the thing with alcina is that her announcing 'how much blood and sweat do you think it took to raise those daughters?' when her children have all been killed really does sum up her worldview and personality perfectly. you lose a child and you expect devastation- your children are gone forever, they have had their lives taken, how will you cope? how will you carry on? but for alcina it's all about the fact that she's poured a lot of bloody time and effort into those girls and they've had the audacity to go and get themselves killed. it's all just an irritating inconvenience for her.
I love helping everyone rediscover the fact that the opening passage of My Immortal is a parody of the opening passage of The Vampire Lestat and not just a generic exaggeration of the typical fanfic Mary Sue introduction. One of the many delightful goth kid Easter eggs the author planted for the audience.
Anne Rice COULD write and she made excellent use of narrative voice. Lestat is egotistical, less intelligent than he believes himself to be and above all, deeply unhinged. This is absolutely what his internal monologue would sound like and you have to read her other works to contextualize that. I think it is the same for the author of My Immortal and the fact that they’ve never (actually) come forward to claim ownership makes me think they enjoy the ambiguity.
As mentioned in my post on Donna Beneviento, the other RE8 timeline question that’s been eating at me is just how long Miranda has been posing as Mia before Chris busts in on her.
It’s fascinating how many obscure clues you can find about the days leading up to the start of the game – and if that doesn’t grab you, I’ve also got some lovely fridge-horror-logic to share about why a bunch of jars of baby food and a note about Rose’s recent half-birthday may be some of the most subtly sinister details in the game.
To reiterate again up front, I really doubt there are any definitive, ‘canonical’ answers here. The whole game is a campy, fairy-tale fever dream, and if anyone had a clear timeline in mind, lord knows if the rest of the team were on the same page. Details from in-game documents may contradict cutscene dialogue, may contradict environmental clues, etc. But analysing all those clues still turns up some interesting details, so here we go.
To begin with, in the game’s opening scenes, we learn several significant things about “Mia”:
She’s ‘gone local’ (using local recipes, reading a ‘local fairy tale’ to Rose, etc)
She doesn’t want to talk about what happened in Louisianna (RE7)
She makes most of Rose’s food by hand
She and Ethan have been fighting
Something is very wrong with her
That last point is mostly a vibe, but it is strong. The idea that creepy ‘local’ tale is suitable bedtime reading is suspicious, and her tone of voice when she insists ‘there’s nothing wrong with my memory!’ is bizarrely defensive. Something is off.
All of this makes perfect sense in retrospect, knowing this is Miranda-posing-as-Mia. She’s doesn’t want to talk about the past, because what she "doesn’t remember" could give her away. She’s "gone local" because she is local. She makes baby-food by hand because she’s an overbearing mother from the early 1900s. And she and Ethan have been fighting because she’s a stranger masquerading as his wife.
Now, some of these things may be true of the real Mia as well, if to a lesser degree – there was already tension between Ethan and Mia, the Baker Incident Report talks about Mia learning local recipes, etc. And that does makes sense, if Ethan didn’t immediately notice the change – but we’ll come back to that stuff later.
Mostly what I want to point to is one detail you can find in the house that seems innocent out of context, but was a big oh shit moment for me with all that weirdness leading up.
Oh fuck, what has not!Mia been feeding Rose???
This is also the detail that convinced me ‘Mia’ hasn’t been Mia for some time. Because if Mia’s been making all the baby food for Rose since she started solids (presumably in the last couple of months), why would they be buying these jars at all? Which suggests it’s a recent change to her behaviour, that Ethan hasn’t quite adjusted to yet when he goes out for groceries ‒ we're probably talking at least a couple of weeks, maybe longer. And given that Mia isn't Mia anymore, every recent change to her behaviour becomes pretty suspect. (I mean, you can totally come up with other explanations where it’s some kind of nervous-new-parents-over-buying thing, or a ‘just in case Mia needs a break’-emergency supply that never actually gets used, but c’mon, this is horror: lemme have the freaky version!)
