This analysis is addition to this. I finally fully listened to "One Last Fight Pt.2" and I heard the text that is used there… You know what? I don't have the words, just listen.
The text that can be heard:
We part, too soon
But in our lies
There′s a truth to find
The end is new
A tomorrow we must reach for
To be heard
Though I can't stay with you
Oh, I won′t stray away from the truth
Oh, I'm still learning to love anew
Before this, Higgs used someone else’s words, broke the fourth wall to express his despair. But this time, the words belong to him, and it’s the most straightforward message I could imagine.
Through these lines, he expresses the weight of his loss. The loss of what could have been, but wasn’t meant to be. He had lost all meaning in the world, because he knows the truth - that everything will fall. That’s why he believes Sam clings to lies. But inside those lies is his truth, and Higgs is capable of admitting it.
The only thing keeping Higgs together is the truth, his last pillar. He puts it above the "lies and hope" that Sam fights for. And even if he’s lost all reason to believe in anything good, he still admits he learning to love. The world? People? Sam?
There’s no hope in his words, only motion through ruins. But he still wants to be heard, because he understands this is the end… for everyone, or just for him.
Maybe the fact that Higgs breaks the fourth wall more than once tells us his songs are aimed more at the viewer than at Sam. It’s a way of passing something on to us indirectly - something important that can’t be put into simple words. And each person will understand it in their own way.
Higgs’s desire to turn the world into nothing is a veiled desire to end himself, his pain, his powerlessness. And it… tragically intertwines with those verses.
Inside Higgs is a man who wants to live, but doesn’t believe he can. He’s lost all hope for anything but oblivion. And maybe he does want to be saved, but he has no idea how to reach that without using rigidity, which has become a way of self-expression for him.
He also longs to be important, significant, necessary, so that his existence is not in vain.
And Higgs has become what raised him: isolation, violence, despair.
Let's just say… I plunged under this iceberg and almost drowned. Well, Let's talk about Higgs and I'll tell you what I saw in him. Believe me, it's interesting. And it's very sad.
Higgs is a man who never had anything of his own - no meaning, no closeness, no confirmation of his worth. His story is about how loneliness breeds the desire for absolute power just to feel alive. He doesn’t hate the world by default - he hates his own powerlessness within it.
At the beginning of Death Stranding, he plays the role of a Horseman of the Apocalypse, but behind it lies a tragic longing to be important in any way. He found nothing meaningful in this world, no real connections. No family, no friendship, no love. Meeting Amelie was the final tipping point that altered his identity - because she betrayed the hope he’d clung to. He believed he was finally needed by someone. Amelie gave him power, and with it, recognition - as if to say he mattered, he was special. But that feeling turned out to be an illusion.
His childhood was shaped by total isolation, emotional and physical abuse at the hands of an uncle he called "daddy". He grew up believing he was an object. He lived in a world where there were no "others". That warped reality became the only one he knew. Completely cut off from the outside world, even knowledge was restricted. In such an environment, Higgs’s identity couldn’t form properly. He saw no value in himself, but he wanted to survive, to become a part of the community.
He layered his image with narcissism as a form of protection. He placed himself at the center of events as a desperate attempt to convince himself he still existed as someone. His thinking: "If I wasn’t loved, then I must be better than everyone else." He built the persona of someone special, chosen, to justify his pain. At his core lies vulnerability and sensitivity. But he puts on a choleric mask, hiding under aggression, sarcasm, intimidation - to conceal weakness and preserve a sense of control.
Even his aggression is a form of desperate self-assertion. He’s closer to the philosophy of absurdism than to basic evil. His lack of empathy doesn’t come from hate, but from a kind of psychic deafness - he doesn’t know how to recognize other people’s pain. He literally can’t see others until someone (like Sam) forces him to feel.
He could have had empathy - but it was crushed by trauma and isolation. He’s so damaged, he no longer knows how to be different. He’s a wounded, abandoned, burned-out man with no idea how to feel, or who it’s even safe to show that to.
His pain runs so deep it mutates into a desire for annihilation. He’s not looking for an equal - he wants nothing to remain. He is, in fact, a suicide bomber, and his radicalism comes from a desire to erase everything. Higgs doesn’t bury his pain under rationalizations. He shows how empty he is. He craves to dissolve in destruction - together with Sam. And in his mecha-body, he spills everything out, in grotesque form - because he doesn’t know how else to express himself.
He simply gave up when he found out the truth from Amelie's mouth. That everything he aspired to as a porter uniting America would eventually disappear. That it was all for nothing.
His hunger for destruction is a way to take revenge for all the things he never had. Deep down, Higgs never wanted destruction for its own sake. His "wish for the end of the world" is a twisted confession of his failure - as a person. His apocalypse isn’t a crime for power, but an attempt to escape pain through a grand finale. "If nothing can ever matter to me, then maybe destroying everything can." It’s a kind of ironic vengeance - against the world, and himself.
10.000+ years on the Beach, outside time, outside society. No aging, no feelings, no development. Just a stagnant swamp of emptiness, where he’s trapped alone with himself... no room to grow, no purpose. He feels boredom, but never madness - which makes the torment even worse. His mind is poisoned by despair, but his intellect remains intact.
In DS2, Higgs’s appearance in the mecha-body looks like a parody of feelings, a tragicomic makeup where he is laughing and crying at the same time. His face is a mask, a new level of theatricality. His makeup reflects the searing inner instability. This image is a scream of pain, wrapped in a glossy, screaming shell. He didn’t just experience loneliness, but long, exhausting years on the Beach, where he had nothing except the memory of Sam and the feeling of rejection. His new image makes him far more human than before.
