The November issue of Cerise is out today! It’s sex themed, and I’m not especially into talking about sex, yet I find myself just as engaged with this issue of the magazine as any other. Go figure. I even had time to write an article for this issue (grad school is calming down a bit), a gamer story called Who’s entitled to me? It’s more of a narrative than analytical. I really needed to write it, but it was stuff that was hard to put out there for the world to read.
Meghann and I put a few more hours into Resident Evil 4: Wii edition today, and I was thinking: Ashley’s really not that bad. It’s a lot easier to take her seriously now that we’re not playing through in her special outfit. (We took that picture with my digital camera because we couldn’t find a picture online.)
I haven’t played the other games in the series, but yeah, the whole premise of RE4 seems kind of petty. Like Diego Luna points out in his article Shotgun vs. Skirt: Gender in Resident Evil 4, Ashley’s helplessness is a sharp contrast to Leon’s manly manliness. But seriously, for a college student constantly shot at, kidnapped, and pawed on by zombies, she really keeps it together and does what Leon asks instead of panicking and running off. Her shrill cries for “Leon!” are reasonable enough–but what I find less reasonable is what a huge part of this game is a young woman being shot at, kidnapped, and grabbed.
There are a lot of scenes in which Ashley grunts and turns a crank, or the camera follows her as she crawls under tables. I don’t get if she’s supposed to be fanservice or what. Some of the searches that lead folks to my blog are trying to find Ashley porn. I really don’t think she’s very pretty. What is it–the school-girl outfit and big boobs?
For some reason, we still love RE4 anyways. Maybe there’s just something campy about how rediculous the story is. Gives us something to laugh about in between being terrified of the scary, scary monsters.