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Freecam pics of the Winters' front garden
There's some neat stuff to be discovered in RE8 with a freecam mod right from the opening prologue.
For obvious reasons, the Winters' house was never designed to be viewed from the outside: it has no proper walls, and the layout makes no sense. But we do get a very brief glimpse of the front garden through the open door during Ethan's abduction, and with a little freecam experimentation, there's so much more out there to see!
The Winters even have a fully-rendered front porch! Have some pics, with the door both open and closed. (Horrible things had to be done to the colour balance to get the lighting bright enough to see all this, but it does the job.)
Out in the garden proper, we've got what I assume is an artistically irregular garden path, a small pond or fountain (currently snowed over), and a high property wall with a gate.
Details tail off almost as soon as we get out of the direct line of sight through the doorway, and there are plenty of familiar, recycled assets. The driveway that goes directly to their front door doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but having the van waiting there menacingly right outside the door was obviously the element that mattered most.
Over on the other side of the gate, we've got a single, sad garden chair, a table, and another pot plant, plus some more garden foliage. Taller trees loom over the fence from not far outside the property line.
But there's still more to share from the Winters' property, because if you go exploring outside the window during the flashback sequence... well shit!
Guys, there's a whole background out here!
But it didn't take long for me to realise that what's outside the Winters' home is just a 360 degree photo taken in a park somewhere, probably captured for use as a skybox. You aren't usually supposed to see anything below the skyline in game.
Naturally I had to go find the asset in the game files, where I also learned that most all the sky shots from the same folder look to have been taken in the same park on different days. Presumably, these are some of the same shots used to change the time of day as the village story progresses.
(I still kind of like the idea that maybe the Winters do have a lake view out of their bedroom window, but since you'll never see it without mods, that's up to you to take or leave.)
For the record, I do really mean it when I say the Winters' house makes no sense. I've spent enough time in freecam mode now that I can tell you that many houses in RE land have rooms and windows you can see from the outside that are just empty space inside, with no way to access them from within the house ‒ probably all very standard for this type of game. The Winters house, however, is one that you can't see from the outside at all, and the layout... well, this is what the top floor looks like when viewed from above.
The bathroom apparently exists in a weird little appendage that does not exist on the floor below. There are spaces in the walls with nothing in them. The bedroom windows exist in a bizarre little angular appendage that probably isn't worse than you could find on a particular kind of McMansion, but is still pretty bizarre.
None of this is to cast any real shade on the game devs who created this place. We're not in the Winters house very long, and we can always tell ourselves that surely there ought to be other rooms to pad the layout into something sensible, but which we couldn't access for whatever reason. But damn, is this thing incoherent the moment you step back from it! Poor Ethan's got enough to be paranoid about even without knowing that there's a whole mysterious empty wall space between his bedroom and the guest room and anything could be living there.
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PG, 4,126 words (so far)
Michael's pretty sure there's no risk to the bike. The risk is David skidding it to a halt somewhere in the woods, miles outside Santa Carla, so he can throw Michael down in the dirt and tear his clothes off again, while the others roar on into the night for god knows how long before ever realising they're two men down. Willing as David seems to be, he wants the deal sealed before Michael gets any more encouragement.
He wants to know that Michael would kill for him.
The long-promised Pater Unfamilias sequel ‒ or at least, part 1 thereof. This one got a way from me a little.
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A little intro to free camera mode in REs 7 & 8
In my ongoing fixation on to picking apart these games from every angle possible, I finally got around to experimenting with free-camera mods. But before I get to sharing all the coolest new stuff I've found playing with freecam options, I wanted to say a bit about the general experience I've had with these mods. Installing them wasn’t too hard – there are instructions on their NexusMods pages (RE8 here, RE7 here). Figuring out how to use them effectively was a whole other thing.
In brief, switching into free camera mode decouples your viewpoint from its usual position in Ethan’s head (or from standard third-person viewing distance, if you’re in that mode). You can then fly around freely, even through solid objects, using the same keyboard-and-mouse combo that works for regular movement. The downside is that you’re now separately controlling both Ethan and the camera with the same controls, at different speeds.
To deal with this, you’re generally going to want to toggle one of two other settings – the lock-character setting, which makes Ethan stand still while the camera moves, or the lock-camera setting, which lets you move Ethan around while the camera hangs wherever you’ve put it. You can see me switching between all three variants in the video above, in that order, before switching freecam mode off again, resetting the camera back to it's original position.
So if, for example, you want a good shot of Ethan from a particular angle, you’ll want to activate free camera mode, then toggle lock-character to make him stay still while you position the camera, then probably toggle lock-camera on and lock-character off again so you can move Ethan around from your new, fixed viewpoint. Toggling both lock-character and lock-camera on at once, however, will just leave you unable to move anything at all. (Confused yet?)
Once you do get the hang of it though, you’ll find yourself exploring the game with the miraculous new ability to just fwoop backwards out of Ethan’s POV at the press of a couple of buttons, like the poor guy is suddenly having an out-of-body experience. But if you’re playing in first-person mode (which I mostly do), the Ethan you leave behind will be disconcertingly headless, because heads of player characters aren’t fully rendered in first person view – they’d only get in the way of the camera.
Which leaves me feeling like Ethan’s developed some strange, new mould-power which allows him to detach his head from his body like some kind of penanggalan, and send it soaring freely all over the place, dangling entrails trailing behind him (and if there is any fan artist out there willing to draw The Terrifying Adventures Of Ethan's Flying head, please take my encouragement to do so.)
Beyond the free camera basics, though, the REFramework tool comes with so many other toys. You can fast forward or rewind cutscenes, replay things in slow motion, then move the camera and rewatch from a different angle. You can toggle text and GUI elements on and off (including the copyright statement at the bottom of photo mode, to my glee). You can even (and this quickly became my favourite technique) move the camera around while a scene is paused, or in photo mode. I have developed a whole new appreciation for the dynamic lighting and texturing effects in RE8, just from flying around paused scene and watching the way reflections in someone character's eyeballs change from different angles. It’s gorgeous.
There’s a lot to find in freecam mode. A surprising amount of detailed character animation takes place outside Ethan's POV in many cutscenes. You can view scenes and vistas from new angles, get a close up on details you weren’t supposed to go near, fly through walls into forbidden, unfinished areas, etc. I’ve picked up a whole new appreciation for the factory using this mod ‒ the fact the whole massive labyrinth of a place really is one big, interconnected space becomes so much more impressive when you can just fly all around the open spaces in three dimension. But more on my favourite new discoveries in posts to come.
In fact, the more I play with this feature, the more I find myself thinking, damn, why aren’t there more games that make free-roaming astral projection into a real mechanic? Think what you could do with it! Detach from your body and go explore! Figure out your way through the maze from a bird’s eye view! Listen in on people’s conversations unseen to find hints and passwords! Give us items to interact with and traps that can only be sprung in or out of OOB-mode! Leaving your body behind could be a great way to keep it out of danger, but what if something happens to it while you’re gone? And inevitably, at some point you’ll realise you’re dealing with opponents who can see you even when you’re just a ghost, or even possess your empty body while you're out. There’s so much you could play with here!
But putting aside all that pipe-dream stuff, as much fun as I’ve had with the free camera tools, they’re not exactly intuitive. Maybe there are already good instructions for this stuff online somewhere, but I have not found them, so I'm going to spend the rest of this post sharing some advice on how to get this whole thing working.
Using the REFramework mod for free camera shenanigans can be initially pretty daunting for a couple of reasons. It comes with a handy pop-up menu full of options (you can toggle it on and off with the 'Insert' key), but there are so many different options hidden in different sub-menus that this quickly becomes pretty daunting. Worse, messing with the free camera options specifically means that the camera may be swinging around wildly in response to movements of the same mouse you’re currently trying to use to turn free camera mode off.
For most practical purposes, you’re going to want to use the mouse just to set up shortcut keys for the various modes, and then use those shortcuts to actually toggle the mods. Obviously, you’re going to want your shortcut keys to be some of the ones not already mapped to something you need in-game – I used J, K and L to toggle the free camera, character movement lock, and camera lock respectively.
Since the pop-up uses a number ID for each of the default shortcut keys, it’s not going to be obvious to most of us at a glance what those defaults actually are. I recommend going through everything under the FreeCam menu and setting your own shortcuts that you’ll remember.
At default free cam speeds, I find the camera seems to whip around uncomfortably fast, so it’s also worth messing with the mouse speed (the Rotation Speed slider) and movement speed ('Speed' slider) settings to get them to something more comfortable. But one speed won't work for everything: it's handy to have a higher speed for exploring longer distances, and a lower speed for getting close to objects you want to examine in detail, and this is where the Speed Modifier keys come in. Set the Speed Modifier to, say 4, and you can zoom away at 4x speed while holding down the ‘Fast’ shortcut key (I wound up using the usual sprint key, since that felt natural and didn’t actually interfere with regular gameplay), or reduce speed to 4x slower than normal with the ‘Slow’ key.
You can similarly set up shortcuts for slowing down up or rewinding cutscenes under the Scene menu. The slider here sets how much faster or slower than usual speed you want to go when toggled into this mode ‒ to rewind, set it to negative numbers. The Timescale 'Toggle' shortcut will turn the new speed mode on or off, while the 'Continuous' key will do the same only while you hold that key down, reverting as soon as you release it.
This does get complicated in practice. When I was trying to figure out where the the fence post Heisenberg stabs Ethan with actually came from, for example, the process basically went: watch cutscene until Ethan gets hit, pause the game, set the slider to 'rewind at 5% speed', or -0.05 , unpause (you can't rewind while paused, and unpausing while in rewind mode sometimes bugs out), toggle Timescale to rewind, then watch for where the spear seemed to disappear. A lot of toggling through various forward-and-backwards slow motion speeds were necessary to get a decent screencap of it in flight. You can genuinely do a lot with all these options, but they can take a bit to get the hang of.
Finally, one last toggle I found super useful was the GUI/text toggle, which you can find under the Graphics submenu (above).
