If it seems inconspicuous at all that for all the extended thoughts I've relayed about the game that none have been specifically about Alcina Dimitrescu... well, it's partly because I think the character warrants a post-mortem of her own, and the other reason is just that I'm tired: tired of the way they chose her to dominate the game's marketing, and how that enterprise was expressed. It's happened before, when Nier: Automata's ubiquitously sexualized android women were picked up as the thing the game would be colloquially known for upon first contact with it. Things like these, what people will latch onto, are partly uncontrollable, but the deliberate catalyst for those obsessions exists in the visual designs and presentation of the subject matter, so they're also not accidental; Yoko Taro or whoever on high decided to want sexy and leered at women in his game, the character designer in Akihiko Yoshida concurred, and the rest was just momentum. The worst of it is when even for all this deliberate staging, the company or creator calling the shots take part in the public performance, and bestow legitimacy, permission and encouragement on the gleeful objectification taking place--Taro did it with his calls for .zip files full of porn and more; Capcom at large did it with their entire latter marketing focus with Village. It changes the dynamic from an audience with expected bad actors in it to dropping the veil on the intentions of just what the takeaway is supposed to be here: to be aroused freely and exchange those high-fives with the highest authority looking on in approval.
It's not like Dimitrescu could be ignored as a sexualized character since so much of that is built-in from the start. The foremost visual model for the character is the modern day Internet urban legend Hachishaku-sama, rumours of whom started percolating outward from communities like 2ch around 2008. A little later elsewhere in the world, Slender Man would be conceptualized, and the two have their share of similarities: impossibly tall specters lurking about the fringes of mundane normalcy, on the periphery of scenes where they might engage in their child-snatching and spiriting away. Unlike Slender Man, who's designed to be anonymous to the point of nothingness, Hachishaku-sama mixes the traditional ghost story trappings and behaviour with an "attractive" exterior, of a superficially beautiful giant woman garbed in an airy summer dress whose menace is only revealed when she already has you in her clutches. This, coupled with her explicit focus in stalking children and the knowledge of just what kind of community conceived of her in the first place makes it fairly transparently clear that aspects of horror were secondary to who she is and what her purpose as a cult figure is supposed to be: she is pure distilled fetish, a glamourized vision of a hot older woman forcing herself on children, with all the kinks suggested by that having been exploited time and time again in pornography that's sprung up around the character. Dimitrescu borrows her stature, her stalking premise, her dress code--and yes, the explicit sexualization, so the fundamental influence molding the character doesn't really leave room for her to be anything else, opportunistic marketing or not.
Sexuality is so emphasized with Dimitrescu that it's difficult to see her for anything more than that in how the game presents her and what associations it makes. Kikuko Inoue voices her in Japanese, and if you want your pop culture allusions from that direction you could easily point to Inoue's other role as another performatively sultry character in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood's Lust--a literal incarnation of sex whose signature maneuver is the hyperextension and hardening of her nails or fingers into matter-shredding talons, something Dimitrescu does to identical fashion and effect. The first-person camera that defines the Ethan games is directed to always focus on her cleavage in any scene she's in, for optimal framing of her body; similarly the voyeur scene outside her bedchambers is staged to provide extreme close-up views of all the contours of her body otherwise impossible to accomplish in face-to-face interactions. Village isn't a game that cares much for assigning its cast and characters specific ages, as it has hazy chronology around the community it's set in that it's not too invested in exploring down to minutiae--but it does provide an exceptional, convenient file for the explicit purpose of assigning a specific number to outline Dimitrescu's effective physical age when her infection took hold and she stopped changing outwardly (she is 44); there's nothing else to surmise with this footnote than an attempt to push the fetish angle even harder with relevant datapoints--they might as well be listing her three sizes. If the marketing seemed overbearing to the point of parody in how it portrayed her, the reality of it turned out that her role in the game reflects that single-minded reductive instinct very faithfully.