But even if his face is a mask, there is no lie in it. He is not trying to seem like someone else – he’s just artificially emphasizing what he has become. His smile is carved in gold, but it isn’t real, and his tears are drawn on, because he can’t allow himself to shed real ones in this body.
Higgs has a distorted understanding of attachment. He doesn’t know how to love – he only knows how to grab, dominate, force a reaction. This is especially visible in the context of Sam’s demisexuality, where Higgs seems to instinctively feel that simple display of the body, flirting, or impulsiveness won’t affect Sam. Which means he must force his way into his life.
Higgs has an obsession with Sam with a clear erotic-emotional undertone. This isn’t just fixation on an enemy. It’s an obsessive, distorted attraction born from loneliness, pain, and the desire to be seen by this one person. Because only Sam was able to provoke any reaction in him.
When Higgs, under a pseudonym (his real name), ordered pizza from Sam, it can be seen as a symbolic act of courtship, but in a twisted form. Higgs wants Sam to come to him, to do something personal. Physical contact (licking the cheek) and body language, combined with his behavior, are perceived not as domination, but as an aggressive form of closeness that he doesn’t know how to express differently. Almost a confession – but in a monstrous form.
The only longing on the Beach – is for Sam. Despite centuries of isolation, Higgs remembers him first. He is the center of his fixation.
He is intimate, contradictory, obsessed, even tender in a monstrous way. This is not eroticism for epatage, but a deep connection formed through suffering, loneliness, and pain. Even their battle isn’t just a fight, but almost a ritual, a dance with a subtext. Sam is living proof that a person can carry connection, light, persistence, even pain. Higgs falls in love with persistence, with the idea, with the fact that Sam isn’t afraid to be human.
Higgs’s love language is provocation, violence, mockery with subtext. Singing during Sam’s torture is a confession, encrypted in a crude, self-destructive form. The one who used to behave like a mocker and manipulator now expresses himself through song. It’s romance poisoned by obsession. The song becomes not an expression of kindness, but a way to express his despair.
He smiles and sings about wanting to be closer, while mocking Sam. It’s the contrast between outer grotesque and inner scream. He, the destroyer, sings the words of a parent to the person he’s trying to destroy. This cannot be accidental.
Higgs shows his pain not so someone would comfort him, but because it’s become all he has left. And he sings not for Sam, but in spite of him. His cruelty is a substitute for attachment, his face is a cry for help, his song is the echo of a soul that doesn’t know how to ask – but still knows how to feel.
I’m probably going to get shit for this but I honestly don’t care. If you don’t like Higgs Monaghan that’s fine just understand this is from someone who adores him so I guess warning for an unpopular opinion
To say I’m more than a little ticked off with the Drawbridge crew is a massive understatement. They all have situations similar to Higgs and the only difference is that they get help. I can understand Higgs’s frustrations and pain with Fragile because her willingness to help the others and abandon him makes me incredibly angry with her. This unwillingness to help also makes her look so much worse in DS1 because Higgs has no journal entry of Fragile trying to help him and him brushing her off. It tells me that she didn’t fucking try. The way Fragile and Sam brutalized him is haunting because you see Higgs losing his mind as they do it his laughter and saying “I’ll take the damage and the goods I don’t break that easy.” It paints this horrible picture of him trying to keep himself together as he was on The Beach. Seriously this scene hasn’t left me alone since I have seen it along with the scene of him talking about being alone for “tens of thousands of years” . The fact Fragile and Sam can do what they did makes them the biggest hypocrites I have ever seen. You might think oh that’s harsh or Higgs had it coming. Let me remind you that Amelie in my opinion the next most hypocritical character/ most manipulative who is considered all alone (debatable but I’m not here for her) she with her many crimes is given a hug. A simple hug and someone saying they understand. And what does Higgs get for submitting to loneliness and depression? Death. Just F U FRAGILE AND SAM!!!! F the both of you!!!! Fragile Higgs told you immediately what Amelie was planning and what the F did you do?! You left him!!!!! You left him!!!! Just how Higgs speaks of loneliness just shows how much his biggest fear came to pass. The fact he gave up because he knew no one was coming for him breaks my heart and you can see how much it broke him. The fact he didn’t even struggle or even make a sound when he finally dies just says so much about how he gave up. Hell Sam couldn’t even so much as say his name despite knowing it. I might do a deeper analysis into Peter soon but right now I’m incredibly sorry for him and how he has been alone all his life.
spread i did for the Focus Network zine! we are having left over sales currently so if you missed out on grabbing a copy during preorders, nows the chance to go grab a copy it really is a beautiful zine 😭🫶
i like aloy x tilda as a way of aloy getting to be a little selfish and induldge, being wanted from her very bones, even if it hasnt got enough legs to last in that state.
local clown makes humble request: can we please not bring legitimate shipping discourse/vitriol/conflict to the Horizon fandom? There's so much room on this playground for all of us, and nobody deserves to have their personal taste and preferred story extrapolations tossed against the wall. I've seen that happen too many times.
The gorgeous part of this fandom is the way that we all vibe in enjoyment and appreciation of these characters and this world. Let's all do our best to keep it a fun and welcoming space for all, including the folks whose preferred ideas don't float our boats!
