Resident Evil Requiem's secret hero is the "damsel in distress" that redefines the trope – and continues the franchise's mutated definition of girlhood

Of all the places a little girl could grow up, beneath Umbrella Corporation's thumb is one of the worst. The evil pharmaceutical front and its rival, The Connections, likes turning girlhood into a bioweapon, and Resident Evil Requiem continues a new trend for Capcom in demonstrating that as painfully as possible. The horror game makes orphan Emily suffer even more – in the sense of her dignity – than dual protagonists Leon Kennedy and Grace Ashcroft, but Resident Evil Requiem also upends the ancient trope that young ladies are powerless.

Instead, in the past three Resident Evil installments, young ladies are infected. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard introduced us to Eveline, black mold that took the shape of a homicidal 10-year-old, while Resident Evil Village demonstrated how much trouble an infant can cause if it's also a superhuman like Rosemary Winters. Resident Evil Requiem is at its best blending those two contradictory ideas – that a mutant child is both watery-eyed and innocent, as well as capable of demolishing the United States.

Major spoilers for Resident Evil Requiem ahead.

Gotcha Day

When we first meet Emily in Resident Evil Requiem, she's sitting on a bed locked inside a glass cage. Her feet dangle at least two feet off the ground, bringing back my memories of sitting criss-cross applesauce, being too short to reach the Froot Loops in the pantry. But there's a strange air about her – if the Level 3 security of her cage wasn't spooky enough, Emily is also as pale as milk, with cream-white cataracts blinding her big eyes.

Resilient FBI analyst Grace is undeterred. As her, I'm determined to help the child who might otherwise get squished to death by an enemy in the Care Center we're both trapped in, whose infected inhabitants rudely keep taking huge bites out of my arm. More pleasantly, even with the creatures undoubtedly smelling like microwaved mildew all around us, Emily and I manage to bond.

Having never spent a day out of her holding cell, and having been made blind by unregulated experiments, Emily moves like any step she takes could plunge her into Hades. Grace clearly senses this, so she scoops the girl into her arms when they have to move fast, but trusts her to be alone while tasking her with solving a puzzle box in Braille. She speaks to her tenderly, and with a motherly waver whenever guaranteeing something to the effect of, "Everything is going to be all right. You'll one day be strong and tall."

Incredibly, Emily seems to stay collected even without Grace's sometimes unconvincing reassurance, even while I'm liberally dispensing my bullets into crusty infected in the other room. Being thrown into a basement dungeon and added to a pile of equally blonde porcelain dolls by her former cellmate Marie, now a toothy maniac – isn't enough to take Emily's good sense away from her, either. While she's understandably terrified, and now Grace has yet another cold room to break her out of, Emily nonetheless holds onto the key we need to leave the Care Center forever. She's ready to breathe nighttime wind instead of stale hospital air.

Girly things

Before Grace, Emily lived a small, powerless life. It sounds sadistic, but I appreciate this about her almost as much as her resilience – "girlhood," in recent pop culture philosophy, has been used to nearly exclusively refer to mundane and stereotypically feminine childhood things. Making friendship bracelets, putting on your mother's makeup, gossiping about your best friend because you love her more than you know how to say – things like that.

But while these events may feel universal, and are, in many cases, accurate for people, I don't want anyone to assume I grew up in a never-ending rainbow just because I'm a woman now. My childhood wasn't remotely as dismal as Emily's was inside her glass cage, but it was less unlike that than I would prefer.

So, with Emily, and also Eveline and Rosemary, Capcom creates familiarity for girls like me, who feel, on bad days, that their minds may as well have been replaced with T-virus. Nothing about the girlhood presented in the last three Resident Evil games is easy, and it's definitely not normal. I feel understood by it.

Not like other bioweapons

I'm especially hung up on Resident Evil Requiem, since Capcom actively tries to make Emily, in particular, the type of person who withstands expectations. Throughout video game history, little girls are often either exploited, like Angela in Silent Hill 2, or they demonstrate the folklore belief that demons take the form of children to be trusted, like the weapon Eveline in Biohazard.

Emily is harder to define. As a test tube clone, she's never had agency over her existence, and yet she defies the fragility she was inflicted with by being reliable, brave, and trusting. As another example of her boldness, when Emily dies from unavoidable bleeding out – what else was she supposed to do when Grace disastrously fails a helicopter landing? – she turns into a slobbering, mottled monster like Marie. Oops.

The revelation makes Grace a wreck, but even while her eyes are clouded with tears, she can still see that Emily is… Emily.

Of course she is. Girls experience disproportionate violence in both reality and art, and while we hardly ever ask to be turned into monsters or fainting damsels in distress, the transformation can be inevitable.

This is why I'm walking away from Requiem feeling like Emily might be a bigger hero than hotshot agent Leon Kennedy, as large as his arms may be, and even her caring, makeshift mother Grace. Emily carries a difficult duality within her, as many young girls are forced to by the unfair circumstances of their existence. But the struggle doesn't define her.

Check out our best Resident Evil games ranking for more reasons to feel scared!