Resident Evil’s Ada Wong goes head-to-head with sexpionage stereotypes

polygon.com:

Let’s get one thing clear: I am obsessed with Ada Wong. While she first appeared in Resident Evil 2as a spy in Raccoon City, I first got acquainted with her during my playthrough of the original Resident Evil 4. Needless to say, I immediately loved her. Ada is a femme fatale to the core, always wearing a seductive red dress and doing killer flips while fighting and zipping around with her hookshot. When I found out about Ada-specific extra content Separate Ways, I sped through the ending of RE4 to get to it, and of course I giggled and kicked my feet every time she showed up in the RE4 remake. She fits in perfectly with Resident Evil 4’s schlocky action-movie energy and her equally ridiculous macho counterparts, Leon and Krauser.

Ada is a very fun character in a fun game. But RE4’scinematic approach comes with plenty of action-movie tropes. Some, like Leon’s terrible movie hero one-liners and head-exploding roundhouse kicks, are still really funny. Others — especially the ones that apply to my favorite international spy — aren’t. So let’s dig into that.

The title screen for Separate Ways gives a bump to her femme fatale reading: In a nod to the 1990 film La Femme Nikita, Ada is shown in the same pose as the titular Nikita in the movie’s poster. The movie is about a young woman who becomes an assassin and falls in love, and fans have noted that Ada’s love for a man (namely, Leon) is a trait they share.

Ada is Asian American, though, and that impacts the reading of the femme fatale trope, since she also ends up falling very neatly into the derogatory “Dragon Lady” trope, which portrays Asian female characters as deceitful, mysterious, villainous, and domineering. Oftentimes, these characters are dressed in sexualised