- You land on the ship and play as Snake. Kojima used this bit and the advertisements outside the game to make you think you were going to play only as Snake. And then, he took that away, but from the stories' perspective, it's because the simulation doesn't entirely know what happened to Snake in the tanker chapter. They know what kind of tanker it was, so they plotted his likely path, but when the tanker detonated, the simulation took the only likely explanation that Snake bought the farm there. Raiden played this simulation, as you did. In fact, you were controlling Raiden controlling Sim-Snake. Raiden is supposed to be the player analogue after all.
- Then, you (and Raiden) are sent on your seeming first real mission so far. (This would be the first long mission you were sent on in this game.) Raiden comments on having done three hundred V.R. missions, including Shadow Moses. What if Kojima has been training the player/Raiden longer than we know? How are we to know whether or not we are ever given the truth? There is a theory farther down that states that Twin Snakes is the V.R. simulation, especially with the new crazier things (e.g. jumping over a missile). Maybe that's what Raiden saw during his mission. After all, Raiden never witnessed the real events. So Raiden begins his mission in the Plant, but he doesn't know that the Plant is either a giant V.R. station or a real station that is being influenced by the nanomachines in his body. I am partial to the first, as according to mission control, Snake is not supposed to be in the simulation and should not be trusted. I think he can be trusted, but not for events taking place outside of his philosophical rants or memories. His reality is being just as subjective as Raiden's. He says he has infinite ammo, but that obviously can't be true. Assuming he is not another V.R. illusion, he merely brought plenty of equipment and figured he had brought enough for them to share. But the V.R. simulation may actually have made his proclamation real. The simulation needed to stay consistent, and when he said he had infinite, it gave him infinite, at least for the next battle. Snake was probably being fooled by the station into thinking he was fighting all those soldiers just like Raiden was, and that he had continued to have enough extra equipment for Raiden to share with him. For that matter, they may have never been firing weapons of any kind at all at that point, it's nearly impossible to tell. Snake also said that the Tanker simulation Raiden took place in probably wasn't accurate to the real events, as shown by his surviving. Either the simulation didn't know what happened to Snake or was deliberately censored, it's hard to tell. The Patriots have a want to censor and control information, but it's unknown if they know know exactly what happened.
- In any case, Raiden/the player never could bounce bullets with a sword, didn't destroy 25 Metal Gears, and never went to Manhattan. But the player/Raiden were trained to think they could and did, as part of a military V.R. simulation. Raiden never left the Big Shell. He passed out, woke up in "Manhattan", met "Rose", and then the game ends on a note of confusion for Raiden and most likely the player, leaving you wondering who Raiden is and what exactly he did, if he and you did anything at all. To sum it up, you did not. It was just more training, but it's up to the player and Raiden to decide if there was any merit in it to learn from. As for Snake showing up in the end, well, in that form, it's hard to say. He may have shown up in an attempt to free Raiden, or he may have been a V.R. illusion or a hallucination, it's difficult to tell.
- You don't even have to go so far as to say that only The Twin Snakes was a V.R. mission. MGS1 being a V.R. mission explains why Meryl is alive in MGS4 even though you may have let her die in the ending you saw. As the player, you get your choice of endings because you are a soldier being trained in the Shadow Moses V.R. mission. The ending where you save Meryl is what really happened. The other is a mission failure but perhaps something the Patriots want in a soldier for some reason (Haven't thought it out enough to figure out why they'd want you to give up under torture.)
So, essentially, Kojima has been training Raiden/the Player since the first game's remake through the entire second game, Both were V.R. missions since Raiden never saw the original missions with Snake in them. The V.R. mission had Snake in the game, but his reality was just as skewed as Raiden's, assuming he wasn't just another part of the simulation.
- Twin Snakes clues us in with that random shooting mission target in the Metal Gear hangar. The random acrobatic bullshit they added to the cutscenes is for additional difficulty in training Raiden, which is one half of how he got the skills to be a badass cyborg ninja in Metal Gear Solid 4.
- V.R. missions, when completed, gives you a picture of RAY. Raiden had to complete all of the missions as part of his mission preparation. The picture was a part of his briefing, to know the Metal Gear he was supposed to be on the lookout for. Completing the Ninja missions explains how he was so quickly able to get used to the sword in Metal Gear Solid 2, and the other half of how he became the ninja in Metal Gear Solid 4.
- Not to mention that Arsenal Gear just crashed into New York. Those people in the street don't seem to notice at all. Several cops gathered around it wondering what was going on, but they seemed more focused the corpse of the aforementioned ex-President than the big metal internet-controlling submarine just a few feet away. If you look *real* closely some people seem to be glancing at Arsenal Gear as well.
- Can anyone say, "perception filter"?
- On the contrary, 4chan was created by the Patriots to serve as a testbed for memetic soldier programming techniques, and continues to exist because Arsenal Gear periodically seeds it with CP so that they can V& everyone involved in the event that the project outlives its usefulness.
