An Essay on My Favorite Media, and How They Understand and Misunderstand the Pitfalls of Legacy (Part One)

I am a now 37 year old man at the beginning of this writing. In my 31 years of playing video games, and slightly longer amounts of time consuming TV and movies, I have formed opinions about what things are good, and what things are bad. Obviously, I have not and cannot consume all media. There is simply too much media out there in the world, that it is highly likely that the entire human race cannot at this point collectively and cooperatively consume the billions upon billions of pieces of media that the human race has collectively developed; in nearly 5000 years of having the written word, thousands of years of organizing theatrical plays, and somewhere around 40,000 years maybe of creating songs with the most rudimentary bone flutes and percussion from the Stone Age.

But I do have my favorite pieces of media, which include but are not limited to, Dune, Star Wars, the Metal Gear Solid game series, Game of Thrones, and more. I have been thinking about and consuming media, gathering my favorites, talking about them and analyzing their themes and messaging in discussions with people, for most of my entire life. With that in mind, I would like to explore some of these media franchises that I love, and explain how these aforementioned properties all have a lot to say about one interesting concept: legacy. Future generations are often the subject of consideration for characters in media, especially when that media deals with an exceptionally long time line, such as in the case of Star Wars and Dune. But what are the pitfalls of legacy? Sometimes characters leave behind a legacy of an idea to uphold, a tradition to follow; and sometimes all the legacy they have to give the future generations, is pain.

In order to truly analyze my favorite media, I will also have to give as brief as I can, a synopsis of their stories, or specific points of the stories that I need to make my point. I certainly will not be rehashing literally every story ever made. But, each of these pieces of media deal with large systems of politics, and as a result, they all also deal with family to a great deal. Family dynamics are part and parcel with the idea of legacy, that of some kind of patriarch or leader of a clan of people, who worries about the impact of their actions upon the future generations to come, and worries about the ability of coming generations to either uphold that which the progenitor has built, or to fix the mistakes that the progenitor character had made. The impact of the now upon the future has been a key facet of human storytelling from the beginning of the written word. So with that in mind; let’s begin.

Part One: The Story of the Metal Gear Solid Series, Chronologically

I first began with MGS2, in the year of 2001. Put very simply to begin with, the Metal Gear Solid series tells the story of a handful of heroes and villains, who fight for control of, or fight to destroy, horrific technological doomsday devices of nuclear armament called Metal Gear, in a series of stories that deal with the fate of the entire world hanging on a knife’s edge, with themes of corporatized government, the “war economy” of war profiteering, environmentalism, nuclear weapons, AI, the digital computer age post Y2K, child soldiers, war crimes and brutality against civilians, and the ever-present prospect of global nuclear Armageddon. A massively popular series of mixed media centered primarily around its 7 main line video games and several secondary games that add to and sometimes change the main story, the MGS series diverges from our real-life history at the point of the beginning of World War Two.

But the story begins chronologically with MGS3, “Snake Eater”, the fifth main game in the series, where a veteran soldier from the Second World War, a woman code named “The Boss”, privately trains a young soldier in her veteran battle techniques, developing a military fighting style called CQC along with her protege, and then The Boss disappears from the United States forever. A longtime agent of the United States, part of a secret soldier unit called the Cobra Unit, The Boss and her Cobras saved the US war effort against the Axis Powers due to each person having a unique, largely unexplained, supernatural power.

Having become “the Mother of the Special Forces” after WW2, The Boss became a famous, feared, beloved celebrity military veteran worldwide, who then quickly and quietly encouraged her supernatural Cobra Unit to defect alongside her to the Soviet Union. But why? In 1963 at the height of the Cold War, The Boss allows a KGB Spetsnaz colonel to fire a portable American nuclear warhead that she stole and presented to him, at a secret Soviet weapons facility to turn the Cold War into a hot one. Secret negotiations take place between Soviet Russia’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the United States’ President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who sends the Boss’ aforementioned apprentice (a since CIA-trained Green Beret soldier, known only by what The Boss called him, “Jack”, whom the US military code names “Naked Snake”) to find The Boss and kill her, with orders to eliminate her entire unit. During the course of his mission in Soviet Russia, Jack encounters The Boss multiple times, who either beats him up or asks him questions, and talks to him about her disillusionment with the United States; the simple question “why did you defect?” upon Jack’s lips for most of the game.

The Boss has betrayed her protege, the last soldier she has ever trained, and he needs to understand why. She speaks cryptically, about how he will only understand why she has done this when the world breaks him, that her allegiance is not to the US or to the Soviet Union, but “to the end”, speaking about the mercurial and ever-changing nature of politics, and that it is both a tragedy and a necessity that a soldier obeys his duties and finish his mission, no matter how terrible or immoral his orders are. “Today’s friend will be tomorrow’s enemy, there is no such thing as an enemy in absolute terms”, she says, to Jack’s confusion. Along the way, Naked Snake discovers that a disgraced Soviet weapons designer named Aleksandr Granin has created a prototype of a “walking tank” (basically a giant walking robot) equipped with nuclear ICBMs, capable of firing nuclear missile strikes at any target in the world, from anywhere in the world; the ultimate expression of the ability of humankind to destroy itself completely. This man calls his creation “Metal Gear”, the namesake of the series.

Naked Snake, with the help of a joint US-British military intelligence operation commanded by a man code named “Major Zero”, and aided by a double-agent Soviet GRU soldier code named “Adam”; a disillusioned Soviet rocket scientist named Sokolov who just wants to defect to the US; and a femme fatale code named “EVA” (whose allegiances are at first believed to be with the NSA). Snake searches for The Boss behind enemy lines, discovering a stolen data disk containing the location of “The Philosophers’ Legacy”, the code name for a massive, hidden slush fund of billions of dollars, amassed by the countries that “won” WW2. The Philosopher’s Legacy is hungrily searched for by the returning Spetsnaz colonel, named Yevgeny Volgin, who seeks to win the Cold War for the Soviet Union by finding the Legacy, and funding the development of nuclear weapons that would obliterate the US.

