Metal Gear The Soild Ground Pains Zero Five Rising The Backdown

[Jagos]

... Holy shit...

Kojima just decided to say "Fuck it..."

Bit, just a reminder, Snatcher was based off of hentai games of the time. Sexuality is handled differently in Japan and given the subject matter here, Kojima is taking a HUGE risk in showing you what can happen on the battlefield.

We hear about this stuff on the news, particularly with the women being raped by superiors in the military but we haven't seen that in a video game. We haven't seen the Gitmo prisoners as they were tortured. The point here is that MGS 5 seems to be making a game about exactly that.

The only other game that was doing anything similar to this was The Fall of Fallujah and that was about the experiences of the soldier and received a HUGE backlash, forcing its premature termination.

Now we're really going to see how brutal war can be... In a video game.

I don't think anyone is going to be ready for this...

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Originally Posted by Bells

after playing... i'm not sure i can say that it is... sexist. It's absolutely brutal... but i got a bigger ''this is the horror of war'' vibe from the whole thing.

just another spoiler that i forgot to mention...

Before it is revealed that Paz had an explosive device inserted into her privates it is very strongly alluded that she also suffered genital mutilation as part of her abuse and torture. Maybe as part of the procedure. Can't tell if it was part of the whole process with her or if it was an isolated instance.

It's cruel, cold and quite disturbing... but i didn't see it as Fetishistic, i saw it as twisted.... fucked up. And the point that this game is trying to make such blunt parallels with real life war stories is really what irks the most... that it's not necessarily an overblown fantastic notion of the truth... it is presented more like a raw view of the stuff that happens in these war scenarios... all condensed and compressed into a quite nightmarish scenario really...

As a ZOE fan even I can second this. it seems a good number of the games he's worked on so far are geared towards this and how terrible we as a species can really be.

[Bells]

Also worth mentioning Rainbow Six Patriots, that literally retreated into the shadows when it was pretty much done for a few more years just to avoid backlash over similar topics...

Just to make it perfectly clear for those who didn't play it yet... the game makes it crystal clear, explicitly so... that Paz is an Enemy Combatant in this ''shadowy'' prison and is being treated as such. It's not out of the blue... you are given context... but the game unfolds to show you just how ugly that context really is... and it is quite dark.

[BitVyper]

after playing... i'm not sure i can say that it is... sexist.

It pretty much sounds like Kojima's weird thing for torturing women to a tee. I can't even be that bothered by it, I just don't understand how anyone can be surprised by it anymore. It's a Kojima game; it will have partial ENF (total ENF if Raiden counts hur hur) and it will have vaguely (or sometimes explicitly) fetishized tortured/brutalized women. That's how Hideo rolls.

Edit: Like no, I'm not even saying it makes his games something you shouldn't play (the GAMEPLAY in his games, on the other hand...). Do whatever you want, just, well you should be pretty aware of what you're getting into by now.

[Jagos]

So we're just going to ignore the child soldiers and all the other craziness in the MGS games?

[BitVyper]

Originally Posted by Jagos

So we're just going to ignore the child soldiers and all the other craziness in the MGS games?

Well.... he's not doing anything like this with child soldiers. At least I hope not.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

I wouldn't call it a fetish. Sexual intent would be more apparent if it was. for example the tank top Ken easter egg in ZOE2. And her space suit in that game.

with MGS5, he's going for a more darker and more surreal story about the horrors of war.




EDIT whoops wrong vid... there we go this is the one I was thinking about. 9:43

[Ryong]

Originally Posted by BitVyper

Well.... he's not doing anything like this with child soldiers. At least I hope not.

I want to say he was trying to pull off some meta crap about perverted gamers, but then it was too sexual and so whatever meta commentary there could be was lost.

[Bells]

Originally Posted by BitVyper

Well.... he's not doing anything like this with child soldiers. At least I hope not.

uhmmm... debatable.

I totally see your point though, but if you accept Chico as the sole persona for child soldiers in that game... here are some spoilers of things that are done to Chico in Ground Zeroes.



1- He can't walk because his ankles were locked by metal bolts surgically inserted through his feet. This seems to be how they keep the POW's from running away.

2- All prisioners (and thus chico) are kept in cages. Not cells, but specifically cages... and they are reminded of the fact that their holding cells are cages on purpose and repeatedly during interrogation.

