WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Resident Evil Village, available now.

Resident Evil Village brings back Ethan Winters, the long-suffering protagonist who was introduced in 2017's Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. In the three-year gap between Biohazard and Village, Ethan has settled down with his wife Mia in Europe, with the couple welcoming a baby daughter named Rosemary. And while Ethan has been seemingly relocated to safety by longtime franchise main character Chris Redfield and received enough military training to competently handle an array of weaponry, the ending of Village reveals a dark truth about Ethan's true nature: the man that was actually Ethan Winters has been dead since the events of Biohazard.

While searching a remote, Eastern European village for his kidnapped daughter, Ethan confronts the villainous Mother Miranda who easily rips out Ethan's heart with her bare hands and leaves him to die. However, as Ethan hovers between life and death, a vision of Eveline, the main antagonist of Biohazard appears and explains to him what actually occurred at the Baker estate deep in the Louisiana bayou. Jack Baker murdered Ethan when he first caught him inside the mansion trying to rescue Mia from their clutches. However, the strange mold that Eveline had brought from Miranda's experiments to Louisiana and mutated the Baker family had the unexpected side effect of resurrecting Ethan...sort of.

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The mold infected Ethan's corpse, retaining his memories and consciousness and healing the body of its mortal wounds as Ethan revived. This infection also meant that Ethan possessed unnatural healing abilities, able to attach severed limbs with only the use of some medicinal serum to the wound. While Ethan simply assumed the mold infection had given him incredible, regenerative abilities, Eveline reveals that Ethan's body is now largely compromised of the mold itself, becoming more visibly apparent from all the grievous wounds Ethan has suffered while combatting Miranda and her four lords to recover his daughter from them. This is most noticeable with Ethan's right hand, previously severed by Lady Dimitrescu in a bloody showdown inside her castle, now appearing to be entirely composed of mold.

In essence, this change to Ethan means he's essentially a mold-based variation on the popular comic book superhero Swamp Thing. For years, Swamp Thing assumed he was the resurrected body of Alec Holland, rising from the bayou after an attempt on his life with a hunger for environmental justice. Swamp Thing would later discover, much to his horror, that he was a sentient plant all along, with none of Holland's physical form within him, simply absorbing the late botanist's memories and consciousness as he died in the swampy waters around his bombed-out laboratory.

Ethan Winters has the memories of the man but the physical form that he was originally born as died during in that nightmarish confrontation with the Baker family years ago. This suggests that Mia may have similarly perished given her longer imprisonment and healing powers due to being infected by the mold, while their daughter Rose may not be a human child at all but rather, something uniquely conceived by the two. Of course, this just makes it all the more understandable why Miranda would be hunting for her to resurrect her own daughter. And just as Swamp Thing is a plant that stood up to fight humanity, Ethan is an individual borne of mold that fought against the woman that would seek to use that mold to subjugate humanity.

Developed and published by Capcom, Resident Evil Village is available now for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC and Google Stadia.

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