleasant, but a Chris who won’t make eye contact is somehow worse. “All our intel points to you being safest where you are at this time.” “Safe? Chris, someone just left a dead body at my front door!” Is Ethan not hearing this right? What the hell is Chris playing at? What is he not telling Ethan? “Did you know this could happen? Are we bait?” “Ethan,” Chris growls, “stand down.” Ethan does not stand down. “Are you scared of me, Chris? Is that what’s really going on here? Is that why you’re keeping us in the dark?” That’s when it happens: the faint sensation of something warm and damp, trickling from his left ear. Ethan studiously ignores it, almost daring Chris to notice what Ethan can’t risk drawing attention to. At least being mad can only help with the poker face. Chris gives a short sigh, mostly down at his clipboard. “I’m not scared of you, Ethan.” “Well maybe you should be!” The awareness that he’s playing with fire flickers around the edges of Ethan’s mind, some mad instinct that almost wants Chris to throw the first punch. Probably the same hair-brained impulse that makes him taunt creepy fishmen, and invite metalbending freaks to do their worst. Good thing that's never got him in trouble before.

[rallamajoop]

Hi! Do you have a resource for the Japanese text of Resident Evil Village? While I need to replay the game for environmental story telling, I noticed some changes during localization, some big ans others small. Namely the origin of the death flower dagger, or the “christianization” of certain pagan elements such as Nichola’s goddess, etc. I would like to maybe one day hyper focus on Donna’s region. I feel like one can infer much from what we’re given between her home to the path leading to it

The residentevil.fandom wiki, for all its flaws, does have Japanese versions of all the text documents (or at least all the ones I've checked)! You can find it under the 'original script' tab under the 'Transcript' section for any file. It's the one big advantage that wiki does have over the file list at evilresource.com, which I'd otherwise prefer.

Having spent so long going through the actual game files, I do also have text dumps of pretty much everything in the game. That includes a lot of shorter titles or descriptions that the wiki wouldn't have. But they're not the easiest to navigate, as they include EVERY language the game supports, and things aren't always ordered intuitively. There's also some unused content in there, which is interesting but not always easy to identify.

To the best of my knowledge there aren't many significant changes between the Japanese and English text, though there are certainly a few. I've talked about a few examples before: the RE7 text for Mia's Orders document does describe her job a little differently in the Japanese (though neither version calls her a scientist, and good god am I sick of people repeating that nonsense!) I brought up a few more in my post about the Four Lords: Japanese text for Dimitrescu specifies she's the daughter of a fallen noble, the information about some of Dimitrescu's and Donna's powers is framed a little differently in the Japanese, and Heisenberg seems to mock the very idea he's any real kind of noble in his diary. These stood out to me mostly because they're cases where the Japanese version explained things that weren't made more sense than the English, given the rest of the context of the game (give or take some individual interpretation ‒ my own Japanese is not much above fangirl-level, and machine translation is only ever so reliable).

The one other interesting change I'm aware of is that Miranda's diary has a little more information about the Cadou in the Japanese text, stating they're derived from a nematode worm. That arguably makes some sense, in that nematodes can be parasitic, and we do see wormlike tendrils emerging from some infected characters. But it explains nothing about how you combine a worm with the mould and get what looks like a deformed human foetus, let alone why the megamycete itself takes the same shape ‒ and it's still pretty hard to read the whole Cadou concept as much more than an ill-thought-out attempt to copy RE4's parasites into their pseudo-RE4-remake. I'd guess the fact it adds so little to our understanding of the Cadou may be why it's excluded from the English version. Possibly the inclusion flowed more naturally in the Japanese version than it does in English, or perhaps it was just missed by accident.

But since I hadn't seen either of your own examples before, naturally, I took a look into them!

From 'Rumours of a Dagger', it looks like the biggest difference is that while the Japanese says something about who created it ‒ "a delusional former head of the family" ‒ that detail is missing from the English version, is that what you're referring to? Interesting! I can see why it might've been dropped from the English, it's the kind of throwaway detail that doesn't really add anything important, and may not have flowed as naturally without a bigger restructure. But the image of a nutjob former lord of the castle, abusing his power to indulge his whims, gathering poisons from all over the world as part of some mad project ‒ that's evocative enough to create quite the image. Was he inspired to create it out of fear of village-mould-monsters like the demon from the relief on the castle gate, maybe? The Japanese version does seem to carry slightly more suggestion that the dagger was created in the castle too, which I didn't get from the English. Nice, and definitely intriguing!

On the Nichola's goddess thing, though ‒ it looks like the main discrepancy is that she's framed as 'Father Nichola's Angel' in the English, but 'Nichola's Goddess' (ニコラの女神像) in the Japanese? That's the kind of change that I'd be a little more leery of reading much into. Japanese does technically have a word for 'angel' (tenshi, 天��), but I've seen localisations translate '女神/megami/female goddess' as 'angel' before (and the reverse), because, well, we're in comparative religion territory now, and concepts overlap. The difference between a literal god or goddess and an angel or 'heavenly messenger' is going to be hazy at the best of times, and 'megami' carries feminine connotations where 'tenshi' doesn't, so may have been seen as more appropriate for the statue asset they used.

