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Ethan Winters

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Character in the Resident Evil series of video games

Fictional character
Ethan Winters
Resident Evil character
A person with a hidden face, wearing a jacket and carrying a gun.Ethan as he appears in Resident Evil Village
First appearanceResident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017)
Last appearanceResident Evil Village (2021)
Created byCapcom
Voiced byEnglish Todd Soley
Japanese Hidenobu Kiuchi
Motion captureYaya Chamki
In-universe information
SpouseMia Winters
ChildrenRosemary Winters

Ethan Winters is a character in the Resident Evil survival horror video game series created by the Japanese company Capcom. Ethan was introduced as one of the playable characters in the 2017 video game Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, in which he is depicted as an ordinary civilian searching for his missing wife within a dilapidated estate in Louisiana. He returned in the 2021 sequel Resident Evil Village, where he is forced to locate his daughter after she is kidnapped by a cult leader in a mysterious European village.

Originally designed as an unseen everyman to foster the player's identification with him as the protagonist of Resident Evil 7, Capcom intended to shape Ethan from a blank state into a more defined character in Village. He is voiced by Hidenobu Kiuchi in Japanese and Todd Soley in English. Ethan has received a mixed reception from video game publications, with some praising his relatability, while others have criticized him for a lack of emotional range and character development.

Conception and creation

"It's a balancing act between giving Ethan his own personality, but also helping the player imagine that it could be them, reacting in the same way."

—Resident Evil Village scriptwriter Antony Johnston, GamesRadar+ in 2021

In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017), players take Ethan's viewpoint as an embodied presence as opposed to an on-screen avatar. The game's goal for players is to advance the narrative while keeping him alive with limited resources. According to Morimasa Sato, who was a writer for Resident Evil 7 and the director of Resident Evil Village (2021), the development team initially thought of Ethan as merely "a camera for the player" and "transparent".

Towards the end of development for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, its developers had begun planning for the next mainline Resident Evil game. A decision was made by the developers to set it as a direct continuation of Resident Evil 7 and Ethan's story arc, as they had developed an attachment to Ethan and saw potential in him as a character. Producer Peter Fabiano stated that the team wanted players to experience Village from Ethan's perspective, with Sato describing Village as the story of Ethan and "the entirety of who he is".

Ethan's face is never shown within the gameplay for Resident Evil 7 or Resident Evil Village due to players controlling Ethan from a first-person perspective. An unused version of Ethan's character model, hidden within the game's assets, has fully developed facial features.

Portrayal

American actor Todd Soley voiced Ethan in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil Village. In Japanese, he was voiced by Hidenobu Kiuchi. Tunisian model Yaya Chamki portrayed Ethan.

The amount of blood and gore players as Ethan are exposed to in the Japanese version of the game, Biohazard 7: Resident Evil, is substantially less than in the international release. On the other hand, smaller changes made to Ethan's dismemberment, such as black blood flowing from his severed limbs, alludes to an important plot point: it suggests that he may have been infected with the mold generated by the antagonist, Eveline.

Appearances

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Ethan made his first appearance in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017), in which he is looking for his missing wife Mia in Louisiana after being captive of the Baker family. He attempts to rescue Mia, but she abruptly becomes hostile and attacks Ethan while attempting to flee, dismembering his hand with a chainsaw. He is captured by Jack Baker and forced to join a family dinner, after which he escapes and kills Jack and his wife Marguerite. He then finds Mia after being contacted by the family's daughter, Zoe, who seeks to create a serum that will cure their infection. Ethan later discovers that the Baker family has been under the control of the game's main antagonist, Eveline, a powerful genetically engineered bio-weapon. He later crafted a necrotoxin and then stabbed it into Eveline before she mutated into a giant monster. After the final confrontation with Ethan, assisted by a paramilitary company led by Chris Redfield, Eveline is destroyed. Ethan and Mia then escape the plantation.

