11/7/2022 0 Comments Resident evil 7 story![]() ![]() There is so much room for stories that go beyond the (excellent, and necessary) small-town love and heartbreak of a series like Friday Night Lights, and instead delve into complicated, nuanced tales that reflect the reality of existence in the region, like the former FX series Justified's complicated cast of cops and criminals. ![]() It's a shame, too, because the rural South isn't a genre but a setting, one full of potential for all kinds of stories. We’re in a bit of a pop-cultural gap when it comes to the modern rural South on mainstream television-a few critically acclaimed and nuanced TV series are no longer on the air, and meanwhile, other shows have yet to take on the mantle. (The situation is less dire in film, where Hollywood sets a film in the South roughly as often as it makes a movie about a superhero.) In contrast, consider the abundance of procedurals set in major American cities-three have premiered this year alone at the time this is being written ( Ransom, APB, and Training Day), joining returning series like Law & Order SVU, Shades of Blue, and the soon-to-be-departed Bones. We're in a bit of a pop-cultural gap when it comes to the modern rural South on mainstream television, with a few critically acclaimed and nuanced TV series no longer on the air (like Treme, Rectify, or Justified) while we wait for other shows to take on the mantle, like the upcoming seasons of both American Crime (which will be set in North Carolina) and American Crime Story (which will focus on Hurricane Katrina), which are set to join the second season of Queen Sugar, a story about a woman who inherits a Louisiana sugarcane farm, as the most prominent depictions of the modern South in 2017. There's a kernel of truth in the idea that "liberals have lost touch": The modern South does deserve better, more visible representations in popular culture. It's made it easy for pop culture to seize upon the caricature of the southern backwoods hick, a backward person from a backward culture, the butt of jokes going back to 1962's The Beverly Hillbillies and surfacing to this day, albeit in a manner more self-aware via works such as My Name Is Earl and the Pennsatucky character in Orange Is the New Black. This is partly responsible for setting "the South" as an abstract concept, and particularly the rural South, at odds with the United States' narrative of progress. The southern cultural response to this has been defined by sustained acts of protest and resistance, from Jim Crow following the Reconstruction era to the embrace of the Confederate battle flag when those Jim Crow laws were overturned by the civil rights movement and integration became the law of the land. Its story is one where many have decided the burden of shame for the Civil War lies. The American South, however, does have a more complicated shading than its neighbors in the heartland. Before Baker exits the story for good, he gets a scene where we finally see him as a person. He speaks in soft, sad tones utterly at odds with the cartoonish redneck that hunted you for much of the game's first act and implores you to forgive his family and put an end to the monster that turned them all into killers. But then-and this is a spoiler for Resident Evil 7's final act-the game redeems the Bakers, revealing them to be under the control of a monster disguised as a little girl, and grants the Baker patriarch one final moment of sobriety. The hillbilly nightmare that runs through the majority of the game isn't terribly nuanced-as with a lot of exploitative works, subtlety isn't necessarily the point. Its earliest chapters directly reference the climaxes of both The Blair Witch Project and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, while later it pivots to Saw-inspired deadly puzzles. It's almost impossible to ignore the blatant House of 1000 Corpses hicksploitation vibes a premise like that has- Resident Evil 7, after all, wears its influences on its sleeve. But for most of the game, Resident Evil 7 has players running in terror from the Baker family, a clan of Southerners who live in a decrepit Louisiana plantation home and also happen to be unkillable cannibals. It is definitely scary, but there is also an absurdity to its plot, which, without spoiling things too much, unspools to reveal a dark conspiracy and a finale that trades the tense, claustrophobic horror it does so well for much of its runtime for a more action-packed finish. Resident Evil 7 is not a particularly serious game. ![]()
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