Of course, Dimitrescu's not just a facsimile of modern day pop culture--Village thinks itself a dark fairy tale, set in an apocryphal and plausiby deniable vague "Europe" as its model RE4 did... only now instead of a caricature of Spain we have an analogous Romania, with all its relevant folk tales, myths and cultural export touchstones serving as fodder for the new strains of series explorations of "horror." Thus, we have a thematically sound werewolf virus, and some good old outdated Eastern Bloc industrialization anxiety filtered through Tetsuo: The Iron Man in other local horror sideshows, and many more seeming genre anthology expressions, but the most prominent is Dimitrescu's domain in the vampire myth which she very neatly occupies in nearly everything she is. Her bloodlust's rationalized by the game's internal pseudoscience as a hereditary blood disease mutated further into a dependency on blood for sustenance by the virus that grants her her abilities; her abode is just the right kind of aristocratic and old world to read as oppressing; she has her coven of "daughters" to propagate her will wantonly within her demesne. It's all there, and as far as expressions of vampirism in media go, it's subject to the genre's pervasive, boring subtexts in the ways that have been popularized by mostly Victorian English dudes writing about their mistrust and loathing of women, of queer people, of the foreign invader. Dimitrescu is Dracula; she's Carmilla; she's Erzsébet Báthory in all the ways that don't really say anything at all about the subject matter except repeat the legends of bigotry that fuel their staying power in culture at large.
The trappings of lesbian vampires are so omnipresent in her and her daughters and everything they do that the impression is that a thematic payoff must come at some point, yet it never does. All the game ever does with it is borrow the easy iconography of predatory lesbians decadently imprisoning, torturing and consuming innocent young women by the dozens or hundreds, all the while framing that vaguely gay menace as going hand in hand with hating men in turn--the outbursts of "manflesh" really don't have any other bearing on what occurs except to underline the gendered intent. At the same time, Ethan is given the euphemistic response of labeling the feminine influence as "witches" as he fends them off--something no one actually says in the regular Joe model the character's voice is supposed to follow, nor given to precedent in the prior game or even elsewhere in this one. It's a self-censoring convention that occurs in media when actual profanity is intended or wanted to be uttered, but can't be or as in this case, is abstained from for reasons that can only be guessed at--perhaps to weakly frame Ethan as more heroic going through his eventual arc, with the literal "bitch" utterances left to more malicious characters to spit out. At the end, when the calcified remains of Dimitrescu's body are in Ethan's pocket as a war trophy and trinket to be sold, the living contrivance of a game function made into a half-hearted character in the Duke comments upon her attractiveness even in death--leering at the shape of what is her corpse, which remains sexualized in its figure-like form, available for the player to view and rotate around through the game's interface. That's about as lingering a statement as could be made of what purpose Lady Dimitrescu was ever meant to serve in this story.
But what about outside of the textual narrative? Dimitrescu is after all positioned as the latest in the long line, especially present in the modern RE era, of the implacable stalker figure--discussed narratively earlier, but also embodied mechanically. Jack Baker and the "Mr. X" Tyrant in their respective games garnered near-total terror-laden appreciation from audiences at large because of either the camp characterization or how the design of their encounters and presence in the game world defined the play experience for nearly everyone that ever interacted with those games. This was in my mind the one avenue left for "redeeming" Dimitrescu as to what kind of legacy she might leave behind when the dust had settled and evaluations been made, and the crying shame of it is that she's likely the least compelling execution of the shared concept made in the series, at least in this modern run. It's arresting when you first see her in all her visage from a live feed of existing in the same space as her, outside of a predetermined cinematic; an incomparably huge shape closing in. When the initial shock fades, more and more seams begin to unravel around the entire presentation: the sparse population of the castle with other threats that prevent her from acting as an unpredictable pressuring wall pushing you into danger zones, as Mr. X might have. The overall layout of the castle itself, with empty loops circling the main hall where she lingers nearly all of her screentime, providing easy and safe escape routes that never allow her to really dominate the environment with her presence--a coffee table alone will stymie her. Her daughters while in some way replicating her danger on a smaller scale, also exist as very binary, scripted figures--you'll run or you'll die, with risking resources to hold them off never being a valid or valuable strategy or decision to weigh, as they simply have no effect, temporarily or otherwise. Everything about Dimitrescu's use in this ostensible marquee heritage role is underdeveloped, slapdash and worst of all, ineffective--an impression that through its conception has made its inroads in defining the entire character, both mechanically and narratively.
I don't think Alcina Dimitrescu as she is exists as a solitary case of a character done dirty by her own existence: to me she is more of a symptom of a generalized ill intent, bad ideas and sidelining that exists in the game and its writing. For as much as she defined the game's promotional image, I guess that's truth in advertising.
