Ashley’s Helplessness, Agency, & Failure?: Resident Evil 4 Remake
As Ashley screamed/cried the words, “This suuuuuucks!” before dodging the attacks of yet another suit of armor, I found myself laughing. Not simply because it was a legitimately funny moment, but also because Ashley seemed so terribly human, something that was always sorely lacking whenever I watched playthroughs of the original Resident Evil 4.
It was unfortunate because this was a reminder that Ashley was continually, even in this moment, haunted by failure. And on the note of that last word I should probably reiterate my own.
Despite the fact that I lived in the novels of Stephen King between the ages of 14-19, I never played horror videogames. I knew of Resident Evil, but mostly in the abstract. They were videogames that had inspired some Paul Anderson films that I wouldn’t appreciate until my late 20s because by then I recognised them for what they were: dumb-fun-bonkers action films and Paul Anderson’s reminder to the world that he has a hot wife. I never played videogames like Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, Siren, Haunting Ground, or even the Resident Evil Games because, well, I was a weenie. I loved looking at the covers, and if I had a minute I would google the titles and read the plot synopsis but that’s about as close as I got.
I still recall reading the guide for Resident Evil 4 that was published in volume 82 of Nintendo Power Magazine, the glossy pages decorated with Ganado’s and Gigante (and of course Leon Kennedy’s perfect blond hair). No matter how much a part of me desperately wanted to actually play that game, there was still the simple matter of aforementioned weenie-ness, and so I would wait until my early twenties before I ever actually attempted the game. And after acquiring a copy for my Playstation 4 and quickly dying during the opening village sequence (I was right to fear Dr. Salvador and his unrelenting chainsaw), I put the game down and resolved to just watch playthroughs on YouTube (Shoutout to SHN: Survival Horror Network & P.B. Horror Gaming who provided those great playthroughs).
My failure(an important word that I’ll return to later) to play horror games when I was younger eventually passed when Resident Evil 4 Remake was released in 2023. I bought the game (even pre-ordered it as a personal commitment) and played through it to completion. And, if I can give myself credit, I only scream-cried once while playing the game and that was entirely because of Regeneradors.
Regeneradors, suck.
These nightmares aside, leading up to actually buying the game I was gripped by an anxious fear, mostly because of Ashley. What didn’t change over the course of watching these playthroughs was a growing contempt with Ashley.
And I wanna be clear, I wasn’t miffed at her, I was miffed at the dudes who designed, wrote, and programmed her character.
Ashley was, originally, just a “Damsel in Distress.” That was the bedrock of her character. The narrative set-up of Resident Evil 4 was that Ashley’s been kidnapped by the religious cult Los Illuminados for some malevolent political goal and it’s up to Leon to save her. This established her powerlessness, and establish the typical trope of “damsel in distress.” I want to be clear, this in and of itself was not a strike against the game, it was the rest of Ashley’s behavior and presentation. Her general visual presentation was juvenile, i.e. she looked like a pre-teen, and her voice was often a shrill whine. Some players argued that she was supposed to be 20 years, and to be fair she was explained as a college student. None of this was able to refute the point however that her visual appearance and auditory range made her continually present as a pre-teen girl, and therefore often made her look and sound like a child rather than a young adult woman. What little dialog she was usually offered were flexes that she was the President’s daughter, cries for help when she was captured by enemy npcs, or else accusing Leon or Louis of being a pervert. And on that last note, of course there was her green mini-skirt, and the player’s ability to look up it whenever she was climbing ladders.
In short, Ashley Graham was a prop to be saved from danger or ogled by the player.
By the time Resident Evil 4 Remake was released the videogame culture existed in a post-Gamergate reality. Women have increasingly entered the market both as consumers as well as developers of videogames, and while there are still holdouts of the boys-club mentality, most of the larger developers of videogames seem to be taking this reality into consideration.
Some people would, and continue, to grouse about this change.
These people, charitably speaking, are idiots.
Moving on.
I didn’t like Ashley in the original game, but I had liked the women in the later re-releases. I liked Claire Redfield and Ada Wong in the remake of Resident Evil 2, and, while I didn’t play it, I did like Jill Valentine in the remake of Resident Evil 3. I even liked Mia Winters in Resident Evil 7 and 8. Capcom seemed with each of these remakes as if they wanted to show players that they recognised what it’s past was but that they were trying to make sure their female characters weren’t just decoration. I try to the best of my ability at this point in life to keep whatever political opinions I have to myself, as there’s nothing worse than some dude with a blog typing out his shitty opinions ad nauseum to the universe. Nevertheless, here it is. The original Ashley was a feminist’s, and a videogame player’s nightmare in no small part because she was helpless and she failed to contribute something meaningful to the game.
