What do you say to the notion that people think Leon is a misogynist?

Only evidence maybe would’ve been og4 but even so later games never imply that nor does he ever mistreat/degrade his female colleagues/teammates

I think the whole image of him as that for some fans seem to stem from what Capcom writers back then projected on/imparted on Leon

What are your thoughts?

I feel like this is going to be a hot take and potentially misconstrued, but, here we go:

I think it's completely fair to critique the misogynistic lines from OG4 for example, however, I believe that's more of a reflection of the creators than it is of Leon specifically. Outside of those few instances of the "women" line, all of which are from older media now, there's no evidence to suggest he is misogynistic. Hating women is not a character trait of his, there's nothing where he's dismissive toward them or makes shitty comments-- he doesn't treat the women he interacts with any different than the men, and the majority of his friends are women.

That being said, Capcom has a huge problem with misogyny, and it's especially apparent in RE. I can't speak to their other franchises since RE is the one I'm familiar with, but having read so much material from the devs, I think it's abundantly clear that they are misogynistic. Just think of the way the women are treated compared to the men-- there's so much emphasis on making sure Leon looks "cool" and does "cool things" in the narratives, but their focus for Jill and Claire is making them pretty, making sure they don't look "too old," etc.... it's just all superficial things. And then there's the issue of all the alternative costumes. The men characters get things like pirate costumes and the women get lingerie. So many of the alternative costume for the women characters are extremely sexualized in a way that's completely incomparable to the very few instances of the men being sexualized.

And that doesn't even get at the narrative issues like Jill being fridged for sake of Chris' storyline or production issues like the scene of Rebecca drinking water in Vendetta apparently having be meant to look sexual (or the licker scene with Jill, which was also done to look sexual, and both of these instances were confirmed by the creators in the movie booklets). So I think it's inaccurate to say Leon is misogynistic. Some of his lines were misogynistic, that's an irrefutable fact, but that was due to the an intentional mistranslation by Capcom for sake of making Leon "look cool" (context: his original line had nothing to do with women, it was the equivalent of "story of my life" which is how they translated it in 4R). So Capcom is misogynist, the people in positions of power working on these games have allowed and encouraged misogyny and the maltreatment of women characters.