Metal Gear/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• The Beauties from MGS4. At first I thought they were cheesecake, but then I realized that the contrast between their attractive outsides and their horribly, horribly damaged insides made them even creepier. -Jonn
  • Laughing Octopus did that for me- during the second playthrough, her lines about people hurt and dying being hilarious sound much creepier when you know what she was forced to do. -Regiment
    • Additionally, they thematically fit with the growing themes of nature vs technology in the series. Compare and contrast say, Crying Wolf with The End. One is a sniper with an almost symboitic relationship with nature and uncanny talent which was honed through years of developing technique. The other is a machine mockup of an animal who barely adheres to proper tactics because the technology that made them allows them to do so. It goes on. Compare how the Fear could run on water to how Vamp is eventually theorized to. Or just Fortune's powers in general. The progression of bosses in the series (chronologically) traces a shift between natural talent with a tad of mysticism tossed in to full on, technologically dependent, VR trained soldiers.
    • How about the fact that Old Snake's namechange makes him fit the naming scheme of the Beauties? Snake was the other member of FOX-HOUND, and the 'emotion' he carries into battle is "End", signified by his "Old"-ness. He used to be gorgeous, but now he's ugly and dependent on his suit to fight. Makes Drebin's suggestion that Snake's just like the Beauties a bit more than just a generic Not So Different line.
      • Ugly? Says you.
  • This Troper saw the "Octopus" advertisement as an interesting aside. However, in the codec conversation about it, Snake mentions that you have to use what you have. Octopi are some of the most adaptable creatures in the ocean. And how do the members of the Beauty and the Beast Corps adapt? By using nanomachines! The ad has a second layer, saying that adaptability is better than raw power. This sums up the gameplay of Metal Gear
• This troper was like thousands of others who got really, really annoyed with the Recessive And Dominant Genes Rant Liquid gives in Metal Gear Solid, until a bit of a replay and then some reading of a certain webcomic made this less of a wallbanger but some sheer brilliance. What's the best way to raise a Super Soldier that will do anything? Fuck with his mind. Tell him he's the child of the world's greatest soldier, but that he wasn't chosen to be a successor, because he's weaker, and that he was rejected in favor of his brother, do this to him all his life, while making him go through the most rigorous training in the world, courtesy of SAS, and oh yea - tell him that he can't get a pat on the back by daddy because his brother killed him, and destroyed the Warrior Paradise that Daddy spent the latter part of his life constructing. The Dominant and Recessive Genes is just a way to drive Liquid off-rails, if he didn't break under the pressure, he would be insanely devoted to proving everyone wrong, he just a little nudge for how to do so. - Shini
  • Not to mention the sheer, and utter mixture of Hilarity and Horror that the entire Shadow Moses Incident can be caused by someone having a major jealousy-induced temper tantrum taken up to eleven, hilarious because the motive was because Liquid didn't like being the "inferior" brother, and horrifying because of just how easily someone that unstable can take over a nuclear disposal site and hijack a Metal Gear - Shini
  • Ocelot's hidden conversation at the end implies this was all part of the plan. Sprangitudinous
  • This not-troper always liked the MGS games, even with the long and wordy cutscenes, but always felt that some elements were a bit... off. Then he realized that MGS is a Deconstruction, not just of movie and video game tropes, but of the entire medium of video games. Everything from the fourth wall-breaking Codec calls to the perfectly straight tutorials to Psycho Mantis' mind reading and psychokinesis to GW urging Raiden to turn off the console is part of an attempt to show what games can get away with in the name of fun, without banging the players head with it or turning into a total parody. And the way the endings for each entry in the series got steadily more depressing was an incredible setup to the amazingly heroic finale of MGS 4. --Not a troper, but I use the screenname "Bad Username" frequently.
    • MGS 2 gets even more mind screwy when you consider not only the actual plot being a deconstruction but also an allegory to the player-character relationship. The Patriots plotted perfectly to get Raiden to do what they wanted him to. Even though you're trying to help Raiden, you're controlling to make the plot fit while looking at him from a 3rd person view. Guess what that means? I must fight The Patriots! No player, you ARE The Patriots.
