#malingen

The Moon:

Upright: unconscious, illusions, intuition 

Reversed: confusion, fear, misinterpretation

The Sun:

Upright: joy, success, celebration, positivity

ONE METEOR MADE TWO : MÅLINGEN + LOCKNE : DEATH STRANDING

Kojima loves his parallels. Higgs and Sam (the "tom and jerry" archetype he made a tweet about), the two Lous (self explanatory), Amelie and Cliff (the parents at war). Mama herself already has a natural double in her twin, Lockne.

but she's also an inversion of a concept the game doesn't mention much: stillmothers.

a stillmother is where BBs come from, a pregnant brain-dead woman whose fetus is removed and sealed in a pod. this teetering between life and death, the unborn child taken from a functionally dead mother, is what allows the BBs to function like they do, making a bridge between the living and the dead and not only seeing BTs but allowing others to see them too via a connection with the umbilical cord. the stillmother and BB maintain their connection through womb data, which is essential to the BBs continued health, as it must always believe it is in its mother's womb.

Mama is the opposite: a living mother birthing a child that dies in the same instant, a BT before the umbilical cord was even cut. this tethers the BT to her instead of the other side, but it also holds her, the mother, in stasis. she's not dead, but not really living either, and the tension of the cord pulling in both directions is the only thing that's keeping her walking and talking. once it's cut, the snap back kills her, and the BT baby flooded her with so much chiralium in the process that her body will never decompose.

where BBs are in constant portable motion, facilitating connection both to the other side and between people (as they're vital for building the chiral network), Mama is stationary, solitary, disconnected from her twin and the other half of her soul because of her condition. both metaphorically and literally, Mama lives for the dead, where a stillmother dies for the living. in a way, she's also a more extreme reflection of Sam, or maybe a warning to him - reconnection with the living literally saves Mama's soul, makes her whole again, even if it takes letting go of her baby and the death of her body to do it.

the BT baby too is an inversion of a BB's role, an attempt at connection gone wrong. the baby that was meant to be raised by both Lockne and Malingen, that was meant to bridge the divide between living and dead by contiuing the bloodline of Lockne's lover died, and when it died it severed all of those connections near permanently. that this is practically the only other child character we see in the game apart from Sam and BB isn't a coincedence. Sam and the BT baby were both children that were meant to create personal bonds at their birth/ removal from the pod, Sam was meant to connect Cliff and Lisa, but instead unintentionally severed the connection when Cliff kills Lisa in order to save Sam and severing Cliff and John/DieHardman when John is made to kill Cliff for the escape attempt, so we can see how Sam and the BT baby are similar to each other.

but BB 28 is different. BB 28 is a collective child, impersonal, working for the future of the whole. she connects, she does her job, but she's a tool while doing it. only once BB 28 has completed her function and reconnected the whole of America is she allowed to become Lou, the personal child, only required to connect herself and Sam. maybe this is the critical difference between Lou and the others - Sam and the BT baby were always meant to fulfil personal bonds and were treated as such, the concept of their wider impact on society came afterwards, and nearly by accident. but Lou is the inverse.

what's the message in this? I'm not sure. kojima is obviously playing on themes of children as a social tool and the ways it can backfire, but beyond that there are a lot of threads i can't connect in my head very neatly.

children connect the collective, but cannot be relied upon to connect the personal for anyone but their own sake, maybe?

in any case, Mama is fooling herself, same as the BB must be fooled to continue on. she knows her child must return to the other side, that she isn't the BT baby's mother in anything but name, but she holds onto that umbilical cord with both hands, until she literally can't anymore, until she realises that her connection with the living has to be rekindled for the sake of America and the chiral network, her life's work. even when her baby causes her so much pain, she can't bear to let her go until the very last moment.