With the help of these spies and defectors, and even help from The Boss herself, who again beats Jack up multiple times but also gives him the means to escape torture at Volgin’s hands, Naked Snake destroys the prototype nuclear tank, kills the Cobra Unit and Volgin, and after a climactic, very “video game” final battle, Snake executes The Boss. Despite hesitating, with The Boss demanding that he complete his mission because he is a soldier, and to remember her as a woman, as a lover, and a mentor, Jack solemnly kills The Boss with her own gun. EVA seduces Jack and steals the Philosopher’s Legacy from him, confessing in a cassette tape she leaves him that she was a Chinese sleeper agent; only for Ocelot to happily call the President of the United States, letting him know that his mission as a double-agent for the CIA was a success, the Soviet Union is collapsing, he gave the Chinese a fake copy of the “Legacy”, and the real one was on its way back to Washington. If you think that’s dumb, you’re right, and we’ve only just begun.

This mission forges Jack into a hardened, disillusioned, guilt-ridden and broken man. Taking The Boss’ bandana as a memento and wearing it for the rest of his life, Jack is indelibly changed by his experiences in 1960s Soviet Russia; he succeeds, but it absolutely shatters him. The accolades given to him by a grateful US military mean nothing to him. Killing the woman that he idolized, loved, and thought of as a mentor, even a mother, shatters his “idealistic” patriotism. And after seeing Ocelot outside of the Oval Office, saluting Jack with a grin, Jack realizes that his mission was all a game played by the US and Soviet Russia, vying for nothing more than power and money. The woman who meant the world to Jack, the US military sent him to kill her with a smile, all the while the men in charge knew that Jack was just enriching them for their own personal gain, and cleaning up their mess; they used him. Jack visits the grave of The Boss, weeping, and salutes the headstone. This is the moment, the climax of MGS3, where Jack decides to honor The Boss over the country that betrayed him, and take control of his own narrative.

The man idolized by the US government as “Big Boss, greater even than The Boss”, would defect from the US government in order to become a mercenary, a criminal, and a terrorist for the next 30 years, spending time in Latin America until 1974 (in the side game Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker). Seeking to stop the remnants of Granin’s prototype Metal Gear from getting out into the world, Big Boss would eventually fail to stop the proliferation of nuclear armed robots becoming the new doomsday weapons, at the hands of a psychotic CIA officer conducting illegal warfare and nuclear strikes in Costa Rica. The world would know Metal Gear, and unfortunately, only Jack’s “son” would be able to survive long enough to keep his dream, arguably his vengeance, of stopping Metal Gear alive. The Les Enfants Terribles (“The Terrible Infants”) Project, secretly undertaken by a group of American political leaders and businessmen calling themselves “The Philosophers”, would use the money of the Philosopher’s Legacy to see to the creation of clones of the “world’s greatest soldier” that they can mold to their aims; using a captured EVA as an unwilling broodmare.

Big Boss would then spend the rest of his life training soldiers and taking on military missions across the world for the highest bidder; training an elite group he first calls the Militaire Sans Frontieres (“Soldiers Without Borders”, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the actual Medicines Sans Frontieres, the real-life “Doctors Without Borders”). The MSF is a for-hire private army personally gathered and trained by Big Boss, made up of Soviet and US military defectors, spies, and guerilla militia men and women across the world; with no allegiance to any country, dedicated only to gathering and organizing disillusioned soldiers into a cohesive mercenary force, to go to war in illegal and unsanctioned military operations worldwide. He would create an independent nation at war with the entire world, an enclave for soldiers that governments forgot, and he would destroy all Metal Gear, and every nuclear missile, in the world.

In MGSV: The Phantom Pain, the as-of-yet final game in the saga, after the US government later attacks and destroys MSF in the late 1970s, Big Boss reforms them after being in the hospital for nearly a decade, creating the Diamond Dogs mercenary group, which Big Boss has to largely destroy later on in order to prevent a horrific virus from killing millions of innocent people, while also fighting a Metal Gear that would serve as a prototype for future Metal Gears controlled by an out-of-control US government. The Metal Gear that Big Boss fights in MGSV, code named “Sahelenthropus”, is developed by a cowardly but brilliant roboticist named Huey Emmerich, the same man who assisted the CIA in building Granin’s prototypes in Costa Rica in 1974. It is later revealed that while he may have thought he was helping, Emmerich called in the UN nuclear weapons inspectors in the late 70s to MSF’s “Mother Base”, which the CIA used as a pretext to attack and destroy MSF.

And then we learn at the end of the game that the Big Boss we play as in MGSV, also called Venom Snake or Punished Snake, is not the original Snake, not the “real” Big Boss. But this time, Venom is not a clone of Big Boss. Venom is a loyal MSF soldier, a helicopter pilot who was horrifically maimed in an explosion, and given years of surgery and some kind of mind control to become the Big Boss, to carry on his legacy, and it took nearly a decade for him to recover from this transformation. It is now the mid-1980s, the Diamond Dogs are fighting on behalf of the Afghani Mujahideen in Afghanistan during Soviet Russia’s failed invasion from 1979–1989, and later on fighting in the Angolan Civil War, from 1975–2002. Venom’s orders from Big Boss’ compatriots Adam (now calling himself Revolver Ocelot) and a man named Kazuhira Miller that Bug Boss met in Costa Rica, are to act as Big Boss and reform the Diamond Dogs, stop a mysterious virus from killing everyone in the world that speaks English (yes, it’s programmed to only kill English speakers), and fight Metal Gear while the real Big Boss is off setting up Zanzibar Land and Outer Heaven; it’s a very goofy game series.

