Help, everyone’s turning Resident Evil 4’s Ashley into a mouse and now Capcom is in on it too

Hey, you know Ashley? From Resident Evil 4 (opens in new tab)? She’s a mouse now. Yeah, I don’t really get it either, but you need to clear any images you have of the president’s daughter as an actual human woman from your mind, because the internet has decided she’s an adorable, cheese-loving rodent no taller than your ankles, and now Capcom has acknowledged it too. I can only imagine a patch to the game will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.

It began just over a week ago, when a Twitter user named Agrimmora posted an innocuous bit of fanart to their personal account. Asking “What if you booted up resident evil 4 remake and Ashley was just a tiny mouse, what would you do,” Agrimmora inadvertently sparked off one of the most powerful and inexplicable memes in recent memory.

There’s so much “Moushly” fanart out there that I feel confident saying it must outweigh the amount of ‘normal’ RE4 remake Ashley art by now. There’s Moushly finding cheese (opens in new tab), Moushly recreating memes (opens in new tab), pixel Moushly (opens in new tab), a bunch more I’ll put below and, yes, a truly staggering amount of art I cannot, under any circumstances, embed or link to in the body of this article. The boundaries of human taste are truly infinite.

I’m neither a social scientist nor the owner of a fursona, so I might be overstepping my bounds by theorising about this one. But if I were to push my luck, I’d say that Agrimmora’s quick sketch contained a design that was easy to replicate, immediately recognisable, and (let’s be honest) pretty adorable. Moushly has the vibe of a beloved Saturday morning cartoon character, and while the mental A-to-B of ‘turning RE4’s Ashley into a mouse’ is a little hard to grasp, I think the popularity of the Moushly character is easy to intuit.

Plus, as with RE4’s Ghibli-esque trailers (opens in new tab), there’s something appealing in the gap between the game’s actual subject matter (sinister cultists using parasites to convert human beings into bioweapons) and the memes (Ashley is a cute mouse who wants cheese).

But like I said, it’s now reached the point where even Capcom has commented on the trend, albeit in a pretty oblique way. Last Friday, the official Resident Evil Twitter account posted (opens in new tab) a mouse emoji and a cheese emoji, which naturally sent several thousand people into overdrive, with many taking it as confirmation that Moushly is now “canon” (opens in new tab). What does it mean for an alternative, rodent version of a videogame character to be canon? No clue, but whatever it means, it’s true.

Anyway, you’ve had quite enough of me. Here’s a selection of my favourite Moushly fanart that I cannot and will not explain: