#analysis or something

narrative reasons

narratively, killua and gon have to part for two main reasons. the first is that with gons dream of seeing his father fulfilled (or about to be fulfilled) gon no longer has a goal to work toward, therefore killua is no longer able to piggy back off of gons ambitions until he figures out what he wants to do. keeping them together after this, even if alluka wasnt there, would render them uninteresting to the audience because they wouldnt be doing a whole lot of anything. just hanging out- shooting the shit, etc.

the second reason is gons character development. a lot of people think the seperation is more about killuas development, allowing him to grow and learn what he wants in life, apart from just gon. but their seperation is actually designed to kickstart gons own rapid development and growth. ill explain how here:

gon at the end of the CAA has lost his nen and is effectively starting from the ground up. many people see this as a punishment and a setback, consequences for his actions in the CAA, but i think it’ll end up being the best thing that could have happened to gon, especially for his nen. why?

gons nen technique: jajanken vs killua’s electric nen.

gons jajanken, or his rock-paper-scissors, is extremely ineffective, full of weak points and is more often than not, more detrimental to gon than it is to his enemies.

we’re constantly being told through side characters like knuckle and even kite’s observations about gons nen that it is sloppy, unrefined, too slow, too obvious. this is contrasted by killua, who so far has been on the same nen level as gon and offered the same criticism and training, yet in the CAA his nen technique is only ever complimented— a sharp contrast where previously there was none.

gon also loses a majority of his fights in the CAA. not that he has many, but his losses are very heavily focused on. this is unlike killua, who also loses against shoot, but the reason (illumis needle) is quickly discovered, overcame and killua proceeds to then *mostly* win his fights, only losing one for the narrative purpose of starting his friendship with ikalgo. gon however doesnt manage to overcome his fatal flaw, or even work towards doing so. this flaw is his techniques rigid nature, but its also worsened by gons lack of strategic skill, adaptability, logical reasoning, and emotional regulation when in battle.

all of these issues come to a head in his fight against pitou, he loses himself in his anguish, doesnt accept any help— behaving illogically and being led by his need to satisfy his conscience before his common sense, but also his lack of adaptability— often complimented as his determination and source of strength— this comes back to bite him as his stubbornness. gons technique is a physical manifestation of this stubbornness— it’s extremely rigid, only having three options to use against someone, only one of which is very strong, and is shown to be completely ineffective against a stronger opponent, because it refuses to adapt. it also is wasteful, consuming wild amounts of his aura leading him to constantly collapse, this again is a reflection of what gon’s mindset is doing to him, working himself to exhaustion and constantly needing to be saved.

killuas technique is far more adaptable and we see it develop into something that many characters openly admire and praise it’s effectiveness. it has room to grow to crazy power levels and suits killua extremely well.

jajanken however, despite having the same screentime as killuas electricity, doesnt have any such development, we barely see scissors or paper, and whenever we do see it, its often accompanied by a character critiquing it.

jajanken is a manifestation of gons strong but often unstable and even unpredictable personality. it’s what ends up putting him in hospital. and its the reason killua wanted an apology from him.

gons apology

killua wants an apology from gon because the level that gon hurt himself against pitou upset killua, because gon had refused his help and destroyed himself as a result.

killua at the end of the day wants to help gon, so his issue was gon had pushed him away, refusing his help, yet couldnt even back up his words without destroying himself beyond repair. he still needs killuas help. so when gon apologises, he is apologising for his dismissive words, but more than that, he’s apologising for pushing him away, and for not being strong enough to admit he needed to accept killuas help in the first place.

but we also see gon learn what an apology means- that he cant do it again and must promise to do different. and so his apology to killua cant be completed with just words, it requires a full mindset overhaul, starting with the overhaul of his nen technique- his mindsets physical manifestation.

this is why he loses his nen. he needs to start from the ground up. needs to purge himself of his poor habits, including an often overlooked fault of gons, his total lack of strategy to the point of being dangerous- to him and to others. killua has to knock him out to remove him from kite because gon cant understand or just doesnt have space to care that they cant win right now. hes too emotionally reactive.

gons future

gons nen, at least in my opinion, definitely wont stay gone— theres no point and its extremely unsatisfying imo— but i think, instead it will grow and most likely even change types (im assuming manipulator because the other five have been covered by the main cast and we have no experience of seeing a GOOD manipulator)(despite someone from the troupe probably being a manipulator dont pull me for that), gon might also be a specialist because its definitely the most interesting type and despite chrollo and kurapika being specialists theres definitely still room for gon to have a very unique ability. however i firmly believe he wont remain an enhancer because its by FAR the most boring type) we also know how your nen type often correlates with your personality, and i think gons nen type change will reflect his mindset shift but also his growth from innocent headstrong child (enhancer) into someone cool calm and collected (manipulator) who can harness his emotions responsibly to use to power his nen ability— something as versatile and with as much room for growth as killuas technique. ​despite seeming goalless, gon is definitely working toward reuniting with killua based off what ging said to him— that the detours are often more valuable. finding killua ended up being more valuable to gon than finding ging. so gon will definitely seek killua out after he gets strong enough (fulfilling his apology promise to both killua and kite) this would also make an interesting switch in dynamics, where gon is chasing killua— maybe even joining him against his family toward the end. would definitely be exciting to see them reunite in battle. yearnerboy gon i await ur arrival.

killuas future

its only after gon perfects his new nen technique that he can then, narratively, reunite with killua, because nothing is technically stopping them from doing it whenever they feel like it, and they’re definitely not upset with eachother as often is reflected in fanworks (not that im complaining, yearning killugon solos everytime) i actually believe they split on great terms. killua isnt mad at gon because he knows that that is just who gon is and gon did apologise. killua is not a grudge holder, especially not toward gon. and even without losing his nen, i think gon couldve easily made up for his errs in judgement by simply training in mindfulness etc— though again its way more boring and doesnt change gons terrible nen ability.

but that brings us to alluka, who masquerades as a genuine reason for killua to leave gon, because narratively she is a fantastic way to develop killuas character— he can start living for someone OTHER than gon, but also living for someone who he doesnt feel he has to earn the affections of (not that he had to do that with gon, but killua often felt morally inferior to gon and unworthy of his friendship- see “you are light”). he doesnt have to worry about losing this relationship because its his sister, not his friend. this also allows an amazing opportunity for a zoldyck centered plotline later on where we can really dive deep and intimately explore the extremely interesting dynamics of their family. it also gives killua an oppurtunity to discover his own strengths, passions and goals to work toward.

their future

i believe that killua and gons reunion will involve them finally working toward a shared goal, or working side by side to achieve seperate goals. their reunion will be a show of how they have balanced their opposing strengths and come together again to be equals, both fully (or mostly) realised. always has to be room for improvement.

lastly, i also think their seperation allows them the opportunity to yearn and miss eachother. far from just loving eachothers company they also have to mourn eachothers absences.

my silly silly boys. togashi please let me see my kids its been decades.

Here's the poem first:

Invuctus means as much as unconquerable or undefeated. Frankly a title I can stand by for Jason. Seeing as one of my favorite aspects of Jason's character is his representation of victims and I stand by the fact that we are undefeated by what has happened to us. The word recognizes the gravity of what has happened and pays homage to your experience and finally we get to see ourselves not only as the sufferers of a poor fate, but also the victors, you're still standing. And I will be the last person to ever tell someone how that "standing" has to look like to be undefeated. Overcoming is not something you have to earn, you already overcame. You have nothing to prove to be undefeated.

The "unconquerable soul" is not exemplified in the body that is standing tall more than in the body that is slumping and panting, no matter how you stand or breath, you are still breathing. The other verses of the first stanza are rather straightforward in setting the stage. Our main character is in the black of the night, in the belly of the whale. They are where all is lost and seems hopeless, but that does not mean they are defeated.

Moving on to the second stanza. This part of the poem acknowledges a disillusioned worldview. It is hard to perceive the world as still containing beauty and hope after trauma. And yet you can be unafraid. And I do hope for everyone who has suffered to be able to return to a previous, more naive, less burdensome, perspective. But if you can't, then frankly that is alright, it does not have to diminish your spirit. I think Jason incorporates a lot of the concept of lost innocence, of not being able to return to how things were. But while Jason does grieve his own loss, he does not lose hope to that fact.

Finally, the last stanza, as a call to the strength of autonomy. Now Bruce might like to think he works alone, but Batman's strength lies in his allies. Jason however has perfected himself into the deus ex machina of himself. He has learnt that sometimes there is no powerful saviour who will swoop in for you. Jason is a one man army in combat skill, knowledge and in practice as well. We have seen team-ups, but they never seem to stick. Something about Jason screams lone wolf.