There are a lot of quirks to the whole system, many of which I only figured out after much trial and error. But to hopefully save others some time and confusion, have some additional notes.
The REFramework mod for RE7 isn’t nearly as advanced as the one for RE8, probably just because it’s older and the modder doesn’t have the same incentive to improve it. The lack of a proper photo mode in RE7 is also frustrating, and I couldn’t get the camera to work at all while in the pause menu. I also couldn’t get the lock-character toggle to work. You can still do good stuff in RE7 with this mod, but I found it a lot more limited (and frustrating).
Rewinding or accelerating a cutscene will mean that the sound goes out of sync. I don’t think there’s a solution to this, it’s just something I had to put up with.
Cutscenes will only rewind so far, and it’s not always obvious where one ‘scene’ ends and the next begins. There’s a cutscene break in Luisa’s house after the fire starts and Ethan flees into the hallway, for example ‒ trying to rewind back before this point failed for me.
Accidentally leaving Ethan in lock-character mode can also mess up cutscenes. Start him moving again mid-cutscene, and he’ll pick up from where he left off, even if that leaves him lagging behind everything else in the scene. He may also keep moving long after the rest of the scene ends if he’s not done yet. Using the cutscene skip is generally the easiest fix here.
It is very easy to close the game with your character movement locked, your camera locked in a weird position, and all GUI elements turned off – and then reload it later to discover that nothing works anymore and worry you broke the whole game. But I’ve always been able to fix this just by toggling everything on and off until you get things working again (or just hitting ‘Insert’ to call up the pop-up menu, so you can see what's actually on or off).
Playing around with rewinding scenes can also mess up GUI transitions in some very confusing ways, leaving you waiting for a minute or more for the pause screen you just cancelled to actually go away (I’m pretty sure I’d just accidentally ‘rewound’ a half-second transition back to many seconds before it was ever supposed to start). If you’re still toggled into rewind mode, transitions may not work at all. Very confusing when it happens, but the root cause at least makes some logical sense.
You can also use freecam tools to zoom in on the model viewer (though ending up inside the model is also very easy).
Toggling GUI on and off also seems to mess with a related damage numbers mod I was trying out that also uses REFramework. Any time I toggled GUI off and on again, I’d have to toggle that separate mod off and on again before it would work again (fortunately, you can also do that via the pop-up pretty easily).
In other words, this is not a mod for the faint of heart (or the likely-to-forget-shortcut-keys) ‒ especially not once you get into messing with rewinding scenes. But for all the bullshit I've done to these poor games with these mods, I've only actually manged to mess them up to the point of needing to restart them once or twice, which is pretty impressive, considering. So take it all as you will.
#Resident Evil Village#Resident Evil 7#mods#REFramework#free camera#freecam#tips#The Terrifying Adventures Of Ethan's Flying head
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1. Have you seen the re6 promo campaign, the butcher shop one? I think it was in London. There are some photos, and while I think it's kinda cool to get any sort of creative campaign to promote a video game, I felt majorly grossed out by it. Which was likely the intent lol, but I also felt it was pretty misleading? Like, it implied that there was cannibalism involved in the plot. 2. Would you ever like to get another resident evil co-op game? And if so, what would you like it to be - the characters, the plot, the time line, etc.
So, I don't know if I've managed to be too subtle about the fact I think RE + co-op was always a terrible idea the last, er, every time I've ever mentioned it, but, well, I think RE + co-op is a terrible idea. I have never even played an RE co-op game (I'm very open about the fact my opinions on RE5&6 come entirely from watching cutscene compilations and let's plays) and the fact they are co-op is among the reasons I don't want to play them. I'm just not interested in co-op experiences, they're too contrary to what I'm generally looking for in games.
It's questionable whether horror + co-op + narrative is ever a good mix. It's hard to do atmosphere with multiple different players alternately screaming, laughing and ribbing each other, and co-op is too good at generating its own narratives via player interactions to gel with a strong narrative horror experience. I've heard of online multiplayer games working in horror settings ‒ scenarios where you're basically playing as the ubiquitous team of cannon fodder from every other horror film, whose job is mostly to get picked off one by one. But I honestly can't think of a single example of a co-op game with a strong narrative where the co-op is more than an awkwardly tacked-on gimmick. I mean, by all means, send me counter-examples here if you know of any, but the best I've got is, "well, I hear the Portal 2 co-op campaign was actually pretty good, but me and my sister couldn't get it working even back when we were still living together, so we never actually played it."
This is not to say that narrative + co-op is necessarily an unworkable combination. The one genuinely interesting thing I've ever heard of being done in a co-op/horror experience is that one sequence in Dead Space 3 which one player character spends hallucinating, so the two players are seeing very different things. And I'm sure there's way more that could be done with asymmetric gameplay experiences, not just in the sense of giving characters different weapons (or whatever else you're all about to tell me they totally did in that one RE Revelations game), but actively splitting them up, letting decisions made by one player affect the experiences of the other, building trust issues directly into the narrative ‒ you can't tell me there aren't possibilities there.
But the trouble with all those kinds of ideas is that they depend on someone building co-op in as a core part of the whole design, rather than an optional extra, and the audience for an experience that needs exactly two people to work (rather than one person, who can play without having to synchronise with anyone else's schedule, or a variable group of however many of your friends are free today for online multiplayer) doesn't easily justify the amount of extra work that'd require. Add in all the extra issues with local vs remote co-op, and whether the whole conceit falls apart if your two players talk to each other about bits the other guy isn't meant to have seen, and you can see why games like this don't get made. And even if they did, I don't know why you'd try to retrofit that many new ideas into a Resident Evil game, other than for cheap name recognition. I mean, you might as well try to sell me a Final Fantasy as a single player action game [insert sad laughter here].
As for the RE6 promo campaign, no I hadn't heard of it, and now that I've looked it up, my thoughts are, "oh, a pop-up butcher selling cuts of meat constructed to look like human body parts? Yeah, sure, that seems pretty on-brand." A few fake body parts are not going to seriously gross me out (what made RE6 genuinely unpleasant for me was a mix of misery porn, toxic masculinity, and the random injection of bouncing-titty-monsters in the middle of yet more misery porn). Nothing really misleading about it either: RE has zombies, and zombies eat people. It's a publicity stunt, not a game trailer ‒ it's only there to get your attention in the broadest way they can come up with to grab some headlines (but if you wanna talk about real misleading advertising in game advertisements, that's a rabbit hole that probably goes all the way to China). But I'm guessing they probably weren't even really selling that shit, so you can always feel misled on that front if you like.
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What is your bunny called?
Ah, what the hell, it's Easter, season of the bunny ‒ let's do this properly.
Meet Attila the Bun!
(I can't actually take credit for that name, but that's a longer story.)
Anyway. The first and by far the most important thing you need to know about Attila is that he wants you (yes, you) to rub his cheeks.
If you asked him, "Attila! What is best in life?" he would respond, "Cheek rubs!" And while you sit there waiting for him to maybe list another best-thing or two ‒ maybe getting into the vegie beds, or digging big holes in places he's not supposed to, or at least the inevitable, treats! ‒ he'll be down there, significantly nudging your ankle, because excuse you, he said cheek rubs, why are aren't you rubbing his cheeks yet?
Don't get me wrong ‒ like any pet, he loves treats too. He loves grape vine leaves so much he has effectively trimmed our grape vine from the bottom up to as high as he can reach. Some days he will jump up on a chair just to reach higher. He will regularly do a little happy dance just because he's seen me go near the grape vine, which can only mean one thing (sure, I may claim I'm there to hang out my laundry, but he isn't fooled).
But frankly, most of the time, you can leave the treats, he'll eat them when you're gone ‒ while you're here, how about rubbing his cheeks? Reach down to offer this guy any treat he's not completely in the mood for, and he's liable to go, hnn, y'know what, this here hand could be rubbing my cheeks. His happy place is sitting with his face in my lap, getting rubbed on both cheeks at once (a single cheek is acceptable if you're holding a camera, but we both know you can do better).
Attila mostly spends his days in our back yard, but by around 5:30 most evenings you'll find him sitting up top in his two-storey hutch, patiently waiting for the miraculous appearance of tasty rabbit pellets he's learned to expect in the evening (post-pellets, you will usually find him snoozing in a happy pellet coma). In the morning, however, convincing him that the hutch is open again, and that he can totally come out and enjoy the garden, is often complicated by the fact that you're standing near his hutch, and you could definitely be giving him a good head-scritch or some cheek-rub through the bars.
He spends so much time doing this that I have been known to joke that if someone ever stuffed Attila then propped him up at the bars of his hutch in this exact position, it might genuinely take me a while to notice.
It is to my great shame that Attila had been living with me for some time before I happened upon a random youtube video by a fellow rabbit-owner who mentioned in passing that her bun liked having her cheeks rubbed. Believe me when I tell you that nothing I have ever done for this lil' guy has improved his quality life more than the day we discovered just how much he enjoyed this particular form of attention. From that day forth, I am no longer his owner, I am his cheek rub delivery service.
(He will still attest that I do absolutely give the best cheek rubs. No-one else in the household is nearly so willing to flow down on the grass with him so he can shove his face up on my leg. The fact he usually gets a grape vine leaf afterwards doesn't hurt either.)
Now, just to end this post, I'm going to have to hope there are no underaged buns reading, because I am about to share some filthy bunny-porn.
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Portraits of Miranda's family: Image assets and renders
Have some assets and object renders of all those fancy portraits of Miranda, Donna and Lady D and her daughters! There are also many more portraits of Miranda herself to be found all over the village, of course, but I've posted those before. Not sure exactly why the Dimitrescu portrait is so much lower-res than the others (the actual picture is plenty big in-game), but this is the only version of it I could find in the game files.
The painting of the three daughters is (as you've probably heard before) based on a real painting by George Theodore Berthon called "The Three Robinson Sisters" ‒ and when I say "based on" what I mean of course is "it's the same picture, they've just tweaked the poses and added the Dimitrescu crest and a few extra details." But then, you can do that when a picture is over a hundred years out of copyright.
