Welcome back. Yesterday, I detailed what I considered to be the five best of Metal Gear Solid's female offerings. As I cautioned in my last post, however, it's not all sunshine and empowerment here. Today we look at the other side, looking at the five worst Metal Gear Solid women.

Continuing on last post's point scale, higher values equal a better score, meaning -1 is the least objectionable and -5 is a turd sandwich daring to call itself a female character.

Note: by necessity, there are spoilers ALL OVER this. Read at your own discretion.

-1
Sniper Wolf

Appears in: MGS1
Hands down one of the hardest bosses in the original Metal Gear Solid, Sniper Wolf was not a woman to be trifled with. She was a better shot than you, she could stay awake for weeks without food or drink, and her "children", the local wolf-hound population, were clearly out for your damn blood. However, that doesn't stop Wolf from positively screaming bad cliche, as a quintessential femme fatale, the exotic cold-as-ice beauty who is one part video game staple and two parts chauvinistic war fantasy.

But not only is Sniper Wolf deadly, no, she falls in love with her targets-- and only her targets. After Snake defeats her the first time, she marks him with her nails, and appears completely obsessed with him until her death, at which point she very helpfully monologues about her tragic wartorn past. Snake respects her as a warrior, but there's another side of her character it's hard to overlook: that of the pitiable, secretly scared femme fatale who has chosen to harden herself and become your classic spider-woman villainness. She remains among the most interesting of MGS's bad guys, but she's still not very original.

Function: Antagonist.
Dies? Yes.
Pros: Definitely no pushover, and rewardingly fleshed-out for an antagonist.
Cons: Chronic wardrobe malfunction, and the first of many Random Cursed Otacon Lust Objects.


-2
EVA

aka: Tatyana, Big Mama
Appears in: MGS3, MGS4
An effective triple-crossing spy for the Chinese, EVA demonstrates that she is smart, capable, and ballsy-- certainly characteristics to aspire to. She remains one of the only characters who actually pulls one over on a Snake and gets away with it, although it turns out post-credits that even she was outwitted by Ocelot. (But really, only Ocelot can outwit Ocelot.) She successfully beds Big Boss, which is no small feat, considering how much he resists throughout the game.

But apart from that, her record is less than inspiring: she isn't clever enough to figure out how to maintain her role as a spy without enduring Volgin's sadistic bedroom games; she by and large stands by when horrible stuff goes down all around her; she is found out and captured, mostly by making a simple mistake like forgetting which boots she ought to be wearing; and a few years later, she decides that a one-night stand with a former target is enough for her to Really Want His Babies.

Yes, it was pretty powerful when Solid Snake met his mom in MGS4, but when you really think about it, EVA continues to be hung up over a man she slept with once, fifty years ago. Not only that, but she's expanded her mother complex to her entire Paradise Lost organization, refering to all of her cronies as her "children" and herself as their "Mama". Defining yourself by a conventional role, much?

And her antigravity super-rock-hard implants are something to behold.

Function: Ally, femme fatale.
Dies? Yes.
Pros: Successfully tricked Big Boss, and on a tigerskin rug too.
Cons: So many attempts at seduction she became a parody of herself. Chronic wardrobe malfunction even into her 70s.


-3
Naomi Hunter

Appears in: MGS1, MGS4
You know that idiot quiet girl in the first Battle Royale? The one who tries to revenge-poison Shuya over a mistake in perception, but ends up killing an entire kitchen full of schoolgirls? THAT'S NAOMI.

It's hard to imagine a character in this series who has stirred as much shit as Naomi Hunter. I mean, except maybe Ocelot or something. Naomi may claim to have reasons for contaminating Snake with FOXDIE, but honestly they aren't very good ones: she blames Snake for killing Gray Fox, even though he was under orders and Gray Fox accepted the conditions (and anyway, Gray Fox gets better, as so often happens in these games); her sobbing apologies after the fact do little but infuriate the player further. What are we supposed to make of a woman who couldn't see the virtue in a "man's duel" and sought revenge in a conventional "coward's way", poison? (Well, genetic poison.) That's right-- she's a bitter poisoner of the Biblical tradition, and when she shows up again in MGS4 it's nothing but the same old bullshit about guilt, atonement, and BY THE WAY I DOUBLE-CROSSED YOU OH WAIT IT'S COOL GUYS NEVERMIND. And then there's the sleeping-with-Vamp thing, which I flatly refuse to get into.

It isn't so much that Naomi is a bad female as it is that she's simply a bad character: in a series where absurd motivations are sort of par the course, her agenda is so arcane and pointless that it makes everyone else an expert in formal logic. She comes across as petty, irrational and emotionally unstable, quite in conflict with her supposed mental acuity.

Function: Ally-turned-antagonist-turned-ally-turned-religious-nutcase.
Dies? By suicide, no less.
Pros: She's as smart as the plot requires, and sometimes that's very smart indeed.
Cons: Everything else. That includes a late onset of chronic wardrobe malfunction and an arbitrary sleeping-with-Otacon disease, which, again, only happens so that her death can be more tragic.


