A Dying Star

i wanted to give them more jewelry and try a different coloring style but 1) my limp wrist gave up on me and 2) i couldn't decide on the shading/tint

and im sick of tweaking opacity so im gonna call this done!

EDIT: i hope it's obvious it's a jewelry swap

katara's earrings + her piercings are based on nuniwarmiut / nunivak island people (labret piercings, long beaded strings with wooden??? stops)

For example, the very first thing hallucinatory!Mia says is: “Ethan! Come with me. There's something I have to tell you.” That could be a hint at Mia's secrets, but tonally? To me, that reads less "Mia has chosen this moment to come clean", and more "a spectre of Mia is trying to tempt you into am ambush."

Doesn't help that this one gets echoed back to us not long after, in the message we see in the elevator after the lights come back on. 

That one's as loudly Donna as any message we get from this point on.

The same vibe continues through Ethan's next two visions. "Rose feels different. Ethan, you have to fix her…" ‒ what's that about? Rose's powers have presumably existed since birth, she didn't suddenly become 'different' later, and Mia certainly wouldn't be asking Ethan to fix her (Ethan, as usual, is the most clueless person involved). 

"Everyone leaves me… even Rose… I don't want to be alone…" doesn't make a lot of sense either. You could argue it's some kind of flash-forward to Ethan's death and Rose being taken from her by the government (if that's even what happened), but that feels like reaching. Everything in this area comes across as vague, unspecific anxieties. At most, maybe this is Ethan processing the fear that there's something about Mia and Rose that he doesn't know, that he's let them down (or this is just Donna showing Ethan images of his family to lead him further in). 

This changes once we get into the mansion proper ‒ or more specifically, into the basement. What Ethan hears from that point on suddenly gets a lot more specific.

So perhaps it's notable that these are the hallucinations that come after Ethan has reached the gateway that asks you to ‘Give up your memories’, and has to give away a family photo to progress ‒ is this the point where Ethan's actual memories start to direct what he hears and sees?

Also no coincidence that our next batch of hallucinations happen in a room with a doll version of Mia. That Ethan is forced to take apart in order to progress. So the possibility that what we're hearing comes from within Mia's herself is a very obvious interpretation.

Either way, the radio in the central room gives Mia four lines of dialogue, delivered one at a time as you progress with the puzzle. Those four lines might just chart her gradual realisation that Rose isn't going to be born normal, and Ethan is the reason why. 

First up, we've got: “Whoa, that's a kick! Can you believe it? S-She's so energetic, it's crazy!”

This one sounds like something Mia may well have actually said to Ethan out loud during her pregnancy. Perhaps this is him remembering this moment word-for-word. 

Next, we have maybe the most interesting line, which I've already brought up once: “Oh god, no… I, I can't tell Ethan. Anything but this.” To me, this sounds a lot like it could be the moment the truth hit Mia for the first time. Maybe it's even something Ethan half-heard or half-remembered actually hearing her say.

Whether Mia did ever speak those words aloud, the sentiment is almost certainly genuine. That line is actually a big part of my personal theory that Mia probably didn't even realise until very recently that Ethan was still infected – like, post-Rose-recently (look, I do still have this whole second chapter of Quarantine planned to go into this, if I ever get around to finishing it!) It's worth remembering that Mia's own memory was a mess when Ethan found her in RE7, and she was directly under mind control a lot of the time. So it tracks for me that she might've spent a long time after escaping the Bakers' mansion unsure how much of what she thought she remembered was true. 

The third line is just Mia weeping, before sobbing Rose's name, and the fourth is her just repeating “It'll be fine. It'll be fine," over and over in a panicked voice. At this point, we're in T-minus to the moment the monster-fetus shows up, and we're drumming up the atmosphere, so it's harder to know how ‘real’ these lines might be. Someone having a difficult pregnancy or post-partum depression might well have had these moments for real – especially given how very ‘not-normal’ Rose is going to turn out to be. Hell, maybe the monster fetus represents all Mia's worst fears about what she might have been about to give birth to, at her lowest moments. (Something mentioned in the notes in the gallery is the intent that the fetus is actually born from the puppet body of Mia, which is missing from the table when it first appears.) 

Obviously, Rose is not a monster on par with that thing, and Mia loves her baby girl just as much as Ethan does. At this point in Beneviento Mansion, everything is getting rapidly deeper into abstract-trip-land, so it's more questionable how literally we should take things. But damn, does it set an atmosphere!

Sandwiched in the middle of those four lines, however, we get our single most direct message from Mia in the form of the the phone call. 

Mia: Please Ethan, listen to me. I didn't want to keep it from you.

Ethan: Mia?

Mia: I didn't want to lose you again—I didn't want to destroy this family.

Ethan: Mia, what are you talking about?

Mia: I love you both so much I had to. I had to do it.

Like Mia's previous dialogue about what she can't tell Ethan, I do like how this highlights just how horribly conflicted Mia must have been about whether to tell Ethan the truth. It's the same general vibe I got from their conversation about Rose's test results (previously discussed in the context of the pre-game timeline ‒ though there, Mia seems like she's reached the point of trying to get Ethan to face the truth about himself, and Rose, and is becoming increasingly frustrated that she can't get through to him). Likely, she's scared stupid that telling the truth will end with Ethan being wheeled off to a lab somewhere. 

The last line, “I had to, I had to do it” confuses me, though (and makes it sound a lot like Mia might have done something even worse than what we know). I assume what she 'had to do' was 'keep the truth a secret', but it's an odd way to phrase a negative. "I couldn't do it" would feel more natural to me. Maybe it works better in Japanese.

But again, maybe this should be taken as a semi-confession being filtered through Ethan's own sense that Mia's keeping something from him (again), without really knowing what, or how Mia would talk about it. Either way, on the pure level of vibes, it all works. 

So here we are back with the original question: how much of Mia's dialogue in this section was really her own words or thoughts (that Ethan may or may not have heard or half-heard at some point), and how much is just Ethan's own anxieties speaking with her voice? How much has been twisted still further by Donna's powers, intentionally or otherwise? Anything is possible! 

The visions are Ethan's, but Mia is in the village, and was once infected herself, and the mutamycete network does, canonically, allow Ethan to see some of Rose's memories directly. Could he be seeing some of Mia's too? If so, how much of it came from her? Fuck, is there even any point in analysing what's plausible to this degree, when the whole game is set in a surrealist gothic fairytale, where events have been fictionalised into a children's book before the story even really begins?