Resident Evil Village

Ethan returns in Resident Evil Village (2021) as its central character. Set three years after the events of the previous game, Ethan lives in Europe with Mia and their newborn daughter, Rosemary. Chris Redfield storms the house and seemingly kills Mia while taking Ethan and Rosemary into custody. Ethan ends up in a remote village, where he looks for his daughter. Ethan eventually learns that the person shot was not Mia, but a disguised cult leader named Mother Miranda. As Ethan defeats the Four Lords of the village, Miranda appears and kills him, telling him that she plans to use Rose to resurrect her daughter, Eva, who died of the Spanish Flu. Later, Ethan realizes that he had died in his first encounter with Jack Baker in Resident Evil 7, but that the mold, a type of fungus used in creating humanoid creatures, had given him the ability to regenerate. As Ethan regains consciousness, he kills Miranda and rescues his daughter. As Ethan's body begins to deteriorate, he sacrifices himself and gives Rosemary to Chris, who makes it to a helicopter before Ethan detonates a bomb that destroys the village.

In the Shadows of Rose chapter, set sixteen years after the events of Resident Evil Village, a teenaged Rose visits Ethan's grave on his birthday before heading off in a car with an unnamed organization.

Promotion and merchandise

To promote Village, Capcom released a developer diary titled "The Making of Resident Evil Village: Winter Comes for Ethan" in September 2020, wherein staff members discuss Ethan's role within the game. The Resident Evil Village Deluxe Edition is bundled with an art book titled "The Tragedy of Ethan Winters". In addition, Epic Games included Ethan, along with Jill Valentine and Lady Dimitrescu, in a list of characters and brands as part of a 2021 survey it distributed to Fortnite players in order to gauge interest in future crossover promotions.

Critical reception

Ethan has received a mixed reception. Some video game journalists, such as Chris Moyse from Destructoid and Liana Ruppert from Game Informer, credited the character's role in Resident Evil 7 as a factor behind the video game's popularity and ongoing commercial success. Josh West from GamesRadar+ suggested that Ethan's return to headline a direct sequel to Resident Evil 7 was unprecedented and noted that Capcom had never previously entrusted a single protagonist with back-to-back installments of the mainline Resident Evil series. Other critics also have positively reviewed Ethan as a relatable protagonist. Ray Porreca of Destructoid thought that the "murky" environments of Resident Evil 7 conflicted with Ethan's slightly formal attire, delineating him as "what a modern hero can look like". Porreca described Ethan as at odds with conventional Resident Evil protagonists, being an unskilled everyman who survives against overwhelming odds and thereby subverting player's expectations of "a game that upsets tradition to restore some glory to its name". The Escapist's Audric Figueroa agreed that Ethan is very different than previous Resident Evil protagonists, who are portrayed as heroic law enforcement agents fighting against corporations, as he is motivated by his personal relationship with Mia. Figueroa suggested that a mundane family man who is eager to rescue his wife is the "perfect protagonist" for the story, where domestic violence both "literal and metaphorical" forms the core of the game's "encounter philosophy".

Ethan has been criticized as lacking personality and character development. Game Informer's Andrew Reiner considered Ethan "as transparent as the specters he encounters", noting an incongruency between the character's occasional reactions to inconsequential details but mostly silent nature in the face of danger. He thought that, as a result, the game's narrative unravels into a "voyeuristic" exploration of the estate's inhabitants instead of its protagonist's personal stake in it. Hannes Rossow from German publication GamePro was highly critical of the Ethan's perceived lack of personality in Resident Evil 7, writing that Ethan's prominence in Village had dampened his enthusiasm for the earlier game and expressed a desire for another, more developed protagonist. Meanwhile, Gene Park of The Washington Post called Ethan an "idiot" for his reactions to the events of Village, arguing that Ethan "has no character arc" and "isn't likely to enter the pantheon of great video game characters." Others have cited Ethan as one of the worst protagonists in the Resident Evil series. For instance, Ashley Bardhan from Kotaku compared Ethan to James Sunderland from Silent Hill, criticizing both characters for being "bumbling" and "regrettably uninteresting" to the extent that she was unable to find anything about them to care about compared to their missing wives, while Matthew Bryd of Den of Geek felt Ethan was the worst protagonist of a Resident Evil title and even gaming in general, citing "bad voice acting, bad writing, and questionable lore", as well as further character flaws. Conversely, Andy Kelly from PC Gamer and Jade King from TheGamer opined that being "boring" or "generic" is Ethan's most positive contribution to the player's gameplay experience, given the context of the dangerous environments and characters he faces.