Whether the portraits of Dimitrescu and Donna were similarly based on specific historical art I do not know, though their faces look far more game-accurate, at least. Meanwhile, the portrait of Miranda so perfectly apes a thousand different madonna-with-baby images that I wouldn't be at all surprised if that slightly-creepy-baby comes direct from some original art piece, but who knows?
On a related note, has anyone else ever noticed the weird gender/class divide in Miranda's family? All five female family members appear in these flattering portraits (all seven if you count Angie and Eva), and Donna lives in a stately home and Dimitrescu in a castle, both attended by staff and servants. Heisenberg and Moreau, meanwhile, live in an old, run-down factory and a lake. The men do get their photos displayed in the church with everyone else's, of course, but that's hardly comparable to an actual painting.
There's arguably something of a technology divide too: though everything in the village seems old, Heisenberg's factory and the reservoir control mechanisms at least mark those areas as post-industrial revolution, and both feature major puzzles to get power generators running. But very little in Donna or Dimitrescu's domains would seem out of place in pre-Victorian times.
I don't think there's much meaning to be read into the gender divide (except inasmuch as you know Heisenberg plays up his filthy, lower-class persona just to get under Dimitrescu's skin) and I doubt it was even intentional. There's not much to suggest Miranda actively favours her 'daughters' over her 'sons', given Heisenberg's favoured treatment at Ethan's trial, and you definitely don't see the same kind of split in the Baker family of RE7, which gave us the gloriously revolting Marguerite. But as soon as you start digging into these characters, it's hard not to notice it all the same.
#Resident Evil Village#Alcina Dimitrescu#Donna Beneviento#Mother Miranda#Bela Dimitrescu#Cassandra Dimitrescu#Daniela Dimitrescu#Angie#Eva
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Hi !! I've followed your fics across multiple fandoms, and I've always been really impressed by how quickly and consistently you're able to put out works. How are you able to write seemingly so quickly?! Do you use betas? Do you spend a lot of time planning, or are you more of a chapter by chapter writer? I'm always really fascinated by people's process. Thank you if you answer this, and have a good day!! :D
Well, thank you first of all ‒ it's always such an ego-boost to know anyone's following me across fandoms! But as for 'how I write so fast', I think 'seemingly' may be most of your answer. I do like to have some fic to post every week or so, but my consistency on that comes and goes. I've done okay so far this year, but only if you ignore the part where I posted nothing during the whole month of February, or in the entire last quarter of 2023 ‒ and there was a solid 6 month gap where I posted nothing back in 2022 as well.
Back before I hit my current stride in Witcher fandom a few years back, months or longer between fics was even more the norm for me. Productivity on the fic-writing front comes and goes in bursts for me for all sorts of reasons. But it's not unusual for several bits and pieces I've had not-quite-finished for months to end up getting posted close together though, even after I've been quiet for a while, which might help with the illusion I'm better at keeping up that schedule than is really accurate.
Even when I am actually managing to keep that weekly schedule, a lot of what I post is short (2K or less), and gets lumped together into anthology-fics like Spare Parts, Viscera or The Beast of Castle Heisenberg (and other stories) (which also saves on the minor hassle of thinking up proper titles for them all). Coming up with short concepts like that is something I've always enjoyed doing (going all the way back to my time in xxxHolic fandom over a decade ago). Occasionally, I'll come back later and expand them into something longer (another habit that started way back in Holic fandom, actually), but posting them as shorts means that at least I've posted something, even if the longer version never happens. Whenever a fic works as shorter chapters, I'll post it that way ‒ it's just easier to edit in smaller chunks (and I can't really overstate how big of a motivator positive feedback is for me, if it does go down well with people).
Obviously, not everything I post lends itself to being broken down ‒ smut particularly tends to require much longer scenes, but stories like that have often been in progress for months before they actually get posted. At 15K in a single chapter, Quarantine stands out as the longest thing I've posted in years that I couldn't find any way to break down into shorter pieces ‒ and I'd been working on that one on-and-off since around, oh, August last year? Having multiple different things in progress at once works for me, because if I'm not in the mood to work on one, maybe I'm more in the mood to work on another. I'll often bash out rough drafts of various parts of a few different ideas in one spell if I'm in a good mood to just sit down and write, then come back to finish and polish them later. A lot of my ideas build themselves around dialogue ‒ having a good sense of the characters' voices is really central to how I think about writing for them ‒ so a lot of scenes might start as just dialogue, and then I'll come back and flesh out the rest later.
Planning… really depends on the length of the fic? Sometimes you need to know exactly where a story is going just to figure out how to start it, other times you don't realise half of what's really going on in a scene until you're in the middle of actually writing it down. For example, I currently have about three more (very rough) chapters of Follow Me Home sitting in a word document, which is as much of that story as I had planned out in real detail ‒ the rest consists of scattered scenes I know I'm aiming for later on. But in the process of writing them, I realised more or less exactly what needs to happen in chapter 4, so that's encouraging ‒ we'll see where it goes from there.
For years now, I've done most of my writing on laptops ‒ before that, first drafts were mostly scribbled down by hand in notebooks. I own a desktop computer too, but that gets used for so much else (work, gaming, watching videos, etc etc) that I find it's useful to have a separate platform that's 'for' writing, that's portable, something I can curl up with in a beanbag with, and (crucially) presents less distractions. A notebook or a low-spec laptop (my current one is a tiny tablet computer) is also something I can get out on the bus on the way to work or in a cafe while waiting for a meal. I wouldn't say I do most of my writing out of the home like that, but it's definitely a long-established habit.
It does help that I've been writing long enough to be reasonably confident with the general process of sitting down to make a story happen. I'm reasonably lucky just having the time and energy to dedicate to all this fannish nonsense, and to have an enthusiastic beta-reader/BFF who's always encouraging about my work ‒ she's seriously a huge help (and probably too kind with her critiques, if anything). It has taken many years of doing this to get to the point where I can do something like (for a recent example) realise there's a week or two left before the a challenge deadline and go, "oh, sure, I can bash out a few thousand words worth of smut in that time to fill a treat for that prompt I liked." But as a rule, a posting rate of maybe a couple thousand words a week, not every week, isn't that much of an output (it's probably a lot more if you count all the fannish meta I churn out too, but I mostly don't think about that too much). But writing means a lot to me, even if it's mostly fannish nonsense that makes no money, so it's something I'll make time for.
If I've got any advice that might be useful to someone else, it's to suggest that getting yourself to write something is usually better than sitting on something you're blocked on, even if that does mean perpetually getting distracted by the shiny new idea instead of staying bogged down on the huge WIP you promised yourself you'd finish (and maybe you will come back to that WIP later, fresher for having given your brain a change of scene ‒ or maybe not, that's not the end of the world either). Short fic is fine, more words do not automatically make a story better, and unfinished WIPs are just a fact of fandom (or even original writing). Part of the joy of fanfic is that you can jump straight to the novel bits, trusting your readers already know who these people are and how the base story goes (seriously, the number of fics out there that spend chapter after chapter just retelling canon in prose form boggles my brain).
But like all writing advice, if that doesn't sound like it'd be useful advice to you, it probably isn't ‒ what works for people can be terribly individual. No-one's obligated to aim for a couple of thousand words per week (let alone per day, to hit NaNoWriMo or Stephen King levels of productivity) if they're just writing as a hobby.
And I hope you're having a good day too. *g*
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More random details from the depths of RE8
With the excuse of trying some shiny new mods, I've been replaying RE8 lately for the umpteenth time. Given the number of hours I've already poured into this game, you'd really think there'd be nothing left to find by this stage ‒ yet here I am, finding still more details I'd somehow missed the first half-dozen times through.
For one, there's the fact you can actually find Eva's grave in the graveyard outside the church. As the only photo we ever see of her shows her as a baby, I'd assumed she was still a baby when she died, but turns out, she was ten years old.
"Eva, June 1909 ‒ August 1919
May you slumber for only a short while"
As expected, her death of the Spanish flu took place in 1919. There's some semi-legible text on the stone, but it doesn't match the caption ‒ it's just the same generic filler text you'll find on half the gravestone assets in this game.
For another, there's Rose's baby monitor. I'd noticed Ethan turning the thing on when he puts her to bed, and even found the assets for its screen ‒ but since I'd never found the monitor itself, I assumed they must be unused.
Until this playthrough, when suddenly I'm just like, oh, there it is, sitting right on the table. You can even interact with it!
How did I miss this so many times? It is pretty easy to overlook, given you'll trigger the cutscene with Mia if you go much closer to the kitchen, but I'm still surprised I never spotted it before. (And you do have to wonder if there was ever any plan for it to show a glimpse of something more sinister than just a still-image of Rose sleeping.)
In other minor details, there's the bit where Ethan arrives on the outskirts of the village at 8AM. You can hear a clock striking 8 times as you get your first view of area.
Granted, this is not going to excite anyone who hasn't spent as long as I have putting together an hour-by-hour timeline of everything that happens in this game, but I still do love that they give you enough detail that that's even possible ‒ and this new timestamp fits right into that timeline. (And why yes I have just gone back and updated that post, what do you take me for?)
Speaking of assets I thought were unused, you know that hidden room under the castle you can't get into until later, where you have to solve a puzzle that involves setting a moroaica on fire? Have you ever looked closely at the tapestries decorating this place? Because I found them in the game files ages ago, and have been trying to figure out if they're actually in the game ever since.
Because seriously, look at these things!
Yes, that is a indeed a man with a sword and spear, wearing a hoplite helmet and sandals and nothing else. And the women seeing him from the front seem to be having a whole range of reactions to all that, er, weaponry being brandished their way. Isn't fine art wonderful?
Another asset I'd innocently assumed was unused is this wonderful bit of bullshit which was labeled simply 'antibow'. It wasn't until I took a long look at it that I realised what they meant was more like 'anti-B.O.W.', as in Bio-Organic-Weapon.
Yes, that is indeed a knife taped to some kind of grenade. Sure is one high-tech outfit we're working with here!
Only now do I spot that this is actually the bomb Chris chucks at the Megamycete in the cavern. It doesn't even come with the knife already attached, he just kind of sticks the knife onto the bomb and presumably straps some tape around them while the camera cuts away.
