You know what.
I have a bone to pick with the entire crew of the Michelangelo or whatever the fuck it's called. It's almost 4AM, I'm not going to go look up how it's spelled. Also, fuck Tarman, he's involved too.
Why the fuck does every single character in Death Stranding 2 spend the entire goddamned game straight up lying to Sam, given that he's supposed to be their friend?
I'm actually going to start with Fragile, because fuck Fragile. I loved her in the first game and I am so PISSED at her in the second game.
She knows that Lou is dead. Oh, we may get a super bullshitty excuse from her at the end of the game about how she magically forgot key details, but he fucking knows Lou is dead. From the start. She knows she's gone. Does she tell Sam? No, of course she doesn't, because she wants something from him. She lets him walk right into this stupid mission thinking there's still a chance. She lets him carry that tiny flicker of hope and DELUSION like it's a cargo container strapped to his back.
And for what? So he'll do what they want? So he'll stop grieving his dead child?
It's so manipulative. It's so gross. She looks him in the eyes and just lets him keep believing that Lou is inside that stupid, empty little coffin strapped to his chest. She weaponizes his grief the delusion born of it to force him to be okay enough to help them even though he's obviously not fucking okay. That's not friendship, it's exploitation.
And the rest of them are no better. The whole Magellan squad, every single one of them is complicit. They treat Sam like a tool, like some kind of half-feral, half-divine postman they can just point in a direction and trust he'll deliver the impossible no matter how many times it kills him, even if it breaks him in the end.
None of them respect him enough to tell him the truth. None of them actually let him choose to grieve. Him being able-bodied and somewhat able-minded serves them more than a broken man who'd just lost his child and needs time to come to terms with that, so they just let him not come to terms with it for as long as it takes them to finish the mission.
They treat him like a fucking pack mule. I don't give a shit about Noman Reedus not being able to mocap as much. The animators could have worked without it. You get NO bonding time with the crew when you go back to the Magellan. They just tell him to go get some rest every time he tries to spend time with them and what the FUCK? You guys could at least pretend you give a shit.
And then the truth comes out and it's fucking devastating, because of course it is. All that grief building up behind that steadily cracking dam of deluded hope for so long, patched over by the duct tape of your "friends" playing along with your delusions so that you'll continue to be useful for them. And then he deals with that pain and suffers alone in that awful, painful cutscene because Fragile just walks out like a coward when she and Dollman are finally forced to admit it.
Because, you know, the only person in this entire two-game series that never lied to Sam (Higgs? HIGGS?!) has finally sown enough seeds of doubt that he's beginning to see through his own delusion.
Also they're near the end of the mission, so they don't need him to pretend to be okay anymore, so whatever.
I will fistfight the entire crew of the Magellan in a tar pit.