It's also worth noting that the model they used for the statue is actually all over the modern Resident Evil series, going back to RE7, mostly appearing as a bit of decorative kitsch in very-western settings where it's very definitely meant to be read as an angel is the traditional Christian sense (the Bakers sure wouldn't have pagan goddesses around their home!) Seriously, this thing haunts me ‒ I have found it in RE7, RE8, and the remakes of both RE2 and RE4. It's probably in RE3 somewhere too. So I'd read 'megami' as a poor translation of 'angel', rather than the other way around.

It's even in multiple places in the Winters' own home in RE8! No-one recycles assets like the RE series!

All that said though, this all comes with my usual big "I am NOT a fluent Japanese speaker" caveat, and if you want to take 'Nicola's Goddess' as evidence of a pagan religion in the village? Heck, why not? 'Megami' is still totally open to interpretation, and though most of the pre-Miranda imagery around the village is v. Christian (all the pictures of saints, etc), the village does still have a very pagan-coded fixation on goats, and we've also got at least one document referring to the locals as 'heathens'. I've suggested before that probably means a different denomination of Christians, rather than actual pagans, but it's certainly open to interpretation.

And in the same text, it's also interesting that '叔父ニコラ' or 'Oji/Uncle Nicola' has become 'Father Nichola' in translation. I'm not aware of any religious implications of 'Oji/Uncle', whereas 'Father' is very clearly Christian in context. Does that mean anything? Heck, IDK, if you want it to!

Speaking of localisation issues: as far as I can see, translations into languages other than English or Japanese have been done using the English version as a template, not the Japanese. This is based on the few times I've tried machine translation on those other languages from the text files, so we're not talking about a big sample here, but the results look pretty definitive. Most likely this is done for practical reasons: I'm sure it's easier to find translator for French, Spanish or German who can translate from English than from Japanese, but it's interesting that they seem to be taking the English version as 'definitive', even though the Japanese version consistently comes first in the text dumps. But either way, you're not likely to find 'confirmation' of the Japanese/English differences looking anywhere else ‒ if there are any significant differences between the English and other language versions, I haven't spotted them.

On another more general note, I am coming at all this with some real-world experience with the translation/localisation process in projects like these (I don't work in game development, but I am a programmer who's worked on major websites while language support was being added as a new feature), and the little I can tell you is that translating something of that scale can be a heckuva chaotic process. You don't want to leave all the translations to be done at the last minute before release, because it can be a huge job ‒ and I know Capcom has English-speaking staff, so getting things translated into English as they're written (or even written first in English and translated into Japanese) is bound to be a priority.

But at the same time, things get re-written all the time during development. Maybe we've changed our minds about some story or technical detail. Maybe we've spotted an error. Maybe the text is slightly too long. Which can be a major headache, if every minor change might need to be translated into multiple other languages, and/or checked by multiple different people to make sure it makes sense in context. A lot of minor details will also likely get dropped or embellished during the translation process, either due to misunderstandings or just because producing something which sounds natural in the target language is usually better than wording that is technically correct but linguistically awkward.

So tl;dr: small differences between localisations are bound to happen, and are absolutely grounds for over-analysis, if you're so inclined. Who knows what else might be buried in all those files?

[rallamajoop]

This is really random but what are your headcanons on Mia and Ethan's early childhood? Two, I kind of wonder what your thoughts on a Miranda/Ethan/Mia story would be like (canonically, don't think there's a chance in hell, but it's interesting to consider what could lead to Miranda obsessing over Ethan or Mia in a manner similiar to Rose, because I doubt it would be anything healthy. I don't know, maybe she baby-traps them or something - the baby would have megamycete powers, like Rose.

To answer your first question, basically all my ideas about Ethan and Mia's pre-canon lives are in my fic Quarantine! Probably the only one that counts as 'early childhood' is that I like the idea Ethan spent some summers as a kid living with gun-loving relatives from Texas, just to explain why a guy as mild-mannered as him is still so comfortable using and reloading guns in RE7. He and Mia seem to have lived in Texas, according to Mia's driver's license, at least, and the geography tracks with roughly how long it seems to take him to get to Louisiana, but neither of them have Texas accents, so I doubt either of them grew up there. But they might be more likely to have moved there as adults if Ethan has family and some fond memories of the state.

I have no particular ideas about Mia's early childhood, but hoo boy can I go on and on about everything that happened to her from college to the present day ‒ y'know, the stuff that actually explains all the backstory behind how she wound up working for the Connections (again, see Quarantine if you do actually want to hear me go on about it). But I do like the idea that the music box that was "a wedding gift from Grandma" was her grandma's, not Ethan's, so maybe that counts.

As for Miranda/Ethan/Mia... well heck, you don't have to dig far in the canon to find real support for the idea of Miranda having a sinister fixation on Ethan specifically: I mean, she spends god knows how long pretending to be his wife, and both Heisenberg and Moreau suggest pretty loudly that Miranda's plans involve Ethan 'joining the family', so to speak. The implications are right there, and so much so that I'm already kind of playing them from different angles in both my current WIPs (Follow Me Home and Atypical side-effects may include, FTR). And if I'm not about to share all my ideas on that front, it's mostly because that would mean Spoilers. XD

But let's look at your ideas for now, because there's a whole second ask to elaborate on that one, and it's long, so I'm sticking it under a cut.

