He sees that soldiers are slaves of Nation States in service of Geopolitical goals so he creates a mercenary army free from any country, to fight for whoever regardless of ideology
This just makes soldiers slaves of the market and it's Geopolitical goals :think-mark: and when MSF got rich enough that they didn't have to take every mission, the soldiers just became pawns of Big Boss, Kaz, and Ocelot. Virtually no different than serving the US or the USSR, which they end up doing anyways.
A world where soldiers are free and will always have place? The only person remotely free in this new scenario is Big Boss!!!!! :think-mark:
kojipro really understands the ideologically incoherent warhorny mindset.
I think this is why I had such a hard time understanding the games as I played them. To understand characters' relationships to MSF you have to accept the deranged premise of MSF, which seems a little like getting your head around quantum field theory — you can't bring any metaphors to it, you just have to accept it. As a young thing my brain was unprepared for something that alien.
Now that I'm older, I understand that people can build their whole existence around an idea that doesn't stand up to a stiff breeze.
"I understand that people can build their whole existence around an idea that doesn’t stand up to a stiff breeze."
:melon-musk: is going to save humanity by placing a laughing unsustainable colony on Mars, a place hostile to all life as we know it, with toxic ultra-fine dust that gets into everything, that also lacks a protective magnetosphere, but this is saving humanity because we can't have all our eggs in one basket! I'm already saving up for a Mars ticket! :melon-musk: even tweeted that I can get a return trip for free if I need it! :so-true:
Without patriotic political education, a soldier is only a potential criminal
:sankara-shining:
Motherfucker he's on literal 1984 Big Boss is watching you posters in V, how much more direct do you want this to get.
If Kojima has any coherent politics, and he kind of seems to do, it leans arnachist. The MSF just joins random wars for money in Peace Walker and V, they're literally, honest to god mercenaries who don't care what they fight, you just randomly send them across the globe to kill some folks. This is a bad thing.
But a sizeable amount of people go "oh well Big Boss saves the world" or whatever and yeah he does, sure, he also runs a private army of hired killers that don't care who they're fighting. You have at least one literal fucking child soldier in Peace Walker you can put in the combat team. It's all out in the open.
And you know what, call me a Fanboy, but it's fucking brilliant. You're actively managing the private for profit army you brainwash-recruit together from random conscripts as a cult leader which sends those people to fight shit all over the world but you know Big Boss does occasionally safe the world and is kind of nice and also cool so obviously he's the good guy.
I'm pretty sure both Peace Walker and V are a meta-commentary about how easy people would be to rope into this shit. Hey look we have charismatic cool guy who occasionally does good shit, obviously he's good, disregard the torture and the nukes and fighting in unnamed conflicts for money haha. It seems to me filtered through a lense of understanding "evil" organisations as if they're all either in combat, kicking puppies to death, or sitting around muttering slurs under their breath. You know that photo of the taliban having a nice day out in boats that shocked so many people? it's that mindset. The Taliban are bad, because they're bad, so they must spend their whole day conniving and making up plans as to how to kill more puppies and tie virgings to traintracks while twiddling with their mustaches, no fun allowed.
But you know, you see the good guy story. Boss saving some children. Boss stopping some giant mech, or a virus, or taking someone in who's shit outta luck. And then he goes on to murder 50 soviet conscripts. You know, good guy shit.
He's the protagonist, not the good guy. And the way everyone misses this proves what I think is Kojimas Meta-Message right, you can have someone do vile shit all day long if you hide it and the cult leader occasionally does some good shit on camera.
I personally think Kojima is somewhat of a "realist" in the truest sense of that word in that he seems to recognize that anyone who seeks to move history in any direction by exercising power for any reason (though perhaps especially in service to some sort of ideal) is destined to be both hero and villain. Ultimately in the scheme of it all: the real villain of the Metal Gear series is no one man or woman, or even a group of people, but rather the system they built which they themselves become consumed by.
The antagonist of MGS 2 is literally the system they build which they themselves become consumed by, and that trend continues through 4.
