Characterization and Lexical Construction of Heroism in the Resident Evil Game Series: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Abstract

Heroism is defined as the courageous actions of heroes or heroines. However, it is not just about valiant deeds but it is also reflected in the rhetoric that presents their characters as idiosyncratic, which leads the audience to perceive how the speaker wields leadership. Using the Resident Evil game series, this case study examined how verbal choices by protagonists contributed to representations of heroism within the survival horror context. Only selected utterances of Claire Redfield, Leon S. Kennedy, Jill Valentine, and Carlos Oliveira were extracted from the scripts of the remakes of Resident Evil 2 (RE2) (2019) and Resident Evil 3 (RE3) (2020) to form a dedicated corpus. The reference corpus used to show differences in style consisted of the concatenated speech from all four characters. The results revealed that Leon’s hedging (ask, believe) reflected his institutional self-consciousness, while Carlos’s rescue lexicon (clear, rescue, get you to a hospital) foregrounded his bravery and protectiveness. Claire’s affect markers and swearing (care, asshole, bastard) signaled her emotional openness, and Jill’s moral evaluatives (greed, get out of here) underlined her interpersonal skill. Moreover, the shared collocates (you, I, get, and do) suggested that heroism was constructed as second-person and action-oriented discourse. Consequently, the results obtained from the corpus-based analysis not only highlight the value of digital humanities in research but also validate literary interpretations through empirical substantiation.