when I awoke, the universe had ceased to be the dark and hostile place I previously imagined it to be. Instead, I was overwhelmed, yes, even awed by the beauty and perfection of it all!
i think the thing that fucks me up about anti-fatness is that it's a pure disgust response but people don't even realize it cause they've wrapped it up in so much moralizing and bad science. Like they can't even look at the part where they're just taught to view people as disgusting anymore and understand that that's all it is. And when they see fat people trying to be or do anything that isn't being sorry for existing they have to push it back into that mold. I have to be a walking talking anti-fat psa.
I really did think I was done talking about (read: furiously defending) Mia Winters when I made all those other posts earlier this year. I’ve even touched on the misconceptions about her in Shadows of Rose before, at least in a reblog. But someone reblogged one of those posts recently with a comment that mentioned this particular aspect of the hate she gets in passing, and I had such a strong response to it (and for what is honestly in no way that poster’s fault) that I had to accept that maybe I wasn’t as done as I thought he was.
So there’s the idea in fandom that Mia voluntarily gave up her daughter to the government after RE8. It's bullshit and obviously so, but it's still going to take me another whole post to get into why seeing this ‘fact’ parroted about her annoys me so damn much.
Because this is not an outside take. I’ve seen people claim they didn’t have any particular opinion on Mia until this was the tipping point that pushed them into hating her. I’ve seen "sympathetic" takes on Mia which suggest that really it’s not her fault at all that she couldn’t love her own daughter, because [elaborate bullshit]. "Mia abandonned Rose at the first opportunity after RE8" is one of those takes that gets repeated ad nauseum.
First question: based on what, exactly?
No really, if there’s some obscure, mistranslated press release out there as the source, please, someone point me to it, because nothing in Shadows of Rose tells us anything of the sort.
Excluding Eveline’s horrifying Mia-puppets, the real Mia is mentioned all of twice in Shadows of Rose. The first mention comes when you find young Rose’s diary, which tells us that she found regular school a bit basic, because she’d already learned all that stuff with ‘Mommy’. So we can safely assume Rose was home-schooled by Mia for much of her childhood, though now Rose is attending a regular school. "Home schooled with enough care to put her ahead of her same-age peers" sure says "abandoned" to me!
The other mention of Mia is more ambiguous, and is easily missed, heard only if you read her letter about baking a cake for Rose’s half birthday in the Winters’ home sequence. After reading it, Rose sadly says, "I haven’t seen Mom in ages." Why she hasn’t seen her mother in so long isn’t explained (though she certainly sounds like she'd like to), nor do we have any idea how long ‘ages’ really is. It’s certainly enough to make the player wonder, but no answers are ever supplied, or even really hinted at.
And that’s it. That’s everything we’ve actually got on Mia’s place in Rose’s mid-teens life. I have played this DLC multiple times and poured through the game files ‒ trust me on this.
Unlike so many other bits of slander thrown at Mia’s feet, the idea that Mia ‘gave up her daughter to the government’ sometime after that first diary was written is at least theoretically possible, given the very little we know. But why the fuck do people treat it like it’s the only possibility? Do we really have so little imagination?
The only thing we can positively say about Mia in Shadows of Rose is that she’s not in it. Mia could be in a coma for all we know! She could be in prison! The government could’ve taken Rose from her against her will! She could be deep undercover in some criminal organisation who represent a real threat to her daughter! She could be in some mental institution after the stress of losing Ethan proved too much! Those experiments Miranda performed on her could’ve had horrifying long-term side effects! ALL of these things are at least as possible as ‘Mia gave her daughter up voluntarily’. And they’re all a whole fuckload more plausible.
Because lemme tell you what we actually know about Mia's relationship with her daughter. In fact, you know what, have a whole mini gallery of what we know.
Mia ‘nothing else matters as long as my family is together’ Winters – the woman who advanced on Chris demanding where is my husband? Where is my daughter? – who positively lights up when she sees her daughter safe at the end of RE8 ‒ the one with the whole photo album full of pictures documenting her pregnancy or where she's gazing happily at her newborn daughter… you’re telling me this woman would just give Rose up? Come on.
Even Shadows of Rose contributes to this take on Mia: to get that one line from Rose about not having seen her mother, you have to read the one document in the game written from Mia’s perspective, which is full of joy about making a cake for her daughter’s half-birthday celebration.
Heck, even the Baker Incident Report makes clear that Rose is the most important thing in Mia’s life. Mia loves Rose more than anything in every other part of this canon.
And someone still went, "Oh, well Rose hasn’t seen her in a while in SoR, and the government seems to have their sticky fingers in her life, so clearly Mia just gave her up"? And the rest of fandom has been repeating it ever since? What is wrong with people?
In fact, while we’re talking the adults in Rose’s life as of SoR, why on earth does Chris get a pass? The only thing we hear about his current ‘relationship’ with Rose, a girl who’s still in high school and hasn’t even begun learning to control her powers yet, is that he’s apparently pestering her to join his para-military squad. Her first assumption when a member of his squad comes to talk to her is that this is what it’s about. I mean, that’s objectively pretty fucked up.
