In the beginning of April, the actress behindResident Evil 4 Remake’s Ada Wong, Lily Gao, deactivated replies on her Instagram posts afterreceiving thousands of angry comments from gamers about her performance. She later deactivated the account, butreactivated it recently with a statementabout being the first Asian actor to represent Ada Wong in the Resident Evil games and how she’d faced racist and sexist backlash “for simply participating”.
I haven’t played the game (I’m too scared) but I watched every Ada cutscene on YouTube so I could make my own comparison, watching clips from both the remake and the original. I can’t say that the voice acting isn’t a big departure from what Ada usually sounds like. The delivery is very obviously different, because Ada no longer has her stereotypical chronic Hot Girl™ voice. Gao’s delivery can tend towards being wooden, but there are plenty of moments in the game where Luis and Leon’s lines fall flat as well, and honestly,the Resident Evil series has never been known for stellar acting.
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Nonetheless, Gao did her job. It’s not a life-changing acting performance, but it’s certainly not bad enough to warrant harassing her on social media – in fact, I think there are very few reasons to harass people on social media, if they haven’t done anybody any harm. Ada Wong, and Lily Gao, certainly didn’t hurt anybody. A wooden performance isn’t offensive or harmful, it’s just mildly disappointing, and you’ll get over it, I promise. More importantly, you don’t see other cast members getting harassed for mediocre acting, and this is because of the intersection of a couple of factors.
For one, capital G Gamers were already mad about the desexualisation of the remake’s female characters. In the original games, Ada wore a ridiculous red dress with a slit up to her hip, and flirted a lot. Her dialogue was plagued with sexual innuendos, which is probably part of what fuelled gamers’ obsession with her. Resident Evil 4 Remake replaced the dress with a long turtleneck, leather harness, and thigh-high boots. She is still extremely hot, but she isn’t falling victim to the male gaze or vamping for the camera anymore. You still see her ass in her new outfit sometimes, but she’s not doing cartwheels and flashing her underwear, and that focus on desexualisation comes through in her voice acting as well. A combination of this and flat line delivery likely made Ada seem incredibly unsexy to players who already were biased against her, and that was enough to start a barrage of hate against Gao.
Another thing: Gao is an Asian woman. Many people will say that her race has nothing to do with it, and that their problem was with the acting, but I think it had everything to do with it. In her statement, Gao said she faced racist backlash, and talked about authentic representation, saying “Inauthentic casting perpetuates an unhealthy image that further dehumanizes the community they seek to reflect. It is time we stop only capitalizing on the sexualized, eroticized, and mysterious Asian woman, and make space to honour every kind of Asian woman. My Ada is a survivor. My Ada is kind, just, intelligent, and funny. She is unpredictable, resilient, and absolutely not a stereotype.”
She’s right. East Asian women are often stereotyped as submissive, mysterious, and hyper-sexual – lots of people fetishise Asian women, and of course that feeds into what people want to see in Ada Wong. Resident Evil 4 was lewd, and in overtly sexualising Ada Wong, reinforced this stereotype many people have. The way Gao played Ada pulled away from this, leading people to leave comments about there being ‘nothing seductive’ about her performance. It doesn’t matter if people didn’t have that at the forefront of their minds when typing their mean comments under her photos, because again, she’s right.
She, as an Asian woman, decided she would not be perpetuating that stereotype in her performance, and tried to create a more interesting, fleshed-out Ada. In her post, she references East Asian female protagonists from The Assassin, Chungking Express, and Irma Vep, showing her influences on her portrayal of Ada. These characters were all different, but independent and compelling in their own ways – it’s clear she put work into her characterisation of Ada and that it meant something to her.Ada is considered by some to be the coolest character in the series, and Gao tried to represent that instead of her sexuality.
Of course, being Asian also made her an easy target. Considering the flak her statement took, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d gotten a ton of racist DMs as well. Again, the rest of the cast have not been harassed about their voice acting, and certainly not to this degree. I’m personally glad that Capcom decided to cast an Asian voice actress as Ada’s English voice actor for the first time, because Asian actors should be given opportunities to play roles that represent their communities. Those roles are so often given by default to white actors, and this was a win for representation in my book.
I think it’s disingenuous to say that the harassment of Lily Gao wasn’t racially motivated, especially if she’s saying it is. She was the one reading the comments, and the one who had to deactivate her account to get some peace – she would know best. She is not the first woman to be attacked for her work on a video game, and she won’t be the last, but it’s especially painful for me to see an Asian person denigrated for an attempt to push against stereotypes enforced on their character for so long. Gao deserves to have her damn Instagram account without weirdos telling her that her character wasn’t sexy enough. Touch some grass, gamers. Go read about racist stereotyping of Asian women while you’re at it.
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