3- He was forced to rape Paz... so there is that...

4- The whole time he is kept with earphones on and you don't know why... he also thinks Paz is dead... until snakes listen to what he is listening and it's just a loop tape of Paz being tortured over and over with music in the background.

5- He keeps the earphone jacket attacked to a hole on his chest while not connected to his walkman (i don't know if this has meaning... it's just fucked up). Makes the case for his mental well-being at this point...


You can say that Chico is a child only in age (he is 13...) due to his life and all that he has seen... but it is still very much so a kid.

I might be off by a mile here... but i think that perhaps Kojima drives certain brutal scenarios for women because, in a sense, it irks us more... it hits harder. At least this seems to me like what he would be going for...

We see a rugged soldier full of scars and being tortured and we are kinda desensitized about that. Specially in entertainment media. It's ugly and may be very graphical but it doesn't really... makes you shift in your sit uncomfortably, y'know? At least not in an average generalization of the facts... and Paz is not just any random girl either she is an able and highly trained fighter in her own rights. With motivations, goals and overall a personality of her own...

I dunno, i think if they replaced Paz with, let's say Raiden (who, BTW, had his whole body ripped apart from jaw down to be made into a cyborg... but that was never really shown) and kept all the events the same... it would still be fucked up and just as ugly. It just... somehow being Paz adds an extra layer of uncomfortable...




With all that being said... and changing gears a bit... the runnign theory is that David Hayter is actually involved in MGS5.

The ongoing idea is that he is ''Raiden 2.0'' and that MGS 5 is the final game that links directly into the very first Metal Gear game. Under that notice, Big Boss would meet during MGS 5 the kid named ''Solid Snake'', and that would be David, as it would make more sense to have 2 Snakes in a game if they had different VO's... being the same guy would be weird, specially since the age difference would be beyond apparent.

Here is the catch though... Solid Snake was born in 1972 and Phantom pain is going to take place on 1984, making Solid Snake 12 years old. So either there is a time skip in the end and you have David as snake, or he is not really in the game but Big Boss takes snake with him in the end of MGS5.

[Solid Snake]

I'm all for a game that confronts harsh realities of war (I think Spec Ops: The Line is a good example of a game that accomplishes just that.)
And I'm even all for a game that confronts sexism in modern society. I don't think rape, if it's handled appropriately, sincerely and with tact, should be off-limits. I think with the right approach, you absolutely could make an experience that exposes the awful misogyny and condemns it.

This just doesn't feel like Kojima's actually condemning misogyny, though. It feels more like Kojima's relying upon the thin excuse of "War is Hell" to include degrading moments that just don't add any value.

Like, I don't mind the notion that MGSV would explore how traumatic it'd be for a young woman like Paz to be raped. I haven't played Ground Zeroes, so I don't know whether Kojima used the proper tone and tenor of conveying this information to the gamer, but if the right writers and game designers show appropriate deference while tackling the subject matter, it can be really eye-opening for a predominantly male audience to be confronted with a truly hideous side-effect of war that's rarely explored in a medium that tends to merely celebrate rampant acts of chaos.

...But sticking in a bomb in her vagina?!?
That doesn't add anything to the conversation, it's just sexually degrading because "Paz is a woman, therefore let's put the bomb in her lady-parts!"
I mean, from a plot perspective the bomb could be anywhere, even outside her body, and so long as it goes off and kills her, it serves that narrative function.
I mean, imagine the narrative equivalent if Paz simply changed genders. No writer's going to put a bomb in a man's urethra. It's stupid.

It's unfortunate because there's actually topics MGSV is exploring that I want more video games to explore, more games absolutely need to take lessons from Spec Ops and try to tackle the harsh, ugly realities of what war is really like as opposed to glossing it up for an audience.

But there's a way to do that without delving into unnecessary levels of misogynistic sexual depravity. And the problem when the envelope is pushed too far is that you're left wondering whether a particular depraved scene or a particular discomforting plot twist is present because the writer's making an unambiguous statement against that conduct, or if the writer isn't trying to have his cake and eat it too, relying upon a generic Anti-War message to provide moments of depravity for the audience that reinforce regressive norms and tropes. Of course the female character who's tortured is going to be reduced to a sex object! Of course she's going to be raped! Of course we're going to explicitly reduce her to her genitals! Of course she's going to be tortured more severely than the boys!!!