In Metal Gear 1 and 2, the very first games of the series, during the “Zanzibar Land” and “Outer Heaven” Incidents, set in the turn of the 1980s into the 1990s, “Big Boss” takes the remnants of his mercenaries and gains control of a series of nuclear weapons and a manufactured Metal Gear weapon on the black market, after the world almost completely disarms its collective nuclear stockpiles. Now armed with the only nuclear arsenal on the planet and the means to hit anyone anywhere using the widely proliferating Metal Gear, “Big Boss” becomes a worldwide villain and criminal on such a scale that the world partially unites against him, sending the youngest soldier of FOXHOUND, the last unit trained by the Big Boss, to kill him, whom the US government codenames “Solid Snake”. Snake eventually destroys Metal Gear. It would take two games for the mythical, infamous and feared “Big Boss” to finally die at Snake’s hands.

Years after these events, in Metal Gear Solid 1 set in 2005, Solid Snake is sent to Shadow Moses Island, an attempt to restart Big Boss’ nuclear-armed independent, hostile mercenary nation, run by a man called “Liquid Snake”, who turns out to be Solid Snake’s “twin brother”. Liquid has recruited the remnants of FOXHOUND that Solid Snake trained under Big Boss with, and Revolver Ocelot, Big Boss’ old friend and compatriot. It is revealed in MGS1 that both Solid and Liquid are actually the clones of Big Boss, and this is why Solid was chosen to stop “Big Boss” during the Metal Gear missions. Aided by a rookie soldier named Meryl, who is the daughter of Snake’s general Roy Campbell who commands the Shadow Moses mission, Snake’s friend “Otacon”, a computer genius analyst who is the son of Huey Emmerich; and a mysterious cybernetic ninja calling himself Gray Fox; Snake defeats his brother Liquid, he defeats Ocelot, kills the remaining members of FOXHOUND, rescues Meryl from Shadow Moses, and with the help of Gray Fox sacrificing his life, Snake destroys Metal Gear.

Liquid and Ocelot escape from Shadow Moses, and the world is saved as far as we know. Snake, too, becomes disillusioned with the US government, and in MGS2: The Sons of Liberty, he forms a private nonprofit organization with Otacon, dedicated to fighting nuclear proliferation, and combating the global nuclear threat of Metal Gear, as they have spread across the world through black market means for the last 20 years thanks to the original Snake’s failure to stop the US military from getting Metal Gear. Working with a much larger and more powerful United Nations than in our world, Solid Snake and his Philanthropy nonprofit combats the American Marine Corps and remnants of the collapsed Soviet Union to keep Metal Gear prototypes out of the hands of every nation and terrorist group. When the US Marines act to develop their own Metal Gear prototype, a Soviet splinter faction attempts to blow up an oil tanker hiding the Metal Gear, hoping to steal it.

Unbeknownst to everyone, Liquid and Ocelot appear, to steal the prototype Metal Gear for themselves. Snake fails to stop the takeover, at the cost of an environmental disaster oil spill in the North Atlantic past the Hudson Bay, as the tanker sinks and the Marines die, which may or may not have also killed Liquid. “The Big Shell” cleanup facility was built by the US to clean the oil spill. Not too much later, the fictional 44th President of the United States, James Jackson, is kidnapped by a group of supernatural terrorists called Dead Cell, when he goes to view the “Big Shell” cleanup program, necessitating that the US government send a rookie soldier just out of their newest prototype “virtual reality training program” based on Solid and Naked Snake’s missions, to try to save the President, and the “nuclear football”, a briefcase with all of America’s nuclear weapons codes, and the means to fire them all.

This rookie soldier, Jack, is formerly code named “Snake”, but has his code name reset to “Raiden”, and over the course of MGS2 he is aided by his general, who is still Roy Campbell; Jack’s fiancee Rose, who works for Campbell and is trained as a military psychologist; Solid Snake working undercover posing as a Marine calling himself “Iroquois Plissken” (Snake is also an intentional nod to the also fictional “Snake Plisken” of Jack Carpenter’s Escape from New York and Escape from LA films); and a secretive, robotic-suited ninja warrior, a claimed successor to Gray Fox calling herself “Deepthroat”, who is the pregnant daughter of the disgraced Soviet colonel Gurlukovich who causes the tanker incident in MGS2. The President dies halfway through the mission, when Ocelot triggers the President’s pacemaker to stop working as Jack fights the members of Dead Cell, trying to prevent them from blowing up the Big Shell. With the mission a mess and a failure, Jack kills most of the Dead Cell members, and is captured by a man calling himself “Solidus Snake”, who claims he is the only true son of Big Boss, who tortures Jack.

Solidus, who in addition to being a failed clone of Big Boss, the first prototype in the Les Enfants Terribles Project, is also George Sears, the fictional 42nd President of the United States. Solidus explains that he was chosen by The Patriots to be their president and agent, but he believes that he caught wind of their conspiracies and is working to fight them. Solidus also reveals that he is Jack’s uncle, who raised him as a child soldier in Africa, revealing memories that Jack has buried deep down. Jack experiences PTSD through the resurfacing of traumatic memories, and appears to be breaking from reality as he confides in Rose, who is horrified that her fiancee has gone through so much pain. With Solid Snake and Deepthroat’s help, Solidus is driven off, Jack is freed, Deepthroat dies, and then our heroes realize that the Big Shell facility is a front for an AI intelligence.

The AI is called Arsenal Gear, which toys with Jack’s mind and forces him to fight a seemingly endless supply of ninjas and Metal Gears within the remains of the Big Shell that form its autonomous superstructure, mimicking Rose and Campbell with increasingly unhinged statements, forcing Jack to question whether his reality is even coherent, and whether Rose really even existed. Through Rose and Campbell, the AI explains to Jack that the AI itself was a creation of a secret military project to control social and traditional media, to shape the beliefs and the prejudices of the entire world, through advertising, psychology, and spooky mind control. The AI explains that it was built at the behest of the Patriots, the successors to America’s corporate and governmental power, The Philosophers.

