Daniel submitted:
Jim Sterling’s take on Quiet from Metal Gear
~*~
Amazingly~*~, we’re not the only two people in the world
who do not “feel ashamed for our words and deeds”
and don’t think Quiet’s design is justifiable in any possible way.
Not with “she HAS to uncover her skin, because narrative reasons”, not with “Hideo Kojima can do no wrong”, not with “MGS is a silly franchise, so ANYTHING absurd is acceptable”.
Here are some of my favorite things Jim says in the video:
I’d have been so much cooler with the situation if [Kojima] just said “The secret reason for her exposure is that I just wanna get a gigantic fucking hard-on with my big Kojima cock.”
Indeed. If you guys were wondering why BABD is so hung up on Quiet compared to many similarly bad designs, it’s because how straight-up disingenuous (and inconsistent) her creator is about the character’s conception.
What Kojima promised would be the “antithesis to the women characters appeared in the past fighting game who are excessively exposed” is instead the embodiment of characters in the past who are excessively exposed.
As we covered before, the “it’s criticism of harmful status quo” argument doesn’t apply when the status quo is simply reproduced. “Kojima is trolling everyone” also falls under this.
If you explain away everything with “It’s a Metal Gear game, it’s always silly and you’re stupid if you criticize it”, then you ultimately do Hideo Kojima himself a disservice as a writer.
Interestingly, another baffling excuse we’ve been hearing again and again since we started criticizing Quiet is “The Boss is awesome, therefore every MGS heroine is just as good”.
And while Jim agrees about Boss being great, he knows she’s just one character, and therefore should be upheld as a model for women in the franchise, not as a proof that female representation is okay already in MGS.
Also, predictably, this is the sort of replies the video gets:
Apparently not being able to go back in time and complain about two characters in military uniforms with absurdly deep cleavages, while he currently complains about another military-themed character clad literally only in a bikini and fishnets makes him a “hypocrite”.
~Ozzie