I still have so much more to share from my ongoing free-camera adventures, but I think we'll leave this one there for today.
#Resident Evil Village#Rosemary Winters#Ethan Winters#Eva#Mother Miranda#Chris Redfield#RE assets#RE lore#Resident Evil#ununsed assets
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What changes would you make if you were in charge of remaking Resident Evil 6?
Ha, trick question! You're not getting me with that one. I wouldn't remake RE6, it's the only good solution.
Seriously, as much as I did enjoy so much of the absurd nonsense that is RE6, you can't make something so-bad-it's-good deliberately, nor should you try. A complete list of everything from RE6 I'd want to preserve in some hypothetical remake basically goes 1. Jake, 2. uhhhhh, maybe that bit where Piers grows a MONSTER ARM that shoots lightning? (But does that mean we'd have to keep the rest of the Chris/Piers campaign to get there? Ugh, no. Not worth it.) I liked Jake's dynamic with Sherry, but Sherry herself could use a major rewrite. I mean, she has almost-wolverine-level healing powers, and the game still thinks she needs to be tackled out of danger every 10 minutes. Aaaaand I'm already running out of stuff I'd genuinely want to keep.
RE6 is the kind of fractal disaster that could be broken down into a near-infinite number of smaller disasters, representing almost every major creative decision that went into it. Making it a co-op game was a mistake, giving the player 4 different campaigns was a mistake, the big-bads are laughable, the mooks are forgettable, the story leaves far too much hanging and unresolved. It's overlong and tediously repetitive, forcing you to fight the same bosses over and over, and then again as a different character ‒ and that's without even touching on all the weird bugs and jank. The campaign throws you from major outbreak location to major outbreak location, over and over, like a scenario that once supported all of RE2 and 3 is no longer interesting enough to hold anyone's attention. Chris' entire campaign is one long military-shooter-handjob that doesn't matter. Leon and Helena's has far more redeeming features, but I wouldn't really miss it. And Ada's campaign, while critical to the plot, is just the absolute worst way to get all that plot-critical info across to the player.
You could maybe salvage something worth remaking by coming up with some real villains and extending Jake and Sherry's campaign into the whole story, with Chris and Leon (and partners?) mostly appearing as NPCs, ala RE8. But how you'd make Jake and Sherry work without co-op I don't know, and can't be bothered trying to figure out.
How do you remake RE6 successfully? You start by deciding what kind of bloody game you're trying to make, and committing to that. Is it supposed to be horror? A military shooter? Action co-op? Is what you're trying to make even really Resident Evil at all? Or are you actually aiming for some sort of weirdly compelling, frequently ugly, campy, janky, utter mess of an experience? Well, good news if so on that last point: you don't have to remake it, it's all that already.
For the record, a complete list of everything I'd want to save from RE5 goes, 1. Sheva, 2. That bit where Chris punches a boulder. But hell, maybe you could salvage something decent by promoting Sheva to the main character, now trying to save her own country from these fucking foreigners who've introduced bioweapons into her homeland, with Chris reduced to an NPC who's too focused on trying to rescue Jill to do much else but get in Sheva's way (until towards the very end where they finally manage to team up to save the day). But that's all about as likely as Capcom actually producing a good version of RE6.
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Did Ethan play the piano?
There are a bunch of little hints scattered through these games about Ethan's character. He seems to have a love for the retro ‒ at least, his drawer is full of jazz CDs and he drives a 1971 Dodge Challenger. As Rose notes, he's clearly a wine drinker. And he may have played he piano.
I don't want to overstate the hints RE7&8 give us on that last part. Resident Evil is, after all, a universe where apparently being able to bang out a full sonata at a moment's notice is just a basic life skill for anyone who might want to infiltrate a suspicious facility (though just jamming a few bars of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star may also do in a pinch).
There's a piano in the Winters' home, but then, maybe Mia's the one who plays, or maybe the BSAA set them up in an already-furnished house ‒ who knows? You can't actually interact with it as Ethan, nor does Rose comment on it. But Rose does wonder out loud if her Dad played any instruments (after he jokes about whether baby Rose banging her spoon to the Miss D. record suggests she's going to grow up to be a musician) ‒ and that at least primes you to notice that piano, if you hadn't already.
There are also two different pianos you can interact with in the Baker property ‒ one in the guest room, which will slam shut if Ethan reaches for the keys, and a second in Lucas' room that merely prompts the message 'it's broken'.
It's not until Dimitrescu's castle that Ethan himself finally gets to make like all those other Resi heros, and bash out a quick solo to open a mini door in the piano, in which you'll find a key that will open another door... look, you've heard this one before.
There's an argument to be had whether any of the puzzle solutions in a video game like RE should be taken as truly diegetic. But if nothing else, this does at least suggest Ethan can read sheet music. Here's the asset for the sheet, by the way (and again with the bit you actually play highlighted). You can hear someone play the full song ("Sogno" ‒ which means 'Dream' in Italian ‒ by Francesco Paolo Tosti) here.
There's even a version with lyrics, though I doubt they necessarily meant much to whoever picked this piece for the game: more likely it was chosen for being a song with a very simple treble clef (so the player doesn't have to do too much work to solve the 'puzzle') but a much more complicated bass (so it still sounds sophisticated when played). Regardless, you can hear it sung here.
There's also one other little clue that might suggest that someone in the Winters' household has some real musical leanings: one of the CDs you can find in that drawer is titled 'Jazz Standard Theory'. Which sounds a lot more like an instructional CD than easy listening (though they're certainly not winning any prizes for those other titles).
Actually, while we're talking Ethan's CD collection, here's the asset for that Miss D & the Pallboys CD too! Surprisingly, it has a back as well, suggesting that at some point you might have been able to pick it up and examine it. The text is all pretty illegible, however.
(I've talked before about the theory that 'Miss D' is actually Lady Dimitrescu, but if you want the short version ‒ given that she's not from the village and is 'descended from a fallen noble', this one's surprisingly plausible!)
Hilariously, a love for jazz might just be one thing Ethan has in common with the Bakers, given you can find some records lying around the rec room upstairs.
Mind you, even RE2R managed to work a jazz festival flyer into this one puzzle solution...
Does someone in the team at Capcom have a thing for Jazz? Evidence is starting to stack up...
But getting back to our original topic, does Ethan play the piano? You can make a case either way, as the game never tells us explicitly. But there's enough here to point that way that I'd like to think he does, anyhow.
Which only makes the implications of this so much more tragic.
#Ethan Winters#Resident Evil Village#Resident Evil 7#Rosemary Winters#Shadows of Rose#Resident Evil#RE lore#RE assets#jazz#Miss D and the Pallboys
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NC-17, 6,670 words (total)
"It took me by surprise too, you know," Heisenberg admits to him later, between lazy puffs on his cigar. "Never had it come on so strong before. Then again, never met anyone from a different mutamycete colony before, either." There's something idly speculative in the glance he throws Ethan's way. "'Spose that makes all the difference."
Ethan looks at him. He's aware his brain probably isn't firing on all cylinders just now, but he still can't make sense out of what those words are supposed to mean in that order. "A different what?"
Read from start
As promised, part 2 of the sex pollen fic: in which Ethan finally gets some answers, even if they're not answers he's especially happy with.
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Some Zoe/Mia fic recs
To wrap up this little impromptu Mia-Winters-week on a positive note, I wanted to throw a quick rec for a great author of Mia/Zoe fic, CoffinLiqeur. I'm reccing them as an author rather than reccing specific fic because they're single-handedly responsible for nearly half of all the fic ever posted to AO3 with the Mia/Zoe tag (a paltry 42 fics at time of writing). They've also written a bunch of Ethan/Mia, and a ton of other mostly-RE7-focused RE fic ‒ but it's the Mia/Zoe stuff that really stands out for me.
And seriously, there's so much here I've been craving in Resi fic for ages and not been able to find! Most of all how CoffinLiqeur never shies away from the horror, the grief and the trauma of everything these two women went through. There are stories here about Zoe and Mia trapped in the Baker mansion, leaning upon each other for comfort, about Zoe dealing with her feelings for Mia after Mia's escape with Ethan ‒ even about them reconnecting after Ethan's death, and going on to bring up Rose together (and for any non-fixit universe, where Ethan doesn't make it out alive, this is now seriously headcanon confirmed material for me).
Not all their fic is that heavy, but the weight of their shared grief for the years they've lost, for Zoe's family, and later for Ethan too, all hits just the right note ‒ these stories can absolutely make you feel just how hard Mia Winters loves, as well as Zoe's own complex mix of strengths and vulnerabilities. Remember how I was just rambling about how much wintersberg fandom has been missing by shying away from any hint of a Heisenberg/Ethan/Mia love triangle? This right here is such a great example of all the lovely angst and complex emotions that could come out of that.
It doesn't hurt that CoffinLiqeur has a brilliant handle on all their character voices too ‒ including the rest of the Baker clan. Jack and Marguerite are just as loudly terrifying and Lucas just as creepy as they all should be. There are some really lovely surreal sequences too ‒ seriously, so much to rec these on.
CoffinLiqeur mostly writes Zoe as trans ‒ though this is that species of trans-fic where it doesn't really come up other than as an excuse to write PIV between a same-sex couple, which I know can be a squick for some trans readers (though a selling point for others). You won't get to see any exploration of what it would've been like for Zoe to grow up as a trans lesbian in rural Louisiana, the added horror of losing access to HRT during her three years of imprisonment, or any of the other explorations of dysphoria vs mould-body-horror that immediately struck me on considering the possibility of a trans Zoe either. That's more a case of missed opportunity than a real judgment on their fic though ‒ this is really just me wishing (yet again) that the AO3 community had better conventions for tagging this stuff so I could set my expectations going in.
