This article contains RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE spoilers.
While Resident Evil Village‘s trailers and demos strongly suggested that the mysterious Mother Miranda would ultimately be the game’s “main” villain, even the wildest theories regarding the character’s background didn’t come close to guessing just how important and fascinating she would prove to be.
As is this case with many things in Resident Evil Village, though, there’s a chance you could walk away from the game without a proper understanding of who, exactly, Mother Miranda is and why she is more than just another entry into Resident Evil‘s impressive collection of big bads. While some of that ambiguity can be attributed to storytelling issues, much of what makes Mother Miranda so interesting is simply not explicitly stated. It’s waiting to be discovered in various discoverable texts and pieces of environmental storytelling.
So if you walked away from Resident Evil Village with a few unanswered questions about Mother Miranda, here are some of the things you need to know about her origin story and the significance of her character.
Mother Miranda is Over 100 Years Old
It’s not clear exactly how old Mother Miranda is, but we know that her daughter, Eveline, was born in 1909. We also know that Resident Evil Village takes place in 2021, so that would mean that Mother Miranda is well over 100 years old by the time we encounter her in the game. She’s probably between 130-150, but her ability to alter her form makes it kind of tough to tell her exact age based on her physical appearance alone.
How did Mother Miranda survive for so long? Well, the easy answer is that the Megamycete granted her extended life (which we discussed elsewhere), but it’s not entirely clear how some people survive this process and others do not. The Megamycete seems to identify some kind of quality in people that make them ideal hosts, but the specifics of how that works seem to be intentionally ambiguous.
Mother Miranda Lost Her Daughter to the Spanish Flu
As noted above, Mother Miranda had a daughter named Eveline who she clearly loved dearly. In fact, her grief over Eveline’s death in 1919 is essentially what triggers the next 100+ years of RE lore. We’ll dive into that more in a bit.
What you might not have realized, though, is that Eveline died after contracting what is commonly known as the Spanish flu. It’s fascinating that Miranda notes in one of her diary entries that she felt guilty for not being able to save Eveline from the Spanish flu but then proceeds to essentially create a different virus as part of her attempts to resurrect her daughter.
Mother Miranda Was a Priestess Who Became a Scientist
Again, the details of Miranda’s life prior to her daughter’s birth aren’t as well-documented, but some notes and environmental clues suggest that she was essentially a priestess who also occasionally acted as a kind of physician for the region.
However, Miranda would later become one of the most intelligent and capable biologists in the world. While it’s implied that Miranda was always somewhat intelligent, the Megamycete eventually granted her the combined knowledge of all the people it had come in contact with over countless years. Needless to say, that greatly enhanced Miranda’s understanding of the world and allowed her to begin her seemingly impossible experiments.
Alcina Dimitrescu Was Mother Miranda’s First “Successful” Transformation
Mother Miranda began her search for a suitable vessel for her daughter’s resurrection by infecting the local villagers, but many of those villagers just turned into Lycans or other animalistic creatures. It wasn’t until Miranda infected the noble Alcina Dimitrescu that she found a vessel that was able to survive the process with many of their human features intact. Even better, Dimitrescu was able to exercise a degree of control over the abilities she acquired.
Still, Miranda makes it clear that she did not consider Dimitrescu to be a capable vessel for Evelyn. While the extent of Dimitrescu’s mutations may have been too great for Miranda to resurrect Eveline in an ideal form, it’s also worth noting that Dimitrescu had a pre-existing condition that left her with a “thirst” for blood after the transformation. That defect alone may have made Miranda somewhat bitter towards Alcina, though Miranda did eventually create the creatures that would become Dimitrescu’s daughters, so it seems Dimitrescu may have been the closest thing to a daughter that Miranda “created.”
Mother Miranda Helped Start Umbrella (Kind of)
In the 1950s, Mother Miranda saved a young lost hiker who had the misfortune of wandering too close to Miranda’s village. Rather than kill or infect him, though, Miranda came to treat the young hiker as a kind of protégé. To make a long story a bit shorter, that young hiker turned out to be Oswell E. Spencer: the eventual founder of Umbrella.
In a way, then, Miranda’s decision to not only save Spencer but teach him about her discoveries would eventually lead to the events of almost every Resident Evil game so far. After all, Spencer took “mold” samples from the village (as well as Miranda’s teachings) which he later turned into the first Umbrella virus, and he even based the eventual Umbrella logo off a symbol he saw in the village. So why did Miranda spare him in the first place? She was likely just happy to find a companion who understood her work, but there’s a possibility the Megamycete recognized something special in Spencer and somehow persuaded Miranda to spare him.
Mother Miranda and The Connections Are Responsible For Resident Evil 7’s Eveline
It’s shocking enough that Mother Miranda was essentially Umbrella’s uncredited founder, but it turns out that Mother Miranda played a large part in the creation of Resident Evil 7‘s engineered villain: Eveline.
Mother Miranda’s diary reveals that she was approached by a group called “The Connections” who offered to help her with her experiments in exchange for a mold sample and information on her progress so far. Miranda complied, but the result of The Connections’ experiments, the creature known as Eve, did not please Mother Miranda. In fact, Mother Miranda considered Eve to be defective. It seems that she was hoping for a perfect recreation of her daughter rather than a genetically enhanced variation.
Not all was lost, though. The Connections eventually told Mother Miranda about Rose Winters (possibly out of revenge over Eve’s apparent death at Ethan’s hands), which is what leads to Mother Miranda deciding to impersonate Mia Winters, kidnap Rose, and kick off the events of Village.