I used to watch my brother play the Metal Gear Solid games and it’s actually really interesting to look at Hideo Kojima’s games in the context of how homosexuality is viewed in Japan.
I’m not going to speculate on Kojima’s own sexuality, I’ll leave that to himself, but his games are famous for being very horny, homoerotic and having a ridiculously high number of bisexual male characters. People will point out that they’re all villains, but that’s just the explicitly bisexual characters. His two main characters, Snake from Metal Gear Solid and Sam from Death Stranding, are also implied to not be straight.
This is where Japanese culture and the extensive lore of Kojima’s works comes in.
Homosexuality is taboo in the west and Japan for different reasons. In the west it’s seen as sinful, but in Japan it’s seen as disruptive. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t call attention to yourself in any way. Don’t mess with the status quo. Most queer people choose not to come out to their families for this reason. And to make matters worse, even if a small majority of Japanese people are in favor of queer people having rights the government is very conservative and it’s even illegal to depict homosexuality positively in some parts of Japan.
So what does Kojima do to appease his government and the culture of his people? He does what people did in Hollywood in the 30’s and make the explicitly bisexual characters villains and make his heroes covertly bisexual.
Kojima always had an interest in sexuality and gender. In high school he wrote a story where all women succumbed to an illness, leaving the men unsure of how to continue. Remember, at the time the majority of women in Japan quit their jobs when they got married and took care of their husband and children. So who was supposed to take care of the house and their sons? Could men just stop craving intimacy or would they have to turn to each other? And how would they make more babies? I’ll get back to that.
One of the most famous scenes in Metal Gear happens when Snake disguise himself as Ivan, the lover of Volgin. Volgin walks up to what he assumed to be his lover and grabs his crotch, looks confused, grabs him again and asks “Who are you? I know the major better than anyone else” Volgin and Ivan are undoubtedly villains, but their love for each other is surprisingly the most human thing about them. If Snake puts on Ivan’s mask during his bossbattle with Volgin, Volgin will hesitate at first, then double his attacks in anger, but also cry because he’s trying to kill a man with his boyfriend’s face.
Snake/Otacon is the most heavily implied relationship in the whole series that hasn’t been confirmed. In the first game Snake could end up with Otacon at the end, and since then they’ve moved in together, raised a child together, talked at length about how they taught each other to love, teased each other about their libido, and the list goes on. They also notably get call-backs to two other canon romantic couples; Raiden and Rosemary when Otacon tells Snake that he won’t be let back inside before he takes a shower (Rosemary wouldn’t let Raiden back in because he got pee on him), and Volgin and Ivan when Otacon says he knows Snake better than anyone else. My point being, Snake and Otacon are very heavily implied to be a bisexual couple.
Then there’s Death Stranding. The game is definitely written by a more mature Kojima who has been hanging out with a lot of Americans. His view of sex and love is more nuanced and he understands that there’s a difference between sexual and romantic orientation. We still got Higgs, a flamboyant villain who acts very predatory and is heavily implied to be bisexual, though never confirmed, and Sam who’s implied to be asexual (he has an Ace of Spades sticker on his bike) and biromantic, and we get our first confirmed good bisexual character, Die-Hardman.
Kojima never got to play around with gender much in Metal Gear Solid, but he made up for that in Death Standing. Remember that story he wrote in high school? We see a lot of inspiration from that here. The solution the men came up with for having healthy babies in the story was to have men carry pods around on their stomachs where the fetus could grow in the most natural way possible.
There’s still women in Death Stranding but there’s a lot of men carrying babies around on their stomachs, men forming family unions, and the main character Sam acts more like a stereotypical mother than father. There’s literally a scene where Deadman puts a hand on Sam’s pod like it’s a pregnant belly and basically asks him “The three of us are a family, aren’t we?”
Sam later tries to give the baby to a woman, Fragile, but she only sees it as babysitting and gives it back, so Sam gives it to Deadman who declares it “our little one”.
By the end of the game the three of them are seen together, depicted as two parents holding their child. Throughout the game people are constantly trying to hug and touch Sam but in the end the only person who gets a hug is Deadman.
It’s also worth noting that in the universe of Death Stranding Sam and Deadman are believed to be a couple before they actually are. Deadman made sure of that so no one would question why they spend so much time together.
There will no doubt be more bisexual men in Kojima’s next game, and I’m curious to see if there’ll be any development in how openly he depictes queer characters. He’s a middle aged man so no matter what his own sexuality might be I don’t expect him to easily shake the expectations of Japanese society off, but he has started hanging out with a lot of Danes, most notably Nicolas Winding Refn who despite making extremely violent movies is very open minded and has, when asked, been very honest about his own sexuality (to spare you the pain of digging though Danish interviews, he’s a straight, slightly bi-curious man with an interest in BDSM, but who’s also satisfied leaving a lot of his fantasies to his imagination because his movies gives him an outlet for a lot of it).
You can see a lot of Scandinavian/Nordic influences in Death Stranding and I’d be surprised if Nicolas didn’t expose Kojima, intentionally or unintentionally, to the Scandinavian view of homosexuality. I can best describe it with a news report I once saw on national television. Parents were worried about a dangerous road that their children had to cross every day to get to school but the government wasn’t doing anything about it. The parents they interviewed were a gay couple but they were treated exactly like any other worried parents. No fuss, no spectacle. Please think of the safety of these parents’ children.
I can imagine that approach would go over very well with a middle aged Japanese man who clearly wants queer people to be able to live happy, fulfilling lives with families and children but doesn’t seem to want to upset his society.
Other people have pointed out that Kojima and Nicolas seem to inspire each other a lot and have taken an interest in each other’s cultures, and Nicolas was the first person to announce publicly that he’d be in Kojima’s next game, so I’m really interested in seeing what that will do, if anything, to how comfortable Kojima is with depicting his queer characters. Something certainly happened once he started socializing with a lot of Americans.
I am of course not saying Kojima is a saint who’s doing everything right, but he is an interesting guy to follow.
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