That's a lot to cover, so we'll take it point by point. For reference, the post that mentions Miranda possibly getting close to her in some disguised form was this one, primarily about the timeline for how long she might've spent posing as Mia.

Okay, so the elephant in the room when we're talking anything Miranda/Ethan (or Miranda/Mia) is that we are essentially talking about rape, and I'd rather acknowledge that up front. There's no real redeeming a character like Miranda; the nicest possible way I can imagine her getting to Ethan would involve deliberately driving a wedge between him and Mia, then taking advantage of him post-breakup. The more obvious option involves rape-by-deception, with Miranda impersonating Mia. Being Miranda, violence and mind-control are always options too. No judgement here for wanting to go there: this is a horror canon, and there's so much territory here that went under-explored in the game. I'm all for dark scenarios and dirtybadwrong fic, and god knows there's ample potential in what Miranda did to both Mia and Ethan for either ‒ but let's not kid ourselves about where this is going.

So I'm a little thrown by the idea of Miranda 'baby trapping' Ethan. A baby trap generally means one partner trying to prevent the other from leaving a relationship by getting them pregnant, getting themselves pregnant, or faking a pregnancy ‒ perhaps even sabotaging contraception to make it happen. But Miranda is, y'know, not in a relationship with either Mia or Ethan, and the idea of raping someone and then trying to start a relationship with them because one of you is now pregnant is… well, I mean, it's definitely a thing that has happened in some parts of the world, but I think we've left traditional 'baby trap' territory pretty far behind.

Naive as he can be, I don't think Ethan Winters would be particularly susceptible to this one. I can see Ethan being more reluctant to kill Miranda if she's pregnant, or doing his best to save the baby after it's born, but "this complete stranger who impersonated my wife and raped me thinks we're in a relationship now" is a level of delusion I do not see even Ethan falling for. Miranda's canonically 100% willing to use deception, manipulation and straight-up mind-control to get what she wants; she doesn't need "I'm having your baby!" as a tactic.

In other points worth addressing, I wouldn't take Ethan and Mia's fertility as evidence that Miranda would be necessarily fertile herself. Maybe she is, maybe she isn't, but the Winters were infected by a different strain of the mould under very different circumstances. Ethan's fertility may even be just about unique: if anyone with the mould in their system could have produced a kid like Rose, I doubt getting one would've taken Miranda so long.

But regardless of her own status, Ethan's fertility is still categorically the prime reason Miranda would be interested in him. He is, after all, the father of 'her' child, or at least her child's new body. That's plenty reason enough for someone as fucked up as Miranda to get Ideas about Ethan's place in her new 'family'.

And as I touched on above, there is a surprising amount in canon to back that up. Heisenberg states outright that Miranda's been having Ethan destroy her current 'family' as a test to see if he's good enough to join himself, and Moreau's heartfelt, "I should be with her, not you," strongly suggests that Miranda doesn't want Ethan as just another new 'child'.

Then you've got everything she was up to in the Winters' home. Sure, we're probably meant to assume that Miranda impersonated Mia as a means to get close enough to Rose to make sure she was a suitable vessel for Eva without immediately alerting the authorities. Perhaps she originally assumed that Mia was the source of most of Rose's powers, and capturing and experimenting on Mia was a means to learn more. Fuck, maybe she's even had Mia pegged as a potentially compatible infectee and future surrogate mother since way back when she was working with the Connections ‒ maybe that's even part of how Eveline got the idea that Mia was the one she wanted as her mother in the first place.

And there would be so much territory to play with here! We know nothing about Mia's own history with Miranda, beyond the fact that one photo was taken. I've speculated before) that it may have only been taken shortly before Mia and Alan left to transport Eveline to the US, but that's certainly not the only option. There's every reason to imagine that the Connections might've had genetic profiles of its own staff, and Miranda might well have had access to them. And there's no reason to imagine that the Connections would've done anything to protect Mia if Miranda was developing a creepy fascination with one of their best agents, or had requested she be transferred to the E-series project, perhaps even considered as a donor or incubator for the next series. Mia would've had no-one she could've gone to if Miranda's interest made her uncomfortable. In that situation, Mia's disappearance en route to the US might have saved her from much worse. You could really go so many places developing Miranda's history with Mia, climaxing with her capture and imprisonment in Miranda's lab.

But Ethan still remains the more obvious target for any fixation Miranda might've developed with the Winters. I mean, the fact she spent so much time living in Ethan's home, imitating his wife… man, is that suggestive, no matter how you slice it.

The major fly in the ointment of the whole theory is, of course, that none of Miranda's own interactions with Ethan suggest much interest in him 'joining the family' in any capacity ‒ and I'm sure that's the main reason I've never seen much fic exploring the idea. When she finally reveals herself to Ethan, she greets him with nothing but mocking disdain. But that's nothing you can't work around with a little imagination.