I should also mention that the overwhelming majority of CoffinLiqeur's fic are very short prompt-fills, with some of those prompts feeling like a more natural fit than others, and a lot of the fic feeling very quick and unbetaed. There's a real stream-of-consciousness flow to most, which can be brilliant for establishing mood when used well, but can also lead to long run-on sequences that can be very hard to follow in others. So there can be a degree of quantity over quality here ‒ but given how many truly lovely Mia/Zoe stories I've still found in their archive, I'm really not complaining at all.
You can find all their fic here, or the Mia/Zoe tag specifically here ‒ or you could just go through my own recent bookmarks for just the shortlist of my own favourites here. (And there's also plenty of wintersberg in those bookmarks too, if that's mote your speed)
#Mia Winters#Zoe Baker#Resident Evil Village#Resident Evil 7#fic recs#MiaZoe#?#ZoeMia?#Zia?#it is criminal that these two are not popular enough together for a proper shipname#Mia Winters week
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With a video game which seven is would the confrontation of Mia and Ethan and they talk about her past fit? would it not break the pacing they were working so hard to maintain and achieve?
Ethan (and the audience of course) does get some answers to his questions but not all of them (RE9 Mia centric) doesn't he?
and with the Baker Incident Report i am never not going to be mad they chose that clunky bullshit of everything (though i do find it funny if you compare what we knew of the connections before and after the baker incident report)
I feel like you're asking a lot of questions already answered in the post you're referring to. But it's a long post, so what the hell - let's see if I can summarise down further.
I've already covered the idea a real confrontation over Mia's secrets might not "fit" by suggesting an easy solution: just let Ethan find Mia's diary on his way out of the ship! Give us a bunch of entries dated to different months and years, summarising how Mia wound up working for the Connections and how she felt about it. At the end, you can have Ethan exclaim, "Mia… I had no idea…" or something. Congrats! You've fixed the problem! Ethan now knows Mia's secrets, and the ending implies he's forgiven her. It's not ideal, but it's still a fuckload better than what we got.
But the idea there was no better way to resolve this in a genre-appropriate manner just shows a lack of imagination. So here's one quick, off-the-top-of-my-head outline for how it could have gone down in RE7, with relatively minimal changes to the existing narrative.
When Ethan and Mia are separated in the swamp, Ethan isn't immediately sucked into the mould. On the ship (either with the player in control, or off-screen, while Mia's exploring), he discovers what Mia was really doing there, and gets angry. They meet up again, he confronts her, they argue briefly, she makes excuses, and THEN Ethan gets sucked into the mould and disappears.
Now Mia's quest to rescue him and her willingness to sacrifice herself to save him has been (even more) explicitly framed as her atonement. Their reunion on the chopper has been reframed as him forgiving her. Stripped to its minimum requirements, that's asking for one more scene with maybe a dozen lines of dialogue to be added to the game. You could almost do that with a mod, if you were determined enough. (Better yet, you could do all that and then let Ethan find Mia's diary, to flesh out her backstory some more).
But if you're really, really determined to leave Ethan in the dark, well, here are some ways I've already suggested to make that work, all achievable with maybe a few different lines of dialogue in the ending sequence:
Tell us Ethan's convinced himself Mia's memory is gone for good
Imply that Ethan's gone directly into denial, refusing to face anything that might threaten his ‘happy ending’ with Mia
Imply that Eveline wiped his suspicions about Mia away in a misguided attempt to do her a favour
etc
What we're really talking about here isn't a matter of whether Ethan and Mia needed a big emotional confrontation over her secrets, it's a matter of set-up and payoff. The whole game sets up that Ethan wants answers, and Mia wants to come clean. If they didn't want Ethan to ever find out the truth, they didn't have to tell us (SO MANY TIMES!) that he's suspicious of Mia, and has been since long before she disappeared. This could be as minor as, eg, taking his line from the boat: "You had something to do with this, didn't you? I just want the truth." and framing it as more of a question: "How did you even get involved in all this?" You don't have to have him tell Zoe both "I knew Mia was hiding something" and "I gotta know what Mia was up to." Let Zoe ask those questions, and Ethan brush them off. (Screencaps of all those scenes back on that original post, FTR.)
The point I keep coming back to is that watching Ethan abruptly go from "I know you had something to do with this" to "happy ending, no further questions your honour" left me going, "wait, WHAT?" the first time that ending played, and it's the single biggest thing that leaves me unsatisfied. It's still a great game, don't get me wrong, but it so easily could've been better.
Reading up about the development of RE7 does drive home that the whole approach was to start with vibes, then patch in a story around them later, which may lend some context as to how issues like this might have snuck through. Like I've said before, I don't even think that's a bad approach for a horror title like RE. Besides, RE7 is hardly the only entry in this franchise that opens with a clear thesis statement that it never really comes back to ‒ I've complained about similar issues in RE5, RE4R, RE3R, and Claire's side of RE2R too.
But RE7 still strikes me as a worse example because it spends so much more time reminding us that Ethan wants answers along the way. Clearly, this is an issue that bothers me more than many other fans. But I don't think it's unreasonable to point out just how many, easy ways there would have been to resolve it. The result is that poor Ethan gets so much crap for being dumb, while Mia gets treated like she's solely responsible for how both of them suddenly drop the subject at the 11th hour. When really, it's just the writing itself that really dropped the ball.
#Mia Winters#Ethan Winters#Resident Evil 7#RE lore#Resident Evil#meta#asks#freelance scriptdoctor at work
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On Mia Winters, misogyny, and abuse
As should be pretty obvious by now, I love Mia Winters. I honestly think she’s one of the most compelling characters in this whole damn franchise.
But let me make clear: you don’t have to love her. Mia’s canonically done a lot of shady shit in her time, and her relationship with Ethan has real problems. There are perfectly viable interpretations where the only thing really holding it together is his own denial. Only I never seem to get to read any of those takes, because the most common characterisations Mia gets in fic are an irredeemable monster, or a cardboard cutout who exists only to be written out as quickly as possible. And to write Mia out to that degree doesn’t just do her character a disservice, it does Ethan a disservice, and a big one.
The amount of Mia-bashing I see out there in this fandom turns my stomach. It’s not just the slash fans who’d rather ship Ethan with another dude. I have seen Mia loudly bashed in tags on het or gen fic in which she does not even appear. I have seen male fans reviewing these games on youtube who treat her the exact same way. But it’s never more frustrating than when that hate comes from the same fans who’ll turn around and talk about characters like Chris or even Lady Dimitrescu (she who canonically abuses her and murders her servants, and, y’know, eats people without a shred of remorse) like they’re perfectly forgivable and have done no real wrong. And don’t get me wrong: I love Lady D, but I love her because she’s magnificently evil. Mia? Mia’s a whole lot more complicated.
But to really explain why this hate makes me so uncomfortable, I’m going to have to start with the start of Resident Evil 7, and Mia’s very first scenes in this whole franchise.
Let me quickly summarise the opening of that game. A man whose wife disappeared without explanation suddenly gets a message about her whereabouts. He travels to an isolated location, breaks in, and finds her. She denies ever sending him that message, and seems incredibly distressed that he’s there at all. They fight. It ends with him sinking an axe into her neck and shooting her several times with a handgun. But see, he didn’t do anything wrong! It was all self-defence! She started it! She was acting crazy!
If you didn’t spot it, the whole opening of RE7 reads uncomfortably like a story about a woman escaping an abusive relationship, then being tracked down and murdered by her ex.
Obviously, I am not here to tell you Ethan’s abusive. He’s not, we’ve got no reason to imagine he is. He was legitimately acting in self-defence.
But the fact the first thing Ethan has to do in this game is find the balls to kill his own wife ‒ that a whole new era of Resi games has opened with a sequence so easily read as a sympathetic justification for how a man might perfectly innocently track down his missing spouse and "have" to kill her – that made those opening minutes into by far the most uncomfortable part of this whole franchise for me. Shit like this really happens. I mean it, I will track down the fucking statistics on women who are murdered after trying to leave an abusive partner if I have to.
What happens to ‘Mia’ in the opening to RE8 isn’t much better: it's as textbook a fridging as any I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s a fridging that gets retconned away later when she turns up alive, but the fact that’s even possible speaks to just how awful and confusing her death is. The game opens with Mia’s violent murder at the hands of this series’ longest running ‘hero’, and the event is framed entirely in terms of how awful it is for her husband. That's as frigid as a fridging gets.
The eventual reveal that the real Mia was just trapped alone in a cell being experimented on by a madwoman for god knows how long doesn’t actually make it better. The horror Mia goes through in both these games is a footnote, barely explored.
I bring these events up not to condemn the RE franchise, not to say that including these sequences was unconscionable, or that violence against women can never be shown in a horror title. A quick glance at my tumblr should demonstrate how much I adore these games. Tropes like fridging become problems only because they’re so ubiquitous they can come to define almost the only roles women get to play, not because any individual example is necessarily grounds for outrage. If anything, there’s just as much to analyse in all the hate thrown at characters like Ethan Winters (or his predecessor, Jonathan Harker) as a archtypical examples of sexism against men – backlash against the very idea of a male character in the disempowered role of horror victim, usually reserved for women.
But with this context in mind, my god is it uncomfortable to see people talk about Mia as irredeemable monster who deserves to suffer more. People who will valorise the likes of Chris Redfield, who didn’t even bother to stop to tell Ethan that’s not Mia, yet talk about Mia like being shot to death in her own living room was only what she deserved. That is just a whole load of yikes.
And given that both games open with Mia being violently killed by a male protagonist (twice in RE7, with the player in control), it sure is convenient how so many people have managed to ‘find’ the evidence that proves she’s the real villain. You don’t have to think too hard about Chris Redfield as a violent maniac or Ethan Winters being forced to kill his own wife if it’s okay to inflict violence on this woman. “Yes, but she shouldn’t have done [X]…” or even “But what if she’s the real abuser” is a narrative that gets thrown at real women in abusive relationships all the time – especially when the man is a friend of whoever’s casting judgement, or even a celebrity. Real world examples of this shit in the wild run the gamut from wild fan-takes on The Shining ‘proving’ that actually the abused wife was the ‘real’ abuser all along, right up to the ongoing hate campaign against Amber Heard. People don’t want to have to think badly of someone they admire, and will take any excuse to shift the blame. The stakes are infinitely lower when we’re talking about fictional characters, but the same pattern plays out.
