(no subject)

[luciazephyr]

Hey, MGSers, have some screencaps. Sorry for the huge delay- I was busy having a meltdown a few days ago and it threw me off.

I admit, I got cap-happy with Johnny and Raiden's Crowning Moments of Awesome. And there's some Drebin and Meryl thrown in.

So, during my rewatch of MGS4, I learned:

1. I have gigantic crushes on Meryl and EVA.


2. I play FPS games, so EVA and Kojima hate me. YEAH BECAUSE KILLING HEADCRABS MAKES ME A KILLER. STFD AND STFU, Kojima.


3. Again, I never really thought Naomi liked Hal until her message at the end.


4. Naomi's "It hurt me most to betray you like that"? Was the nail in the coffin for my hate of her character. No, bitch, you know how it hurt? Fucking Snake. The guy you told to kill himself. Just... christ, Naomi, no. No no no no.


5. Act 3 is my favorite. EVA, man. And Ocelot. And EVA.


6. I refuse to call Ocelot "Liquid". Just fucking no.


7. I still don't understand the plot, really.


8. Johnny is a lucky lucky man. I am so head-over-heels for Meryl.


9. No, really, the "video gamers are murderers" in Act 3 really offended me. :| I learned to read playing games, Kojima, so blow me.

Bad Idea #542: Ocelot song set to "Girlfriend" would be deliriously fun.

-Lucy

Comments

[astrokittie.livejournal.com]

Thank you darlin'!

[firefly99.livejournal.com]

i think what bothered me the most about Naomi is that Kojima himself didn't seem to have a clue how he wanted to present her. Is she fanservice? Messianic and self-sacrificing? A traitorous whore? A genuine love interest, or a squick machine? The woman who saved the world and helped a daughter reconnect with her family, or the homewrecker who slept with a man within earshot of him just to use the man's emotions against him? By the end all her traits kind of mesh together and she becomes 'a person who did a bunch of stuff' rather than a coherent character. Which I suppose is more 'realistic', in a sense, but that doesn't make her a good character.

Thing is, I'm not sure I'm not just butthurt over my OTP, or just way too trope-savvy to understand a woman character using sex as a weapon and actually being commended for it.

I do think we are supposed to be mad at Naomi for sleeping with Otacon, because of Snake's response. So when the game wanted us to sympathise with Otacon (the whole thing with the glasses, etc.) and, later, sympathise with Naomi, it felt really strange.

Mind you, Kojima could have been doing something a bit clever there. Snake wanted Otacon to be happy, even if he really didn't want him to be sleeping with her. Maybe the game was trying to invoke those mixed emotions - kind of 'I hate her but she's the only chance my family has to be happy' kind of thing.



Oh yeah, so this is on topic - could you upload me the one portion of the one cutscene from where Naomi tells Snake to strip to her little tear at seeing him? I may or may not have an idea for an awful AMV.

[lucia-tanaka.livejournal.com]

It don't know if I'd mind it if I weren't a slasher, really. On one hand, I could be just bitter than Hal is a complete idiot and Snake deserves better than his dumb ass. On the other... Naomi's character irked me before she started badtouching Hal-

And the Act 3 Briefing really was squicky to me. With his reactions to her advances throughout the whole thing and the way you could see her thinking about how to push- it felt so manipulative, it ruined her good moment talking about Sunny. Also, I've said it once and I'll say it again: I had no idea she gave a damn about him outside using him until her final message (which was rage-inducing in its own ways).

(also, the fact that their 'relationship' was all of a day long makes me want to hit Otacon with something blunt and heavy. but wotev.)

Is our audience proxy meant to be Snake tho? I always thought it was equal parts Snake and Otacon. Snake for the actiony portion where it's all wish fulfillment about being a supersoldier dude, but Otacon for the story itself, to have a more emphatic (or, rather, more easily recognized as emphatic) character.

I could just be bitter. It really bugs me how Snake and Otacon's relationship is just... not important to the game. There are little glimpses of great moments between them (Act 4 and 5's briefings come to mind, Otacon's office for a moment, plus the non-Stinger at the end), but even then...

And I think this may be my biggest problem with MGS4- there's no real warmth between them. It's all not very comfortable and cold, which to me makes no sense since these are two men who, whether you slash them or not, are meant to have such a strong relationship. They've known each other almost a decade, have lived and worked together for most of it, and had apparently settled down into a nice little semi-retirement before Campbell calls them back out of it. So where the hell is the.... fuck, anything? Anything to show that?


I'll stop now, I think I'm on the brink of a tangent. :|

OH AND UH, I don't have the software to cut a .mkv file, but I can probably upload you the whole scene on SendSpace. That okay?

[thene]

(I hadn't realised til I looked over these VERY AWESOME CAPS that, shit, Raiden's high heels? ARE FUCKING CLOVEN. CLOVEN. How sexy is that? Thanks so much for doing this.)

That was my big problem with MGS4 as a whole; the lack of warmth & emotional intimacy, when the entire win of MGS1 was Snake's emotional interactions with people - Otacon, Meryl, Naomi & Fox especially. But in MGS4, I guessed the point was that Snake has just totally withdrawn because of the whole impending death thing and if anyone wants warmth, they're going to have to get it elsewhere. Which sucked, to me, but made sense.

I tend to read Snake as being a stand-in for videogaming as a medium, and read Otacon and Rose as being avatars of the audience, or rather, avatars of how much Kojima hates videogame fans, one masculinised (is that a word?) and one feminised; Otacon started off just liking giant robots and not caring about the consequences, and is now trying to fix a medium he created in the first place; he 'knows Snake better than anyone else' but can't stop him getting old. Rose, she wanted the protagonist to be a lovely bishieboy and she wanted him to have feelings & an existence outside the gameplay, but couldn't deal when it happened - I think her encounter with Raiden's real feelings and his real backstory are analogous to Otacon's encounter with the violent and terrifying reality of Gray Fox & Solid Snake. So that's the crappy support team in MGS4; the gameplay and giant robots side, the one who allegedly cares about your feelings, and Snake doesn't have much to say to either of them.

...Yeah, I've put way too much thought into this. :/

[lucia-tanaka.livejournal.com]

Ta dah: http://www.sendspace.com/file/btm8ph