- The Great Crash was the result of Raiden crashing Arsenal Gear into New York in the future.
- Therefore, the admins need scissors. 61.
- But I gave you scissors YESTERDAY.
- TIME PARADOX
- The Great Crash was the result of Raiden crashing Arsenal Gear into New York in the future.
The Patriots just wanted to ensure that humanity could move forward in at least some way as otherwise the population will just devise new "problems that need to be solved" that are actually just mindless dribble that sidetracks discussion of real and important matters. The Patriots just went too far when they started trying to assign peoples personalities and lives with the research of the S3 plan.
Solidus and the Sons of Liberty wanted to reject the digital age altogether by alarming the world of the Patriots´ plans of complete control. They wanted to create Outer Haven in the place of New York as a refuge for people that want to flee a stagnating world or a world without choice.
Raiden in the end just enabled the world of Metal Gear to be as ours is today. People are left occupied with trivial problems and trying to tackle things that are impossible to solve in the name of justice when it will just serve to either halt real cultural progress or destroy our world and possibilities at a faster rate.
- It really says something about the series that this is, in fact, perfectly obvious.
- And it's also WRONG! Nothing more than a Red Herring. He's actually faking it because he's actually against the Patriots.
- But maybe not entirely. I wonder if he did actually absorb Liquid's spirit, but only as a method to improve his acting. The Sorrow was similar, he absorbed the outward personality and skills of his targets but his motives and beliefs remained the same (Otherwise he would turn on the rest of the Cobra Unit the moment he used his powers). It would explain a couple of plot holes, and hardly be inconsistent with what we already know.
- Turns out that he used to be possessed in Metal Gear Solid 2, but got a cybernetic replacement between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4, but kept up the illusion of it in order to get his long con to work.
- If he were possessed by Liquid, then why would Liquid allow him to remove the arm?
- Because Liquid was taking his orders from The Boss and The Sorrow the whole time?
- Liquid was only really able to physically channel when Snake is around. Thus, the arm could probably be removed at any time in between MGS2 and MGS4.
- This troper believes that while most of the time Ocelot was acting, whenever Snake was present, Liquid's spirit would forcibly channel itself through Ocelot's latent abilities as a medium, taking control for the duration, and then giving Ocelot his body back once Snake was gone. Or, fleeing once Snake had beaten Ocelot's body to a bloody pulp, as it seems Ocelot was himself after MGS4's final battle.
- Still wrong. Big Boss says there's no way this can happen.
- That's hardly reliable. Ocelot himself says in Sons of Liberty, "There's no such thing as miracles or the supernatural, only cutting edge technology." He's clearly come up with some sort of silly, "plausible" explanation for how Psycho Mantis, who he served with for years, worked. Oh, and The Sorrow. Also, I don't think you're remembering what Big Boss said correctly; he was explaining that it was impossible for someone to perfectly impersonate someone to an absolute T, but possible to put on a reasonable facade that would fool people using hypnosis and nanomachines. And why would Big Boss discredit the supernatural, anyway? He did meet The Sorrow, after all. Really, there's absolutely no reason to disbelieve that Liquid could, through tremendous will, usually motivated when Snake was around, possess Ocelot through his own arm, only for Ocelot to remove it during a period when Liquid didn't have control so he could pretend it was still going on as a way of furthering his plans.
- By extension, the Patriots are American Bizarro Universe-SEELE.
- Alternate theory: Ocelot is the leader of the Patriots. He seems to be the one everyone else gets their orders from, and yet, we never see him taking any from the Patriots. He wields authority by claiming he's under orders from the Wisemen's committee and relaying those orders (or through his Fake Defector routine, which is what we usually see him in the middle of. Liquid, Gurlukovich, Solidus...they all had the man they wanted nothing but to kill working directly under them). Presumably, Ocelot shot his way up through the ranks sometime in the 70's.
- These theories made by someone who has not played MGS4 and is not going to be reading any spoilers about it for a while, for reference.
- Turns out that this is true; the Wisemen's Committee (whose last member actually died after World War II) had nothing to do with the Patriots, and in a way the Patriots — or rather, the AIs that succeeded the original Patriots — kept much of the world unaware of their existence, as well as of the fact that they're AIs... who did mutate, hence the "War economy".
- Explains why everything was so weird right at the end; the remaining members of training exercise were just adlibbing madly.
- And Dead Cell was bored and felt like messing with the FNG. Explains why you have all those weird fetch quests for the cards at the beginning, rather than being supplied at the start. Had they not been drinking (well, Fat Man was definitely boozing), they might have progressed to telling him he needed to mix elbow grease and headlight fluid to pour on the golden rivet to disable Arsenal Gear. As it was, they downed a few too many brewskis and went with the crazy superpowers and Presidents and robot conspiracies angle.
