#way back when and acknowledge that could be wrong but regardless i can't unsee the damn connections

[savage-rhi]

I went down the rabbit hole looking up horrible diseases like malaria, fungal infections, kuru, etc. then I got to rabies and the story of how the vaccine for it was discovered.

Louis Pasteur was a French chemist, pharmacist and microbiologist. When he was a kiddo, he witnessed a man from his town succumb to rabies after being bitten by a wolf. Watching the guy deteriorate hit him really fucking hard that he ended up dedicating his life to trying to understand how diseases like that worked and develop treatment for it--which miraculously, he accomplished (seriously, read up on the man's life. He did a lot of cool shit.)

And that brings me to this question:

Did mother fucking Capcom use this information at all for the basis of Luis's backstory in the RE4 remake?

I mean...

As a kid, Luis watches his grandfather get burned alive in his home after gramps was bitten by an infected wolf that caused him to slowly lose his mind (strongly hinted gramps had rabies, although there's theories he was sick with the plaga).

That experience was the inciting incident that more than likely inspired Luis to leave his village and pursue a career working with viruses/parasites. He hyperfixated hard on it like Pasteur did with with diseases and microorganisms.

After Pasteur's death, it was revealed that despite his genius, he was flawed and labeled as, "sometimes unfair, combative, arrogant, unattractive in attitude, inflexible and even dogmatic." Now Luis doesn't come across like this in game (at least not for all these traits), BUT we don't know what he was like as an Umbrella scientist. Before turning a new leaf, he could've very well been a bit of an ass given he was a prodigy biologist.

Pasteur had his breakthroughs and also his controversies such as being criticized for keeping secrecy of his procedures and not giving proper pre-clinical trials on animals. Then there was a whole ethical scandal testing the rabies vaccine on a boy (since he wasn't a licensed professional he could've faced prosecution among other punishments). Kind of sounds like shit Luis would do. Pushing the envelope to satisfy his curiosity even at high personal risk, keeping a lot of his research to himself the best he could after the shit with Umbrella, working against Saddler in secret after realizing what was really unfolding with his work, etc.

Both are in the field of biology.

Luis = Louis (close enough!)