Ethan Winters is the protagonist of Resident Evil Village and its predecessor, Resident Evil 7, but, despite appearing human, he is very different from other characters. Trapped in a strange village looking for his missing daughter, Rosemary, Ethan deals with highly dangerous scenarios and fights all types of monsters. But, unlike his wife, Mia Winters, or even Chris Redfield, what keeps him alive isn’t mere strength or the will to live.
This article contains spoilers for Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village.Both Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 7 presented the franchise with a very unusual protagonist. Unlike Chris Redfield or Leon Kennedy, Ethan Winters has barely enough training to be capable of defending himself in a domestic situation, even less to deal with highly dangerous creations of bioterrorism. In both games, RE's Ethan is just a normal guy who tries endlessly to keep his loved ones safe and ends up tangled in a terrible situation that had nearly nothing to do with him. But not only does Ethan win fights against these monsters, he continuously survives serious injuries and manages to get back to safety mostly unharmed.
Although this might have seemed like a consequence of sheer protagonist luck, Resident Evil Village confirms that there isn’t a way for a proper untrained human to survive these conditions. Ethan Winters might just seem like a worried husband and father who stumbles upon these situations, but he is completely different from other human characters, like Mia and Zoe, mostly because he isn’t human at all. Ethan has supernatural healing abilities that defy belief, and also prevent him from being able to revert this situation by using the cure to the mold infection.
Ethan Winters Was Dead All Along
In the ending of Resident Evil Village, it’s revealed that Ethan Winters hadn’t actually survived the Baker mansion of the previous game. Instead, he had been killed early in the story by Jack Baker and resurrected as a sentient mold creature. Because of this, he managed to survive the events of the titles. Like the infected version of Mia Winters shown in the beginning of Resident Evil 7, Ethan’s enhanced healing abilities allow him to fight through the most serious injuries. This even let him easily reattach his lost limbs, something even Chris Redfield’s advanced technology couldn’t do. Despite many having attributed this to Resident Evil’s absurd healing mechanics, this was foreshadowing towards the protagonist’s true nature.
Ethan also couldn’t have been saved by the cure for the mold he used on Mia in the canon ending of RE7, because he hadn’t been infected by it. Instead, when he died, he became a part of the collective mind of the Megamycete depicted in Resident Evil Village, having more in common with the Four Lords and Mother Miranda than the infected Bakers. If he were to have taken the cure, he would have turned into crystal, like Eveline and Jack. This makes the epilogue of the latest installment even more heartbreaking, given that, by destroying the Megamycete, Ethan destroyed the only thing that had kept him alive for the past few games.
Ethan Winters certainly isn’t the regular protagonist of Resident Evil games, being the epitome of the conscious and unaware monster. Although the questions about the major differences between Ethan and the other human characters were answered by Resident Evil Village, there are many new ones about what role his daughter will play in the DLC, Shadows of Rose.
