What if Resident Evil 4’s Ashley was a mouse? Wonder no longer

You read that right. Folk across Twitter and beyond are turning Resident Evil 4 Remake’s Ashley into a mouse. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I know that I sure as hell can’t stop thinking about it.

What started as an innocent message from Tom Orry in Slack, asking if Ashley being depicted as a mouse was ‘a thing’, resulted in me trawling through illustration after illustration of mouse-Ashley. The deeper I went, the more confused I found myself.

Did I miss something? Was there some grand ol’ joke about mice and cheese in Resident Evil 4 Remake that I ignored? I know Bitores Mendez is ‘The Big Cheese’ but what has Ashley - as a mouse - got to do with this?

Well, nothing. The trend started with Twitter user, Mora, who simply posed the question of, “What if you booted up Resident Evil 4 Remake and Ashley was just a tiny mouse? What would you do?”

The question was followed by a drawing of Ashley as a mouse, craving cheese, with the Merchant also making an appearance, selling cheese. From there, the floodgates opened, and cheese puns were flowing. We even got to see a mouse-sized Ashley wielding the Grenade Launcher, and honestly, that was pretty cool.

I really wanted to work out why Ashley was being depicted as a mouse of all animals, or if this was just a rendition of the endless, “would you still love me if I was a worm?” bit from a while back. Alas, I did find some answers among the chaos on ResetEra, from user Fat4all.

Remember how in 2005’s Resident Evil 4, Ashley had ears? Big ears, at that. These were often a topic of conversation, and ultimately, a distinct part of Ashley’s identity as a character. In Resident Evil 4 Remake, Ashley receives a new haircut; one that obscures her ears.

Many fans were actually saddened by the fact; Ashley’s sizeable ears were adorable, really. Alas, Capcom took them away. At the time of the discovery, a bunch of memes appeared about Ashley’s ears, and this is what encouraged Mora to draw Ashley as a mouse.

“I saw a joke drawing that depicted Ashley with big ears, and this came to my mind,” shared Mora in a follow-up tweet to their illustration.

Needless to say, Mora’s playful drawing kicked off a real trend, and there’s now illustration galore - and even some animations - of Ashley Graham as a cute mouse.

There’s really no denying that the Resident Evil community is committed to the cause, and ‘what if RE4’s Ashley was just a tiny mouse?’ is going to haunt me for days to come. Either way, I have to honestly commend these artists for doing what they do best, and that’s having fun, while sharing some damn good, amusing art as a result.

That’s not all, either. Someone drew Ada Wong as a bat, too. In the words of Twitter user Spiral God King, “This is just turning into Resident Evil, but everyone except Leon is an Animal Crossing character now.”