| NOTE: As this proposal will contain some information from my removal of Ruvik on NPE Wiki, all of this info is not plagiarism. |
Picture 2010 Freddy Krueger, but only inside of someone's brain. And yes, Ruvik is portrayed by the same guy, Jackie Earle Haley, who portrayed Freddy in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
| “ | Who do you think you are? I know who you are, "Seb". I know what you crave, what you fear... Will you be able to live with yourself knowing what I'm going to make you do? Poor little Joseph couldn't... Too bad they dragged you into this. But either way, you're mine to do with what I please. | „ |
| ~ Ruvik gloating at Sebastian. |
19th IH Proposal and the only The Evil Within content I'll be dealing with, until Esmeralda Torres came to mind. She is to be discussed through a future IH discussion post. Following the success of Ruvik's removal on NPE, we're gonna propose him here for the category. With that said, let's begin!
What is the Work?
The Evil Within is a franchise that firstly spawned two video games developed by Tango Gameworks and published by Bethesda Softworks (same publishers behind RAGE, Doom, and Wolfenstein).
The first game focuses on Sebastian Castellanos, a detective from Krimson City Police Department, whose day job is turned upside down after investigating the odd occurrences within Beacon Mental Hospital, forcing him and his associates Juli Kidman and Joseph Oda to investigate what really lurks in there and uncover the mastermind behind it.
The second game focuses three years after the events of the first game. Sebastian retired from Krimson City Police Department following the events of the Beacon Mental Hospital and his nightmarish encounter with Ruvik in STEM, causing him to be an alcoholic. However, his luck changed when he realised that his daughter, Lily Castellanos, who was supposedly dead after a house fire, isn't dead, and it would take Sebastian to MOBIUS, a shadowy organisation, to find her and once again visit the horrors of STEM, now known as Union, with a different core.
Who is Ruvik? What Has He Done?
Ruvik is the secondary antagonist of The Evil Within series. He serves as the main antagonist of the first game, the secondary antagonist of The Assignment DLC, and a minor character in The Consequence.
He is a slender, sharp-featured man who looks like a walking cadaver due to his extensive disfigurement from several burns and scars. He can teleport and appears to be immune to most physical attacks, seemingly unconstrained by the laws of reality. Ruvik tortures everyone he encounters, driven in equal measure by his own insanity and an apparent thirst for vengeance.
Shut out of the world, Ruvik carried on his studies by himself. His skin is illogical and unable of controlling his body temperature due to severe burns. He was notorious for being at the physical boundaries of his body and for suffering from constant migraines and seizures, both mental and physical.
Heinous Standards
Easily sets it. Ruvik is responsible for the events of the first game. He's responsible for turning people into walking, mindless zombies known as Haunted within STEM, with victims including Oscar Connelly and Valerio Jimenez, which the process is shown as painful and agonising to the point that gave them immense pain. He also kills and tortures anyone who enters inside including the police officers and countless workers within the Beacon Mental Hospital as one example; psychologically driving Seb, Kidman, and Joseph insane (as with Ruvik himself trying to turn Joseph into a Haunted in multiple instances); mind-raping Leslie Withers and possessing him. He is basically responsible for Sebastian being traumatised and with his life getting ruined after escaping STEM to the point that he was called out as "crazy" by his peers that contributed to losing his job in the three-year interim between the first and second game and had to take counselling because of it.
Ruvik's actions in the first game lingered in the second game as it also led the existence of Union, another version of STEM, where his influence would posthumously continue as Theodore Wallace would use Sebastian's failures in Beacon to psychologically manipulate him into giving Lily Castellanos, his daughter and the new core of STEM, and conjured The Sadist, The Keeper, and Laura as revenge to drive Sebastian to insanity for defying him (which failed after Sebastian stopped them all).
Preventions?
Nothing. Even if he's still presented as a tragic monster, which is where 100% of his descent to villainy comes from, Ruvik still commits needless atrocities out of spite so it doesn't make him a full-blown anti-villain as he is always presented as a psychological, murderous threat to not just Sebastian but to any unfortunate soul who visit STEM. It's unironic enough that Sebastian calls him out for his attempts of feeling sorry, as his death was never taken with sympathy at all.
Inconsistencies?
Getting burnt and horribly disfigured in his childhood is needlessly cruel, given that his piece-of-shit father, Ernesto Victoriano, would imprison him to their estate's basement after that incident.
Just because Ruvik is a sadist who tortures people, with Sebastian calling him out for his attempts at being sorry, doesn't mean Ruvik's tragedy is automatically invalidated. In fact, Ruvik is a tragic monster, too tragic for NPE in fact, given that Chapter 9 explores heavily about his past and how Ruvik's descent to villainy started.
It's hard not to talk about Ruvik's fall to insanity without mentioning them, because a lot of it came from it. This is shown during the barn scene where both Ruben (Ruvik's real name) and his sister Laura were playing at the barn, with Ruben who was a child at the time, when all of a sudden the villagers who were angry started burning the barn. Even if the villagers themselves were angry because their parents were responsible for buying their land out, Ruben and Laura were not even perpetrators of it and were just treated as a scapegoat by the villagers. Not to mention, the infamous barn fire pretty much burnt Ruben alive, who was just a child at the time, to the point of utter disfigurement. But the tipping point was Laura's death; in that while Laura was not killed by the fire, she was badly wounded and became a vegetable before ultimately dying. Now what does this have to do with Ruvik? Laura's death ultimately put Ruvik to the brink of mental decline, starting from his childhood, and started seeing visions of her for the next few years. This doesn't even help the fact that Ruben, after getting disfigured, was treated like a monster by his father and was imprisoned in the basement.
There's also Laura, the person he actually had great attachment with. Laura is essentially Ruvik's morality chain and the person he truly cared for, where basically Ruvik would never fall to villainy had it not for her death. Again, too tragic, because Ruben witnessed his sister's death and pretty much became the catalyst of who he is in the present. Not to mention, the game further delves into his brainchild project, STEM, where he created it for the sole purpose of wanting to relive with Laura and live his life out with her, during The Assignment DLC. This shows that despite being a sadist, Ruvik's care for Laura mainly sticks there, as her death is entirely the reason why Ruvik even became a villain in the first place.
And then there's him getitng screwed over by both MOBIUS and Dr. Jimenez. So during the cutscene with Ruvik's encounter with MOBIUS and Dr. Jimenez in the past, it turns out that Dr. Jimenez, the person he supposedly allied with, is an asshole of a traitor working under MOBIUS' payroll who actually want his project, especially for the fact that The Administrator ordered Ruvik's termination. Sure that would justify the fact that Ruvik is a serial killer, but Ruvik did not take well at getting stabbed in the back by his former colleagues who only feigned their alliances to him out of pragmatism. To make matters worse, Ruvik had a reason to be angry given that his project, whose actual purpose is to revisit his life with Laura before her death, is now being used for MOBIUS' malicious purposes of world domination with their twisted agenda. Which doesn't help the fact that MOBIUS eventually betrayed him and reduced him to nothing more than his brain to be used as a core for STEM, which is basically another reason why he became a sadistic torturer within STEM because of their betrayal of having his hard work getting stolen by both MOBIUS and Dr. Jimenez.
So in short even if Ruvik is a sadistic monster that Sebastian had a hard time sympathising with because of his heinous deeds, his tragic past of getting burnt and horribly disfigured from the fire, his genuine attachment to his late older sister (whose death is the reason why he is currently), and basically getting screwed over by both Dr. Jimenez and MOBIUS who want to steal his research, as well as being reduced to a brain to be used as a core for STEM make him an inconsistent character and again a tragic monster.
Verdict
Yes.