Perhaps claiming Ethan was the original plan, but in the time since, she's realised he'd never want her willingly, and is immune to her usual mind-control powers over other infected, and now she's going all tsundere, playing it like she was never that interested in him anyway. Maybe Chris bursting in with guns blazing messed up her original plans to manipulate Ethan into believing that Miranda's twisted version of his wife was always the real woman he was in love with, who would willingly hand over his daughter and follow her back to her village, to assassinate her 'false' children in a show of devotion. The idea of her turning Ethan against Chris (or the real Mia) is actually a hell of an image too, or trying similar tactics on Mia by imitating Ethan. Miranda is categorically a fairy-tale witch-queen, and a willingness to turn on a previous lover who no longer seems pliable or useful is wholly in character.

It's also notable that, as devoted as Miranda is to her long-lost Eva, we never hear a single breath about Eva's father. Was he alive or dead when she lost Eva? Was she ever married? Was he ever more to her than some itinerant asshole who left her pregnant? We don't know, because he's no longer of any importance to her. Miranda is not someone with any obvious capacity for romantic or sexual love.

It's not even remotely clear whether her apparent love for Eva took any form that the real Eva would appreciate, had she lived or been reborn to experience it. Eva is dead, and thus perfect, incapable of disappointing her mother with any mortal flaw. And though Miranda may be incapable of loving, she certainly enjoys devotion from all her subjects, right up until the devoted are judged to outlived their usefulness. I'm sure her only interest in Ethan would be to expect him to express the same devotion, and she wouldn't hesitate to discard him the moment he disappointed her.

Of course, the idea of Miranda developing her own twisted obsession with Ethan, as you suggest ‒ deciding he's already hers, much as she did with Rose ‒ is a pretty compelling angle too. I can't see her loving Ethan, but convincing herself that Ethan was meant to be hers ‒ this perfect father figure for her reborn daughter, host of the same mould Miranda herself gifted to the Connections, so clearly a gift from the very fates in answer to her long years of labour! It's not a huge stretch to imagine her getting invested enough in that idea to be furious and disbelieving when Ethan turns her down.

At the end of the day, it's still perfectly believable that she never had any interest in Ethan beyond what she expresses in game, and that Heisenberg and Moreau were mistaken about her intentions. But had Miranda been a little more invested, or Ethan a little more susceptible to her attempts at mind control and manipulation, it's very easy to imagine the conflict of the game going in some very different directions. And her plans for Mia are a completely blank page in canon, and could go anywhere you like.

[rallamajoop]

What if Shadow of Rose isn’t actually a sixteen year time skip? We know Rose has a lot of the same symptoms as Evelyn. Wouldn’t it also make sense for her to be so ostracized if she were aging faster than her peers?

I like that you're asking the question, Anon ‒ the same thought has occurred to me too! You're correct that nothing in Shadow of Rose is dated (or if it is, I missed it too). The possibility that Rose might have aged at an abnormal rate isn't that out there either, considering that we know Eveline's apparent 10-year-old age was artificially maintained, and that she aged rapidly without those treatments. Rose isn't Eveline, of course, but who knows what's true for her? (I mean, one hopes at least any accelerated aging Rose might face will cut off at adulthood, but still.) Miranda's experiments have clearly frozen people at the age they were when experimented on too, which is further proof the mould can fuck with aging in various ways.

Regardless of when Shadows of Rose is actually set though, I'm not surprised that we aren't given any hard dates. Resident Evil is a rare franchise that's always aged more or less in real time: events like the Raccoon City Outbreak are still referenced as taking place in the 90's, and RE8's Chris certainly looks like he's pushing 50 these days. (I also suspect this is one reason why all those fans clamoring for a return of Jill or Claire haven't got their wish yet: letting the fanboys deal with how both women should have aged just as much as Chris is more than Capcom probably has the balls for.)

But if Rose really is, say, 16 in SoR, that puts the date around 2037 (the wiki uses this year, but as usual cites 0 sources, so is likely bullshit). And that's just a little awkward from a continuity standpoint, because SoR would also have us believe that not only is Chris still alive and working well into his sixties, he's apparently still working with his Dog-Dog squad too. That could be a problem going forward, because it really limits what the franchise can realistically do with Chris for the next solid generation or so.

It's not just Chris, either: selling the audience on potentially-world-changing future major bio threats is going to be that little bit harder when we "know" that there's a future in canon already, and that future looks like SoR.

So it's very much in Capcom's interest to play a little coy with the dates for SoR. Fans can't come to them complaining that (say, for example) RE11 comes along and tells us Hound Wolf disband in 2035 when we don't actually know for sure that SoR is set later than that. It may well be one of the reasons why we don't see any recognisable faces like Chris or Mia in the DLC: the time gap is more ambiguous if we don't get to see how much they've aged. Besides, keeping them unseen leaves RE9 free to have them lose an eye or gain a sexy new scar without contradicting anything SoR's shown us already. And if the timeline does get tight, they've always got the option of going back later and telling us that Rose actually does age unnaturally fast, and in fact SoR is only 4 years after RE8. When writing for an ongoing franchise, leaving that sort of wiggle room for later installments to explore is often the best policy.