Because the truth is, after trauma, the only person you want to feel is strong enough to protect you is yourself. In a realistic sense, trauma does not make you dependent on other people, it can make you want to become the most whole and in control person you can be. This is why some children from abusive and neglectful homes have incredible emotional reflectivity and recognition skills. They will not be victims of the arbitrariness of emotions any longer and have mastered the flow of their own and others emotions just to feel a semblance of control. It's why victims might have incredible scheduling and self-discipline skill. Coming out of an unpredictable and volatile situation they have gained control of their surroundings. It's why vicitms might be high-achievers in academics, because they know what is expected and they can control their input and actually get the reward that was promised. Jason is to me an epitome of effective pragmaticism. He knows the value of reliability and certainty. Rather than going in hotheaded in an attempt to murder a man for trafficking children, he employs a failsafe by also poisoning his energy drink. Because Jason is the one in control. He orchestrates a distraction for Batman and spends three hours creeping up on the Batmobile to plant a bomb. His anger doesn't ignite him like an explosion, it fuels him, like the steady supply of purpose.

Jason is in command now, the captain of his soul. Because let us face it, so far Jason's life has been shaped only by other people. His parents' deaths, Bruce adopting him, Sheila betraying him, the Joker murdering him, Superboy Prime's punch returning him to life. Jason's life has been so far out of his autonomy and control, but he claims command of his soul and of his fate. No one has set him on his vengeance trip against Bruce and against the Joker. No one defines Jason anymore. Bruce does not actually have the power to grant whether or not Jason is a hero, It's Jason's jurisdiction now who he is and if he says he is a hero, the patron saint to victims, the avenging spirit of the innocent, then yes, he is.

I am going to say something potentially controversial: even before saw V ocelot, I thought 3 Ocelot looked like he was wearing drag *queen* makeup. I don't know whether it's intentional, or an attempt to circumvent the lower poly models and lower definition textures of the PS2, but the first image looks like someone who is going for a highly exaggerated, feminine cheek contour. Here's a few drag queens who, imo, do a very similar contour look:

Whether the color filter or the texturing of the PS2 or something else, the MGS3 version of Ocelot also has a look of mascara and frosted lipgloss (frosted lips being much more popular at the time of MGS3's original release than today, but alas).

So from that I was already very much primed to look for femininity in Ocelot's whole vibe. It was actually kind of jarring how much more rugged he is in V than in any of the previous games, to the extent that it sent up alarm bells in my head that something was going on.

I don't remember the moment that I went "hey, wait a minute," but it was certainly pretty early on. As someone who's been on tumblr a hella long time and remembers when we used to swap passing tips, the specific combination of facial features remind me of a very specific genre of "ftm makeup tutorials" that were also pretty contemporarily popular on tumblr. A very quick summary being mascara on the eyelashes and specific peach fuzz to give the impression of a squarer jaw and having more facial hair, as well as specific contouring to give a "masculine cheekbone." Most of these tips basically came directly from drag king makeup.

Gonna include some drag kings as well, some things to notice include the tendency towards using stubble as contouring and vice versa, the shaping of cheek contouring, and the tendency to accentuate mustache and sideburns.

I'm pretty bad at wording descriptions of hair and makeup so you'll have to forgive me for not going ham on explaining the similarities bc now we actually get to the interesting part which is: so fucking what? If this is true, if you take my word for it, what does it say about the text? If I want to make this argument to someone else, what can I say that will convince them that, even if it's not *intentional,* it's a valid and meaningful view of his character?

Like, you can make a character based on anything you want, but why does it matter whether Ocelot is based on drag either direction?

Ocelot's "drag"iness is multipurpose. One: he's queer. Like, I grant that he never comes out and says "I love 'Big "Naked 'John' Snake" Boss'" but we get a hell of a lot more confirmation that he's gay than we get straight confirmation for a lot of presumed-straight characters. I feel comfortable saying he's canon queer.

Two: it's a visual metaphor for being a double/triple agent. While he's literally performing several roles (KGB/GRU/CIA, or MSF/Real BB/US, or US/Patriots/BB, or anything in between), he's also visually playing two (or more) gender roles, a feminine man, a mannish woman, something neither or in-between. The implication of drag specifically is pretending to be something that he isn't (which he literally always is, holy shit, again, does he even know who he realiy is?).

And before anyone says "Well, if it's so important to his character, why did they wait until 3 to start doing it?" They didn't!!

