OHHH MY GOD THAT LENS FLARE HES LYING I CANT BELIEVE I NEVER NOTICED THAT BEFORE
MGS has a very tight color language, especially obvious in V and PW, but it's present throughout if you know what you're looking for. The main ones that get played on are red, yellow, and blue.
Red is kind of obvious. Violence, etc. Ocelot is typically wearing a lot of red, like in this image. In V, characters who are doing/about to do violent acts are often back-lit with red lights that seem to come from nowhere.
In PW, red incites dissonance by foreshadowing Paz being a double agent, while *also* painting her as an innocent little red riding hood analogue. But I digress.
Yellow is also kind of a no-brainer. It's typically associated with allies, general good-heartedness, and maybe a sense of naivete. Think about Amanda and Cecile in Peace Walker.
Kaz even *changes his outfit* from yellow ascot (and blond hair) to red tie and beret post-GZs incident.
Blue is a little harder to tie down. It's best described as deception (including self deception), "something isn't what it seems." Sometimes it's used for grief as well. Think Paz's whole room's lighting, the blue butterfly, or the way Snavid is described as a blue rose-- pretty, technically biological, but unnatural.
The lens flares in V are used a LOT to toss a flash of the appropriate color behind someone. Here we have Ocelot saying "yeah boss I'm over it dw" and the lighting going
Which. We know he's lying. We know because of the way he acts for the next THIRTY YEARS. We know bc when he has a senior moment (a multiply-hypnosis addled senior moment, but still) and mistakes snavid for john, the first thing he does is plant a kiss on him.
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Kinda want to write about ocelot going cruising and having extremely mediocre hookups that he can't stop comparing to the *idea* of bb
Dude has expertise in playing roles, in hedonistic sadism, he absolutely could thrive in cruising culture. He's navigating a world that isn't really his (but not in the way people would expect).
Just want him to be scraping for any ounce of power and control he can get, seeking pleasure and coming up empty, like food turning to sand in his mouth, slowly realizing already in his 20s that he's going to spend the rest of his life hopelessly wasted on BB.
thinking about BB leaving cigar burns on Kaz skin ughahdjajehehe he doesnt do that to Ocelot tho cuz he wouldn't wanna ruin his kitty (not like this at least)
i've been thinking about this for the past 3 days but my bf was visiting this weekend so i haven't had a chance to respond ghgfhjgf
you're so right, and i think that ocelot gets jealous over it. he *wants* bb to leave permanent marks on him, and seeing kaz get exactly what he wants makes him feel like bb doesn't think he's good enough
of course, he'll never say that because he doesn't want to be ~needy~
kaz and ocelot have definitely got into fights over this, whether kaz actually knows that's the source of it or not. ocelot will pick a fight over anything just to have an excuse to take out his pissiness with kaz
someone please teach ocelot to use his big boy words
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Can you try explain what you mean about Ocelot looking like a drag king in mgsv? I feel like your boyfriend in that I just. Don't see it? I'm trying to understand why Ocelot would even have that applied when he's always been just A Guyâ„¢
Okay so I'm going to try to do this without getting into Grad-Level 5D Queer Theory Media Criticism, but I also fully realize that in doing that, a lot of this is going to sound very much like I'm saying "Source: Just Trust Me Bro".
(anon i am SO sorry that you happen to be the first person to directly adress me about gender in MGS)
I also wanna be straight up front here and say that I'm not trying to imply that Ocelot is anything other than a guy, he's just also a guy who's playing a million roles (this is important) and lying to damn near everyone, including himself. He has some of the worst identity issues I've ever seen in a character, and that comes to a head in 4 where he literally isn't even *Ocelot* until the final moments of his life. So yes, for the sake of not writing War and Peace, I'm going to assume Ocelot is "just a guy" and come at this from a pure queer theory/media analysis standpoint, not a headcanon one.
So first it's really important to point out the order in which we see Ocelot through the series. In the timeline, the last time we see Ocelot before V is 3 (or PO which I haven't played due to its placement in canon-limbo, but Ocelot looks basically the same). So we see him go from A to B here.
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.
I am so sorry anon I have been thinking about him nonstop for a full year </3 I hope at least the first part of this answered your question about what features I see that scream drag to me.
The Boss being John's emotional pillar and base to what he thinks relationships are supposed to be like/end up really fucks him up and i dont think people talk enough about that...
and yea she definitely slept with him at some point and all that, theres so many implications that she was more than one thing at the same time (master, mother girlfriend thing) and it just makes sense yknow? I wonder if part of his attraction to Ocelot is motivated by the fact he looks so much like her,,,, ouch
Anon you have no idea how much you fed my brainworms today lmao
Like, we definitely know the Boss and Snake were involved. We hear people talk about it on Mother Base in V, and when asked if she was his lover Snake doesn't deny it but says it was "deeper than that"
But ALSO Kojima literally said this:
so I mean idk maybe we're all crazy and The Boss would never fuck the kid she picked up as a replacement for the one the Philosophers stole, and we're the sick ones. lmao.
I love The Boss bc she really is this all-encompassing icon of femininity and nurturing (naive Maiden/mature Mother/wise Crone roles vs Lover/Mommy Figure/Mentor) while being completely untameable. You've heard of a domestic housewife? The Boss is a feral wildwife.
And then you bring me to the thing that I think is the most hair-pulling, teeth-grindingly tragic thing about Bosselot: the fact that they're just perpetually loving *past* each other. Big Boss wants a solution for his mommy issues, and Ocelot just wants to be seen and cherished, even used, for just a fucking taste of love and appreciation from Big Boss (that he doesn't even get in death, god i will cry about this forever).
The worst part is, Ocelot is by far the Boss's son that has the most inherent capacity to be most like her, but he has neither the environment nor the inclination to foster that in himself.
If he had ever listened to anything BB said, he would know that the fact that he lived with the Boss as an equal, someone who challenged him, was exactly why he loved her. He had the capacity to be exactly what BB wanted, but instead he went the low risk/low reward route of making (or trying to) himself indispensable as a tool, a weapon, an attack dog for BB to command, a possession instead of a partner.
But it's better to be appreciated by the love of your life for what you aren't than potentially lose them for what you are, right?
Also the same people who want to talk about how Bosselot is the better mgs3 ship bc of the mommy figure situation totally ignore the fact that that makes them like...adoptive brothers? Wouldn't be a Kojima game without a strong undercurrent of incest themes.
