I Think The Resident Evil 3 Remake Turned Me Genderqueer

or, Plagiarize This, You Idiot

Ever since the release of Hbomberguy and Todd in the Shadows’s recent excellent videos exploring the plagiarism and lies and straight-up hypocrisy of gay video essay creator James Somerton, I’ve been thinking a lot about…a lot of things, really. (Weird intro to this, I know, but it connects, I promise.)

The reason Hbomb made his video was not to ragebait or trigger a pile-on, but to call attention to why Somerton doing what he does is so damaging. Much of his writing — when it doesn’t make up white women to get mad at — is straight-up stolen from queer writers who go uncredited and unrecognized. And if you read the title of this piece, I think you can kind of see why I have feelings about this.

I am a relatively recently out-ish queer person. I tend to refer to myself as bisexual, though I don’t really know if that’s accurate. The majority of my queerness comes in my gender presentation; I have only started presenting as more feminine on occasion in recent months. This is thanks to a number of factors, such as that I’m still living in my parents’ house and don’t want to get weird questions from my dad, or that I only just got involved in my local drag and burlesque scene. When I say I got involved, I mean I got involved:

This is a photo from my first ever attempt at performing draglesque. My character’s name is Vanessa X. Machina and she’s a defective combat android who wants to destroy humanity but loves performing too much to actually go through with it.

But while recent events may be the main cause of me finally diving into this, I can easily trace it back to an event in 2021 that I think flipped the switch for me.

I am unfortunately a gamer. I spent a lot of pandemic time indoors, blowing things up and exploring virtual worlds and generally annoying my family because the console’s in the same room my parents use to work. When I found out the Resident Evil 3 remake was on sale, despite the mixed reviews, I wanted to go for it, and upon playing it I had a fantastic time. I actually wrote an article for Game Obsessive about how I think this remake is the perfect gateway horror game; playing it, then the RE2 remake, and then RE7 was a dangerously slippery slope.

Something I didn’t write about in that article was the opening scene of the game.

You begin in first-person, in a nightmare sequence set in muted colors on a rainy night. You slowly make your way to the bathroom, following the sound of running water. You switch off the sink, then look at yourself in the mirror, then recoil in horror as you watch yourself transform into a T-Virus infected zombie. You pick up your gun from the table and shoot yourself in the head — then you wake up.

The shot that taught me what gender euphoria was

It’s a fantastic sequence, I think, giving you visual context for protagonist Jill Valentine’s trauma after the incident she barely survived in the first Resident Evil game. But something happened when I walked into that bathroom and looked myself in the eyes for the first time.

I think the proper term for this is “gender euphoria.”

I looked myself in the eyes, and in the blank space of calm before the nightmare truly becomes a nightmare, my first thought was “god, I wanna be her.”

After this dream opening, you wake up in full color and have to return to the bathroom. This time, when you look at yourself, you’re not a zombie. You’re just Jill, and you can breathe easy as you examine your own face in the mirror. Here, the game returns to the familiar third-person, and this is of course when a giant bioweapon monstrosity — Nemesis — attacks you and the game really becomes Resident Evil.

But I think those two scenes are very reminiscent of how I feel about my own weird nebulous question mark of gender. In the first scene, Jill sees herself transforming into something she isn’t, she doesn’t want to be. In the second, she just sees…herself. The person you get to be most of the time.

You can probably guess that my least favorite parts of the game are the ones where you don’t get to be Jill. Two sections put you in control of Carlos, her ally who I kind of don’t really care that much about. (He’s got a better gun, I guess?) But the majority of the time I get to play as this character I keep seeing myself in for some damn reason I don’t know how to explain.

Bzzzzzzzzzt

Jill is vulnerable, but she’s formidable. She’s been through a lot and it’s changed who she is as a person. By the end of the game, you’ve destroyed hordes of zombies with grenade launchers and gone up against Nemesis in several different forms, finally putting it to rest with a giant laser gun and a lovely little one-liner. (“Next time, take the fucking hint!”) I have not been through anything like Jill’s trauma, but I have had moments — more and more as I come to terms with my own queerness — where I get hurt, where I have my perspective changed, and where I finally get fed up and wish I had a giant laser gun I could take to all this dumb shit in my brain.

But more than anything, Jill Valentine is the first time I’ve seen a character in a piece of media that made me want to actually be them beyond some sort of superhero fantasy. Obviously when I was younger there were plenty of otherworldly supernatural characters who had incredible strength or other powers, and I wanted to be them, but just because their powers were cool. For Jill, I see the person I want to become on my more feminine days.

This article definitely turned into a rant, so I’ll try and wrap it up a little.

In the years since the first time I played RE3R, I came out as bisexual or whatever you call the thing I am. I started trying different pronouns and realizing I don’t like he/him that much. I wore a skirt to an event and felt more powerful than I ever had before. I dressed up like an android woman and lip synced a synthwave song. I finally started calling myself genderfluid. Or genderqueer. Some days I think one is more reflective of who I am than the other.

I recently picked up RE3R again in the giant deluge of winter video game sales, and I have played through it like three times already since. Seeing Jill in the mirror again brought back all those feelings. I feel closer to hitting that sweet spot of whatever the fuck I am than ever before, and I know she doesn’t know how I feel about her because she’s a video game character and I’m a human, but in those two opening scenes alone she made me feel a way about gender that I didn’t even know was a way I could feel.

So that’s how RE3R made me genderqueer, I guess.