And look, I do get it. It’s easy to go into these games and come out with a negative opinion of Mia. She’s the one who lures you into danger in RE7, acts all innocent, and then comes at Ethan with a chainsaw – and when you finally find out her big secret at the end, it turns out she was working for the people who created Eveline from the start! You’re really not given a lot of reasons to invest in Ethan and Mia’s relationship before she’s suddenly coming at him with a knife, and the fact she never does get to come clean to him in canon leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
It’s really easy to go into RE8, note all the glaring signs that Ethan’s relationship with Mia isn’t healthy, and draw your own conclusions about a woman we don’t hardly even see again for most of the runtime of the game. Half this goddamn fandom still seems to think Heisenberg is actually a lycan, ffs – most of what people think they know about Mia is more meme than fact, and the rest is pretty surface level. Basic media literacy is not exactly high out there in the tumblrweeds (let alone the rest of the internet).
But as for the idea that Mia’s responsible for all the horrors Ethan went through, people seem to forget that Mia herself went through so much worse. Ethan spent a day in the Bakers’ property, and a day in the village. Mia spent years trapped in the Bakers’ property, and days at least imprisoned in Miranda’s lab, knowing exactly how much danger her family were in, helpless to save them. She’s no innocent herself, but ye gods has she already suffered for her crimes.
So with all that out of the way, well, what’s the actual ‘evidence’ that Mia herself was abusive? No-one's coming into this one without some bias, but let’s at least give it a fair shake.
Right upfront, I want to recognise that in both fiction and reality, women can be abusers, and men can be victims. Abuse in heterosexual relationships is far more likely to occur with the man as the abuser, but the reverse does happen, and the fact culture at large can be so eager to cast the woman as the villain doesn’t make it any easier for the real male victims of abuse to get recognition and help. Society as a whole is still just really shitty about enabling or excusing real abuse.
But the idea that Mia was abusive has very little to back it up. Whatever you make of “her” interactions with Ethan at the start of the game, the fact remains: that’s not Mia, and the fact she’s acting so strangely is meant to be our clue that something much bigger than a little marital strife is going on here. Knowing all this doesn’t really make the scene where she’s violently executed less disturbing, but you can’t miss the hints we don’t yet know the full story.
So the question becomes, is there any evidence that the real Mia was abusive? I’ve dug into this one a bit before in my post about trying to figure out the timeline of exactly when Mia was replaced, but there are no definitive answers as to how long Miranda's been living in their house. To summarise a long post (and a surprisingly lively timeline of events from the days before the game begins): the most likely intent seems to be that Miranda’s been posing as Mia for less than a week, though a lot of the vibes of the scene give me the impression it’s been several weeks at least. Ultimately, that’s going to come down to your own interpretation.
The Mia mentioned in Ethan’s diary who blew up at him at the hospital could be the real Mia, but more likely isn’t: you can’t really use her to argue anything definitive, one way or another. The Mia from the flashback where Ethan gets the call from Rose’s doctor is the real Mia, but if you think getting upset when your husband brushes off your obvious distress over your daughter’s health makes you abusive, then nothing I say here is going to convince you otherwise.
The only ‘real’ evidence that Mia might be a problem is one line you might hear from Ethan while taking Rose to bed, and it is admittedly a red flag: your mother’s scary when she’s angry.
And to anyone whose whole hatred of Mia has been built backwards from this one line – especially anyone who’s grown up in a dysfunctional household themselves – hell, I get it. It is one really yikes thing for Ethan to say about his wife.
But in Mia’s defence, I can only point out that, well, yes, canonically, she is scary when she’s angry.
Oh, did I say angry? I meant fucking possessed.
And if Ethan’s bringing up the spectre of that time, even subconsciously, maybe that should be an even bigger clue that the Mia in this house right now isn’t Mia.
But what really shows this line for what it is is that we’ve seen the real Mia angry. We’ve seen her cold fury at Eveline, daring to go right back to asking ‘can we be a family now?’ within hours forcing Mia to assault her own husband with a chainsaw. We’ve seen her frustration at Ethan’s own denial, and we’ve seen her stalk out of the room when he blows off an important conversation for a call from work. We’ve seen her advance on Chris after he shut her down, demanding, Where is my husband? Where is my daughter?!
We have never seen her angry without real justification. Her anger is neither violent nor disproportionate. It’s consistently purposeful, focused, and contained. There is nothing scary about the real Mia’s anger, unless you’re threatened by the very idea she might have something valid to be angry about.
There is evidence of tension in the Winters’ marriage from before Miranda’s arrival, but it takes a very different form – most evident in the flashback scene where Ethan receives the call from Rose’s doctor. Far from Miranda’s brusque, dismissive copy of her, the real Mia is anxious and depressed, scared of what Rose’s results might reveal. Here, Ethan’s the one brushing her concerns aside (“We talked about this […] Rose is fine!”) He recognises there seems to be something Mia’s not telling him, says they should talk about it, but then immediately brushes the conversation off when he gets a call from work, while Mia storms out of the room.
You can certainly read Mia as a hypocrite here, getting angry at Ethan for not knowing things she’s deliberately kept from him. But it’s Ethan who decides a call from work is more important than a conversation with his wife – someone who is obviously distressed, canonically still on a regime of drugs after the traumatic events of RE7, very likely suffering PTSD along with Ethan, and maybe even some form of postpartum depression. We don’t know anything about Ethan’s work, so there’s no point in speculating about how much he ‘needs’ to take that call. Mia’s no clear villain here – quite the opposite.
Personally, I tend towards taking this scene as evidence that Mia has tried to talk to Ethan about what really happened to him, but hasn’t managed to get him to face the truth. For all that Ethan supposedly wants to talk about the past, it’s a defining plot point that he’s badly in denial himself.
Or they could both be at some fault here: Ethan unwilling to face the truth, while Mia is reluctant to force him to face something she knows will hurt him and bring him distress. Even when Mia says outright that she ‘tried to keep this a secret, but…’ to Chris at the end of the game, the implication is as much that she’s tried to keep it a secret from people like Chris, who might decide Ethan is dangerous. She’s lied to protect him before, and if she’s still lying to him about her past with the Connections, then the fact that knowing the truth will hurt Ethan is obviously among her reasons. Protecting Ethan has always been among Mia’s top priorities ‒ even at her own expense.
The only other real hints we get about Mia’s inner life come from the glimpses of her we get in Donna’s domain. But I’m hesitant to read too much into these, given how unclear it is how much is just a manifestation of Ethan’s own anxieties. If anything, the ‘Mia’ in these scenes almost seems to have some far worse secret than simply having not told Ethan something he really ought to have put together on his own, and I’d kind of love to see that explored too – at least as long as that goes somewhere more interesting than round umpteen of ‘and that’s why Mia sucks’.
But my point here isn’t that you have to read any of these scenes the same way I do. I do think it’s important to recognise that nothing written for a game like RE is truly character-driven; scenes exist to serve the plot far more than to reflect consistent character motivations or hold up to fridge logic (which, let’s face it, is the real reason for most of Chris’ horrific behaviour in this game, let alone anyone else’s). The result is rarely super consistent, and leaves ample space for multiple interpretations of anyone’s motivations. Regardless, the idea there’s any hard evidence that Ethan and Mia’s relationship is dysfunctional, or that whatever’s wrong is Mia’s fault alone, is going to be incredibly hard to justify.
Any assertion that Ethan and Mia are somehow on the verge of divorce also needs to be weighed against the masses of evidence of how much they love each other – the number of times Mia has said she loves Ethan, up to and including (yes, I’m bringing this up again) how ready she is to die for him in RE7. Her speech to Chris at the end of RE8 states explicitly that being together with Ethan and Rose is the only thing that matters to her. “Mia, I’m sorry, I love you,” are some of the last words Ethan ever speaks – and I can’t help but read into how the moment he finally pushes Rose into Chris’ arms so they can get away with him weighing them down is right after he learns that Mia is alive, and thus implicitly that Rose won’t be alone if Ethan doesn’t make it. And good god does that scene break my heart every time.
It’s worth recognising that the fact Ethan and Mia love each other doesn’t inherently mean their relationship is healthy, or that you have to love them together as much as I do. Like I said up top, you don’t have to like Mia, and you don’t have to justify not liking her if you don’t. I would genuinely like to see fics where Mia and Ethan’s supposedly-necessary break up feels in character. Where Ethan loves her but just can’t deal with the resentment and the fallout over all the lies she told him, where he's been clinging to his 'happy ending' with Mia after surviving the Bakers so hard he can't face the fact things just aren't working, or where he’s having to face that their relationship only ever really worked because she was away so much. It will break my heart, but fiction is allowed to do that.
But god, it would be nice if people could just take the bashing below an eleven around this place. The number of times I’ve had to sigh and back-button out of reading something, because yet another author has decided to project their own hatred for Mia onto the husband who’s still reeling from watching her being violently murdered in front of him… it gets fucking old, y’know?
I would really like to think that in the year of our lord 2024, fandom would be a bit past this thing where they bash the canonical female love interest in the name of shipping the hero with another dude. People will bend over backwards to try and cast Heisenberg and Chris as guys who really care about consent and worry about Ethan getting hurt, because heaven forbid anyone be caught shipping something slightly problematic. And yet misogyny still somehow gets a pass.
You do not have to love Mia. You don’t even have to like her. But ye gods, the hate she gets is baseless and absurd.
Hasn't this poor woman suffered enough?
(And on that note, I promise I am finally done soapboxing in defence of Mia Winters, thank you for bearing with me for this long.)
#Mia Winters#Ethan Winters#mithan#Resident Evil Village#Resident Evil#Resident Evil 7#RE lore#meta#Mia Winters week
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PG, 1300 words (so far)
"Heisenberg?!" Ethan lowers his gun, feeling suddenly, horribly tired. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Nice to see you too, Ethan." Ethan's first name practically drips out of Heisenberg's mouth. He's been using a dinner plate as an ashtray, Ethan notices—the kind of minor detail the mind focuses on in moments of extreme stress (god, he's probably lucky the bastard bothered to find himself an ashtray at all). But Heisenberg's still talking: "Dropped by, you weren't home, so I let myself in. Wouldn't want me loitering around your porch, bringing down the neighbourhood, would you?"
