#this is why I’m on secret backstory Ethan team tho bc it literally makes no sense

[mayybirds]

The thing about Ethan is that I can barely believe this man knows how to use a pistol, let alone all the other shit he pulls in RE7. RE8, fine, he's had some training and probably googled how to make ammo to assuage his PTSD-sourced paranoia just in case he ends up back in that sort of situation.

But RE7, this man looks like he's never held a gun in his life and it's not like he came prepared for a fight. Does he even know where the safety is? I know the US is a pretty gun-centric place but I don't think Ethan is the type of guy to be part of it. Maybe he went out to the shooting range with some buddies but... does Ethan look like the guy who has friends who go shooting for fun? This man is from California and works as a systems engineer.

Leon at least was a police rookie, he had training. Scientists working in high-security and high-risk fields of research, especially in the RE universe, they also probably know how to use a gun at least theoretically. I don't have to explain the soldiers or spies. Having family in the military can also explain at least a basic proficiency with firearms, or coming from an area where hunting was at least semi-common or your dad might keep a gun in a locked box for emergencies. But Ethan is so painfully average in a very specific middle-class suburban California way that I can't imagine him having any sort of weapons training, let alone the ability to use a grenade launcher. He went out to the middle of bumfuck Louisiana looking for his missing wife in a dress shirt and apparently he's worldy enough to know how to use a revolver? Mia had her secret identity as an evil scientist for the military industrial complex but where tf does Ethan's weapons background come from because I bet it's buckwild.

(Of course then you came in with your Raccoon City Survivor Ethan desperately trying to paper over the trauma with the illusion of normalcy even though the knowledge and habits remain just beneath the surface, which is fantastic. But still I wonder what the people at Capcom were thinking when they made Mr. Whitebread build explosives out of scraps in a shack)

Yeah when you get away from like…the kind of patchwork cover me and other fanfic writers do to excuse Ethan’s knowledge of weapons… Canon Ethan’s abilities with firearms get that much more ridiculous and hilarious. Like…I’m someone who plays survival horror games regularly but if you put me in front of a real gun I’d have very limited knowledge of how to use it. So how tf did Ethan know what he was doing.

It’s him being from Cali that’s really the icing on top for me. TtVtL Ethan is from around the L.A. area but canon Ethan in my head is from the greater San Fran area because…systems engineer in chinos. Tech people in San Fran do not fuckin have guns lol. Literally they could have made him from Texas like Mia and I’d have at least bought into it a little more because… Texas.