- Fat Man and the bombs? All the ones going off were only heard about.
- Vamp? Squibs.
- Fortune? MILES.
- Colonel Campbell? Someone spilled beer on the CODEC communicator. Possibly at the same time as someone else was playing a high-stakes game of...damn, whatever that dangerous game with the scissors was called.
- Swiss Variation Knifey-Spoony?
- The President? Played by William Hurt.
- "Solidus" fits better, though. He's supposed to be a balance between Solid and Liquid, and "solidus" is the highest temperature that a substance can be at and still be defined as "solid", so the name "Solidus" reflects his in-between state.
Still, Raiden more or less worships the ground Solid Snake walks on, so even should he ever find out, he wouldn't mind playing surrogate Dad. And he'd get to mentor a Snake, how cool is that?
(Extending this WMG, the Snake in Metal Gear Acid is a clone of Solid Snake raised by Rose and Raiden.)
- There are a few problems with that theory. First, the events of Metal Gear Solids one and two showed that the Patriots didn't particularly want to make more clones and were looking at alternate methods of creating super soldiers. Second, given that MGS2 specifically proved that genes were less important than memes, it would be thematically inappropriate for them to give Rose a Big Boss clone. Finally, did you see the family resemblance on that kid? If he's a clone of anybody, it's Raiden. Actually, isn't blond hair supposed to be a recessive trait...?
- This is assuming that the pregnancy began before they kicked off the "genes verses memes" plan. Maybe the Secret Clone thing is Plan B. Plus, the kid is arguably albino, and we know of at least one other famous albino clone...
- Or maybe one of his parents are albino. You know, like Raiden?
- Peace Walker revealed that the ability to compile convincing AI facsimiles of people as a non-continuous form of Brain Uploading had existed since at least the 1970s. The technology was originally developed by Strangelove to revive The Boss as the basis for titular mech's Mammal Pod, and the persona was compiled through feeding a superintelligent AI troves of documents relating to the individual in question in an effort to reconstruct their memory. They are - quite literally - sentient memes.
This Troper's theory goes something something like this:
- Rosemary knows that Raiden is joining the army but she doesn't know what for. Before Raiden is sent off on the Big Shell, they have farewell sex, resulting in Rose's pregnancy. The Patriots wire Raiden's house and base their AI depiction of Rosemary off of the very emotional post-coital Rosemary, exaggerating all of her traits to the point of absurdity. This exaggeration is why Raiden is so uncomfortable around the AI Rosemary.
- In MGS2's denouement, Raiden makes no mention of the Big Shell incident to the real Rose, and keeps it hidden deep within him as a dark secret. The torment of having to bottle his emotions inside him, Rosemary's confused but ultimately calm complexion when the two finally meet up in the game's finale. Raiden hits the bottle and his condition deteriorates, becoming abusive but still never telling Rosemary what happened to him for fear of scaring her.
- Colonel Campbell, acting as a U.N. ambassador, tracks down Raiden as part of his investigation into Liquid Ocelot's war crimes, sometime after Arsenal crashes into Manhattan. Raiden is finally forced to confess his involvement in the Big Shell incident, and the pain of doing so leads him to leave Rose and his son, becoming a cyborg ninja. Campbell and Rosemary finally realize the danger Raiden's son is in and, trying to protect him, fake their marriage.
- Except for the fact that he deludes himself into believing that Rose, and everything going on around him, is real. In that way, the Patriots, and Kojima, still win.
- As mentioned on the fridge page, they also intentionally designed the Big Shell to be too far to swim from and not have any life boats meaning they intended for the hostages to die when Aresneal rose. Killing those thirty people wasn't beneficial to them in the slightest and given the fact that humans had to build the thing, it was probably more bothersome to build the thing without life boats. There was literally no reason to kill the hostages yet they did just for the sake of it.
Kazuhira would have a motive - after what Huey Emmerich did to him and his men, he'd be willing to go against the will of the Boss if it meant getting revenge on an unrepentant mass-murderer. Seeing Huey try to murder his own stepdaughter would have just vindicated his hatred; he gets to save a child while taking revenge. Emma nearly drowns while Huey strangles her underwater, but Kazuhira manages to stab Huey. Too many times. Enough to scar Emma of a deeper fear than hydrophobia or an abusive parent - the fear of a predator who will never stop hunting his prey, even with monstrous cyber-limbs or amputated limbs or weakened and feeble in general. When Kazuhira hires her on his team of moles in Cipher, she can't say no, she's too scared of him the same way Paz was scared stupid of Zero. He fills her head with his own brand of parasites; anti-authority, paranoia, and unending hatred of traitors.
He thinks she's grateful for saving her life from a monster. She has pointed her hatred at him for turning her into a monster. Like Skull Face, her AI creation would tear the world apart to crush the dreams of her nemesis, twisting Kazuhira's dream of an endless business from war, into a pointless war that has become the heart of the economy.