But all this aside, is there anything to suggest that Rose does age fast, or that SoR is set closer to the present than it looks at first glance? The biggest flaw in the theory would be that baby!Rose is already six months old, and seems to be developing at a normal rate. She's recently started solid food, she doesn't seem to be crawling yet, let alone walking (Ethan makes a comment about dusting out the spare room before Rose gets mobile) ‒ from the outside, she looks pretty normal. Given the range of different ages at which babies hit different developmental milestones, that doesn't really prove anything, but no points in our favour so far.

Surprisingly then, the single biggest indicator that a serious number of years really have (probably) passed is, well, this guy. Remember K?

You wouldn't know it, but he's apparently a member of the same incarnation of Hound Wolf Chris is leading in RE8 proper: apparently K = Canine. Honestly, I didn't even make the connection until I found out they had the same voice actor (Conner Marx), 'K' appearing in the credits for SoR only under the name 'Canine'.

But in my defense, they've done their level best the mask that connection, given that Rose calls him only 'K' in the DLC, while Chris was calling him 'Canine' in the main game. And it was consistently rendered in subs and text as a six-letter-word: 'Canine', never 'K-9'. Nor is this helped by the fact that unused concepts tell us he's a dog handler called Charlie Graham (written in katakana next to his pic), or that the voice actor's performance in the two stories is so wildly different.

Heck, for all I know, maybe 'K' and 'Canine' are two different characters played by the same VA, and the SoR credits used the wrong name. They're both dark-haired, blue-eyed white guys, but the resemblance isn't that obvious (they don't even use the same eye texture ‒ because you know I'd check that). Conner Marx also played Sebastian, the guy with the crutches from Louisa's house, so it's not like Canine is his only role either way.

Assuming they are supposed to be the same guy though, 'Canine' does seem to be one of the more prominent members of the team throughout the main RE8 storyline, not that you'd know it without applying the Hound-Wolf No Mask mod to reveal the team's faces. He's the guy who jumps Ethan and gets judo-flipped in Moreau's area, the guy Chris tells to check out what the BSAA's up to at the start of his section, and the guy in the chopper at the end showing Chris that bioweapon under the BSAA helmets. So he's arguably one of the more logical characters to bring back. Conveniently, you can watch all those scenes with their faces revealed in this compilation video if you're interested.

(Naturally, when I'm playing with mods, Chris does not escape unscathed either. Alt-costumes from RE5 are TOTALLY canon, convince me otherwise!)

While I'm on the subject, can I also mention what a terrific job Conner Marx of bringing K to life in SoR? It's a real shame that everything we learn about K is retroactively proven to be one of Miranda's illusions. She's really upped her game since mimicking Mia back in the original RE8 opening (but then, when Mr. Denial himself is your only audience, why not phone it in?)

But getting back to the original point, K/Canine is the one character who does at least appear to have aged by a solid decade or two in the intervening years. You know, if you compare his SoR appearance to concept art, and that unseen head model that doesn't actually appear in the original RE8 at all.

So here's the thing I want to underline: unused concepts and models you have to hack the game to see are not canon. They can be interesting, as a window into the evolution of creative intent, but no-one should feel beholden to them. There clearly were some plans to reveal the faces of the Hound Wolf squad in RE8 that didn't make the final game, or they wouldn't have distinct faces modelled at all ‒ there's even a storyboard suggesting how it was meant to happen ‒ but it's still hard to guess how 'finished' those face models really were. There's no reason Capcom couldn't completely redesign the whole squad between now and whenever we do officially see their faces in a later RE title (assuming we ever do at all).

So basically, there's nothing to prevent them from coming back a few years from now and telling us the K under the mask in RE8 always looked like the middle-aged guy from SoR, if they want to. The info they've actually given us leaves that open, for now at least.

But in the meantime, the fact K's model appears to have been aged up a good decade plus is probably a decent indicator that SoR is probably intended to be a long way into the future, and that Rose probably ages at a normal rate. But it never hurts to keep your options open. The less concrete lore you have, the less risk of contradicting yourself later on (as so many 'facts' from guide books often do). More is not always better, just because some fan wants to be able to post a definitive RE timeline on Reddit or something.

So yes, as usual, I have taken an innocent little question and spun it all into a whole lecture on unused concepts and some of the realities of writing for a franchise! (Look, if you're reading this blog, you should what you signed up for at this point.) But to reiterate: I do like the idea that Rose may be younger than she appears! It may or may not be intended, but there's certainly nothing in canon to contradict it, and it's a very interesting possibility all on its own.

[rallamajoop]

NC-17, 6095 words (this part), 38,275 words (so far)

"Is there anything I can do? My resources are at your disposal!" For a price, thinks Ethan, but really, money is the least of his problems these days. "Not unless you have a family ticket out of the country to sell me. Or some good advice about how to deal with..." he starts, only realising what he was on the verge of asking when it's almost too late. "...about?" the Duke prompts him. Ethan lets out another sigh. If he can't tell the Duke, who can he tell? "About... god, about being tempted by someone who's not my wife!"