Ethan grits his teeth. He'd actually forgotten just how annoying Heisenberg could be. "Which still doesn't explain what the hell you're doing here."
As promised, this old ficlet is getting extended into a 'proper' story, so reposting the first chapter as a standalone work I can add to as new chapters get finished.
#wintersberg#mithanberg#Ethan Winters#Karl Heisenberg#Mia Winters#Resident Evil Village#Resident Evil#fic
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Twist my arm, why don’t you? XD Well, I did tell you guys to ask!
What the hell, let’s open this one by sharing a few pics from a Sims household created by a good friend of mine, made up of Heisenberg (mad scientist), Mia (secret agent) and Ethan (just really wants to be a dad). The three of them immediately became the most delightful sims-land trainwreck imaginable.
Their neighbourhood is full of werewolves, because you can do that in the Sims. Ethan’s apparently made friends with some of them. But because this is Sims-land, when he and Mia tried to have a romantic dinner together, it ended with Ethan passed out on the kitchen floor while Mia set herself on fire, with Heisenberg running in in his underwear with some passing hippie, and being no help whatsoever. Aren’t Sims wonderful?
Beyond the land of the Sims, though… I mean, let’s be honest, my desire for mithanberg comes from how I ship both Ethan/Heisenberg and Ethan/Mia, and refuse to choose between them. I could see it working either as a proper OT3, or a poly arrangement where Ethan’s involved with both of them, but Mia and Heisenberg aren’t involved with each other (on which note, I also ship the hell out of Mia/Zoe, so Mia is not missing out here).
For the few really mithanberg-ish things I’ve ever posted so far, Follow Me Home is headed for the former category, whereas that other one is more likely headed for the latter. Going for the proper-OT3 option does come with the extra hurdle of trying to figure out how Mia/Heisenberg would work when they’ve never even met in canon, but I am fully up for the challenge.
But there’s way more to this ship for me than just the convenience of ‘why not both’. Seriously, wintersberg fic is missing out on so much by writing Mia off so quickly.
For one, Ethan’s somewhat-complicated relationship with Mia is the best evidence you could ask for that Ethan might actually be up for getting involved with someone as fucked up as Heisenberg (or even Chris, if you’re more into winterfield). Mia has canonically lied to Ethan, (accidentally) drawn him into mortal danger, and (while possessed) sliced off his hand with a chainsaw. Ethan’s still with her in RE8, so clearly he’s willing to forgive.
Fig 1: Apparently not a dealbreaker!
Heisenberg, meanwhile, opens their relationship by stabbing Ethan with a fucking spear-headed fencepost, chains him up, drags him off be put on trial, and ‘rescues’ him only by throwing him into a gauntlet of lycans and spike traps. He later sends Ethan through the second gauntlet that is the Stronghold, before finally trying to make a deal with him. When Ethan refuses, Heisenberg throws him to a chainsaw-propeller-faced monstrosity made of engine parts sewed onto a corpse.
Fig 2: Also not a dealbreaker?
I will make some excuses for Heisenberg, given that he’s been trapped in a repressive cult for decades and seems to have internalised a lot of bullshit about the strong destroying the weak, but holy shit is this guy red flag city (and I love it). And that’s not even touching on all the violent bullshit Chris pulls in this game. You may also note that neither Heisenberg or Chris have Mia’s convenient mind-control or replaced-by-a-shapeshifter excuse for their worst behaviour.
Ethan asks for none of the madness all these maniacs have injected into his life, but goddamn, does he learn to roll with it and come back swinging. Whether or not you assume Ethan ever found out the truth about Mia’s past, she offers us some solid proof that Ethan’s ‘type’ does not exclude covert special agents with a talent for violence, who’ve spent years working full-time for evil bioweapons manufacturers. Ethan may not be ready to admit to himself that he’s got a thing for dangerous people, and Mia may be a lot better at pretending to be normal than Heisenberg, but the fact Ethan’s still with her could say a lot.
Basically, if you wanna ship Ethan with either of these other guys, Mia Winters is the best ally you could ask for!
There are other problems with writing off Mia too quickly so you can ship Ethan with someone else, one being that it makes Ethan look like, well, kind of a psychopath. Fic after fic presents him as the kind of guy who can witness the mother of his child being brutally murdered in front of him, and within a matter of hours, he’s apparently realised he was never that happy with her anyway, so it’s just fine if he’s fucking some other dude. The fact the ‘Mia’ people are so quick to dismiss as an abusive bitch wasn’t even the real Mia apparently doesn’t necessitate any sort or reexamination. It’s basically a meme at this point.
Thing is, even if his relationship with the real Mia was unhealthy, you just aren’t going to make a guy like Ethan process that within hours of watching her fucking assassination. Try and make him face it, and you’ll push him straight into defensiveness. Even at the best of times, Ethan’s just not the kind of guy who could leave the mother of his child without a fuckload of heartache and a few rounds of ‘what does this say about me’ at the very least (and Mia loves Ethan far too much to leave him, except in a misguided attempt to protect him). Even if you're writing an AU where Mia really does die (rather than just suffering the usual round of character assassination), at least let that poor boy ANGST about it! C’mon, people – that’s the juicy stuff!
Of course, the real problem fans are grappling with here is that in the current fandom climate, the idea that Ethan would willingly hook up with a guy who stabbed him in the gut that morning is still somehow more palatable than having to consider that Ethan might be capable of being (gasp!) less than completely faithful to a partner who doesn’t deserve it. So it’s not enough that he thinks Mia’s dead, she’s also got to be a horrible person and a complete non-entity who can be forgotten as quickly as we’ve brought her up, just to get her out of the way – as if that somehow makes Ethan look better.
People are so eager to get rid of Mia that I have legit read multiple different fics where, even after being mysteriously reborn post-game via horrific mould-magic, somehow one of the very first things Ethan wants to talk about afterwards is divorcing his wife. Can we not even give the poor guy a single scene to have a proper existential crisis over not being human anymore before finding a woman to blame for all his problems?
Fig 3: Ethan's actual thoughts on his wife right before his death
On the greater subject of that whole inconvenient marriage poor Ethan's saddled with, I can only say ‒ again ‒ c’mon, people, that’s the juicy stuff! A good story needs conflict, and Ethan having had this weird hook-up with/confusing attraction to an incredibly creepy guy in the middle of an incredibly confusing day and while he thought his wife was dead, only to later discover that she’s alive? GOLD.
You don’t even necessarily have to wrap it all back around to a happy OT3 scenario. An Ethan who's struggling with Mia’s (actual) death, or even the realisation that he truly can’t deal with all her lies, all while telling himself Heisenberg’s just a rebound fling that doesn’t mean anything – that’s all the angst and pathos and opportunities for filthy smut you could ever ask for! Lean into it! Heck, the Duke tells Ethan outright that he can’t go back to his old life anymore – you could have Ethan decide his own status as a mould-creature makes him too dangerous to go back to Mia and Rose. More angst, more drama, more actual material for narrative conflict!
tl;dr: Write Mia off in a sentence, and not only have you made Ethan look like an asshole, you’ve made your story boring. And thus (thank you for bearing with me) ends my tangent about The State of Wintersberg Fandom, and why Mia deserves more love (from Ethan at least, even if the author can't completely bring themselves to join in).
Getting back to the real topic here: if you are up for letting your resolution involve an OT3 scenario, you’ve got some great options to play with.
Mia bossing the other two around is certainly an angle you could go for, but I think I’d prefer watching Mia and Heisenberg working together to drive Ethan out of his mind (not that options like these are ever mutually exclusive, mind!) But I’m broadly more interested in how you get these three together than what it would look like once they get there. In other words, it’s time to talk Mia and Heisenberg.
As I touched on above, these two do have more in common than it might look at a glance. They’ve both been infected by the mould, they’ve both spent years (or even decades) trapped in dysfunctional, cult-like, mould-controlled families, and had to bottle themselves up and hide behind a persona while working for truly terrible people. They’ve both done some truly terrible stuff themselves, probably watched even worse happen to other innocent people, and presumably internalised some pretty awful excuses for themselves along the way. They’re also both madly in love with Ethan (what, is anyone into wintersberg going to argue with me on that one?) In short, there is no lack of stuff for these two to bond over and find common ground.
I can’t see Mia being too hard to convince if Ethan does want to try an open relationship either. Heck, the first thing we ever see from Mia involves sending Ethan a message where she tries to let him go, because she doesn’t think she’s making it back alive. Her guilt throughout RE7 is palpable, and how much she loves Ethan is the same. I don’t think it’s any stretch to say Mia would be willing to contemplate almost anything if it would make Ethan happy (and frankly, she’s pulled enough shit herself in this relationship that she doesn’t get to get judgy anyhow).
That said, I do think she’d have reasonable concerns about Ethan’s new boyfriend being someone like Heisenberg, but then, he’s hardly any more dangerous than what Mia’s brought to the table herself. If anything, your bigger obstacle would be convincing Ethan that he’s sure enough about whatever’s going on with Heisenberg to admit it at all. But then, I don’t think getting Mia and Heisenberg involved with each other too would be too difficult either.
It doesn’t hurt that Mia has a lot of the same characteristics that probably draw Heisenberg to Ethan: a badass survivor, tough and determined enough to be a little sassy even in the face of danger, but still very vulnerably human underneath. That vulnerable side of Mia is a very important part of her to me – it’s the main aspect in play in the longest thing I’ve (yet) posted with any Mia/Heisenberg interaction, where she’s locked up in Miranda’s lab, and has no good reason to trust him. There’s nothing openly shippy going on in that story, though Heisenberg makes no bones about what he wants with her husband. I’m not sure exactly where things are headed in that universe, but you know there’s drama coming on in that front.