This statement requires some clarification though.
This essay is not about Ashley Graham’s role in the entirety of the Remake of Resident Evil 4. For the purpose of this essay I just wanted to observe the sequence where she is on her own and the player controls her as she has to find a key to help Leon escape a cage he’s been imprisoned in.
This image provided by The Cover Project
The setup for the sequence is that Leon and Ashley have just found the three golden heads of the Chimera statue in one of the endless hallways of the Castle where the forces of Ramon Salazar are pursuing them. It’s a typical trope to Resident Evil videogames, and, speaking honestly, it’s one that I love and I hope they don’t get rid of anytime soon. The puzzle results in a door opening to the next part of the castle, but before Leon and Ashley can continue they’re set upon by various ganados (the footsoldiers of Los Illuminados(the zombies, technically speaking(even though they aren’t actually zombies))), and a golden cage falls around Leon separating him from Ashley. He tells her to run and we watch her escape from a few Ganados before locking a door behind her. Ashley’s visibly scared, but she says to herself, “I won’t run.” From there the section begins and the player, for the first time in the game, will control Ashley.
And, most importantly, they will play a character who does not have any weapons.
From a purely mechanical perspective this section is a dramatic shift entirely because there are no offensive weapons. Because of this the verbs become established relatively quickly in this section: explore, hide, dodge, and run. The player can move Ashley through the halls of the “library” as well as the “Mausoleum” and about a few seconds into the space she will find a lantern that becomes a defensive tool. I don’t call it a weapon because it cannot actually destroy enemy npcs, which in this area amounts to various suits of armor (referred to as Armaduras) which are being controlled by Plagas parasites. These suits shuffle through the hallways and will actively try to kill Ashley with a swipe of their sword unless she dodges out of the way or else paralyzes them temporarily with the blue flame from her lantern.
The implication is obvious, Ashley can escape danger, but only for so long.
Ashley’s section of the game subverts the player’s rhythm which, up to this point, has largely been an action-adventure and third-person shooter. And this set-up creates a moment of actual “survival-horror” in a videogame who’s franchise effectively, and quite literally, coined the term. One of the criticisms of the original Resident Evil 4 was that it shifted the series away from its horror origin and became an action-shooter franchise. It wouldn’t be until Resident Evil 7 that the series re-established its horror “street-cred.” And on the note of the original Resident Evil 4 it also contained a sequence in which the player controlled Ashley. However this section hardly endeared players to Ashley, nor did it create a sensation of horror in the player since most of the actual scares employed in this section were Quick Time Events(QTE) that were employed mostly for jumpscares. Another damning element was the fact that in these levels she could throw torches at the various monks of Los Illuminados that were chasing her. While not as effective as the Broken Butterfly revolver or the Stingray rifle at dropping enemies, it did establish that she could fight back.
The remake doesn’t give Ashley this ability, instead limiting her to the ability to hide, evade, and create a temporary defense that all too quickly is gone. Ashley’s mechanics leave the player terribly vulnerable and scared.
While I was writing this essay, I wanted to see what other writers had said or observed about Ashley’s mission. In an article published on the website Gamer Rant on April 6 2023, Gemma Johnson observed Ashley’s portion of the Resident Evil 4 Remake, and how it possibly offered up signs for what Resident Evil 9 might look like in terms of gameplay. I’ll leave her speculation for the reader to peruse and agree and/or disagree at their leisure, but while proposing this possibility, Johnson made some insights into the effect this section has. Johnson writes:
Although Ethan Winters is Resident Evil's Everyman protagonist with a more frightening first-person playthrough, even he knows how to shoot. In contrast, in the Resident Evil 4 Remake playing as Ashley feels more relatable as she can't even throw lanterns at attackers like in the original and is instantly killed by the Armaduras if hit. Ashley's reliance on lantern-lit stealth, solving puzzles, and outwitting her opponents in many ways creates a more realistic and relatable horror survival experience somewhat seen in the Shadow of Rose DLC, but without Rose's powers or weapon-wielding capabilities.
