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Resident Evil: Village sees a truly formidable villain in the form of Mother Miranda. The biologist-turned-cult leader had been driven to dramatic ends in the name of being reunited with her dead daughter Eva, including unleashing Lycans to decimate her own village and kidnapping Rose Winters.

Related: Video Game Villains More Iconic Than The Hero

But who is Miranda, really? Is there a shred of humanity left in her mold-infested heart, what with love and grief being the underlying motivation for her wickedness? There's a complex backstory to this unique villain, especially if you analyse the Gothic literary elements that underpin the game.

Mother Miranda's Origin: Umbrella And The Connections

miranda and the connections from Resident Evil

Miranda was not always a murderous, winged Pagan cult leader. Born in a mountainous Eastern European village, she was an ordinary woman like any other. However, everything changed when the village was struck by the Spanish Flu, and Miranda lost her daughter, Eva, to the disease.

Stricken by an unquenchable sadness and despair after the passing of her only child, Miranda descended into a cave deep beneath the bowels of the village to commit suicide - and it was there that she stumbled upon the megamycete.

Becoming The Mother Of All

This amorphous black mass seemed to throb in the darkness. Mystified, Miranda reached out and touched it, letting the fungus connect her to the thoughts and memories of the many souls that had been consumed by the mold and absorbed into its own hive mind. From that moment, she dedicated herself to serving the mysterious entity, with the foresight to use it to resurrect Eva.

She began using its abilities to convince her fellow villagers that she had a mystical connection to the dead, performing supposed miracles to such an extent that she became revered throughout the village as a deity of sorts. She was henceforth referred to as Mother Miranda: the giver and taker of life itself.

She appeased them to earn their trust, doing supernatural favours for them by connecting them to the mold's web of memories and thereby allowing villagers to commune with deceased loved ones. But secretly, she was only keeping them sweet to distract them whilst secretly carrying out horrendous experiments using the mold - experiments she called 'Cadou', or 'gifts'. Most villagers died after exposure to the harsh mold, but the truly unlucky were transformed by it into ferocious beasts named Lycans.

Oswell Spencer, I Presume?

Miranda crossed paths with future Umbrella Corporation CEO, Oswell Spencer, when he found himself lost in the wilderness whilst conducting scientific research. He and Miranda struck up a close bond, and Spencer made plain his interest in her research into the psychoactive and regenerative properties of the megamycete. Even though he returned to America alone in order to continue his work solo, the two kept in close contact.

He even used a version of her emblem in creating the Umbrella Corporation's logo, which can be seen etched into the stonework floor of the Altar that stands just north of the village.

Connect The Cuts

Time passed and the Cadou continued to fail. As Miranda ceaselessly tortured the villagers with grisly experiments, she was approached by crime syndicate The Connections. They worked in conjunction with Umbrella's rival company, but they had an idea that instantly piqued Miranda's interest.

After learning about the mold and its hive memory, they suggested a plan to combine it with a cloned embryo of Eva in order to bring her back for good. This culminated in the creation of Eveline - the big bad of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard -, whose drive to find and create her own family led to the tragic Baker Incident that precedes the events of Resident Evil Village.

Miranda And The Four Lords

All the council members of the village convening under the leadership of Mother Miranda as Ethan watches in Resident Evil Village.

The Cadou experiments were not entirely unsuccessful, with Miranda managing four partial victories when she implanted each of the Four Lords with a Cadou and effectively built herself a new, adopted family.

Lady Alcina Dimitrescu

Descended from nobility, Lady Dimitrescu was the most promising candidate for the Cadou - and one of Miranda's biggest failures, no pun intended.

When she herself began to experiment with the Cadou, she was able to reanimate the corpses of three women who she would later look upon fondly as her own children. Cassandra, Bela, and Daniela Dimitrescu lived with their mother at Castle Dimitrescu, a functional vineyard and winery, where they hid from the harsh Romanian climes.

Sure, they drank blood to survive - but you would too if you had a blood condition like Alcina.

Donna Beneviento

The last remaining child of the Beneviento family, the Cadou left Donna with a severe facial disfigurement. She had been plagued by overwhelming anxiety issues since childhood, leading to a fascination with dolls. She built dolls in the workshop at House Beneviento, an isolated and peaceful mansion at the edge of a roaring waterfall.

Unlike her siblings, Donna never faced Ethan properly. Rather, their confrontation was performed through Angie the doll, who had been implanted with the Cadou herself and acts as Donna's mouthpiece - or, perhaps, as a makeshift child of her own.