Good take, also important to note that all the Big Boss stuff came after MGS2 which has some very accurate predictions about the internet and mass media.
Kojima was right about everything except his depiction of women, which sucks.
That's the thing, it makes no sense unless you view it as him using The Boss's will to further his dystopian agenda, but the series frames it as him earnestly trying to accomplish the Boss's Will but misunderstanding it. Even in his convos with Kaz and Ocelot, his peers/partners in crime, he never drops the rhetoric.
I used to think that at some point during his feud with Zero he went crazy and began to justify his ambitions with The Boss's Will, but MGS4 shits on that theory. He just says "oh I was wrong sorry lol" and drops dead its so funny.
MGS4 shits on that theory
It is only natural since it's a giant squirty dump of a game
I think it's 50/50 but yeah the Big Boss angle fucked with me. Especially when the post credits secret ending. Should've just ended at Snake blowing his brains out.
"Oh boy, can't wait to experience next-gen MGS" :dean-smile:
My face throughout the experience :dean-frown:
Literally every character got done dirty :ooooooooooooooh:
I will say that the game mechanics themselves were absolutely excellent, but you couldn't really play with them since more than half the levels were wasted on forced combat sections or dumb gimmicks.
The whole "people on a small island becoming extremely militaristic despite it being against their stated beliefs" is based in Kojima's critique of Japanese nationalism, so yeah it makes sense.
The tragedy of Big Boss is making the same mistake that the techno utopians made. He thought he could break away and live outside the machine he helped create..but instead he just wound up being subsumed by it and perpetuating it.
"No more fighting for dubious causes! Only fighting for money!" :so-true:
Big Boss's fatal flaw was his personal need to be the one to usher in his ideal soldiers' world. Literal Strong Man shit. All of BB's ego went to Liquid Snake who even found a way to "transcend" his own death. Solid, on the other hand, has a soldier's skills but without the ego; a killing machine that grows to see the truly fucked nature of war. He doesn't want to lead an army; he wants a world where soldiers are no longer necessary.
The idea of a Snake the War Hero using his super-soldier skills to try to expose illegal arms dealing, and the way the game encourages but does not require non-lethal play, really helps. Like, you can just go nuts and kill tons of people, but the game always makes it clear that you don't half to, and that the in-game vision of an ideal soldier is someone who accomplishes their goals without killing anyone. It makes the player a moral actor within the illusion of choice offered by a video game. Yeah, you can kill that guy, but you can also knock him out or just sneak around him. In later games you can even brainwash/recruit him at which point, simply by changing his uniform, he goes from "Bad guy" to "Good guy".
Putting mercenaries front and center also supports this notion that most soldiers, most of the time, are just hapless mooks being used by some Great Man to further their agenda, and the nationality and ideology of the average soldier is just an accident of birth - Big Boss isn't on the side of any ideology, he's on the side of the soldiers, and he wants to create his weird fucked up state where soldiers fight for themselves (Because he's a deeply unsocialized super-soldier who has literally no skills except those pertaining to war and can't imagine a life where he is not a soldier).
Of course in real life most mercenaries are deeply ideological, often far more so than regular troops, but for the purposes of the game it says a lot about how the dehumanization of the enemy is a tactic of the oppressor, and how war is an ultimately futile pursuit where powerless people kill each other for no gain.
:yea:
I haven't played the games but what you've described sounds like a good representation of the bandit warlord "We are a brotherhood of free warriors who left our armies because they betrayed us. The reason we fight is to build a new society with a place at the top for our noble warrior brotherhood" schtick.
Bonus points for "other armies don't respect or understand us warriors because they're controlled by weak, corrupt, conniving civilians who will throw your lives away for their devious political machinations, unlike me, a warrior who would never do that to my brothers" while maintaining a military hierarchical command and pay structure with themself firmly on top and sending their warband to fight and die for cash, power and their own petty bullshit.