As a result of Ethan's faceless presentation and lack of background information provided by Capcom, he is often discussed in fan theories about his true nature. Ian Walker from Kotaku was amused by Capcom's persistent attempts to hide Ethan's face behind the weapons he wields within promotional art. GamePro's Hannes Rossow called the attempts to maintain the illusion of Ethan as a faceless character absurd, as the character's actual face is known to exist within the game assets of Resident Evil 7, while Moises Taveras of Paste did not feel that Ethan belonged in the game world due to his ambiguous backstory and lack of physical appearance.

Some journalists have noted a tendency throughout the games for Ethan to suffer from serious injury or complete dismemberment of his limbs, particularly his hands, then quickly heal or re-attach them with little effort. In her discussion of allusions between Resident Evil 7 and horror cinema as part of the former's use of intertextuality, Dawn Stobbart described multiple instances where Ethan's journey mirrors that of scenes from the 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Ethan's predicament during the dinner table scene with the Baker family is analyzed as the most overt example: like recurring The Texas Chain Saw Massacre franchise character Sally Hardesty, Ethan is seated at the foot of the table as he awakens to a grotesque feast seemingly made from human entrails. The other characters present almost identically mirror the characters Sally encounters at the table.

Notes

  1. Known in Japan as Īsan Wintāzu (イーサン・ウィンターズ)

References

  1. ^ Capcom (7 May 2021). Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Scene: Closing credits.
  2. ^ Park, Gene (14 May 2021). "The real tragedy of Ethan Winters, Resident Evil's Village idiot". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 15 May 2021. Retrieved 17 April 2022.
  3. ^ Romano, Sal (25 February 2021). "Resident Evil Village Japanese Voice Cast Announced". Gematsu. Retrieved 11 January 2025.
  4. ^ McWhertor, Michael (13 May 2021). "What does Ethan Winters really look like?". Polygon. Archived from the original on 13 May 2021. Retrieved 17 April 2022.
  5. West, Josh (2 November 2021). "Why Ethan Winters is such a wise-ass in Resident Evil Village". GamesRadar+. Archived from the original on 2 November 2021. Retrieved 17 April 2022.
  6. McGreevy, Fawcett & Ouellette 2020, p. 256.
  7. Stobbart 2019, pp. 30–31.
  8. ^ Feit, Diamond (25 September 2020). "Resident Evil Village Will Focus More on Exploration than Resi 7". IGN. Archived from the original on 16 March 2021. Retrieved 19 March 2021.
  9. ^ Ruppert, Liana (12 February 2021). "Capcom Opens Up About The Decision To Bring Back Ethan Winters In Resident Evil Village". Game Informer. Archived from the original on 26 July 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  10. ^ Ian Walker (23 January 2021). "Capcom Is Still Hiding Ethan's Face In Resident Evil Village". Kotaku. Archived from the original on 4 March 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  11. ^ Hannes Rossow (26 January 2021). "Sorry, Resident Evil 8: Warum muss Ethan Winters so langweilig sein?" [Sorry, Resident Evil 8: Why does Ethan Winters have to be so boring?]. GamePro (in German). Archived from the original on 8 May 2024. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  12. 小笠原光 (21 June 2016). "VRデモ「KITCHEN」ロゴでひそかに予告されていた「バイオハザード7」" [Resident Evil 7 secretly announced with the VR demo "KITCHEN" logo]. IGN Japan (in Japanese). Archived from the original on 8 May 2024. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  13. ^ Heather Alexandra (13 February 2017). "Resident Evil 7 Is Way Less Bloody In Japan". Kotaku. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  14. ^ "Resident Evil: The Story so Far". IGN. 28 August 2020. Archived from the original on 11 January 2025. Retrieved 11 January 2025.