In another article that was published on the website The Gamer on April 24, 2023, Jade King went into greater detail, looking at Ashley’s role in the game as a whole. Writing about her playable section first he writes:
Her playable section is still geared towards puzzles and defending herself with a fancy torch, given she has no firearm training, but it’s brimming with detail and treats her as a true character who isn’t merely there to serve and be saved by Leon. She is the person to figure out the blue flame weakness of the sentient knights, and uses them to save her partner in a time of need. Ashley is proud of this contribution, and not in a way that serves to sexualise or present her as an object for us to ogle. Leon’s praise is similarly framed towards how driven and capable she is in these circumstances, more than an object of romantic interest. Such a spark is there, but it isn’t pushed unreasonably or even the endpoint for either character arc.
And after this he observes how this section, along with all the other elements in the game, help build Ashley narratively. He writes:
Yet beneath this superficial exterior sits a deceptive capability that shines through the entire campaign as she becomes more confident and figures out how far she needs to go in order to survive. Even when you disregard all the campy Resident Evil nonsense, she acts like any reasonable person would in this situation, never afraid to voice her displeasure or think up solutions that might otherwise go unsought. More could have been done to make Ashley Graham shine, but she is far from the confines of failure.
The word failure rang in my ear over and over again while writing this essay, and I couldn’t shake it.
On the one hand it seemed a tad unfair to label Ashley and the original Resident Evil 4 as such, but on the other hand I couldn’t find a word more appropriate. Failure as a descriptor can easily be hurled by frustrated and, too often, sadistically minded players and critics who can get lost in relishing the negativity at watching someone else fail to meet expectations. But failure is also, when approached logically, just an acknowledgement.
I don’t have too much reservation to admit that I struggle with my own perceptions of failure. I’m a writer, but professionally I’ve had little to no professional success with only a small handful of publications to date, and most of my writing is distributed by dumb blogs (like this one). Likewise I’m a visual artist, and while I’ve had a little more success getting my work out into the world besides my portfolio website, the fact remains I have little to no cultural capital in the art market.
These failures to achieve professional success are just that, failures. They reveal expectations that weren’t met.
I love the Resident Evil 4 Remake, as well as the original. With that in mind I don’t believe it’s too much to suggest that Ashley’s section in the original game, when compared to the new one, amounts to a failure. Ashley’s section failed in the original game, as long as the player approaches it mechanically and narratively as a horror sequence. And, in fact, it doesn’t even succeed as an action sequence, simply because it’s trying to juggle between action and horror without committing to one or the other completely. The Ashley mission in the remake by contrast doesn’t fail because it’s trying to rob Ashley, and by extension the player, of agency that they’ve enjoyed up to that moment. Ashley’s vulnerability is horrific, not just because of the threat to her life and the literal insect-worm-parasite plaga’s trying to kill her. It’s horrific because Ashley is, in these tense moments, an average human who’s been robbed of her agency.
Laughing at Ashley’s declaration that “this suuuuuuuucks,” was a way of recognising a human being suffering and not just an avatar on the screen reacting to computer code and controls.
This sequence didn’t solve the issues with female representation in videogames, or the long legacy of sexist tropes employed in videogame narratives. But to be fair one sequence of one game by itself never could.
Ashley was, and still is, a “damsel in distress” if we consider her narrative arc, and while that narrative trope has been heavily criticized (often rightfully so) Resident Evil 4 Remake offered players a satisfactory structure by showing Ashley, not as a helpless girl, but instead as a young woman who is at first out of her depth, but then steadily grows through the events of the game. All of this arc is punctuated by her solo mission because it becomes the nexus point at which she is given the chance to overcome her helplessness and prove to herself (out of necessity of course) that she is able to survive and adapt.
Looking at this, I’m humbled by the fact that it took Leon Kennedy just one sentence to say what I’ve tried to say over the course of this essay. Ashley proved she was able to save herself.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
9.2.2024
All images, apart from the cover and the final image in this essay were screenshotted from the Playthrough by the You Tube channel Survival Horror Network. I’ve included that playthrough below and would definitely recommend giving that chanel a follow, and not just because I spent most of the Quarantine period of 2020 watching them play horror games I was too much of a weenie to play myself.
Resident Evil 4 Remake | 4K/60fps | Game Movie Longplay Walkthrough Gameplay No Commentary - YouTube
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