Highlights

  • Ethan Winters endured extreme physical trauma, contrasting with Chris Redfield's emotional struggles in the Resident Evil franchise.
  • Jill Valentine's absence is accepted due to psychological challenges while the often-overlooked Clancy Jarvis faced relentless torture in Resident Evil 7.
  • Clancy's sequential suffering at the hands of the Bakers showcases extreme distress and makes his fate in Resident Evil 7 truly disturbing.

Capcom has put tons of Resident Evil characters through emotional, psychological, and physical wringers. Nobody’s taken quite as much physical abuse as Resident Evil’s Ethan Winters since they physically couldn’t withstand or recover from such mutilation, for instance, while Chris Redfield has endured his fair share of emotional trauma with how many close ones he’s lost, largely due to the sheer number of installments he’s been featured in.

Jill Valentine still hasn’t returned to Resident Evil and, even though she’s one of the most highly demanded characters for Capcom to reprise, somehow the community has accepted her retirement due to the psychological challenges she’d be recovering from since Resident Evil 5. Legacy mascot characters all have their baggage now but there’s one character who only appeared in a single entry and may arguably take the cake—literally—as the franchise’s most pitiful from a narrative and gameplay perspective: Resident Evil 7’s Clancy Jarvis.

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Clancy Jarvis is Resident Evil’s Most Distressing Character

Capcom knew it could exploit Clancy, a character who wasn’t a legacy mascot and thus unimportant to the series as a whole, and it sure twists the knife into his ribcage without any remorse. It’s also important to remember that unlike a Luis Serra or Billy Coen, Clancy is a mild-mannered cameraman and hardly even considered a side character. Resident Evil 7’s Ethan is an everyman, too, but he’s also technically deceased by the time he actually meets the Bakers at their supper table and there’s not really any amount of suffering he wouldn’t have been able to physically recover from anyway.

That’s not to say Clancy is the only character in recent Resident Evil memory who’s suffered greatly, but Clancy is easy to overlook due to him not being a recurring protagonist.

The number of abhorrent and disturbing experiences Clancy endures at the hands of his kidnappers Jack, Marguerite, and Lucas Baker is frankly ridiculous. The horrific events and torturous games Clancy is put through are in chronological order as follows:

  • Dulvey Haunted House case, also known as Resident Evil 7’s Beginning Hour demo (Clancy’s kidnapping at the Baker estate, where he and the ‘Sewer Gators’ crew were investigating the Louisiana residence, which they believed to be abandoned).
  • Banned Footage Vol. 1’s Nightmare DLC (Clancy is locked in the basement and defends himself against Molded and Jack).
  • Banned Footage Vol. 1’s Bedroom DLC (Clancy attempts to escape a room full of environmental puzzles and must put himself back in restraints in bed before Marguerite intermittently reappears, putting items back in their place lest Marguerite notice and injure Clancy).
  • Banned Footage Vol. 2’s 21 DLC (Clancy is strapped into a finger guillotine—he’s later electrocuted and also at risk of having a makeshift circular saw pushed toward his face—and must play a sabotaged game of blackjack against a masked stranger named Hoffman).
  • “Happy Birthday” VHS tape sequence (Clancy’s scripted death at the hands of Lucas as he attempts to complete a puzzle).

Clancy’s Back-to-Back Torture in Resident Evil 7 is a Fate Worse Than Death

Nightmare, Bedroom, and 21 are all icing on the cake regarding how much Clancy bravely suffers, but Resident Evil 7’s base game alone is enough to represent how sad his death is. If players find themselves sympathizing with Clancy at all, it’s deeply upsetting to know that Ethan could learn how to survive the “Happy Birthday” puzzle and outwit Lucas’ trap because he witnessed how Clancy failed.

Clancy is therefore a true MVP of Resident Evil 7 coupled with the good fortune Ethan has to stumble upon that videotape. The tape itself isn’t mandatory for players to succeed and yet Clancy’s death can at least serve a purpose this way, which is better than imagining that what he went through was for nothing at all.