After all, we just heard a dark fairy tale in which a demonic bat and a monster fish ‘helpfully’ feed a little girl parts of their own bodies. Feeding people gross, corrupted food was a major horror element of the Baker family from RE7 too. Heck, there’s even arguably other canonical suggestions that ‘local food’ sourced around the village can enhance the powers of a mould-infected individual, given how food the Duke can make for Ethan boosts his stats (which is definitely me thinking too hard about a shallow game-mechanic, but shut up, this all works on so many levels!)
The opening also features one scene with real!Mia: the flashback/dream sequence Ethan experiences before waking up next to the crashed van. We know this is the real Mia, because she’s anxious about Rose and Ethan in a way that makes no sense for Miranda – in particular about something Ethan won’t face about himself (Ethan accuses her of keeping things from him, tells her they should talk about it, then blows off the conversation for a call from work).
It’s not clear how long ago this was – or even that it’s necessarily a real memory. It could just be a dream Ethan’s having, mixing up multiple different memories and some of his own anxieties (most of what happens in Donna’s basement could be taken the same way). But if it is a memory, the other key plot point is that Ethan receives a phone call about Rose’s test results. Put a pin in that one for later too.
There’s one more relevant detail that comes up when Chris finds the real Mia in Miranda’s lab, where she says she was captured and used in experiments. This is the kind of line it’s best not to get too carried away with, since it’s mostly here to explain why Miranda would have kept Mia alive at all. But if she’s had time for experiments, that does suggest Miranda’s had time to sneak back and forth between Ethan’s house and the village while posing as Mia, which does change the picture a little. I mean, you could say those experiments were performed by one of the four lords or some other assistant, of course, but it’s not the most obvious interpretation.
How Chris discovered Miranda was posing as Mia isn’t clearly explained (and is probably the kind of question you're not supposed to ask), though it’s vaguely hinted in dialogue that his team figured out her plan through 'recon'. Possibly, they had Miranda under surveillance, though it can’t have been very thorough – they obviously didn’t witness Mia’s abduction, for one, or they’d have known she might still be alive.
Then again, if Miranda has been sneaking back and forth from the village while posing as Mia, that might give Chris’ team more chances to spot her doing it and follow her back to the Winters’. Or maybe they’re not good enough to tail Miranda, and found out her plan from a third party, or one of those remarkably convenient diaries that RE characters are forever leaving lying around. Lots of possibilities, no real answers.
A few firmer details about Miranda’s movements come from the diary of Eugen, a peasant in the village. From this and other assorted documents, we can put together a partial timeline of events surrounding Mia’s kidnapping. The list below doesn’t cover every recent date mentioned in the game, just those I caught that looked significant.
February 2: Rose’s half-birthday (she was born on August 2, 2020).
February 3: Miranda requests Eugen find her a list of ‘drugs and tools’ in the next few days (that she presumably needs for her plans for Rose).
February 6: Ethan mentions a fight with Mia (or ‘Mia’) at the hospital in his diary.
February 8: Chris Redfield kills ‘Mia’ and kidnaps Rose and Ethan.
February 9: Eugen is instructed to deliver the tools to Miranda’s ceremony at dawn, where she divides Rose into four pieces. Ethan wakes up outside the village, and the main events of the game take place.
February 10: Miranda's ceremony to revive Rose/Eva takes place at dawn. Final boss battle and ending.
This timeline can’t give us an exact date for Mia’s kidnapping, but we do know from Eugen, that there was ‘no sign of Mother Miranda’ on the 8th (a hint she was off impersonating Mia), but she was in the village on the 3rd of February, about a week before the game begins. He also sacrificed two goats to Miranda on the 1st, but doesn’t specify whether she was personally present.
Now, it’s possible Miranda snuck back to visit the village on the 3rd while posing as Mia, but the more obvious read is that this is before Mia was taken. Either way, it’s safe to assume Miranda’s plans are well underway.
That’s about all the game gives us explicitly, but there are a few other clues.
The note in Ethan’s diary from the 6th about arguing with Mia ‘at the hospital’ provides no context for why he was at the hospital, but in the dream/flashback, we see him making an appointment to collect Rose’s test results ‘next Thursday’. Significantly, those test results can be found in a nearby drawer, signed ‘Applefeld Memorial Hospital’. So that much all adds up: the 6th was Thursday,* they were at the hospital to pick up Rose's test results. When Ethan refers to having “another” fight with Mia in his diary for the 6th, the argument from the flashback could well be the specific previous incident he’s thinking of.
