• axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    One of the main thesis statements of the MGS games is America fights little tiny proxy wars all over the world to finance a small group of secret weirdos who want to turn themselves into AI constructs because they've gone mad with a lust for power and money. The main character of MGS2 was a child soldier in the Liberian civil war and trained by a future president. MGS4 is about how warfare has become so efficiently operated it doesn't even need human input any longer, it's all an algorithm to make money.

    MGSV is the only one I remember that gets into race, but only mentions it directly a few times. Like when Ocelot mentions how it's easier for the Russian Soviet soldiers to shoot Afghans than the previously deployed central Asian Soviet soldiers, because it's easier to shoot someone of a different race. There's also the South African PMCs torturing and kidnapping people. Also African child soldiers. Also the entire motivation of the villain being a loss of cultural identity because of constant warfare.

    Granted the Metal Gear games simultaneously worship America and demonize it, which is an artifact of them being made by a team of Japanese developers who based their understanding of America on Kurt Russel action movies.

    The ideology of those games is so oddly incoherent sometimes I'm surprised this website doesn't instead praise them for upholding conservative values.

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        No, I meant praise. The MGS games are not the best at succinctly delivering their point, plus they often present conflicting ideological stances. If someone had a sufficiently conservative swiss cheese brain it wouldn't be difficult to read MGS as a patriotic, pro-America game series about masculine true American soldiers struggling against the nefarious deep state. I'm pretty sure a bunch of nerds already have that kind of interpretation. I'd say MGS3 very clearly outlines America as the good guys of the Cold War for instance.

        Granted a lot of the pro-America jingoism in the series is probably an artifact of the games being based around silly 80s action movies.

        And yes, the treatment of women in the series is one of the goofier aspects. Nearly every female character is treated as a sexual object. Probably another artifact.

        Edit: By "this website" I meant the one linked by OP, not hexbear. Y'all are cool and smart and know what's up.