Also called the “La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo”, The Patriots are the “true” leaders of the United States, an endless, shadowy cabal of conspiracy-brained, greedy villains who don’t care what happens to humanity as long as they, and only they, can control it and make money from it, forever. Jack is in his own private hell of endless battle with unending faceless enemies and dozens of Metal Gears that no one could manufacture so quickly, until Solid Snake helps upload a computer virus to kill the AI (the virus built by Otacon’s also genius little sister Emma, who dies from a stabbing by a Dead Cell member who is an immortal cyber “vampire” called “Vamp”). Solidus smashes the remains of the AI superstructure into New York Harbor, where Jack is forced to katana duel Solidus atop the remains of the Big Shell right outside the New York Stock Exchange, and personally kill him.

Seeing Jack nearly completely detached from reality, Snake helps to bring him back to his senses by speaking about the human condition and what we in the present owe to future generations, until the real Rose finds Jack in New York City and tells him she is pregnant with his baby. He throws away his US military dog tags and resolves to raise his child, but realizes that he cannot keep his family safe until these evil forces are destroyed entirely, so Raiden stoically walks away from the woman he loves and joins Solid Snake in his crusade to save the world from nuclear annihilation. Otacon then calls Snake after the mission is over, and explains to him that he’s been hacking government databases, and as far as Otacon can tell, The Patriots are all already dead.

Nearly 15 years or so later (diagetically in MGS4: Guns of the Patriots), Solid Snake has “rapidly aged” into an extremely old man, and the game explained eventually that this is due to a mysterious virus and silly complications with magical nano machines in his blood, which are now also in the blood of most professional soldiers. The game declares this to be the reason for Snake’s aging between games, despite the much more realistic fact that Solid Snake has canonically been a professional soldier for about 40 straight years, from the late 1980s to the mid-2020s. That much warfare would absolutely destroy the body of any man who could survive as an active duty soldier for more than 40 years, but sure, let’s chalk it up to magic nanobots and a secret virus in his blood that nobody knew about.

Assuming Snake was 20 something years old in the beginning of his career in the US Special Forces, after let’s say joining the normal Army as a recruit at 17, Solid Snake would still be in his late 50s at best, regardless of fake medical magic writing, and has been blown up, shot, poisoned, tortured, and smoked cigarettes regularly during those 40 years. I know former soldiers whose bodies were broken from serving in the military, whether or not they were shot at. Solid Snake has been through several wars fighting to personally stop no less than 3 canonical nuclear disasters at the point of MGS4. He has been through literal hell, and in his actual 60s, he is still fighting. Dear old dad would be proud.

Still fighting against (potentially) Liquid and Ocelot, Snake embarks on a journey through the Middle East, Eastern Europe (where he meets his genetic mother EVA, later re-code-named “Big Mama”), he goes to help guerillas in South America, fights super soldiers on a US Navy ship in the Atlantic, and ultimately back to the old “Outer Haven” of Shadow Moses Island, where the conflict between Solid and Liquid Snake began. Dealing entirely with Snake trying to track down an antidote to the virus that is killing him, Snake fights endless hordes of nameless soldiers, used as cannon fodder for private military corporations in endless conflicts whose only purpose is to make money for corporations and billionaires.

Snake tracks down and fights a series of supernatural, nano machine-powered beings, including the return of Vamp who repeatedly fights with Raiden. Jack has somehow become a katana-wielding cyber warrior, honoring the legacy and the deaths of both Deepthroat and Gray Fox. I never got a chance to play Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Jack’s standalone arcade game in the Metal Gear universe, but that game is apparently a hilarious blast. That game is one where Jack fights across the United States, killing super soldiers and Metal Gears by the scores, doing crazy robot sword combos, until he has an anime fight with the nano machine-enhanced, psychotic President of the United States, who is hellbent on world domination for some reason. The few clips I have seen of that goofy game are comedy gold.

In MGS4, Raiden and Snake chase Ocelot (who may or may not also be Liquid, after he grafted Liquid’s arm onto his body when he lost an arm to Deepthroat’s sword), and Liquid/Ocelot unleashes another AI program, a different one from the MGS2 AI, that mind controls and kills most of the modern soldiers in the 2010s, leading to global chaos and terrible death. Liquid/Ocelot explains that The Patriots, the shadowy, evil men who sought to control the world, are all dead now, and the world is his for the taking, because he now controls the AI that controls every soldier on the planet, so he’s the king of the world now. Raiden is wounded while killing Vamp, and is then later seriously maimed fighting a Metal Gear single-handedly with a sword. Snake nearly dies getting to, and then defeating Liquid/Ocelot in hand-to-hand combat. The virus in Snake’s body maybe, kills Liquid/Ocelot, for reasons I’m unsure of.

Deepthroat’s daughter, a little genius girl named Sunny adopted by Snake and Otacon, destroys the last AI with her magical computer genius powers, representing the absolute destruction of the old world as America, shadowy corporations, secret societies, and PMCs once ruled it. Meryl gets married to a goofy young soldier with IBS named Johnny, who is a joke character. Johnny is a Japanophile, and insists his unit calls him “Akiba” for some reason, he shits his pants during battle because his very understandable anxiety at being in real war gives him IBS. He is the exact opposite of Snake, who is a battle-hardened veteran, and a “cool guy” character. Johnny is a nervous, anxious wreck, screaming in terror, hiding from gunfire, and pooping his pants. Johnny’s existence is also a nod to a long-standing joke in the series of every subsequent Snake; Naked, Solid, and Raiden, being captured and jailed, and then befriending enemy soldiers, all of whom are inexplicably named Johnny). Johnny saves Meryl’s life (and was her subordinate officer), but they get married anyway. Meanwhile, a crippled Jack gets to meet his son for the first time (who should be at least a teenager in the time frame instead of the shy little boy he is portrayed as), and everyone rejoices, except for Snake who stoically disappears. With the clones of Big Boss all dead except for Solid Snake, he returns to America one final time, in order to die. Choosing to commit suicide by his own gun, in front of the placeholder headstone of Big Boss in the US, the only man to ever be something akin to a father to him, Snake is actually stopped, by the very same father figure he thought he killed more than 30 years prior.