This all matters, because we can be pretty confident the Mia from the flashback was the real thing: Mia can only have been replaced after that call took place. So when was that?
Rose’s test results are undated in the file text, but if you look closely at the in-game asset (screencap above), you might make out the date 28/1/2021. It’s not totally clear whether this is the date the tests were conducted, or the date the report was returned to the doctor. But it does make good sense for Rose to have been due for a check-up, as there are photos and notes about her ‘half-birthday’ on the 2nd Feb, making her just on 6 months old.
From this, we can make a decent guess when the flashback happened. The appointment is made for ‘next week’ and ‘next Thursday’ in dialogue, so the call must have been somewhere between Jan 26 (Mon) and Feb 2 (Sun) the previous week. And if the results themselves are dated to Jan 28, then the call can’t have come through before then, so that gives us between Jan 28 (Wed) and Feb 2 (Sun). Since the doctor says she's 'just received' Rose's test results on the phone, that date on the report (Jan 28) may well be the date of the call.
Either way, Miranda logically can’t have replaced Mia before the 28th – eleven days before the events of the game begin. (Still with me?)
There’s another, more sinister reason why Rose’s check-up might be significant: the BSAA was involved. The text of the report specifies “Results for additional fungal pathogen tests will be provided by BSAA.” The in-game image of the report has a “BSAA Europe Medical Division” logo as its header. And the end of the game contains a lot of hints that the BSAA is no longer to be trusted, and that Miranda may well have contacts in the organisation. So it’s disturbingly plausible that the results of the check-up were deliberately leaked to Miranda – maybe even results of those additional ‘fungal pathogen tests’ too, long before anything ever made it back to Ethan. Perhaps those 6-month-test-results were even the reason Miranda takes an interest in Rose.
All that said, there’s also good reason to suppose Miranda’s had her eye on Rose for much longer than a mere week or two – the fact the Winters were moved to Romania at all could suggest she’s been pulling strings there for some time. So maybe these latest tests only confirmed what she already suspected for a long time.
Either way, it’s very possible that leaked info from Rose’s 6-month-medical-check-up was a key inciting incident behind the events of the game. Happy half-birthday, Rose!
Lord knows how much of all that subtext was even intentional, but if it was, that is some subtle shit, and I applaud it.
But getting back to the point, let’s just expand that timeline a little.
January 28 (Tuesday): Date on Rose’s medical report. Earliest date that Mother Miranda could have replaced Mia.
January 28-February 2: Ethan receives a call from the hospital, making an appointment to come pick up his daughter’s test results on the 6th (Thursday). He and Mia have the argument from the flashback scene.
February 2 (Sunday): Rose’s half-birthday (she was born on August 2, 2020).
February 3 (Monday): Miranda requests Eugen find her a list of ‘drugs and tools’ in the next few days (that she presumably needs for her plans for Rose).
February 6 (Thursday): Ethan and Mia (or possibly Miranda-as-Mia) visit the hospital to pick up Rose’s medical report. They have the fight mentioned in Ethan’s diary.
February 8 (Saturday): Chris Redfield “kills” Miranda-as-Mia and kidnaps Rose and Ethan. Miranda revives, overturns the truck carrying Ethan and Rose, and abducts Rose.
February 9 (Sunday): Eugen is instructed to deliver the tools to Miranda’s ceremony at dawn, where she divides Rose into four pieces. Ethan wakes up outside the village, and the main events of the game take place.
February 10 (Monday): Final boss battle and ending.
There’s plenty of wiggle room in this timeline for other interpretations, but what little info the game gives us mostly seems to add up to this sequence. The 28th remains a plausible earliest date for Mia’s replacement, meaning she’s been posing as Mia for no more than 11 days at the very most. If we take it from Eugen’s diary that Miranda was still in the village on the 3rd, then we’re looking at less than one week.
And that’s just a little disappointing to me, because it doesn’t give a lot of time for stuff like, oh, you know, for all those jars of baby food to build up, while Miranda cooks baby Rose the kind of specially formulated diet that would make Marguerite Baker proud.