Read from start

[rallamajoop]

PG, 530 words

Michael. The sound of his name barely raises him from a deep, dreamless sleep. He feels like he's floating, suspended in space. Wake up, Michael.

Happy Valentines day, have a teeny little snippet of David/Michael fluff!

This started as an idea for a bonus scene following the end of Will of the Living. But it's a little irrelevant to work as an epilogue, a little short to feel worth posting as a whole new fic, and generic enough to fit into almost any David/Michael story where all the Lost Boys live, so adding it to the One of us ficlet collection made more sense to me. It can still be part of Will of the Living if you want to to, though.

[rallamajoop]

Lost Boys fic I am not writing, part 2

I've always had a bit of a thing for creating what amount to multi-choice versions of the same story. I didn't mean to do this for Pater Unfamilias, but there I was a little while back, idly thinking about how I've always assumed there's a universe out there where David and Michael don't end up fucking after the blood transfer in Pater Familias, and about how there's probably also a universe where Tony WAS Michael's first kill, and all the half-formed ideas I had for the Max confrontation that didn't end up being used… and I wound up with an entire alternate version of that story.

See, the thing about David in that story is that as much as he wants Michael, he's very much got his eyes on the prize - and the prize is a Michael who's willingly made his first kill and has no going back. If there's any chance Michael might upend his plans with a bit of a heterosexual panic, well, David is completely willing to delay gratification until Michael's all-in on vampirehood. Or alternately: David is just completely willing to spend the whole night edging Michael just for the fun of it.

So in this alternate version of Pater Familias, things still get a little hot and heavy during the blood transfer, but David never goes in for the kiss. Instead, he just makes Michael put his shirt back on and head out straight away. Michael knows there's something going on between him and David, but he doesn't fully understand what, and gets dragged out to make his first kill regardless (probably on his own bike in this version… unless David talks him into riding bitch just to mess with him, which is actually a pretty fun idea now I think of it). Much the same conversation from the first part of Will of the Living over who to kill takes place, and they still wind up going to Tony's place. But in this universe, because David and Michael did not stop to upend Michael's whole sexual identity after the blood transfer, they make it there much earlier - before Max ever arrives.

Tony lets them in, but he's suspicious. He's expecting Max, but Max sure didn't say anything about the boys coming over tonight. David makes a big song-and-dance about introducing him to Michael, which does relax Tony a little (he already knows Max has plans to expand the family), and David tells him they're looking to do something 'special' for Michael's first kill. Tony initially assumes they're asking him to organise something, but eventually catches on that he's the 'special' something, and now we get to the 'begging for his life' portion of the evening.

If you've already read my post on the Hypothetical Simon Says Part 3, you've already seen another version of Tony-begs-for-his-life. Things would go differently in alt-universe land though, because Tony would be well aware that Michael's just a half-vampire and therefore human enough to require a different tack, and would go for the 'spare me, I have a family!' angle instead. Already knowing he's divorced, Michael would be all, "So where are they?" Tony would do the whole song-and-dance about just needing the chance to win his wife back, and this would probably be the part where the other Lost Boys go exploring the house and turning up the evidence of how little Tony is actually invested in that (family photo stuffed in a drawer with a cigarette burn over his wife's face, underwear left lying around that definitely does not belong to his wife, etc), so Michael's really not buying it. But there's bound to be some violence where Tony attempts to make a run for it and fails, and definitely a bit where David gets Tony's blood all over his fingers and pushes them into Michael's mouth to 'give him a taste'. But one way or another, Tony runs sufficiently afoul of Michael's daddy issues to end up severely un-alived, courtesy of Michel Emerson.

And while Michael's kind of standing there dissociating a little in the aftermath of having just killed someone, David comes up to ask him how it tastes ("Not as good as yours"), lick the blood off Michael's lips, and kiss him properly for the first time ‒ which is very effective at distracting Michael from all that existential murder-angst. David stops it at a kiss, which Michael fully enjoys but doesn't really understand - he ends up trying to tell himself David was just trying to get a taste of Tony's blood or something, which is disappointing because Michael's aware by now that he really wants David to do it again.

But while Michael's still reeling, this is when Max arrives. He realises Tony's dead immediately (there is A Mess) - and worse, in this version, Michael fails to respond to an order from Max, and Max figures out exactly what David's done. Max is not happy, and he orders David to kill Michael.

David resists to the best of his ability, but it doesn't do much good. Michael defends himself, but Max orders the others to help, and they hold Michael down while David drains Michael's blood for the second time in one night, which Michael kinda sorta gets off on a little even while genuinely thinking he's about to die for real… but right when he's at the edge of death, Max orders David to stop.

Yeah, so it turns out Max isn't quite ready to kill Lucy's son, he just wanted to teach David a lesson. Max is also kinda hoping that this soon after Michael's first kill, it might still be possible to change who his sire is again, so he rips open a wrist and feeds Michael his own blood.