      • I see it as the opposite. In MGS3, The Boss' tragedy, and indeed a recurring theme throughout the series, is the Patriots manipulating soldiers to do what they want them to do. Just like the player is 'manipulated' into doing what the game wants you to do. Similarly, the trend of the player-character being mocked for blindly following orders can be seen as a Take That to the player doing whatever the game tells them to do
• I got into the Metal Gear Solid series after hearing so much about it on this wiki. I finished MGS 2, and it occured to me that the whole thing was Hideo Kojima telling the world that he simply didn't believe that he could make a good sequel to MGS that could live up to fans expectations. After I came to this conclusion, I realised that the very first action the player would take - saving - lampshades this, with Otacon's inability to quote correctly, unlike Mei Ling. Maybe I'm slow, but it seemed pretty clever to me. - randomfanboy
  • Also, I was very confused by the fact that Naked Snake kept on referring to EVA as Eva even after discovering her real name. Later I realised it was a deliberate reference to Rose referring to Raiden as Jack. In fact, the whole of MGS 3 is simply retelling MGS 2 in a way that people can swallow. Consider: A man named Jack is sent into a battlezone with no clue that his superiors are betraying him. His formally absent parental figure is the villain of the game. The woman he is in love with betrays him. He ends up killing his parental figure because an ancient conspiracy told him to, and he discovers that the whole mission he's been lied to and jerked around. I think it goes deeper than that, but there you go.
    • I haven't actually played a Metal Gear game, but, y'know, Popcultural Osmosis and all that. So consider this in reference to the above: in MGS2, "Jack" is an attempt at recreating Solid Snake's success at Shadow Moses Island. In MGS3, "Jack" is Big Boss. In other words, in their attempt to create a reprisal of Solid Snake, they instead created a reprisal of Big Boss (A dorky and whiny Big Boss, admittedly, but they knew that going in.) -Kimiko Muffin
  • Cynthia wasn't her real name. It's a reference to a real spy. Call Zero after the cutscene.
  • After playing MGS 1-3, and reading the comics for 1 & 2, I read this page, lo and behold the light shines brightly. What the troper above mentions about Liquid's tantrum, makes it weirdly plausible that Solidus anticipated that the two most dangerous individuals to his plans were unlikely to be easily eliminated-unless the killer was one of the brothers. Given that Liquid and Solid are on a whole new level compared to any other soldier alive at the time, it makes sense for Solidus to set them up to kill each other. The only way he could pull this was to isolate them from society, place them in a perceived high stakes situation, wait for a body, and nuke an already irradiated island, safely in the knowledge that he could blame the detonation on terrorists mishandling the warheads. It further makes more sense when we examine the presence of a Metal Gear, its the only prize big enough to get Liquid there, and scarier enough for Solid to come out of retirement. The sheer size of Rex makes covert transport from such an isolated area, quite difficult, and despite the complexity only the plans are necessary for Solidus to build a Rex in new location. Nuking the island destroys any records of Rex. Kills the CEO and DARPA representatives who knew about Rex. Removes the Next Generation Special Forces who were slowly coming apart genetically(covering up that little not so legal experiment), wipes out Fox Hound which seems to be a pointless liability given its tendency to do The Starscream to the US Government United Nations unlucky bastards stuck with telling them what to do. Foxdie is the chancy bit however, as Solidus's ace in the hole required someone he did not have complete control over to seek vengeance at a jeopardise-the-entire-mission level. Ocelot's selling of the plans is just his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, something Solidus could not stop (and probably anticipated) as he needed Ocelot to rig this Xanatos Roulette, hence why Ocelot does not show signs of Foxdie (Haven't played MGS 4 but if he does turn out have Foxdie then it kind of changes Ocelot into Snake Plisskin from the second movie...). I nearly wrote off my computer with a glass of coke when this clicked ;)- Eyclonus
  • At first, the revelation that Major Zero and Naked Snake's support crew were the founders of the Patriots seemed like a random retcon in an attempt to shoehorn the supporting cast of Snake Eater into the Patriots conspiracy in Sons of Liberty. But if you go back to the beginning of Operation: Snake Eater in MGS3, the password Zero tells Snake to use on ADAM was "Who are the Patriots?" and "La-li-lu-le-lo".
    • I kind of felt the opposite way. Like the cast of Snake Eater was created specifically because Kojima didn't know where he had intended to go with the Patriot's storyline before then. Since he hadn't intended to make another MGS game after 2, he created these characters in 3 specifically so he could have a twist to reveal in 4.
