Higgs: personality
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.