  15. Faulkner, Jason (26 January 2017). "Resident Evil 7: So You Got Your Hand Cut Off". Shacknews. Archived from the original on 5 January 2022. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  16. ^ Figueroa, Audric (5 October 2019). "Resident Evil 7's Focus on Family Made Its Horror Personal". The Escapist. Archived from the original on 20 May 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  17. ^ Roach, Jacob (7 May 2021). "Everything you need to know before playing Resident Evil Village". Digital Trends. Archived from the original on 7 January 2025. Retrieved 17 November 2024.
  18. Peter, Vincent (28 October 2022). "Resident Evil Village: Winters' Expansion is A Great Send-Off for Ethan". IGN. Retrieved 1 November 2022.
  19. Yang, George (25 September 2020). "Resident Evil Village Is Next-Gen, but Capcom Is 'Looking into' Making a PS4/XB1 Version". The Escapist. Archived from the original on 3 February 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  20. Reed, Chris (9 March 2021). "Resident Evil Village: What Comes in Each Edition". IGN. Archived from the original on 10 May 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  21. Dustin Bailey (23 March 2021). "Fortnite devs gauge interest in Lady Dimitrescu". PCGamesN. Archived from the original on 6 May 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  22. ^ Porreca, Ray (9 February 2017). "How Ethan's sleeves saved Resident Evil". Destructoid. Archived from the original on 22 January 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  23. Moyse, Chris (23 March 2021). "Resident Evil 7: Biohazard still shipping one million copies a year". Destructoid. Archived from the original on 23 March 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  24. West, Josh. "Inside Resident Evil Village, Capcom's attempt to create "the best survival horror game to date"". GamesRadar+. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  25. Bardhan, Ashley (25 December 2023). "I lived like Ethan Winters for a week to survive the horrors of the holidays". Polygon. Archived from the original on 8 May 2024. Retrieved 23 January 2024.
  26. Reiner, Andrew (23 January 2017). "A Familiar Taste of Blood – Resident Evil 7: Biohazard – PlayStation 4". Game Informer. Archived from the original on 2 February 2017. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  27. Ashley Bardhan (21 October 2022). "Resident Evil's Ethan Winters And Silent Hill's James Sunderland Are The Same, Boring Protagonist". Kotaku. Retrieved 21 October 2022.
  28. Byrd, Matthew (10 May 2021). "Resident Evil Village: Why Ethan Winters Is the Worst RE Protagonist". Den of Geek. Archived from the original on 14 May 2021. Retrieved 13 May 2021.
  29. Dustin Bailey (6 May 2021). "Resident Evil Village's hero Ethan Winters is painfully boring, and I love him for it". PC Gamer. Archived from the original on 13 May 2021. Retrieved 6 May 2021.
  30. Jade King (19 April 2021). "The Best Thing About Resident Evil Village's Ethan Winters Is How Boring He Is". TheGamer. Archived from the original on 19 April 2021. Retrieved 6 May 2021.
  31. Chris Werian (24 January 2021). "Resident Evil 7: Ethan Winters ist vielleicht doch nicht so unscheinbar, wie ihr denkt" [Resident Evil 7: Ethan Winters may not be as inconspicuous as you think]. GamePro (in German). Archived from the original on 18 April 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  32. Taveras, Moises (18 June 2021). "Ethan Winters Doesn't Have a Face. Is Resident Evil Also Losing Its Identity?". Paste. Archived from the original on 18 June 2021. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  33. Zwiezen, Zack (8 May 2021). "Someone At Capcom Really Hates Ethan's Hands". Kotaku. Archived from the original on 8 May 2021. Retrieved 12 May 2021.
  34. McWhertor, Michael (10 May 2021). "Ethan Winters' poor hands are the laughingstock [sic] of the internet". Polygon. Archived from the original on 10 May 2021. Retrieved 12 May 2021.
  35. Lawrence, Briana (10 May 2021). "So Resident Evil Village's Ethan Winters Is Demi God or Something, Right?". The Mary Sue. Archived from the original on 10 May 2021. Retrieved 12 May 2021.
  36. Troughton, James (21 May 2021). "Resident Evil Village: We Counted Every Time Ethan Winters' Hands Are Injured". IGN. Archived from the original on 21 May 2021. Retrieved 23 May 2021.
  37. Stobbart 2019, pp. 81–83.

Bibliography

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