#but man oh boy do i feel so bad for comparing Isaac to Nicole.

[scorpionyx9621]

I've seen a few people compare Isaac Clarke and Nicole Brennan from Dead Space to Ethan and Mia Winters from Resident Evil and while I think the comparison is pretty apt, I do have some interesting things to point out. I'd say Isaac Clarke and Mia Winters have more in common with each other the same way I think Nicole Brennan and Ethan Winters have more in common.

While yes both Ethan and Isaac are badass action/survival horror men with sharp tongues and are shockingly witty and quippy, Ethan is driven out of love not only for his missing wife in RE 7 but for his wife and daughter in RE 8. Ethan is much more good-natured and genuinely wants to do everything he can to help the people around him even if his loved ones are his first priority. Ethan goes into the Baker Mansion because he's trying to find his missing wife. Ethan genuinely did not know what happened to Mia after her last call with him. So he goes through hell in Resident Evil flavor and has himself get killed by an infected redneck. Only to be re-animated by a super fungus that also co-ops his personality perfectly and Ethan has to go through hell twice to save his family. (I don't want to go into the moral/ethical argument of whether or not Ethan Winters is actually Ethan Winters or he's just a fragment of the Megamycede empowered by Ethan's drive to save his loved ones. It's too existential.) But every action Ethan took throughout the stories of Resident Evil 7 & 8 were for the betterment of his family and for his family's safety.

While I wouldn't say Isaac is a bad person anywhere near to the degree that Mia Winters is, Isaac is definitely the antagonist in terms of the relationship between him and Nicole. In the remake we see that Isaac's last conversation with Nicole he lashed out on her and accused her of indirectly causing the deaths of his parents. When Nicole tries to express her shock and explain herself Isaac shuts her down and barely lets her get a word in. The whole reason why we have the game of Dead Space to begin with is that Isaac is trying to get aboard the Ishimura for some reason even though he knows full-well that Nicole is dead. Isaac is trying to process an incredible amount of grief in that his mother killed his father and then herself, the last time Isaac spoke to Nicole he accused her of letting his mom kill his father and herself, and in Nicole's final transmission Isaac watched Nicole kill herself. The Marker on Aegis 7 that caused the Necromorph outbreak aboard the Ishimura and caused Isaac to see Elizabeth Cross as Nicole was because the Marker just capitalized on Isaac's immense trauma and guilt and used that to manipulate Isaac into doing what it wanted. Also it must be said that Isaac also has killed hundreds of people of his own volition. He killed at least 200 EarthGov soldiers on The Sprawl when they shot at him. Isaac hid and unleashed a whole swarm of Necromorphs on the soldiers and while I'm not certain Isaac was fully in his right mind when he did that. Isaac still did kill around 200 people.

When we compare this to Nicole Brennan, while the games depict her in a variety of ways (loving and supporting but deeply wrong in Dead Space 1 and the most demonic ex-girlfriend ever in Dead Space 2) Nicole is not in the wrong when it comes to hers and Isaac's relationship. Yes Nicole gave Octavia Clarke the go-ahead to be released from her inpatient facility, but there's literally no way that Nicole could have predicted that Octavia would have had another mental break and would have killed Poul and herself. Nicole is a medical professional who made the best choice given the information she had at the time. Isaac blaming Nicole for the death of his parents very much a heat of the moment thing, as Isaac admits that it was easy for him to say the wrong thing. Isaac was deeply in shock and in grief and lashing out at Nicole was his response when he felt he had little control. It fully was the Church of Unitology's fault but Isaac had no real way to take his emotions out on them so he took them out on Nicole. When Nicole realized that the Unitologists had taken over the Ishimura she actively did everything she could to stand against them and when the Necromorph outbreak started she did everything she could to try to help as many people with the best of her knowledge and abilities. Yet she was doomed, and in her final moments she apologized to Isaac. Even though she told Isaac to go to hell as her last words to him. Nicole deeply regretted her words and the fact that Octavia Clarke did what she did because of Nicole's judgement. Her final moments were filled with fear, grief and regret for all things that were completely out of her control.

And finally we get to Mia Winters. Not a single one of these three characters come even remotely close to the level of just being an awful person like Mia Winters. From the moment Mia met Ethan she lied about her identity and career, she worked as a researcher for a bioterrorist organization, committed actual atrocities against children in her experiments, showed little to no remorse for her actions while working in The Connections, continued to hide information about the severity of her husband's mold infection to her husband and actively caused the events of RE 8 to occur by standing around and just letting Mother Miranda find her when Mia KNEW Miranda was in Romania with them and knew full well just what kind of crazed monster Miranda was and did NOTHING. Yes Mia herself also committed atrocities and murdered people while being under the influence of the mold much in the same way Isaac did similar while under the effects of the marker, but Isaac was driven and manipulated by his own intense sense of grief and guilt. Isaac knew Nicole was dead when he volunteered to go fix the Ishimura but his psyche had become so damaged from losing both his parents and his girlfriend in such a short timeframe that Isaac literally was doing the Marker's bidding for it. I theorized that Mia didn't act on her knowledge of Mother Miranda because she didn't know what would happen if Ethan found out that he was still infected, whether he would have left her or if he would have mutated. Yet that doesn't dismiss that she actively lied and manipulated Ethan for three years after she was saved and it's because of this it directly led to Ethan's death as well as the deaths of hundreds in Romania.

These four characters all relate to each other but not in the way that you would think. Ethan Winters has much more to relate to Nicole Brennan in that they were both ultimately in the wrong place at the wrong time and both died because of it. Both of them tried to save people they either directly loved or directly served given the best information they had at the time and both of them ended up taking the brunt from their partners. Whereas Isaac and Mia relate closer to each other. Both have committed atrocities while under the influence of a power greater than their own and have lashed out against their partners (to varying degrees of severity) and have committed atrocities against people (TO VARYING DEGREES OF SEVERITY GOOD GOD) Both are the antagonistic factors of their relationships and again, while Isaac was lashing out because of an extreme trauma he was facing. Mia was actively committing crimes against humanity willingly while being an abusive girlfriend/wife after the fact. I feel so bad comparing Isaac to Mia because overall Isaac is nowhere even remotely close to being as evil of a character as Mia but he does have more in common with her than he does with Ethan unfortunately. (Please don't crucify me I love Isaac I really really do.)

#isaac clarke #ethan winters #mia winters #nicole brennan #dead space #resident evil 7 #resident evil 8 #resident evil village #This was fun to make! #but man oh boy do i feel so bad for comparing Isaac to Nicole. #like one is lashing out against his lover in the heat of the moment #the other is.... mia winters...