the changes weren't made recently whatttt??? i remember being on wattpad when i discovered fanfics in 2019 and they still used the lemons and limes (when i first went to ao3 i remember still using those terms and was shocked that they were under different names)
as a writer you will have a specific deck of vocab words you like using a lot and when you read other peoples' work you will see a very clear spread of different vocab words on their end. this is why you need to read, to collect other writers' words like it's a card game
The one about the ship no one else cares about, or the deeply unpopular character, or the extremely unusual AU?
The fic that got no comments or kudos when you posted it?
Months or years from now, that fic might be exactly what someone is looking for in the sea of fics about all the popular characters, ships, and AUs.
Your fic might be the only fic out there that has what someone is looking for. The only fic that scratches the itch that it turns out you and that reader share.
maaaannn, ik i shouldn't expect much feedback from posting in a small fandom with an even smaller percentage of people who read in the same ship i write for but likeeeeeeeee
My personal take on Mia Winters’ background and development
Mia Winters is the second most neglected character in Resident Evil Village (and in the franchise in general) after Donna Beneviento, and to add insult to injury, half of the time it’s just her being possessed or someone else completely (yet she manages to be blamed for that too). So here are my considerations on this mysterious character that can’t help but honor her name most of the time…
Very little is known about her past, even her complete name is unknown for that matter despite being such a pivotal character in the current arc. Considering that everything is headed towards the company that is actually the root of all her misfortunes, it’s probably time to finally get to know about her and finally form a proper opinion.
She likely wasn’t a scientist at all, but a more ordinary agent dealing with weaponry and other stuff delivery to other companies. Her official cover is “working for a trade company” and is known to travel so that sounds incompatible with a researcher position. In that case she probably wouldn’t need a cover at all.
She seems skilled enough in combat and weaponry management (from what was shown in RE7). That implies that her deliveries aren’t often supposed to be peaceful routine, and a high risk of injuries. Weird bruises on her body and prolonged time far from home is likely what led her husband to be suspicious of her real occupation.
She doesn’t seem to occupy a high rank in Tentsu/The Connections. As soon as Eveline loses control she becomes an extension of the experiment the company is supervising from afar. Hence a disposable employee (for unknown reasons), but paid very well I suppose.
It is unknown how Mia ended up working for Tentsu, but as we know with corrupted organizations, it’s not easy to get out of them. It’s also unknown how they bribe people into working for them.
Becoming Eveline’s handler is a fairly recent job and likely a promotion from her boss, considering the package’s higher status. From Mia’s last videomessage before the incident it could be implied that she was promised a long break afterwards or she intended to leave.
Another good question being raised here is how did she get away with suddenly being a babysitter. Could be covered with the claim that she was temporarily looking after a superior’s kid while being on the job, very common trope in works of fiction.
Zoe and Mia have been in friendly relations since the Baker incident (trauma pack/deluxe version), despite the latter is technically responsible for what happened to the former’s family and she is aware of it. Documents in the Baker house prove they have been in an active collaboration since Mia’s arrival.
Mia immediately releases Ethan from his obligations as soon as she realizes she is infected. She isn’t expecting any kind of help and silently accepts her destiny.
Silence and secrecy do not make Mia a devious character, rather a flawed human who prefers to keep her burdens to herself under the perception of protecting others. Obviously a partial feeling of shame (she is aware at this point that she is not working for the good guys) and fear of losing her loved ones. While revealing her job could actually harm her husband, her keeping an extremely low profile in Village is actually a result of those feelings too.
The game shows Mia as a naturally good spirited character (when in her right mind), probably what led her to be assigned as Evie’s temporary mother. Not treating the girl as a chore (in contrast to the kid’s life in isolation) is what made Evie obsessively attached to her later on. At the same time she tries to save her coworker and prevent the Bakers from being infected by the bio-weapon.
Unpopular one: It’s highly unlikely she knew Ethan was a corpse revived by mold. All she could know was him being a very unusual infected person, who only gained regenerative skills without losing his mind. It is impossible to actually establish his real condition since his vital functions are the same of a human person.
However, considering she starts looking upset after their sudden relocation in Romania, she must have sensed something wasn’t right about it, but couldn’t explain it to Ethan without telling him the rest of the truth, including his infection and her own history with bioterrorism. That explains why she states with confidence she isn’t worried about Rose’s medical exams, as Ethan erroneously assumes.
Her experience with The Connections is probably why she kept her knowledge about Ethan a secret. In RE’s universe even apparently good organizations eventually get corrupted or hide shady activities. That was the case with FBC, and ultimately BSAA itself sending bioweapons on the field.
The reason why she doesn’t tell Ethan (but actually she is shown trying to get to the point) is a more personal one, probably not to ruin the safe bubble they managed to create after those years, and affecting Ethan’s own mental state. That doesn’t mean it proved to be the right choice, but that at least it came from a reasonable place.
Ironically, Ethan becomes paranoid as soon as Mia gets kidnapped and replaced by Miranda. Both Ethan’s and Mia’s behaviour in the first cutscene and the subsequent flashback is inverted, showing that something changed between the two scenes, seemingly clashing with one another.
She had nothing to do with the events of house Beneviento, that’s all a distorted reality created by Ethan’s own projections on Mia and his own fears. The phone from RE7 should be enough of a hint that it’s all an hallucination (not just a reused asset). As explained above she never seems to be concerned about Ethan and Rose as ‘mold creatures’, rather as targets of companies working with bio weapons. (Also, there’s no way half of the Winters’ furniture ended up in Donna’s basement in such a short time, they clearly don’t live near the village.)
The picture portraying both her and mother Miranda doesn’t mean she knew her or they used to braid each other’s hair. Alan, her supervisor during Eveline’s shipping, is also present, meaning it could have been taken right before sailing. That’s more like your average team picture, and probably a nod to the most inattentive players that it’s the same lab from RE7.
That was my short breakdown on Mia Winters, a character with good narrative potential despite the short time she was given. For once, I find it interesting how she confidently addresses Ethan (and likely even Rose) as a special person when he is actually infected with mold and she witnessed and experienced in first person how it can corrupt the most honourable of men. Yet she never questions Ethan’s nature and only informs Chris about it when he is about to leave him behind under the assumption that he is dead.
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.
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