  • I also got into MGS via TV Tropes, and having read the Never Trust a Trailer page, I thought that while it was clever to hide Raiden in the trailers for Sons of Liberty, it was a really jerk move to outright replace him with Snake in the cut scenes taken from the Plant chapter. Then I realized that they said that the entire mission was essentially Solid Snake going through Shadow Moses again, so Snake and Raiden were interchangable in the situation, and the whole thing was symbolic.
• It took me until my second playthrough of the fourth game to realize that, likely as a byproduct of the nanomachine control or similar, that some people are unable to hear or speak The Patriots as such and can only say or hear it as a bunch of garbled letters - La Li Lu Le Lo. It made the president's confusion at Raiden in the second game make a lot more sense, too.
  • It's worth noting that A-I-U-E-O is the way that many East Asian nations learn their vowels and the combinations of consonants and vowels. To Japanese players, this is most likely seen as the Chinese way of learning L sounds as a child.
• In Metal Gear Solid, Snake talked about how virtual training is no substitute for real life experiences. At first, I thought it was just him talking about how he had actual battlefield experience, making him more skilled. Then I realized: what is the definition of a Video Game? This line is basically Hideo Kojima saying that just because you can do surgery or practice law in video games doesn't mean you can do it in real life. The game is basically telling us to not play it too much
• A very small one from Metal Gear Solid 2. The Ninja gives Raiden a Gurlukovich uniform. When Raiden puts it on, his Codec team Hand Wave how it becomes unequpped when you bump into someone by saying it's 'a little too small'. The Colonel even fantasises about how Rose would look wearing the uniform, since he thinks it's in her size. At first I thought this was just a bit of silliness, but it actually makes a lot of sense - why would Raiden's uniform be too small for him, but would fit Rose? Simple - it's a woman's uniform. How would the Ninja get hold of a woman's uniform? By being a female Gurlukovich member herself. Olga even wears the standard Gurlukovich uniform in the Shell 1 core (where the special uniform that she gave Raiden was mandatory for security reasons), just to make sure we get that she doesn't have her special uniform any more.
  • ...and a little Fridge Brilliance about that: Raiden is forced to wear women's clothes.
• A potential one from MGS1, of all things, put in context by MGS3 and 4; Ocelot's post-boss fight line, "You're pretty good. Just what I'd expect from someone with the same code name as the boss.". It just clicked: If this bit of 'retroactive fridge brilliance' is correct [and given what a crazy loon Kojima is, it might be]... He's not talking about Liquid. -Kitsunemimi Maiden
  • And the phrase "code". It refers to both codename, and genetic code. - pinkdalek
• Treblain: From Metal Gear Solid 3, the whole Biblical symbolism with ADAM, EVA, and Snake. EVA comments that this time, it was "Eve" that tempted "the snake" instead of the other way around. But where did the game take place? That's right! In the Garden of Eden, the snake tempts Eve. In Soviet Russia, EVA tempts Snake!
• A bit of fridge creepiness. Before the the Psycho Mantis fight in MGS, there are a couple of unsettling details. 1. The door at the end is closed. 2. Once Meryl becomes possessed, you notice that the first person view is.. third person - through a mask of sorts. That leads me to conclude that Psycho mantis is in that hallway, stalking you. It also points it out as when you enter the commander's room, the door waits for a second (perhaps someone's in the doorway?) until he comes inside. Creepy.
  • That's exactly what's happening, yeah. The 'third person' view you mentioned is Mantis's view, which is exactly what happens if you use first person during the boss fight.
• Who's the final Cobra you have to fight in MGS3? The Boss. Get it?
  • And in the same way, the Big Bad you have to fight in the first two |Metal Gear games is Big Boss.
• Snake and Otacon's rather complicated handshake-y thing in MGS2 used to get on my nerves for years - it just doesn't seem like something Snake would have time for, what with him being the no-nonsense soldier type. However, it does seem like the something Otacon would come up with when they started up Philanthropy, and Snake would probably have gone along with it just to shut him up. When the handshake happens, Otacon's not far from Heroic BSOD - and Snake knows exactly what to do to wake him up.
