![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
about.
age. 33-37
birthday. January 19th (headcanon)
sexuality. wifeguy
marital status. (Canonically) Married
occupation. Systems Engineer
current location. they put my guy in transylvania romania LOLLLLL
build. Slim, athletic
hair. Sandy blond
eyes. Brown. No, ice blue? ...Cloudy? That's weird.
What leads Ethan into the Baker estate is not just a quiet, focused sense of determination. It's also blockheaded stubbornness. Upon receiving an email from his missing wife, Ethan bails on a friend to immediately begin a feverish road trip across the country. Once there, he ignores all the warning signs, gore, and bad vibes to search for his wife. Breaking and entering? No problem, Mia might be in there. Gotta check, you know? At his core, he's a deeply caring individual with a deep-seated need to provide.
Being a normal man in extraordinary circumstances only forces Ethan to focus on this base desire. He seeks to help people no matter what, and if asked to do something, will do it— provided it's not direct danger to someone he cares about. A danger to him? He'd rather work through it. Although Ethan has a sense of self-preservation (After Mia attacks him, he immediately changes his goal from getting her out to trying to leave the estate), he's willing to damn that for someone he cares about.
Beyond this desire is a growing sense of paranoia corrupting his connections. The Baker farm has left him traumatized, but a lack of answers makes it worse. Not knowing "who" or "what" is truly going on, Ethan has no way to identify who "they" are, and the BSAA is intent on hammering into Ethan that "they" will come for him and his wife. Later, this shows in his brief quibble with Mia in the opening of Resident Evil Village, when she calls him paranoid.
Despite this, a core part of Ethan is his dedication. Loyal as a dog, he will put himself through hell for someone he cares about, and is not afraid to use whatever advantages he has to accomplish this goal. Notoriously, he refuses to look deeper into his ability to regenerate, despite writing in his digital journal about how he feels like there's a part of him missing, still stuck in Louisiana. Calling him unaware is not necessarily incorrect, but it would be wrong to imply this isn't another facet related to what a stubborn person he is. Although he's surprised by Eveline revealing the truth to him, Ethan also simply accepts it and keeps moving. Maybe a nicer way to describe this would be flexible, but that's also not as funny, is it?
Although these traits may seem to paint the image of an extraordinary man, Ethan is terribly full of normalcy. A cheesy sense of humor (He doesn't have Leon's cool one-liners, that's for sure), a hardened sarcastic streak, and an inability to leave well enough alone, Ethan is a decent communicator stuck in a world where secrets are the most important currency a person can have. As for his own: He bears a little bit of a sensitive artist's soul. He has a knack for art, piano, and photography that he doesn't indulge in.
Standing at an unobtrusive 5'11", Ethan could not look more unsuspecting. He is a blond haired man with surprisingly broad shoulders, strong arms, and a slim build. His most notable facial characteristics would be his large, hooked nose, and the tiny mole in the corner below his left eye. Ethan also has particularly thick lashes, a strong chin, and round cheeks.
His poor posture does not betray his build, so it's unlikely your character would notice the physical difference between Ethan's canon points. Still, Ethan is in shape, and depending on canon point, obviously works out. At 33, he's definitely skinnier— but at 37, he's not working a dadbod. Instead, he's just kind of bulky beneath the tshirt and jeans, he just doesn't look it because of how thin he is. This isn't really helped by the fact he's long, Ethan's got long arms, long fingers, long legs, despite his height.
Ethan's eye color is a point of interest. In RE7, when he is 33, his eyes were brown, like Mia's. However, in RE8, they both have noticably lighter eyes. While Mia's seem to have gone blue-gray, Ethan's are a very light hazel. I headcanon that the infection changed their eye colors over the years, and you're free to play around with this in threads! If you want your character to bring up the color change, that's fine! If you'd like for them to remark that his eyes are a little corpse-like today, that's also chill! ...Feel free to ruin Ethan's day as much as you like, I won't stop you.
In 2014, Ethan began to suspect his wife was lying to him. A confrontation regarding these suspicions did not gain traction. Sometime following their argument, Mia told Ethan she took a "babysitting job" on a cruise. She did not return home from this trip. In October of that year, Ethan filed a missing persons report for his wife; it was not until July 2017 that he saw his wife again, locked up in the basement of the Baker family's home.
What lead him to that point is a series of stubborn errors: Rather than contacting the police with the mysterious email from his wife's mail address, Ethan opted to investigate the questionable tip on his own. Instead of turning tail when confronted with all the warning signs outside the Baker property, Ethan jumped deeper into the woods surrounding their farm. Stubborn, distrustful, but deeply keen to keep others safe, Ethan is a normal man in wildly abnormal circumstances trying to keep it all together. Following the Dulvey incident, he lives with a heavy paranoia: Fearful of "them", Ethan takes military training through the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA), all while his wife calls him paranoid. He prefers the word cautious. Basically, the physical manifestation of Somebody's Watching Me by Rockwell