If you don’t know about his backstory: Leon basically starts off as a rookie cop sent to Racoon City on his first day. He literally shows up a day late with a hangover b/c his gf broke up with him and he’s an alcoholic. Then he finally gets there and theirs like a fucking zombie invasion and all the other cops are dead af. The whole city gets nuked to handle the zombies and he is no longer a cop after that point. Go play the game if you wanna know details we’re just going over the cop stuff. So shortly after that the government is impressed with how he handled himself in a zombie invasion and forces him to become a lackey. And he goes on some adventures killing zombies and parasites while slowly becoming a full time alcoholic.

So I’d like to step outside of the media for a bit. The RE series started back in the 90’s and back then more people saw cops as the good guys. So I guess being a cop was seen as a good outstanding and cool profession to be and it was reflected in fiction too. Of course there was anti-cop sediment back then but it probably wasn’t as popular or mainstream. Since then it slowly increased as more people saw cop fuckery over the internet that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The cop hate wouldn’t really ramp up till maybe the mid 2010’s and that sorta effected fiction. One big example is with Mortal Kombat. MK9 (2011)- Introduced a retconned Striker cracking police brutality jokes. By MKX (2015) he was *gone*. There wasn’t a trace of him til a small cameo in MK1. It legit is interesting to see to portrayal of cops from neutral or positive to “yea acab guys” as more people discover how heinous they can get in real life.

I think the discourse is more about whether people who are anti cop and government are being hypocrites if they like Leon Kennedy because he works under the government and does their bidding. I just gotta say that the RE series isn’t a kids game. The story isn’t like a flat good/bad narrative. I haven’t seen everything from it, but the games aren’t some “Rah America great cops rad” kind of thing. The gov AND the shady corporations do bad shit in this series and Leon hates it all to be fair. He might’ve started off starry-eyed and believing in the system but that was shattered immediately (like what happened to a lot of people irl when it came to cops and authority in general). He hated being forced to work for the government and witnessing the corruption to the point where he was driven to drink. So no, I don’t think liking Leon Kennedy as a character makes you a hypocrite. Showing things in media on its own isn’t bad thing, just what you’re trying to say and how you’re trying to say it.