See, whatever timeline the in-game dates may suggest, I still like the idea of a Miranda who’s been playing a much longer con: pulling strings to get the Winters moved closer to her, and spending time impersonating Mia, rather than simply absconding with Rose at the first opportunity. That gives her time to make sure Rose is the vessel she needs and prepare for her ceremony before bringing the wrath of Chris Redfield down on her head (and that of anyone else who might take offense at Rose’s abduction).
It gives her time, moreover, to play at being Rose’s mother, while already working to mould Rose into her own daughter. She’ll eat what Eva ate, hear the bedtime stories Eva heard, be cradled in the loving arms of the same mother who mourned Eva’s death.
To that end, imagine a Miranda who may have befriended Mia long before replacing her, using one or more shapeshifted guises to learn more about her and her family, preparing to impersonate her believably. Maybe Miranda’s even the one who taught Mia some of those ‘local recipes’ – recipes she'll go on cooking after taking her place.
The game doesn’t dwell on the horror from Mia’s POV, and that’s a shame, because damn: being abducted and imprisoned, subjected to god-knows-what kind of experimentation – knowing all the while that you won’t be missed, because the monster who abducted you is now living in your home, wearing your face and sleeping beside your husband, who won't even know you’re gone? That is some A-grade shit.
For which matter, how do we know Mia was the only one Miranda was experimenting on? What if one of the reasons Ethan wants to talk about the Bakers at the start of the game is that he’s been having this horrific series of “nightmares” where he wakes up back in the dark, restrained and helpless, while a ‘possessed’ Mia leans over him with a grin and a scalpel? (We know his body would heal any evidence away, and we know Miranda was sourcing drugs – and why would she need drugs to crystalise and divide Rose?)
Basically, I’m 100% here for a Miranda who’s been insinuating herself into the Winters’ lives for at least the maximum nominal period the timeline backs up. It makes so much narrative sense, and the horror possibilities are wonderful.
But this is all just circling around the more character-significant question: how much of the tension in Ethan and Mia’s marriage was really thanks to Miranda, and how much was there to begin with?
The short answer is always going to be that it’s down to interpretation. The “Mia” who argued with Ethan at the hospital may or may not have been the real thing: nothing definitive points one way or the other. There’s definitely evidence things were tense pre-Miranda, given their interactions in the flashback scene. But there's also some evidence those arguments have taken a different character since Mia was replaced.
Miranda’s “Mia” is snidely dismissive of Ethan’s desire to talk about the past, claiming she just wants to put it all behind them. The real Mia from the flashback is anxious and depressed: tired of going back over past trauma, but at the same time frustrated with the aspects they don’t talk about (ie. Ethan). The Mia we hear worrying on the radio in Donna’s basement seems to suffer from a lot of the same anxieties. In the flashback, it’s Ethan being dismissive, insisting “Rose is fine, everything’s fine, what else matters?”
To argue about character inconsistencies here is to miss the point: they’re both worried about what their past means for Rose, and it’s all bubbling over now Rose is due for her 6-month tests. Given all that underlying tension and the weight of past trauma, it’s not unbelievable for the two of them have effectively been taking turns to be the one-who-worries and the one-who-brushes-those-worries-off. Sometimes, that's just how mutual anxieties work in a relationship bubble.
But the jump from the Mia of the flashback to the Mia of the Ethan’s diary – who blows up at the mere mention of events of three years ago – seems unlikely as the same Mia who was so anxious in that flashback, and so clearly still wants to talk about something they haven’t addressed. It’s hardly impossible Mia-from-the-hospital could be the real Mia (Ethan’s summary is very brief, and days have passed in between), but she makes far more sense to me as Miranda’s Mia, who quickly gets defensive when Ethan broaches the subject at all.
In summary: no, Miranda is not the only reason things have been tense between Ethan and Mia lately. But I doubt the argument "Mia" has with Ethan at the opening of the game is all that representative of what things have really been like between them. And the real issues are a lot more nuanced than the generic Mia-told-lies-and-is-mean take, but that’s really a subject for another post.