In all seriousness here, I’m not trying to start some #cancelchrisredfield movement, because I really doubt those lines were written with the primary goal of establishing Rose’s relationship with Chris – they’re just clunky exposition. They’re here to let us know a) Chris is still working with his Dog Dog Squad, b) Kay, the guy we’ve just met, is a member, and c) Chris is aware that Rose’s powers are going to be a big deal – and presumably he’s still as weirdly intense about everything as he is in the rest of RE8. Rose does seem happier about Chris’s role in her life in her diary, where he seems to have pulled some strings to allow her to go to a regular school (but presumably even Chris draws the line at recruiting pre-teens, so that’s yet to start), so we've got some friendly interactions between them, but Chris seems no more involved in Rose's teen life than Mia is.
I don’t know how the RE8 writers did expect us to interpret the idea that Chris is apparently trying to recruit untrained under-18s to his team, but I’m sure with enough imagination, you can come up with some way to spin it that doesn’t paint him in a completely irredeemable light (maybe he just wants her involved in training and self-defence or something, or maybe it’d give him the power to tell other government departments with an interest in her to take a hike, who knows?) What really stands out to me, however, is that I don’t have to defend Chris over how his non-part in this DLC is so under-explained. So why the hell does Mia get both barrels, when we know even less about her current relationship with Rose than for Chris?
Oh wait, I know this one. It’s because she’s a woman, and we’ve already decided she’s a bad person. Any mother whose life doesn’t seem to revolve entirely around her sad daughter is obviously an irredeemable human being, amirite? [Insert table-flip here]
As I’ve said before, I’d really like for there to be a more interesting explanation for why we hear so little about Mia in Shadows of Rose. I would love for the reason to be that they’ve got big plans for Mia in RE9, and don’t want SoR to pre-emptively spoil whatever’s going to happen to her. I would kill for a whole game about Mia, starting way back before RE7 and filling in all those big holes in her story, before picking up again post RE8 and beyond. I’m realistic enough to realise that’s not likely, but gdi, I can dream. It’s certainly possible that one of the reasons we hear so little about her in Shadows of Rose is because the writers are trying to leave their options open, just in case.
But putting all my pipe dreams for RE9 aside, I'd bet good money the main reasons why Mia has so little presence in Shadows of Rose are thematic. The whole story depends on Rose feeling isolated and lonely as motivation for why she wants to be 'normal', before she finally decides it's worth giving that up for the chance to meet her Dad properly for the first time. That all hits a lot harder on a thematic level if we downplay the few positive relationships Rose does have in her life ‒ her mother included. I mean, you may as well ask why all the teachers in any Harry Potter novel are so useless most of the time: because it’s easier to tell the story they want to tell that way. Chris’ part in Rose’s life is almost certainly downplayed for the very same reasons (plus possibly some resistance to making fans face an incarnation of Chris who might well be in his 60s by whatever year this actually is).
So, yeah. Maybe Mia as-long-as-we're-together Winters did home school her beloved daughter all through her early years, and then one day just decided "y’know what, I’m done with this" and signed Rose over to the government without a second thought. God knows I’ve heard of worse cases of random character assassination from franchises I’ve trusted. And the moment Capcom actually gives us any reason to believe that’s the intent, I’m sure someone will let me know.
But in the meantime, Jesus Christ, people – this DLC is like three hours long, and it’s all on youtube – it is not hard to check this shit, c’mon.
The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes
honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.
*A mugger threatening me with a knife* Give me your money!
*Crimeman appearing from the darkness with a bigger knife* NO CRIMINAL! You give me YOUR money!
wanted to find a good and concise "vote biden" post to reblog but couldn't find one i liked yet, so am just going to attempt to capture the sentiment to the best of my abilities:
in light of recent events i am adjusting my heartfelt words of wisdom:
vote the democratic nominee you dumb sluts i literally do not care who or what they put forth as presidential candidate you go and vote for whichever major party option that is not trump
in order to reflect the most recent and most likely predicted constellation this election as well as my sense of dedication and urgency i am nailing down the specifics of my heartfelt words of wisdom:
vote harris/walz you dumb sluts i do not whatsoever fucking care about whatever fucking dumbass excuse or justification you think you have for voting third party or not voting at all you shut up you shut up you shut the fucking fuck up and cleanse your brain of its blindness until you comprehend what is at stake here and then you go and make sure you go and vote harris/walz you dumb sluts
I feel like some people need to relearn Genre Expectations... "Man, this tragedy sucks!!! Why didn't they just do XYZ, then everything could have ended happily!!" well, then it wouldn't be a tragedy, would it. "Man, this lighthearted teen romcom is terrible, it's so sappy and unrealistic!!" Well, yeah. If it had been gritty and dark, it wouldn't have been a lighthearted romcom, would it. Is the writing actually bad or are you just trying to order a milkshake from a Home Depot
why won’t SOMEONE ELSE create media with all the highly specific extremely esoteric themes motifs imagery and allusions i personally wish were in things
im not even the type of guy to go "actually it's frankenstein's MONSTER" because a painting by rembrandt or picasso or any other artist is often called "a rembrandt" or "a picasso" as shorthand. so in this respect frankenstein's monster can be considered "a frankenstein"
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
snowghoul
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
