Earlier today, Felix Biederman tweeted about the character Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V, and it reminded me of some thoughts I’d had on her after finally playing the game a few years ago. I never finished writing that piece, but I wanted to share some of it here.
I am probably too Kojimapilled but I really believe Quiet was him doing a caricature of what he thought straight guy gamers wanted
— merritt k (@merrittk) August 9, 2021
In the run-up to Metal Gear Solid V‘s release, one thing stirred more controversy than any other element of the game. It was the design of a character named Quiet, a lithe sniper whose outfit amounted to torn tights and a tiny bikini top — not exactly standard issue gear for field missions in Afghanistan. In the midst of high-profile conversations about women in games, Quiet stood out as a particularly egregious example of objectification of female characters. (If NieR: Automata was released two years earlier, 2B might have been in the same position.) It’s been years since, and maybe we’re ready to take another look. Maybe we’re ready to consider that like Bayonetta, another contentious woman character of the past decade, Quiet’s design is too over the top to be accidental. Maybe it’s possible that whereas Bayonetta is a parody of femininity in the mode of Barbara Streisand drag, Quiet is a parody — intentional or not — of heterosexual male desire.
Words and Deeds
When the discourse first broke out around Quiet’s design, Kojima didn’t take it sitting down. There was a good reason for her appearance, he announced, and when we discovered the truth, we would be “feel ashamed of our words and deeds.” As anyone with two brain cells left to rub against one another would realize, though, Quiet is a fictional character who lives within a fictional world designed by Kojima. So fine, sure, her fictional condition might justify her appearance, but you wrote the story that way, my dude!
Only days before his famous words and deeds quote, Kojima had fumbled over himself in attempts to address negative reactions to Quiet’s design. Having originally asked lead designer Yoji Shinkawa for a “more erotic” character, he then attempted to clarify his statement, saying through a translator that “Maybe the phrase ‘erotic’ wasn’t really [the correct word for] what I was trying to say. What I’m really trying to do is create unique characters. One of those is, of course, Quiet. She’s a really unique character, I wanted to add that sexiness to her. It wasn’t really supposed to be erotic, but sexy.” He added that “Sexy could be for guys, weapons, vehicles, it’s really that characteristic.”
Was Kojima simply attempting to defend himself and his egregiously horny OC from a negative reaction he hadn’t anticipated? Maybe, and that seemed to be the consensus at the time. But what if Quiet wasn’t just Kojima’s personal fetish fuel awkwardly inserted into the game’s narrative? What if he was instead trying to communicate something intentional about the character’s design? What if Kojima was performing an elaborate dunk on us all?
A Sniper in a Cage
Let’s review the facts. In the world of Metal Gear Solid V, Quiet has been infected with a parasite that grants her superhuman speed and strength. However, it has also changed her body so that she breathes through her skin, such that wearing clothing would cause suffocation. Most importantly, the parasites — which are key to the entire narrative of the game — will begin to reproduce if she ever communicates in English, killing her and infecting any other English speakers they come into contact with.
So we have a character who can’t speak or wear clothes, and whom, when defeated in combat, is then kept in a cage at the player’s headquarters. Once Snake’s advisors become reasonably sure she isn’t going to try to kill them, she becomes available as a companion to help him on missions. For context, the other companions in the game are a horse, a rideable robot, and a dog. Quiet is basically an animal, albeit an animal that can fall in romantic love with Snake and have bizarre shower scenes with him.
You could easily read this as the game taking a dim view of women. After all, the most important female character in the story spends most of it locked up in a cage, nonverbal and barely wearing anything at all. And in any other game, you’d probably be right. But this isn’t just any game we’re dealing with.
Two and a Half Men
Metal Gear Solid V is a game about men. It’s a game where you kidnap enemy soldiers and launch them back to your base, where they willingly fight for you because you’re Big Boss — the coolest, most charismatic dude around. It’s a game where those soldiers will earnestly thank you for slamming them into a locker, because it’s such an honor to be touched by Snake himself. It’s a game about building an enormous party boat full of traumatized men and trying to solve the world’s sociopolitical problems.
You might expect that in such a game, a constantly half-nude woman character would be occasion for dialogue about how hot she is or about what kinds of things the soldiers would like to do to her. But that’s not what happens at all. Far from ogling Quiet, it’s implied that several staff attempted to put some clothes on her and were hospitalized for their trouble. And nearly everyone distrusts her, for good reason — she’s an assassin working for the enemy.
But the distrust goes beyond that. Quiet’s presence disrupts the whole vibe of Mother Base. There’s a girl with her boobs out all the time! Gross! The only other female characters on the base are Paz — kind of — and the rare female soldiers, who don’t have much narrative presence and are treated identically to their more common male counterparts.
The counterargument here would be that Kojima has a history of depicting women in dehumanizing, oversexualized ways. But the Kojima of MGSV is not the same as the one that created Meryl in Policenauts. Quiet is so extreme that she reads to me not as a continuation of Kojima’s depictions, but a self-parody. “Is this what you want?” Her whole design seems to scream. “Really?” Contrast the unselfconscious, easy ways the men of MGSV are almost constantly eroticized versus the torturous rationale provided for Quiet’s situation. In that light, Quiet looks less like the product of an author trying to cover for his own horny sins and more like a deliberate choice to create an absurd presence in a self-aware game.
Of course, MGSV was never really finished. And as it was released, it’s totally understandable why someone might be put off by the depiction of Quiet, might find it hard to believe that she was intended to make any kind of metatextual statement, or even just find her to be poorly developed (Why didn’t she just write things down?) Like so many other aspects of the game, Quiet is a casualty of MGSV‘s boundless ambition, and we can only guess as to what her narrative might have looked like had Kojima been given the time and money to properly finish things. But hey, at least we got Metal Gear Survive!