This is THE most classically masculine that Ocelot ever looks. But there's still precious polygons invested into giving him long hair and a flowing coat. Working with sprites and low-poly models means having to very carefully select traits that you want to display on your character, and Ocelot's go into making him a cringefail cowboy.

The fact that he's a cowboy in itself is also pretty important to the whole gender/sexuality situation. I mean, Brokeback Mountain might not have been out yet, but the male-to-female ratio in the west meant a lot of men cozied up together on the frontier. Hell, hankey code comes from cowboy culture, with men wearing certain colors to announce who would take the "man" or "woman" role while square dancing.

I could go a lot into gender and how it works on a social/societal level in general and why that matters, but OOPS I have been writing this for a WHILE.

I was actually going to go a lot more into queer theory and gender in MGS in general but ngl, I could write a whole doctoral thesis on gender and how different characters perform or subvert gender. Because holy shit when you start peeling back the very thin macho facade of Kojima's work to do a feminist reading of it, boy howdy do you get. A whole lot to talk about. (ask me about death stranding sometime i dare you)

Basically what I'm trying to get across is that Ocelot has a lot of roles that he's playing and NOT playing, and more than a few of those are gender roles, which is very much visually symbolic of his character.

The fact is too, that the two Sams aren't the only ones with gender-ambiguous names in the game...we don't know Lou's gender until the very end! The use of gender-ambiguous names for the only two main characters that you as the player can actually interact with feels hella meaningful.

In fact, the game intentionally lets us think that Lou/BB is a boy for most of the game! Cliff refers to his BB as "him" in one of the first cutscenes we see of him, very early on. The game also lets us believe, for some time at least, that there's a chance that the memories are BB/Lou's, and that Lou is Cliff's baby. We don't know this isn't true until near the end of the game! Why didn't any of the characters point out this contradiction before then? I'm not sure, at least not yet. Very open to thoughts on this. It doesn't feel like the MO of the game to have a gender reveal at the end for shock value.

Anyways, let's get in on point one obvious: like I already said, this is an mpreg game. There's...there's no way around it. A dudes carry a fetus attached to them by an umbilical cord (which they make VERY viscerally look like a real umbilical cord btw, between the color/texture/the additional cable along the outside).

I feel like "haha it's the mpreg game" has probably been done to death but I love it so much specifically because of the implications that it makes and the puns that it plays on.

Sam is a delivery man. He's called "The Great Deliverer" or "The Man Who Delivers." And the last scene of the game, the last line before we flash-back for the postgame, is...?

Literally childbirth! It's...delivery. It's Sam delivering his own child, after making a trek by foot across the continental US carrying a difficult pregnancy. "The Man Who Delivers" is a double entendre throughout the game, just like "strand" is ('strand' like rope or hair, 'strand' as in a portion of a larger network, 'strand' as in stranding, like the beach, etc).

So like, what the fuck, right? Why do we have Mpreg: Hiking Simulator? What the HELL is going on in there?

So. America, right?

If there's anything Kojima really loves to talk about, it's America. American identity, imperialism, national myth, etc. Death Stranding is just the most recent and blatant of these. And, of course, one of the most popular American Myths are the story of the founding fathers, right up there with manifest destiny.

So we have this game where Sam is both literally becoming a father after carrying a surrogate pregnancy, and also metaphorically becoming a father by re-founding America. In that way we can see, through his experience of pregnancy, the trials of (re-)founding America.

Okay, great, cool, Sam is a male mom, wonderful, so glad that technology has progressed to this point, we stan. Maybe we don't stan the use of American nationalism as a tool so much but look at the healthy baby glow <3.

But I also want to contrast this with the only other BB we really see in the game. Yeah, baby, it's Higgs time!!! And I am going to make a comparison that is going to seem batshit insane. Bear with me:

I was skeptical myself when I first saw this comparison, but I've been converted into a believer for a few reasons.

The visual. While imo it wouldn't be enough on its own to make a case, I have to admit that his hood is similar to some popular depictions of Mary

Higgs is literally a male prophet of a goddess of extinction. He essentially considers himself her messenger,

While Sam gets his BB from another person, and it's also a live fetus, Higgs gets his from Amelie, as how god gives mary jesus immaculately

Much like Amelie's reveal that her "soul is a lie," the "baby" that she gives higgs is a twisted effigy. He carries his god(dess)'s physical form, but as she is a goddess of extinction with no remaining soul of her own, it will never grow.

i'm willing to believe higgs is a virgin, for the bit.