Salvatore Moreau

The mutated scientist-turned-fishman Moreau, a clear nod to author Lovecraft's brand of aquatic horror, lived a solitary life in his reservoir. After his Cadou implant rendered him a deformed, morose creature who turns into a gigantic fish, Miranda saw little use for him after the experiment failed. She still, however, kept him on the village Council given that he was the last remaining descendant of House Moreau, one of the four families that once presided over the village.

Obsessed with pleasing his mother, Moreau was the epitome of a rejected child. He was willing to do anything to make her proud of him, including trying (and failing) to kill Ethan Winters when he came to collect one of the four flasks.

Karl Heisenberg

The only one of the Four Lords actively plotting against her, Heisenberg is one of Miranda's secret favourite children. He blames her for his poor upbringing, having been taken by her from his family at a young age and forced to work with Miranda as both a Lord and the leader of the Lycans.

The Cadou granted Heisenberg the ability to manipulate magnetic forces, powers he later used to carry out experiments of his own by implanting them into half man, half machine cyborgs to do his bidding at the Factory in a cyberpunk nod to Dr Frankenstein's own unholy creation.

Heisenberg wished to work with Ethan by using Rose as a weapon to defeat Miranda, harnessing her gifts from the megamycete to bring his "mother" down.

Ethan was, to put it mildly, not really up for it.

Rose Winters: A Mother's Second Chance

Mother Miranda disguised as Mia with baby Rose in Resident Evil Village

When the Eveline project failed, Miranda became fixated on Mia and Ethan Winters' child, Rose. The infant was effectively the product of a human and the megamycete, as Ethan Winters in fact died at the Baker House in 2017 and had been reanimated by the mold. Miranda knew that she would be the perfect vessel to bring Eva back - and so she took her.

Ethan As A Gothic Double

A central theme in Resident Evil Village is the notion of parenthood and sacrifice. Both Miranda and Ethan are frantically racing to retrieve their daughters, each committing a genocide in their own right; Miranda unleashes the Lycans to destroy the villagers, having no use for them anymore, whilst Ethan dots between each of Miranda's adopted children and slaughters them all.

In the Gothic literary tradition, we can use the theory of doubling to explain why there are so many parallels between Ethan and Miranda. To start, both of them are driven solely by their love for their children. Mia herself barely crosses Ethan's mind - she was supposedly shot and killed by Chris Redfield at the start of the game, after all - and Miranda never alludes to Eva's paternal figure. Neither one cares for another soul aside from their daughters, and each would destroy the world to get them back.

By removing the locus of a conventional family unit from each equation, both Miranda and Ethan would be considered unnatural parents due to their blatant disregard for the sanctity of natural birth; Ethan barely grieves his dead wife, and Miranda would sooner infect a stranger with a fungus before having a baby naturally.

In a traditional Gothic narrative, women are frequently depicted in one of three ways:

  • The femme fatale, the villain intending to murder and deceive by using sexuality as a weapon.
  • The damsel in distress, who needs to be rescued and protected by a male character.
  • The purposely, importantly absent woman and mother who rejects the family unit in favour of self-serving behaviours such as divorce, remarriage, or pursuit of single-parenthood.

Miranda fits both the first and last categories, the villainous woman who rejects normalcy in favour of serving herself.

Ethan, being the hero, can see himself in Miranda to an extent because he, too, has rejected normalcy by creating a child of supernatural capability. He and Miranda are of one mind and body; they are both tainted by the mold, and therefore it would be tricky to regard Ethan as a true hero of the Gothic, but rather as a mirror image of Miranda's own grief and suffering, causing his own in the process.

Chris could be deemed the accidental hero of the story, given how he is the one who actually rescues Mia and brings both her and Rose to safety. The final image is of the three of them: a traditional (though somewhat dysfunctional) example of a 'normal' family unit - something neither Ethan nor Miranda could offer their respective children.

Rest In Pieces, Mother Miranda

resident evil village mother miranda with Rose

When Ethan sacrifices himself to kill the megamycete, he follows hot on Miranda's heels. However, the final scenes of Resident Evil: Village provide plenty of food for thought; was that Ethan standing on the road behind teenage Rose Winters' car? And if Ethan lives, does that mean that Mother Miranda might claw her way back out once more?

Lingering questions aside, there is one crucial lesson to learn from Gothic fiction: the dead don't tend to stay that way. Especially when you're one-half of a twisted Gothic double.

Next: Resident Evil Village's Heisenberg Is An Underrated Villain