why leon kennedy?

not quite sure where i want to start with this, lol. i hate being vulnerable on the internet and leon is my tender belly exposed to the teeth of this bitch of an earth. so, i guess i'll start with when and how i came to know of leon.

resident evil (and by extension, leon) has been in the background of my life for a very long time now. even though i came into the series fairly recently (2020?) it's always been there, even if i wasn't personally playing it. i'd heard of it of course; a game a friend played in high school, a game i picked up at blockbuster and put back because mom wouldn't let me play it because it had the word "evil" in the title, a series of (bad) live action movies i'd watched with my dad at too young an age. but then, i met my girlfriend. i love telling the story of how i got to know leon because i was "introduced" to him by my wonderful, hilarious, handsome butch almost 10 years ago. it's a funny story, one that i cherish so deeply because the moment was just so... dutch. and so perfect and funny.

we hadn't been dating long, i don't remember if we'd even officially put a name to what we were yet. i think we were both afraid of scaring the other off with the word 'girlfriend.' i do remember making out with dutch in my teeny tiny twin bed at my mom's for a really long time and then he pulled away and smiled and blurted: "have you ever played resident evil 4?" which, looking back, is a hilarious thing to ask someone you just made out with for nearly 20 minutes. but it was perfect and funny, just like dutch. i laughed and told him no, i hadn't. he bolted up, told me i was gonna love it, and immediately bought it on my ps3.

and he was right, i did love it.

it was absurd and funny and leon was absurd and funny. i fell in love with leon and fell even more in love with dutch. i didn't play resident evil for myself until later, years later actually. i'd enjoyed watching dutch play it and always will. on a whim, i borrowed dutch's sister's copy of the RE2 remake and decided it was finally time to jump in. i was relatively new to horror and was scared of Everything. i think i screamed more than anything in that first playthrough. it reaffirmed my love for leon and his frustratingly naive righteousness and his goofy playfulness. 2023 rolled around and before we knew it, the RE4 remake dropped. there's something about re4r leon that just hits the spot for me. he's a little cocky, a little naive, and a little jaded. guilt weighs him down and he's so self-sacrificial it borders on suicidal. he's a delicious mix of all his iterations and i think capcom did a really great job polishing who he was from the og 4.

it was pretty over for me after re4r came out, i couldn't get enough. i have over 500 hrs on my ps5 copy alone, nearly 300 on dutch's pc, and i don't see myself giving it up anytime soon. after i beat 4r, i played through every resident evil i could get my hands on. it took me an embarrassingly long time to get the hang of the old tank controls but now i think i love them more than i love modern controls, re1 (2002) is probably my all time fave in the series, followed by 4r and re2. dutch and i played re5 and re6 together which was amazing fun. re6 is still my least favorite of the games but it was fun screaming at the tv with dutch. i love that all my memories with resident evil are memories with dutch. it just makes the game all the more special.

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