This is a great power move on paper, but it backfires. For one, unlike when David did this the first time, Max doesn't have a full stomach of fresh blood, so for Michael to drink as much as he needs to get him off death's door weakens Max considerably. More importantly, Max's theory doesn't pay off. He orders Michael to stop, but Michael just ignores him and keeps drinking. Max tries again, maybe threatening David if Michael doesn't obey… but Michael's getting his strength back, and he's inside Max's guard, and Michael lashes out and rips out Max's throat. Max can no longer speak to give orders, so David's free - and in this universe, he falls on Max in a wild fury and tears him apart, and it is fucking brutal (no prizes for guessing why). Michael and the others don't get to do more than watch.

When David gets to the stage where he's pretty much just stomping what's left of Max into the carpet, Michael goes to try and calm him down, and for his trouble, he gets pinned to the wall with David's tongue down his throat in a possessive fury (there is probably some yelling things like "NO-ONE gets to take you from me" etc). And THIS is where they finally fuck, probably on Tony's bed, with Michael going all, oh, THIS is what it was all about, because everything he's been feeling for David all night finally makes sense.

And that's pretty much the whole scenario. After they've both calmed down, Michael still realises he needs to go talk to Sam, but this time David comes with him and with much less bitching, because Michael's a full vampire now and David is not risking him getting so caught up saying goodbye that he forgets to head for home before sunrise. And the conversation with Sam is probably pretty similar, give or take David out the window tapping his watch. (The same conversation with Grandpa does not happen, for obvious reasons, though maybe Michael runs into him briefly on his way out.)

[rallamajoop]

hi!! i saw your compilations of photos from re7 and re8 and thought it was intriguing that some photos look hyper realistic like the ones with mother miranda but others look more animated like mia holding rose and her pregnancy photos. i just dont know why there is a difference like that with photos that come from the same game and maybe you can have an explanation for that? thank you!

Well, yeah ‒ some of the "photos" are renders of in-game models. Others are photomanips of real human faces ‒ presumably the same real humans who had their features scanned as face models for those characters. I already talked about this a bit in my post on the lab photos, FTR. Throwing an actual human face into a fully-rendered horror environment is one of those occasionally-used tricks to lend something a slightly uncanny, out-of-place air ‒ RE is far from the only game to do it (look up the Forbidden Siren series on youtube sometime for another fascinating example of how to use realism for seriously sinister effect). It's like having the eyes of a painting (literally!) follow you around the room, or catching your own reflection in a mirror at the wrong moment ‒ a detail that breaks down the barriers between game world and real world in a wonderfully unnerving way.

You can see the contrast pretty clearly in how Mia looks in her family photos from around the Winters' home in RE8 vs how she looks in photos of her with Ethan or Eveline from RE7 (surprisingly, her drivers license from RE7 seems to be a face render though). Why not do all the photos the same way? Because family photos aren't supposed to look sinister. Renders of the in-game models look like they're part of the same world as the rest of the game in a way hyper-realistic photos don't. Lab photos of creepy experiments are supposed to look sinister. A snapshot of Mia hanging out with Eveline or attached to the email Eveline forced her to send Ethan to bait him into danger are pretty sinister too. It's all about the vibes they're going for.

(Granted, it's also possible some of those pics were just generated in a hurry based on what was easier for whoever was on a deadline. Sometimes, editing a photograph may be simpler than posing an in-game model in a very specific way. Other times, just taking a quick snapshot of a model face may be easier. Some pics may be 'temporary' placeholders that were never replaced with 'final' copies because time was short and/or the placeholder was judged good enough for how long the player would see them. A lot of work goes into these games from a lot of team members with different skillsets and time pressures. But most of the RE stuff looks pretty deliberate to me.)

To the best of my knowledge, none of the face-models actually posed for those photos, or even knew what characters their faces were going to be used for when the scans were originally done. I'm not even completely sure the all faces in all those photos are the original face models, or just someone else who was 'close enough'.

I have no actual behind-the-scenes sources talking about any of this, mind, so you're free to take my version with a grain of salt. But I think the results speak for themselves.

[rallamajoop]

NC-17, 2269 words (this part), 8,936 (so far)

Heisenberg gets an interesting look on his face when Ethan admits he's never exactly done anal before. Or even really thought about it, let alone... "Don't you worry," Heisenberg promises with a hungry grin, "I'll take good care of you." He proceeds to strip Ethan, puts him face down on an old mattress, and then spends so long slowly and methodically opening him up with his fingers that Ethan comes again, for a third time, without ever getting to the main event. He can't even make himself mind. It turns out that prostate orgasms really are that good.

Read from start

Yeah, so it turns out this one might be getting a proper ending after all. Calling this one probably chapter 3 of 5, but we'll have to see if that sticks ‒ in the meantime, have some smut, because that's really what this AU is about (mostly).

[rallamajoop]

the RE fandom is interesting in that we have a series that make it a point to have all the bioweapons with a series like the T-series and they accept that... unless it is about RE7 because despite it being E-series and a file calling Eveline and the E-series bioweapons I occassionally see people saying it's not a real RE game because there are no bioweapons like okay? it's been a few days and i am still baffled by it.