Bonus points for “other armies don’t respect or understand us warriors because they’re controlled by weak, corrupt, conniving civilians who will throw your lives away for their devious political machinations, unlike me, a warrior who would never do that to my brothers”
Pretty much what Liquid Snake said in MGS1. (He was trying to resurrect Big Boss's vision of an independent nation of mercenaries)
In MGS the 'weak, corrupt, conniving civilians" are almost always the intelligence agencies of various nations. Big Boss generally doesn't rail against a corrupt civilian bureaucracy that won't let him win the war, the enemies are usually intelligence agencies and special forces groups that manipulate soldiers in to dying for causes that don't benefit them. Like the game manages to portray this bizarre hero warlord without making him a fascist.
Big Boss is kind of a foil to fascism in some ways. He really, truly believes that all people (which in his world is just soldiers and spooks) are essentially equal, that human life is valuable (the game strongly encourages non-lethal methods without requiring them), and that governments should be honest, transparent, and responsive to their constituents (his chief reason for forming Outer Heaven is his belief that soldiers are mistreated and then abandonded by the powers they serve). Of course it's all weird and fucky because he creates a sort of anti-utopian military state, but Kojima never has the protagonists launch in to tirades about how soldiers should run civilian government or civilian government has betrayed the volk. Even when the civilian government does butt in it turns out the President and Senator Armstrong are super-soldiers themselves, fully part of the high level conspiracies that drive the MGS world.
The thing about Big Boss and Outer Heaven and Mother Base is that the MGS series goes from treating him like a bond villain in the 2D games (Metal Gear 1 & 2) to treating him like an Antihero in the later games. They even erased the swastika off of the original Outer Heaven logo.. Kojima has liberal free market auteur brainworms and it shows in the ideology of his games. He literally developed his understanding of geopolitics from 80s american action movies and says so in interviews.
Phantom Pain, minus the big plot twist, basically does the work of rehabilitating big boss. It also does the work of rehabilitating the NGO-fication of third world governments that were deliberately destabilized by the US. Phantom Pain also seems to ignore Operation Cyclone entirely, and manages to make the soviets seem like an evil empire invading Afghanistan for no reason, while also rehabing the Mujahideen without showing them (except for one guy, Malak, who you rescue in an early mission.) Not a single non-mujahideen Afghan civilian is shown. Only soviet outposts. The socialist government of Taraki that was overthrown by the US/Mujahideen isn't mentioned at all.
Then you've got weird colonialist white savior shit going on with Eli/The White Mamba/Liquid Snake. Am I really to believe that a bunch of African child soldiers in the Angola/Zaire border region answer to an orphaned white boy with a shitty attitude? That entire subplot was just an excuse to shoehorn in characters from the older games.
while also rehabing the Mujahideen without showing them (except for one guy, Malak, who you rescue in an early mission)
If Peace Walker-era Kojima had made MGSV, he would've instead been a hot babe who would've become a secondary character on Mother Base and who would talk to you about the history of the Mujahideen (also you could probably see her in her underwear in a dating minigame or something)
MGS is a video game for children and Kojima is a lib, which is a very childish way of thinking.
I'm an grown up and play the only grown up video game which is Dark Souls because its the only game with a coherent ideology:
The world is shit, you're shit, you can't do anything about it, if you try to do anything you will just fuck it up even more.
I've been progressing quest lines in Elden Ring and so far everyone is like "Well, I can progress the quest line which will result in outcomes I regret, or I can leave it be and let the world exist in an unchanging state."
Like if you do the quest interesting things happen but those things are horrible. If you don't do the quest nothing happens, there's no illusion of choice or change. Pick one.
I still want to make or just play a game just like MGSV or Peace walker except communist in all the right ways.
See I think part of the reason MGS works is that it's all weird and fucked up. If you made a game where your preferred ideology is triumphant and wins then that's just cope. But MGS is like "Hey, isn't it fucked up how - Infomation control! - Propaganda! - Nuclear War! - Child soldiers! - Soldiers abused and then forgotten!" and so on and so forth, so there's actually something to think about beyond just the gameplay loop.
Although I like the Kojima-ism storyline, I also just like the motherbase style gameplay loop.