Yes, Big Boss never died, he somehow survived for…reasons (those reasons were not decided upon because MGSV hadn’t been written yet), and he explains everything to Solid Snake one last time. The entire story, all of this suffering, stopping nuclear Armageddon a full four times and that’s just in the main games, millions of innocent people, soldiers, and some very not innocent people dead, a full 60 actual years of constant war in this game series, all of it; was a backdrop to a symbolic war of the minds between Big Boss, who wanted to save the world, and Major Zero, who wanted to control it. Yes, apparently Zero was the big bad of all of it, and he is single-handedly responsible for the Philosophers and their Legacy, the war economy, The Patriots, the AI constructs that enslaved all the soldiers of the world, all of it. Zero, who was already declared to be 55 by the time of the Virtuous mission in August 24th, 1964, survives about 80 years of warfare across the world and was secretly behind everything, even the events that definitely were perpetrated by only one man, they were somehow secretly carrying out Zero’s orders, whether they knew it or not. I love how dumb this series is.

The virus that Solid Snake was carrying in his body was actually, magically, the only thing capable of putting the genetically and cybernetically prolonged Big Boss and Zero to their final, permanent rests. It was not a death sentence for Snake as he was told, but for the men who started the war that nearly destroyed the entire world. The more than 130 years-old Zero dies in agony, helpless in a chair (Big Boss apparently wheeled in the corpse of his enemy to gloat one final time before death; that’s a mood). The man called Big Boss, worshiped, hated, feared, and loved throughout the world, a broken old warrior named Jack would finally die at over 90 years old, proud of his son for finishing what Jack started. Snake retires, deciding to raise Sunny together with his best friend in a not-at-all gay living situation, before presumably dying of old age and exhaustion, in a world that finally can be at peace, and the story as we know it chronologically ends in a note of hesitant optimism.

Debriefing the Metal Gear Solid Series

So what the hell happened? You see, Zero believed in all of the old world values; his actions, which were driven by nationalism, capitalism, greed, and war profiteering, resulted in literally endless war that any number of powerful and unscrupulous men could profit from (and they did), creating and training child soldiers to fuel endless warfare. Zero was a barbaric, cruel man hiding behind an old world, 1940s, “let’s beat the Jerrys, lads” sensibility. Zero used a sense of nobility, propriety, politeness, and conservative “stiff upper lip” British dignity to cover up crimes, conspiracies, and the literal creation of tortured, monstrous supernatural soldiers. He ordered men to engineer ridiculously complicated AI constructs that would commit horrific acts of torture, political assassination, and mind-control. All of this to create and maintain a sense of power over the entire world. Zero was the embodiment of greed and emptiness, he was a black hole, lacking in humanity.

For Big Boss, it was the breaking of his body and spirit in Soviet Russia that shaped him into a warrior seemingly out of time, practically pulled out of mythology, to fight endlessly trying to save the world. Losing The Boss taught Jack that the things he once believed in, nationalism, obedience, and being an apolitical soldier, were not only illusions, they were actively holding him back. He realized that the only way to save the world from its madness of Cold War tribalism, nuclear terror, and America’s racist paranoia of endless Communist enemies seeking to undo the glory of American exceptionalism and individualism, was to give literally everyone a bad guy to unite against. I believe that Big Boss, following in the footsteps of his creator, became the bad guy in order to save the world from itself. I believe that he wanted to grab up all of the nuclear weapons the world had left, to let “his only true son” stop him and destroy them, because Solid Snake was the only one who could stop him; and maybe Solid Snake was the only one who would understand what the elder Snake was trying to do.

Solid Snake, like his father, pitched himself in a desperate battle against the United States, the remnants of Soviet Russia, nameless PMCs and insane terrorists, in 40 years of pain and suffering like his father, all because arguably, they knew what was right, despite what the world as a whole believes. But is that the truth? A lot of fans of the series are constantly debating whether Big Boss is supposed to be viewed as a hero, or as a villain. Predictably, the attempts to answer this center around pouring over the lore, getting bogged down in endless details, analyzing every line of dialogue in both the Japanese and English versions of the games, “because you have to read it in the original Japanese to really understand it!”, some cry. If they can decode all the secrets in the holy texts, you see, only then will they understand. Metal Gear Solid doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but its devotees believe that if they can just get the lore right, they will finally understand the truth of the ever-wise and genius Kojima, everything will make sense, there will be no plot holes, contradictions, or inconsistencies, and all will be right with the world; Hail Kojima.

I can’t speak to any of that, and I haven’t played his other games like Policenauts or Death Stranding, though I’ve heard good things (I have since played Death Stranding). I’m by no means a “Kojima purist”. I believe that MGS is the story of soldiers and spies who risked everything to save the world from itself, to go to war with the worst people imaginable, the most evil forces of greed, apathy, and cruelty in human, and sometimes supernatural forms. MGS is the story of revolution and freedom, it is a very long story that serves as a lesson to those willing to learn it: to put away the weapons of the past and have the courage to grow into better people, to have the courage to be vulnerable and human in a world full of people obsessed with using violence to “protect” themselves from vulnerability and fear.