Uh, I assume you're thinking of the T-virus. Most Resident Evils have a letter-virus of some variety (G-virus, C-virus, etc), and if the wiki is to be believed, those letters stood for something (Tyrant, Chrysalid, etc). RE7 dispenses with the viruses, and instead tells us Eveline was a member of the E-series, with the preceding round of experiments being the D-series. Presumably, they've been going alphabetically with work started back at the A-series. So it's not really the same thing as the old virus nomenclature, but then, I don't think anyone seriously thinks the identity of the RE series is wrapped up in whether there's a bioweapon with a letter for a name.

The "critique" I have seen thrown at RE8 once or twice (and which may be more like what you're really trying to get at?) is that it's not 'proper' RE because the bad guys aren't Umbrella anymore, or it lacks zombies, which is pretty hilarious. Firstly because dude, if you need Umbrella-zombies to make your evils resident, I have some real bad news for you about the original RE4. That ship has sailed.

But mostly because, I mean, is this not zombie enough for you?

You've got undead things crawling out of the ground, you've got a lycan infection that spreads by bite, I don't know what else you want here! Another US city getting taken over by a zombie plague? Hasn't that been kind of done to death by now?

Realistically, I imagine the real complaint is more that the new games are not like the old games, and some people who liked the old games don't like the new ones and are having trouble articulating why. Folks who signed up for the original haunted zombie house or the RE2-3 era zombie plague (or even the RE4-6 action-shooty-times) may not be here for high gothic horror or Louisiana hillbilly slasher time, and that's fine: they're allowed to be disappointed the new games are less their thing.

The fact the new RE games centre an untrained everyman like Ethan rather than the special forces teams of most previous RE games does break with a lot of what originally set the franchise apart from other survival horror titles like Silent Hill, and so may be firmer grounds for critique. But back in 1996, the idea that a trained special ops team could find themselves facing something even they weren't prepared for was a big part of what made the horror so horrifying. That doesn't work so well a dozen titles later, when the world of RE has now been dealing with major bio-terror outbreaks for so long that it ought to be a standard part of basic training nowadays. And not innovating away from that ‒ just doing the same thing but bigger with each new game ‒ is what produced the mess that was RE6.

Trying something different with RE7 is how the franchise reinvented itself, to great success. Chris and the cavalry flying in with their machine guns at some point is still part of the game, but no longer the whole experience. Myself, I really like the way they've been playing with different genres over the last couple of games, and I really hope they keep doing it.

Realistically though, there'll always be someone going "they changed it now it sucks". For all I know, maybe I'll be the one doing that when Resident Evil 9 rolls around, if what we get just isn't my thing. Reinvention is what's kept RE relevant, and that's been true since at least the days of RE4, even if no new installment will be for everyone (and even that's assuming the franchise maintains anything like the same success going forwards, which is never guaranteed).

But in the meantime, anyone claiming that the RE series would've been a bigger success without the likes of Lady D can safely be laughed out of the room.

[rallamajoop]

Fic I am not writing: The Lost Boys edition

So, for the record, I'm probably not writing any more fic for the Simon Says (aka Pater Unfamilias/Will of the Living) universe. But that hasn't stopped my brain from occasionally throwing ideas at me, and this is one of them.

If you've read Will of the Living, you'd know it ends with Michael basically agreeing to make the previously-nominated Tony-Something his first 'proper' kill (read: this time David gets to watch). It's not a scene I feel needs to be part of the story, when Michael's already done such a thorough job of committing to his new lifestyle, and watching him wrestle with the actual murder part mostly just for David's satisfaction doesn't strike me as the most pleasant note to end on.

That said, the one way I realised I could see the idea working is if it's told from Tony's POV. He'd already be on the run and probably a good couple of days away from Santa Carla by the time they catch up with him, only to be cornered and end up begging a gang of bike-riding teen vamps for his life, while Michael tries to work himself up for the kill.

Where this goes wrong is that Tony's strategy would mostly involve babbling about how useful he could be if they'd just let him live. He'd keep giving examples of all the things Max had done that Tony had helped cover up for him ‒ completely oblivious to the fact that every word he says only makes it easier for Michael to kill him with a clean conscience (which he eventually does).

Cut to a brief scene from Michael or David's POV to wrap up. We'd end with Michael suggesting that rather than heading straight home, they take the excuse to celebrate being out from under Max's thumb by going on a bit of a road trip (subtext: not least because figuring this whole vampire thing out can only be easier without the risk of running into his family on the boardwalk every night). Maybe they'll even wind up paying Michael's real dad a visit back in Phoenix at some point, and bring all this universe's daddy-issues full circle, but that's well beyond the scope of what I've got thought out.

So why is this not getting written, if I like the idea so much? Mostly because Tony is just not the kind of OC I know what to do with. He'd need a backstory, and a whole shitload of worldbuilding details around what he's actually done for Max (not to mention a real last name for the guy), and I just don't have any good ideas that don't feel too much like work to hammer out. So unless I (or anyone else who really wants to write it) suddenly get struck with real inspiration for creating Max's personal divorced-skeezeball-over-privileged-clean-up-guy, this one's likely to stay hypothetical.