  • Hardly. While Snake is indeed a no-nonsense soldier, Otacon is pretty much the only true friend he has and the only person he trusts completely. Actually, the very fact that Snake doesn't really do things like that normally only goes to show the strength of the bond the two share, which is why it's considered such a touching scene by many. You shouldn't underestimate the value of a real friend like Otacon for Snake who is constantly used as a tool or viewed as a "legend" by everyone who isn't either trying to shoot him or is only interested in his genes. However, I think the TRUE Fridge Brilliance -moment for most people comes from the realization that the handshake is the Konami Code. -Kan
• In MGS4's microwave hallway, one of the sequences on the top of the screen near the end is Sunny making eggs, and being happy at the result. It was a sharp contrast to every other scene which were 'sad' and 'downers', but then I remembered one of the conversations Sunny had with Naomi. It was her "sunny-side up fortune telling" - if the eggs came out well, something good was going to happen. And as such, something good did happen: the Patriots were destroyed, and the entire conflict ended.
• One thing I always liked about Metal Gear Solid 3 was the implication that the Patriots are nothing more than a vast bureaucratic system that keeps going out of sheer inertia - essentially, there is no 'Illuminati' or whatever controlling the world, everything is the way it is because human nature keeps it that way and so on. I thought about this in comparison to action movies, in which the hero can usually take down a vast system simply by killing the guy in charge. Then it hit me - this means that in one of the biggest, most extensive love letters to Bond and action movies ever written, Kojima has subverted both the Bond Villain and Power Fantasy in one go, in a far more effective way than the more notorious MGS2. - User:randomfanboy
• So Metal Gear Solid 2 got a bad rep by some who were fans of MGS1 that wanted to be Solid Snake and instead got the infamous protagonist-bait-and-switch. I realized something though; it sounded like they felt betrayed by this. Used, even. Well, guess what? Snake was used as a pawn of the Patriots for years until he caught on to them; in a way, the game made them feel more like Solid Snake than they ever anticipated!
• Everyone knows that Snake was influenced by Plissken from Escape from New York and that Kojima must really like the movie. So, it might be either coincidence, meta-Fridge Brilliance or Shout-Out but Escape From L.A. also copies and parodies the basics of the plot of the first movie much like Metal Gear Solid 2 does with the first game.
• I recently read a theory about Sons of Liberty being almost entirely VR as a message to the player. The exact details aren't very clear to me, but the main thing that this Fridge Brilliance of mine made me realize is that, at the end of the game, Rose gets in the act alongside the Colonel as part of GW...yet I distinctly recall a conversation in Arsenal where Raiden mentions the Colonel's behavior to Rose and she mentions that she hadn't heard from the guy and, like Raiden, hadn't even met the guy. She said that she had been blindfolded and escorted to her current location. The whole thing just didn't seem to fit into the VR theory, which makes me think that, even if the rest of the events on the Arsenal Gear is messing with his head, the real Rose was there and had been helping him up to this point. - Drakohahn

Fridge Horror

• The Patriots of the Metal Gear Solid series are creepy enough as it is, but then you get into Otacon's backstory and realize that the Patriots are responsible for all of it. The sexual abuse, his father's suicide, his estrangement from his beloved little stepsister-- they did it all. They made the life of one of the nicest, sweetest, most truly good-hearted people in the entire series hell just because they decided that his brain would be a good tool. And they've done it before, to multitudes upon multitudes of innocent people. Nobody can trace them. Nobody can identify them. They are faceless and near-omniscient, and they might just be responsible for everything in your life you thought was just a cruel twist of fate. Sleep tight.
  • I thought that his estrangement from his little sister was when his little sister nearly drowned because he was too busy having sex with his stepmother to be able to try and save her?
    • You think that's bad? The Philosophers make this conspiracy way more far-reaching and disturbing. America, Russia, and China had selected children all over the world that they raised from birth to be agents in their organization, guys like Ocelot were kidnapped from their parents shortly after they are born and raised to be nothing more than a cog/screw in a very nuanced and complicated machine. This conspiracy has been going on since at least the time of the First World War and when the Patriots took over the international power the Philosophers once had this means that by the time of Metal Gear Solid 4 this has been going on for almost 100 years.
• In Big Boss's era of the Metal Gear Solid series all 3 of his games have the antagonist try to fire nuclear weapons at the United States. Think about that for a moment, this was during the Cold War when Americans and Russians alike lived in fear that their homelands could be turned into craters of radioactive dust at any moment, this illustrates how realistic the Cold War paranoia really was. Had it not been for the timely intervention of heroes like Big Boss the world could have ended like so many had feared during the Cold War.