I believe that Metal Gear Solid is the lesson that world domination, riches, control, and power are never and can never be enough, for those that worship and chase these things. It is a lesson to allow the best things in us to overcome the worst parts of our natures; to build a world where soldiers are no longer needed, and once we accept that and allow that to be, only then can we have world peace. We have to risk being totally vulnerable as a species, to give up the craft of warfare, before we can learn to live in a world that doesn’t need to go to war anymore. I believe that is what Kojima’s anti-nuke, anti-war messaging taught me. “True” or not, that’s truth enough in my book, and good enough for me.

I have at this point played Metal Gear games in the series for more than 25 years of my life. There are a lot of things that can be said about fandoms, about the psychology of fandoms, and the pitfalls of thinking that your protagonist is the hero because he is the protagonist. “Big Boss did nothing wrong, ever!” some MGS fans cry. They don’t seem to understand that the main character is not the moral hero by default, they’re just a main character. Dune fans fall into this trap, Game of Thrones fans fall into it, it’s incredibly easy. I don’t begrudge people for wanting to see their favorite characters in a good light. I too, poured over lore and details of the MGS series in my teen years, long ago. I can tell you this; a story is much more satisfying when you let it have flaws, when you let it have different interpretations, especially diagetically, or “in-universe”.

Here’s a question. What about the legacy of Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear, himself? The MGS fans are viciously divided over whether or not MGS4, the chronological end of the story, is a good story. The knee-jerk reaction to try to whitewash a character in a story, any story, and paint over his flaws so he can always be the good guy, and he can secretly always have been right all along, is how children interpret stories, and it can be argued, it should be at least asked, did Kojima fall into this trap when he finished MGS4? Children on the internet want the story to be wrapped up with a nice, neat little bow. Real stories, real history, are messy, confusing, and sometimes deeply sad stories. People make mistakes and people think their actions will be interpreted one way, and the common consensus will almost always go the other way. I’m not saying that there is no way for MGS to end decisively and be happy, but it is undeniable that the ending to MGS4 divides the fan base. The mistake comes when we give in to the desire to lionize our main characters, in order to make ourselves feel better about liking them.

And then with MGSV, an exhausted Kojima who thought he wrapped up the story with MGS4, comes up with MGSV to give the fans what they say they wanted, to give us a complete character study, a surrealist deconstruction of the man fans love and worship, both Big Boss and Kojima himself. MGSV shows a Big Boss, who we think is our Big Boss, killing his own soldiers, and with a metal chunk still in his head looking like a demon’s horn out of Japanese myth, Venom Snake smears the ashes of his own comrades onto his face, giving himself a white face, intentionally reminiscent of a Kabuki theater mask. Venom Snake in his identity as Big Boss, becomes the literal demon of the world, to feed the legend of Big Boss and secretly serve as a decoy Big Boss, to protect the real him from the CIA seeking to kill him, so he can set up the events of Metal Gears 1 and 2. Venom Snake is a physically and psychologically shattered man, who takes up the mantle of the biggest bad guy in the world, because he likes it and it feels good. Venom wants to kill the past, and kill the man he actually was, to, as Ocelot told him, “be the legend, come to life!”

Fans look at their screens as the credits roll, and fans start screeching, because how dare Kojima write a story where Snake, any Snake, any Big Boss, did bad things? They ask, “how could you betray us, Kojima? How could you do this to ME personally?” They saw the same story I did. They had the same access to the other video games that I did. They do not understand that this is not about fandom. Artists cannot write with fandom in mind because fandom is by definition impossible to predict, and since all the fans worldwide all like different things in their lives, united only by their membership to liking one specific piece of media, it is literally impossible to write any piece of media that will be universally loved by all the fans. Writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians all discovered this millenia ago, and it is not Kojima’s fault that his fans can’t be pleased by anything, because they don’t understand how hard it is to write any piece of art.

Kojima is done with Metal Gear and there aren’t going to be any more games (after the MGS3 remaster was taken out of Kojima’s hands by Konami), and arguably after creative control for MGSV was taken out of Kojima’s hands as some fans claim, despite the fact that Kojima himself has stated he is done, he no longer has a relationship with Konami, he is moving on to more projects, more Death Stranding, more different stuff, other stuff. The fans cannot accept this to be true. They want, they need more Metal Gear, “make it good the way we like; no, not like that!” The fans don’t want to let Kojima and Metal Gear go. They want more, always more, and are constantly complaining that what is being made is not what they want. The only conclusion that I can come to is that so many millions of fans of anything specifically want to not think about the media that they consume, and just want to blow things up mindlessly.

Maybe, just maybe, the ending to MGSV is so weird and bleak because it’s Kojima commenting on how futile and infuriating it is to try to give fans what they want when all they do is complain. The second that art has a message in it that is a little hard to digest, a little difficult to accept because it contradicts what they’ve already decided is the truth, the fans will screech and rage, and say that the game isn’t canon to them, it’s a dream, or not real, it’s fake, “woke and gay”, it’s liberal communist propaganda, whatever. “It’s not MY Metal Gear!” they say. What they want is to go back in time, and experience Metal Gear 1 up until Metal Gear Solid 3 all over again, forgetting that MGS4 and MGSV ever existed, and they can’t. Nostalgia is the death of art in my opinion; what these people really want is to feel how the games made them feel when they were kids, but no matter what Kojima makes he can’t make you feel like a kid anymore, because you’re not a kid anymore.