It’s only fair to admit here that one of the reasons I like the idea of Miranda replacing Mia earlier is because I’d like to be able to blame her for more of the problems Ethan and “Mia” have been having, because I like them both as characters, and I like them together. But then again, if you’re in the opposite camp, maybe you like the implications of the idea that things are already so awkward in the Winters household that Ethan could even go weeks without even realising Mia had been replaced by an imposter – it’s really all in the spin.
Because at the end of the day, the implications for Ethan and Mia’s relationship aren’t the point. There's just so much potential for atmosphere and twisted horror storytelling that comes with a scenario where Miranda has kept up her ruse for much longer than the nominal timeline suggests.
11 days? Oh, Mother Miranda is just getting started.
*Just to confuse things a little, the actual 6th February 2021 was a Saturday, not a Thursday, but the writers probably didn't bother to check: this is Resident Evil, not Lord of the Rings or something.
mia knew her husband didn't leave the baker house alive because, well, just look at him. but he hasn't hurt her. he refuses to hurt her. and she isn't going to be the one to tell him that he should.
the BSAA cautiously backing her plan to just... cover the mirrors. only print photos where you can't quite see his face. keep him busy enough he doesn't linger on his reflection in his phone screen - or maybe he's just conveniently nervous enough about the outside world that he doesn't look anymore.
mia's husband is a monster, but he's a gentle one.
is it cruel to let him keep thinking he's human? would it be crueller to put him down like a dog? he never would've been this way if not for mia. she wills the back of her neck to stop prickling every time he looks in her direction because the mould wearing her husband's skin is only there because he loves her - or loved her? she isn't sure. she doesn't know if ethan is still ethan - she sure wasn't herself when the mould took her. but he's different.
and regardless - ethan loved her, and whatever walks around as ethan now loves her just the same. so does it matter, really?
Before any anglophones get on the French people's case on this, consider for a second what y'all did when you reanalyzed the Spanish "el lagarto" ("the lizard") as "alligator."
Oh yeah, everybody does this*. Another English example is "apron", which was once "napron" until we reanalyzed the initial N as part of the indefinite article (a napron -> an apron).
A fun one in Arabic is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Quite understandably, Arabic speakers heard the initial "Al" and thought "ah yes, the ubiquitous definite article" and Alexandria became al-’Iskandariyya.
In the opposite direction, Spanish adopted hundreds of Arabic words during the Middle Ages due to Andalusian/Islamic influence, and there are very few Spanish words that start with al- that aren't of Arabic origin (and in fact, many words that start with A without being followed by an L, as in about half of cases in Arabic the L in "al-" is elided).
Reanalysis occurs in many other places besides article-noun combos, of course, but it's an extremely common case.
*citation needed, but reanalysis is extremely common
Oh, this actually explains something I'd just attributed to a quirk of sequence constraints or something; why Alexander is realized as Iskander/Iskandar in Arabic! It makes sense to analyze it as al-Iskander in Arabic!
Same thing happened with the word alchemy! Started out as the Arab term "al-kimiya", and when it was transported to Europe, it became "alchemy". This is actually really interesting, because as the term evolved more, it became "chemistry", effectively un-reanalyzing the word!
Oh actually there's another layer of fun there: the Arabic "al-kimiya" is actually a loan of the Ancient Greek χῠμείᾱ (khumeíā), which was used to refer to the art of alloying metals. Arabic borrowed a lot of Greek terminology owing to Arabic translations of Greek classics (many of which were actually lost in Europe until they were retranslated from Arabic). So, yeah, the Greek khumeíā made a round trip through Arabic, then into medieval Latin as "alchemia," and from there we eventually do get chemistry!
Not quite the same thing, but this reminded me of one of the funniest phenomena in the German language.
So, you may or may not know that x-rays were discovered by a guy called Röntgen (or Roentgen, though the ö is the proper spelling). Because of that, they're called "Röntgen rays" in German. Now, the thing is that in the German, the infinitive of a verb is always formed with an -en at the, so, for example, "to run" is "rennen" or "to sleep" is "schlafen." And because of that, it just so happened that the verb for performing x-rays became... "röntgen."
ich röntge, du röntgst, er/sie/es röntgt, wir röntgen, ihr röntgt, sie röntgen
Before any anglophones get on the French people's case on this, consider for a second what y'all did when you reanalyzed the Spanish "el lagarto" ("the lizard") as "alligator."
