Women of Metal Gear Week: Beauty and the Beast Unit

So I go from talking about Disney movies like Beauty and the Beast yesterday to talking about the Beauty and the Beast Unit from Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I totally had this whole “Women of Metal Gear Week” planned in advance flawlessly.

Yup.

The Beauty and the Beast Unit, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

(HERE THERE BE TRIGGERS! I’ll be talking about traumatic war experiences. Proceed with caution.)

Ahh, Guns of the Patriots. You are basically a movie with some gameplay involved, but I still like ya. The graphics of this game nearly brought me to tears the first time I saw the opening cutscenes. The whole thing was an emotional roller coaster. That’s all I have to say about that.

So, for those who need a refresher, the BB Corps in Guns of the Patriots are the bosses for the game, following in the footsteps of baddies like Psycho Mantis, the Joy, and Vamp from the previous games.

Except these bosses are better, because Screaming Mantis, Laughing Octopus, Raging Raven, and Crying Wolf are brilliant combinations of the names and abilities of the bosses of the previous three Metal Gear Solid games. This is perhaps the coolest way to close out what was originally supposed to be the last of the game series (but we know how that turned out).

Simply put: the bosses of the game are a group of women in animal-themed mech suits. Pretty cool on paper.

Even cooler in execution.

But there is a hitch.

Sure, I’m all about the lady bosses. What better way to signal equality then putting women in mech suits and fighting them? There is literally nothing I can find wrong about this from a feminist standpoint.

A closer look at the backstories of the BB Corps reveals some pretty troublesome stuff. All of them have PTSD of various flavors:

Screaming Mantis: After she was separated from her family while being hunted by enemy death squads in her South American village, she hid in basement that was being used as a makeshift torture chamber. Trapped in the basement, she ended up eating the male corpses in the room in order to survive.

Laughing Octopus: Born in a Scandinavian octopus-fishing village, a crazy cult attacked Laughing Octopus’s village with heavy weapons. When they started executing the survivors, they let her live, but she was forced to torture and kill other prisoners, including her family. The cult forced her to laugh as she did it.

Raging Raven: Born in a war-torn territory of Indonesia, she was kidnapped by soldiers at a young age. The soldiers starved her, beat her, and kept her in a cage. When the soldiers left suddenly, they tied her up and abandoned her in a field, leaving her for dead at the mercy of a flock of ravens. She managed to track down and kill the soldiers who had tortured her.

Crying Wolf: After warlords invaded Crying Wolf’s village in Africa, she and her baby brother were orphaned. Forced to hide in an abandoned shack from the soldiers, her brother started to cry. She tried to to stifle his cries with her hands, but accidentally smothered him. She carried his decaying body with her to a refugee camp, where she killed the other children in nightly hallucinations.

I hope you weren’t happy before reading this, because now…yeah. Sorry.

Where Kojima succeeds with the BB Corps in bringing an awareness of the civilian casualties of war. Though he created video games featuring war extensively, Kojima has always taken an anti-war stance with his games. The stories behind the BB Corps, while fictional, reflect very dark realities faced in war-torn nations.

But behind the mech-suits, the women look like this:

Meet Raging Raven.

Each boss is based on a fashion model. They’re gorgeous.

Aaand here’s Laughing Octopus. And dat ass.

I had mixed reactions to seeing the BB Corps without their suits. I guess with a story like that, you wouldn’t expect them to be this hot. That’s not where your brain goes when you think of a traumatized person.

And that’s in an odd way a good thing. I was expecting these women to be scarred, to physically resemble the harm that had happen to them. But they just look like models.

Because they are. And here’s Screaming Mantis.

By having the BB Corps be traumatized but look normal, the game is demonstrating that trauma victims—indeed, sufferers of a variety of mental illnesses— can’t always be identified by appearance alone. Sure, it’s easy for movies, TV, and video games to show PTSD victims looking exhausted, terrified, or physically damaged, but PTSD is an invisible thing, and this game shows that. That’s something that has stuck with me from this game.

But this is a Metal Gear game, so there’s gotta be a hitch. We can’t have badass mecha-animal female PTSD warriors who teach you a lesson about invisible illnesses.

“No,” says Hideo Kojima. “I want them to be naked too.”

Kojima said in an interview that he intended to have the BB Corps girls appear naked in cutscenes:

Honestly, we asked the motion capture actors to do the motion capture nude, but of course, we couldn’t use this in the actual game.

This wouldn’t work, censorship is a killjoy, but they made do with form-fitting catsuits.

So we’re dealing with overly-sexualized trauma victims. And now I have a problem.

If the goal is to make the characters appear vulnerable, just taking them out of the mech suits accomplishes that. I guess Kojima was following along the addage “When life gives you models, make ’em naked,” but to put them in the game in their birthday suits is just unnecessary and alienating to the female audience.

Crying wolf: Not only is she traumatized, but boys, I hear she’s single!

Let’s call this the “Blurred Lines” effect, after the horrendous uncensored version of the music video for “Blurred Lines,” which depicts naked women dancing around a fully-clothed Robin Thicke. This video makes me (and countless others, of course) feel deeply uncomfortable, because the naked women in the video serve no other role than to be sex objects. The fact that Thicke is still fully-dressed shows that he has power over these women. The video is a male power fantasy, plain and simple.

Put that in a Metal Gear game, and you have succeeded only in:

1. Presenting these formerly badass women as sex toys at the mercy of the fully-clothed Snake.
2. Alienating the females playing the game.

But this is me getting worked up over nothing. Naked BB Corps ladies weren’t in the game, but the specter of the idea does linger. The hot, traumatized BB Corps could easily topple into the dark, damaged sexpot stereotype with a bit of nudity, and that does little to advance the portrayal of women in Metal Gear.

But this desire to show some sexy but damaged skin is no doubt the driving force behind the mysterious Quiet. When Quiet makes an appearance in The Phantom Pain, we’ll know for sure.

But for now, here’s something for the ladies:

Ladiessss

Hopefully this will hold you all over. Due to my schedule, I can’t do my last post on Metal Gear ladies tomorrow. In a few weeks, I’ll do Meryl 2/Love in Metal Gear, but this has been a long week, and I have two corgis that I have been neglected for this blog.

So if you’ll excuse me.