Naked and Solid Snake will never be perpetually 25 or whatever, in their physical primes forever, endlessly fighting the forces that want to control mankind. Most of our villains and heroes of the story are dead and gone, and you can’t ever get them back. To write a story where, “somehow, Solid Snake was re-cloned, and he’s young and strong again, and somehow a one-armed Liquid crawls out of the depths of the North Atlantic, and this time Liquid has the arm of Zero, and he’s basically Zero again, and maybe Sunny has to be the new cyber ninja, because Jack had to retire to live with Rose, and Commander Meryl can fight off Liquid’s armies with the help of Jack’s son, who is also a soldier now, and then a big fucking Metal Gear crawls out of the ocean and Mei Ling shoots it from her battleship or whatever, and Snake has to go and find Big Boss’ old 1911 pistol, and he has to shoot Liquid in the face to finally kill him, but for real this time!” Apparently, slop like what I just thought up in five seconds might be what the fans want. Is that really what you want? Is a story slapped together that stupidly and lazily actually better than just…coming to terms with your own emotions, how you feel about Metal Gear?

For God’s sake, look at Star Wars fans. I was exposed to Star Wars at 6 years old, that was more than 30 years ago now. I love Star Wars, but I hate its fans. Look at how toxic, angry, and screaming they are. They don’t know what they want, or why they want it. George Lucas made three movies in the 70s and 80s that people now love. At the time, A New Hope was called childish garbage, and Empire Strikes Back was called an unrealistic sequel that missed the point of the first film, and Return of the Jedi was derided by critics as unsatisfying and confusing. Then 30 years later, people clamor for more Star Wars. Lucas makes more Star Wars, this time a deeply serious, deconstruction character study of Darth Vader and how he came to be that man, and they hated it. Suddenly, the original trilogy is perfect and unimpeachable, and “always had been”. Go back and look at the reviews of the old movies when they came out, critics did not like them. Star Wars only reached the cultural juggernaut it became because of its fandom, their nostalgia, and the hunger for more content. So George Lucas said “fuck it” and sold Star Wars off to Disney. Now when Disney makes a Star Wars thing, they either worship it, or more likely they scream about how much they hate it, and suddenly, the prequel trilogy “was always” good, say the fans. “Compared to this Disney bullshit, the prequels always were cinematic masterpieces,” the fans claim, even though I was there in the 2000s, I remember how Star Wars fans derided the prequels! But once a new thing comes, the thing before it was declared always actually good, and the new thing is now bad, until something new comes along.

It’s what they said about MGS2, itself a completely self-conscious retelling of MGS1, which was itself a slightly different retelling of the first two Metal Gear games. Kojima is telling the same story three times by the time we get to MGS2, only this time MGS2 is intentionally a deconstruction of it, and at the time MGS2 was derided as confusing, long-winded, boring, and weird. This nostalgia brain rot syndrome gets even worse when you treat one guy like the only genius in the room, and MGS fans make that mistake all day, every day. Kojima himself fell victim to “main character syndrome” because he was treated by his own fan base like a genius auteur filmmaker, a thing that Kojima has always admitted he wanted to be. The fans say, “Oh, just cook, Kojima! Make something brilliant and you’ll be loved forever!” He does it, they love him. Then he tries to improve upon something, tell a different story or a different kind of story, and then all of a sudden the fans hate it, “why didn’t you just make the thing we wanted, Kojima?!” and it’s their mistake for treating a man with the same flaws we all have, as a god in the first place.

Because fans don’t actually question themselves about what they want. Kojima makes a thing people didn’t like and all of a sudden a billion fans start screeching about how Kojima personally betrayed them, specifically. “How dare you do this to your loyal fans?!” He’s trying to make art. He’s trying to tell a story. He doesn’t give a shit about what we think about his story, he’s not writing it with fan approval in mind. Good stories are not written by a committee of thousands, but some people want that story Kojima made to be about how one man was always right, and saved the world, and never did anything wrong. That is doing oneself a massive, massive disservice. Some people need to grow up, accept the flaws that their favorite characters have, and realize that to be a complex character is to be a more human, a more relatable character.

So many of these boys like Big Boss, because they want to be him. You’re never going to be him, and you’re not supposed to want to be. You’re supposed to see his flaws, his mistakes, and think about the flaws and mistakes made by our own leaders, our own political systems. You’re supposed to be thinking about the real world, our world. MGS fans think the story is about cool spies and broken soldiers, dumb robot bullshit, and political machinations. Yeah, it is about that. It’s also about how easy it is to screw the world up entirely, forever, and that’s why we cannot let our political leaders ruin the world for their own short term greed. The entire MGS series has one of the strongest environmentalist, anti-nuclear weapon stances in all of media, but many just look and say, “wow, cool robots! Ninjas and AI cyber dudes, whoa!” Yeah, Metal Gear is fun, silly, and intentionally goofy as hell. But you’re also supposed to realize that this war economy and the creation of the Metal Gears are bad things; “they are the birthing pains of a new world that struggles to be born from the corpse of the old world”.

Big Boss wanted to create a world where soldiers could never be left behind, always taken care of, always useful, always ready to fight, because the world failed the woman he loved, his symbolic “mother” and teacher. She died being the bad guy, trying to stop the nuclear apocalypse, and he was so heartbroken by that sacrifice, that he had to honor it by continuing it. And so the new Big Boss took her place, and created an independent mercenary state that effectively declares war on the entire world. Even he did not realize that maybe, just maybe, what he needed was a world peaceful enough that he can finally rest and die like he’s supposed to. A world where soldiers no longer need to exist, a world without nukes, a world where despite humanity’s flaws, as much as we are all just stupid apes with sticks, Big Boss needed to create a world that we could not end through our own greed and stupidity. So to try to help that world be born, he became its villain, and then he created Venom to continue that legacy.