Oh yeah, everybody does this*. Another English example is "apron", which was once "napron" until we reanalyzed the initial N as part of the indefinite article (a napron -> an apron).
A fun one in Arabic is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Quite understandably, Arabic speakers heard the initial "Al" and thought "ah yes, the ubiquitous definite article" and Alexandria became al-’Iskandariyya.
In the opposite direction, Spanish adopted hundreds of Arabic words during the Middle Ages due to Andalusian/Islamic influence, and there are very few Spanish words that start with al- that aren't of Arabic origin (and in fact, many words that start with A without being followed by an L, as in about half of cases in Arabic the L in "al-" is elided).
Reanalysis occurs in many other places besides article-noun combos, of course, but it's an extremely common case.
*citation needed, but reanalysis is extremely common
Oh, this actually explains something I'd just attributed to a quirk of sequence constraints or something; why Alexander is realized as Iskander/Iskandar in Arabic! It makes sense to analyze it as al-Iskander in Arabic!
Same thing happened with the word alchemy! Started out as the Arab term "al-kimiya", and when it was transported to Europe, it became "alchemy". This is actually really interesting, because as the term evolved more, it became "chemistry", effectively un-reanalyzing the word!
Oh actually there's another layer of fun there: the Arabic "al-kimiya" is actually a loan of the Ancient Greek χῠμείᾱ (khumeíā), which was used to refer to the art of alloying metals. Arabic borrowed a lot of Greek terminology owing to Arabic translations of Greek classics (many of which were actually lost in Europe until they were retranslated from Arabic). So, yeah, the Greek khumeíā made a round trip through Arabic, then into medieval Latin as "alchemia," and from there we eventually do get chemistry!
Not quite the same thing, but this reminded me of one of the funniest phenomena in the German language.
So, you may or may not know that x-rays were discovered by a guy called Röntgen (or Roentgen, though the ö is the proper spelling). Because of that, they're called "Röntgen rays" in German. Now, the thing is that in the German, the infinitive of a verb is always formed with an -en at the, so, for example, "to run" is "rennen" or "to sleep" is "schlafen." And because of that, it just so happened that the verb for performing x-rays became... "röntgen."
ich röntge, du röntgst, er/sie/es röntgt, wir röntgen, ihr röntgt, sie röntgen
Sad update everyone, Tama recently passed away… An estimated 3,000 people, including railway officials, attended Tama the cat’s funeral on Sunday, days after she died of heart failure aged 16. [x]
For those who haven’t read articles about it, the local shrine elevated her to a god. She’s now the Eternal Stationmaster and patron god of the station.
Nitama, already now a mature cat (born 2010), has a protege named Yontama (fourth Tama, b. 2016). There is no information available for either the physical befellment or tragic self-disgrace which has removed Santama from contention.
okay but actually what happened to santama (or sun-tama-tama, which is her name because it’s a pun on santama) was that she was basically sent to train for the position in okayama and they liked her so much they refused to send her back
“Sun-tama-tama” (a pun off of “Santama”, lit. “third Tama”) was a calico cat sent for training in Okayama. Sun-tama-tama was considered as a candidate for Tama’s successor, but the Okayama Public Relations representative who had been caring for Sun-tama-tama refused to give the cat up writing, “I will not let go of this child, she will stay in Okayama.” [25]
As of September 2018, Sun-tama-tama is working as the stationmaster in Naka-ku, Okayama and appears occasionally on Tama’s Twitter account.
The shrine of Tama Daimyōjin (Great gracious deity Tama), next to the Kishi station where she worked.
Nitama presenting her yearly offerings to Tama Daimyōjin on the anniversary of Tama’s Death, June 23 (The offerings are presented by the company president, as Nitama is a cat and thus can’t hold the offerings herself) (Not pictured, but also present, Yontama)
So, fun fact- the manga Noragami has an arc where the main character, Yato (a minor kami/God that is down on his luck but trying to make it big time) goes to a council/conference for all the Gods in Japan.
And they are announcing the winner of the “up and coming god” award, and of course, Yato thinks it’s him.