The main point there is that Mia’s not too badass to be intimated by Heisenberg, especially when she’s got her back up against the wall. Take them out of the village, though, and I can see Mia being a much tougher nut to crack.
Which is mostly my way of leading into mentioning that the longest thing I’ve written between them that I haven’t posted yet basically flips the previous scenario: instead of Heisenberg coming to tell Mia he’s after her husband, now it’s Mia coming to tell him she knows what he’s after, and he's about to receive some serious grilling about his intentions. What I realised in writing it was that somewhere in the middle of this conversation, Heisenberg goes from seeing Mia as an obstacle between him and Ethan to seeing her as a potential bonus. He’s impressed with her gall and starting to look at her in a whole new light. This is one ficbit that's definitely going places ‒ only problem being the usual one: I’ve still got to write the rest of the damn fic to get to that scene. (I’m working on it! But you know how it goes.)
That isn’t the only way I can see you getting the three of them together, of course. One interesting alternate possibility might be to suggest that Mia and Heisenberg have met before. Mia seems to have met Miranda (they’ve been photographed together, at least), and it’s not completely beyond the realms of possibility that Miranda might have brought along an ‘assistant’ (slash-bodyguard-slash-whatever else she thinks he’s useful for). And if she’s going to bring any of her ‘children’, Heisenberg is by far the best qualified to pass as normal, hilarious as that should be.
I don’t imagine either Heisenberg of Mia would be eager to admit any of their personal reservations about their respective ‘bosses’ to each other, meeting under circumstances like that. But the possibilities are intriguing nonetheless.
For complete AU territory, however, I don’t think you could find a better start point for an Ethan/Mia/Heisenberg scenario than to introduce Heisenberg as Mia’s ex. He’d be back in her life for Reasons, and Ethan would naturally be more than a little threatened by this huge, hot guy with history with his wife, little realising that Heisenberg’s as interested in Ethan as he is in rekindling anything with her.
Or for doing the whole thing on easy-mode, suppose Mia and Ethan have always been in an open relationship from the start – or that they’ve already had that conversation because Mia’s also in love with Zoe (I meant it when I said I ship them too!) Doesn’t mean there’s no angst or drama potential for Ethan getting involved with Heisenberg: he’s still going to be questioning what’s wrong with him that this guy is turning his crank, or whether it’s remotely appropriate for him to be seeing someone new while he’s got a six-month-old daughter at home. But if nothing else, I can promise you that having a third person around to babysit while Ethan’s ‘busy’ could only do good things for his sex life at this point. ;D
So, yeah – those would be My Thoughts On Mithanberg in a nutshell (or possibly more of a nut bowl, I can never resist the urge turn out a full essay on this stuff). If you’ve got any interest in writing mithanberg yourself, please do consider all these ideas free to a good home! Treating Mia better makes Ethan/Heisenberg better for me, and all those possibilities are right there to explore.
But to finish, have some more random Sims!
There are many more of these if anyone wants to see them, though most are less G-rated ‒ the friend running this household has installed ALL of the porn mods to enhance this little trainwreck.
(Also, before I'm done, just throwing a quick tag at @macgyvertape, since I had to screenshot their ask rather than reply 'officially' so I could reply to the both of them at once.)
#mithanberg#wintersberg#mithan#Ethan Winters#Karl Heisenberg#Mia Winters#Resident Evil Village#asks#meta#LetThatBoyAngst!#Mia Winters week
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Resident Evil 7 and Mia's secrets
(Oh, did you think I was done talking about Mia? Not even close! >D)
Coming into this fandom late, I was surprised that popular fanon has it that Mia never does come clean to Ethan, post-RE7. Sure, RE8 depends on Mia not having told Ethan he died in Dulvey, but that has nothing to do with her own past with the Connections (and far more to do with Ethan's own denial, but that's a whole other thing).
Myself, I’d taken it as given that the scene where Ethan learns the truth must have just happened off-screen. Because, disappointing as that omission is, the whole damn game is leading up to it.
And having replayed RE7 lately, I realised there'd be no better way to explain my take than to catalog every time the game spells out to us that Ethan knows Mia’s keeping secrets and wants answers, and that Mia herself wants to come clean.
Heck, it’s just about the very first thing we learn about them.
“Ethan... You were right. I did lie to you. I shouldn’t have, but…”
Ethan's not actually stupid, and Mia's secrecy has obviously strained their marriage for some time. And as soon as Ethan finds her, he’s asking questions.
Here, he’s mostly asking who did this to you; it's way too early for real answers. But then Eveline takes control, shit goes down, and next we see her, it’s in her recorded message from the “Mia” video tape.
“There’s so much you need to know.”
When Ethan finds Mia again under the old house, he’s angry and has every right to be, and he doesn’t pull any punches.
“I always wanted to tell you…”
But Mia’s memory’s still a mess, and Lucas interrupts. Ethan’s next chance to ask questions comes in the boat, and he wastes no time.
“You had something to do with this, didn’t you?”
Mia’s a little more defensive here, but she’s not lying about the holes in her memory. The game’s gearing up for the big reveal anyway, and the writers aren’t about to let her spoil it early.
If you choose Zoe instead of Mia, Ethan spends the boat ride asking all the same questions, only louder.
“I knew Mia was hiding something.”
But in the end, what do we get?
Whoever you choose, Ethan only gets a few brief moments with Mia after she frees him from Eveline’s mould, and no explanations are offered. But if you do pick Mia, then we end with Ethan flying away with her in the helicopter, saying only, “Mia's back and she wants to start over,” and I’m left going, wait, what? Haven’t we skipped something here?
In defence of the fanon consensus that Ethan never finds out the truth, that does seem to be the ‘canonical’ intent ‒ at least inasmuch as there's this one throwaway bit about Mia not wanting Ethan to know buried in a bonus text file only available with this one overpriced DLC for RE8. That’s it, that’s as much explicit recognition as this thing ever gets, one way or the other. And fucking hell, but that's a let down.
Even if we assume that Mia’s desire to come clean goes away once her memory comes back, why would Ethan just stop asking? He’s been asking questions the whole damn game – was clearly asking questions long before the game began! Knowing that Eveline was controlling people doesn’t explain what Mia had to do with it all. Now he’s suddenly all, ‘killed the bad guy, saved the girl, everything’s fine’? Was all that ‘a door closed’ bullshit supposed to be him accepting he’d never get answers? Why?
There are workable ways to spin Ethan never finding out. You could suggest he just accepts that Mia’s memory is gone (hell, for all we actually see of the ending, Mia genuinely might have lost her memory again after Eveline sucked her back into the mould). After all the trauma Ethan’s been through, you could also suggest he’s gone directly into denial, refusing to face anything that might threaten his ‘happy ending’ with Mia. You could even suggest that that bit with Eveline saying 'I can make him love you' is her actively wiping Ethan's suspicions away. There's some lovely, subtle horror in any of these possibilities ‒ I would genuinely love to see all of them explored in fic! But none of them actually come through in the ending we get, and that omission is the single biggest issue that makes that conclusion to RE7 unsatisfying to me.
The whole damn game has been building up to the big confrontation where Ethan finds out the truth and (eventually, if not immediately) finds a way to forgive Mia, so we can still have our happy ending. As much OTT hate as Mia gets, the game is consistent in portraying her as someone who is painfully aware of how bad she’s fucked up, regrets it, and is committed to doing everything she can to protect the man she loves from the fallout of her mistakes.
I cannot overstate how willing Mia is to die to save Ethan, from the very moment she realises she's infected. She does die to save him if you choose Zoe over her. It's so much of why I ship them do hard.
But most frustrating of all, denying Mia the chance to come clean denies her any chance to explain herself. How did she get involved with the Connections? Did she know from the outset who she was working for? Did she genuinely buy into the idea they were finding ways to win wars without losing soldiers on battlefield, that the human casualties of all their work was worth it? If not, why did she keep working there? Was she slowly frog-boiled down to the deep end, did they have dirt on her, did she fear they might kill her if she tried to leave? What excuses did she make to herself as the months or years went on?
It's possible Mia’s the kind of hypocrite who doesn’t care about the human casualties of her employer, just as long as she and hers are okay, but nothing we see from her sells me on that interpretation. And even if she ever was, it's even harder to believe she's still that person after all she's been through.
It aggravates me that the games never gave us answers, not just because I want explanations that cast Mia in a sympathetic light, but because not giving us answers leaves this huge hole in her character. I'd even take explanations that cast her in an unsympathetic light, as long as it all ties together.
It irritates me even more because, even if Capcom wasn’t up for giving Ethan and Mia the big emotional confrontation they deserved, the solution was so simple: let Ethan find Mia’s diary on his way out of the ship. The whole goddamn franchise is filled with diaries and documents where characters lay out their backstories and motivations in ludicrous detail – why does Mia never get one? Just give us a handful of entries dated over the years, laying out her own feelings and anxieties about the job she’s doing. It would’ve been so easy!
It irritates me nearly as much that, even in the few corners of this fandom sympathetic to Mia, no-one seems to be very interested in answering these questions in fic or shared headcanons (and if there are examples out there I don't know about, please do link me to them!) How much did Mia know about what she was getting into when she started working for the Connections? Was it the job she kept telling herself was just until she could find something better, only for that ‘something better’ to never come along? Did she have stains on her record that made it hard to find another job? How much of her lying was a misguided attempt to protect Ethan, and how much was simply about protecting herself? There's so much to explore here!
This is also where I mention that I've already put my money where my mouth on this one, and written up my own take on Mia's backstory, and how Ethan might have found out the truth. You don't have to agree with my version, of course ‒ I mean it when I say I'd love to see other people's ideas too. Heck, I'd even be up for versions where Ethan ultimately can't forgive her, just as long as people come at it from the angle of looking at Mia as a character, not just a one-dimensional-villain.
But of course, I'd still prefer to think about versions where these two do find a way to make it work. It takes a lot to make me ship het this hard, but these two stealth-badasses have pulled it off with style.
#Mia Winters#Ethan Winters#mithan#Resident Evil 7#Resident Evil Village#Resident Evil#Mia Winters week#RE lore#meta
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