Is that a neat and tidy story? Hell no, I’ve never seen a story with more plot holes, contradictions, retcons, and inconsistencies than Metal Gear. But that’s why it’s great. And in my opinion, the endings to Metal Gear Solid 2, 3, 4, and V are more important than the other games in the series. I believe that Kojima at one point wanted us to realize that war is not inevitable and unstoppable; it is something we have to grow out of. Look, why don’t I just settle all the fan debating myself? Was Big Boss a villain? Undeniably, yes. A war criminal? Absolutely, yes he is. A terrorist? Without question. The real question, though, is this. Can he be those things and still also be trying to save the world from itself? Yes. Can he make mistakes along the way? Yes. Is he in control of his legend? No. Never at any point does he control what other people believe about him, and neither was Kojima. The difference is that Kojima knows it when his fans don’t.

These fans are people who are too scared to accept these simple facts of the character of Big Boss; simple facts about all humans. We are not neat and tidy, we are messy people by nature. To quote K from Men In Black, “No, a person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.” Idolizing and worshiping this man as a paragon of goodness is not only missing the entire point of the story and the message that Kojima seems to have, but it also actively makes people worse at understanding stories and understanding what lessons about humanity we can learn from them. Metal Gear is not about Big Boss or Solid Snake, or Jack or Otacon, in a vacuum. Metal Gear is about having the courage to stand up and fight to make the world better, whoever stands up to answer that call deserves to be remembered, and that doesn’t by default make them a hero for doing so, even if the ideal they’re fighting for is the correct one. Metal Gear ends with hope in MGS4 because it’s the beginning of a world that can start letting go of the need for war. Literally the best thing that a soldier with a conscience can hope for is a world that no longer needs him to fight in it, and that is why Old Snake goes to die. That, and that alone, is the source of rage that Metal Gear fans have. They don’t want their stories to die, they want Snake to live forever. Part of why MGS4 was so hated by the fans upon its release was because Kojima was trying to end the story, and fans just couldn’t let it go, the trailer literally had Solid Snake say that this story was the end of the saga. MGSV was therefore, an act of frustration by a creator who was literally being abused and held hostage by the fans who claimed to worship and love him.

Stop taking events literally all the time, and start trying to understand them in different ways, think about parable lessons, themes and tropes, think about symbolism and metaphor; you know, the hard stuff to analyze. Leaving your understanding of Metal Gear at the door by only talking about what did or didn’t “really happen” is both doing yourself a disservice, and disgraces Kojima, the man who spent his life telling stories about cool soldiers fighting robots, but who wanted you to think and feel while doing so. Challenge your own preconceived notions, and question the way that you think in the first place. That will teach you not what to think, but how to think. Many writers have made the same mistake that Kojima arguably made in writing MGS4; they fell in love with their protagonists who were flawed people, and eventually stopped writing in those flaws to justify and celebrate their love for the character. They whitewashed their characters, Flanderized them, made them less complex, less flawed, and less interesting, so that they can feel better about liking the character and identifying with them. The only reason that Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining is because Kubrick painted Jack Torrance not as a flawed, ultimately good man who was driven mad by ghosts, but as an abusive asshole whom the ghosts “unleashed”, to see how far Jack would go to be the asshole he already was. Stephen King identified too strongly with Jack Torrance, and thought that if the movie said that Jack was always an asshole, then by extension so was Stephen King, and that wasn’t something he was prepared to handle. This action is unfortunately all too common, and it is the death of authorship and the death of creativity. It’s putting one’s own ego as the writer into the story, and sadly I believe Kojima made that mistake.

While I love Kojima’s work, his work is simultaneously loved and derided for being confusing, overly-detailed, tediously self-referential, self-conscious retellings of the same story, but this time with even more dumb robot bullshit. He can’t resist putting in dumb sex jokes and women in bikinis even when it doesn’t make sense, because “that’s what an otaku would do.” His games have gay jokes, masturbation jokes, references to sexual assault, pee and poop jokes, and old men leering after women and girls that are too young, because that’s what Japan finds funny. Japan loves American culture despite not fully understanding it. Death Stranding is a highly interesting, weird horror story written in an America that is only identifiable as America because people keep saying it’s set there. Kojima’s works are weird, wonderful, and flawed, and don’t let anyone try to argue that every one of them is a masterpiece. Kojima is clearly aware of how his fans view him, and I can only hope that Kojima has over the course of his career, grown. Not as an artist or as a game director, but as a human being. Remember, the thing we’re all supposed to be doing?

Maybe I feel this way because life has given me a four year old, who, while not my own child, I love him more than I have ever loved another human being. Maybe it’s because Metal Gear taught me that blood and genetics don’t matter as much as the bonds you make with the people who like you, believe in giving the world something better, something to believe in, a future to fight for, to die for, and the hope of things better. Kojima’s final entries in the story, MGS4 and V, were self-conscious deconstructions of his own myths that he spent the last few decades of his life telling us. By telling us these stories, Kojima was saying goodbye, telling us that he is done, and we need to accept that. The fan resistance to the end of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear series is literally a child’s tantrum, upset that they’re not in control of the events of the world, and look, I get it, but somewhere along the line I learned when it’s time to let things I love go. Many people online have not yet learned that lesson.

All I can do is heave a big sigh, crouch down to your level, quiet your tantrum screaming about how you want more Metal Gear, but not the kind that makes you think about politics and warfare as a symptom of problems in society, and I’d say to you, “Now buddy, I know you love your soldier toy, but Snake has been a beat up and broken toy for a while now, huh? You’ve had your buddy for almost 40 years now (Metal Gear came out in 1987). You’ve been through a lot of stories with your old buddy, huh? And he’s been a great friend to you, the best soldier buddy a little guy like you could have, right? Yeah, that’s right! Don’t you think maybe it’s time to give old Snake a soldier’s burial, with all the honors you want to give him because I know how much you loved your buddy? Maybe it’s time to let go, pal. It’s OK; I know it’s sad and hard, but this is all part of growing up, and your buddy John is right here to help you through it, OK? I love you, pal. It’s all going to be OK. You can let go of your Snake now.”