-4
B&B Corps (Laughing Octopus, Raging Raven, Crying Wolf, Screaming Mantis)

Appear in: MGS4
If I listed them individually they'd take up the entire bottom rank, when in fact they are just one sin spread over four people. There are no two ways about it: these characters suck, the occasional coolness of their battles notwithstanding. Not only are their "Beauty" forms the hugest crock of male-gaze bullshit MGS4 could have possibly come up with apart from just rendering them naked, but their annoying over-the-top tragic histories as info-dumped by Drebin are pointless, uninteresting, and just plain sloppy writing, even by MGS standards.

No one is particularly concerned with how much tragedy you can heap onto a single character. No, seriously. And even if it were possible, making those characters into one-dimensional lunatics who are mostly threatening by virtue of being insane is even lazier. Not to mention that in the end, all of them were in fact being manipulated by Psycho Mantis, so they don't even have the virtue of acting under their own will, crazed or otherwise.

None of this stopped the epilogue from using the words "beauty and the beast" twenty million times, as if it was a fifth-grader's thesis paragraph. But I'm sorry, Kojima Productions: if you were trying to sell some sort of unity between the B&B Corps and Raiden and Snake's plotlines, guess what, you failed. There is no unity. There is an artificial human and a cyborg to one side and some gratuitous ass shots on the other. For a series that has so far done its best to provide interesting bosses, these sex dolls disguised as enemies are the lowest it was possible to go-- just as what always happens when you objectify women to the level of smut, you make it impossible for players to give a shit about them as people. For shame, MGS4.

Function: One-dimensional baddies.
Die? Depends on player action.
Pros: Raging Raven and Crying Wolf had excellent environments, and Screaming Mantis brought us Psycho Mantis cameo fun.
Cons: EVERYTHING ELSE. I mean, SERIOUSLY. I didn't even get into the fact that posing and dancing for you while you snap your digital camera at them is a goddamn easter egg in this game.

I can see why you wanted the world to call this your opus, Kojima.

-5
Rosemary

aka: Rose
Appears in: MGS2, MGS4
But the rotten cherry on top of the shit pile of bad women in MGS goes to Rosemary, Raiden's girlfriend, a savepoint so obnoxious that she actively discourages players from saving, just so they don't have to listen to her crap one more time. Despite sharing a name with The Boss, this Rosemary is as far from inspiring as it's possible to get: throughout the game, her only function is to offer incessant tirades about the state of her relationship with Raiden, including harping on him for not remembering their anniversary tomorrow, and for his not wanting to commit to having a baby. This whining persists even after Raiden reminds her, repeatedly, that he's on a mission and he'd like to concentrate: Rose is so focused on shrieking about Raiden's emotional distance that she can't even accept that now isn't the time to be talking about it.

Even the revelation that Rose is a Patriot spy is mitigated by the realization that she actually does love Raiden and still really wants his baby. You feel positively sad for Raiden that he actually sees something in her, when it's clear she's trying to trap him with a baby and will be an emotionally manipulative bitch for the rest of their lives together. Her only saving grace in MGS4 is that compared to Naomi and the B&B Corps, she isn't the worst thing with a vagina anymore-- but even then, her role as your "psychologist" is pretty patently useless, except for a few funny conversations, mostly when Campbell interrupts.

Function: "Support" team.
Dies? If only.
Pros: She is one of the few MGS women to always dress sensibly.
Cons: Even if her role in MGS4 is subdued enough to be essentially neutral, her MGS2 performance will go down as one of the most hated characters in the Metal Gear canon, whatever your feelings about Raiden.


Honorable mentions:

Fortune (MGS2): Her tragedy got exhausting after a while and ultimately pointless when you learned it was all a trick by the Patriots. Her choice of "functional" battle wear left much to be desired as well. You do have to applaud the choice to include a woman of colour, though, and her gun couldn't have been much bigger. Ultimately, however, Fortune was rather forgettable.

Sunny Gurlukovich (MGS4): Daughter of Olga Gurlukovich and raised by her two adopted daddies, Otacon and Old Snake, Sunny is almost guaranteed to grow up to be a badass. At the age of 7, she's already a super-genius and the real one who saved the world in MGS4. But if she takes Naomi's feminization to heart, she might grow up to be little more than Otacon's live-in French maid. It wouldn't be the first time a female character with amazing promise saw it squandered by the imposition of "traditional values". I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say this would be appalling to have happen to such a promising little girl. Let's send a clear message to Kojima Productions: we want a Sunny Snake, and we want her to be 110% awesome.

The FROGs (MG4): Not so much characters or they'd warrant a place on the list, this all-female troop of elite soldiers are pretty formidable, for cannon fodder. To their benefit, you see a lot of them; to their detriment, you don't see female soldiers in among the other PMCs or militias/rebels, so the FROGs come off as exceptionally exceptional, with only Meryl and Mei-Ling to counterbalance them. I'm ambivalent about the taunting they do when Snake holds them up and pats them down, as seduction is a tried-and-true tactic of warfare (Olga does it as well), but this is pretty much the extent of their personalities as communicated by the game. So in the end, MGS4 does little but eroticize them as more of those chauvinistic war fantasies I keep mentioning: they are super-powerful, super-deadly women-soldiers, about whom the saucy, demeaning urban legends practically write themselves. But again, they're not really characters, so it's tough to judge them. It does, however, say a lot about the conventionally not-very-feminist Ocelot that he should entrust so much of his operations to them.

True gender equality is gender neutrality. Does this count? Your mileage may vary.

 

Conclusion:

Although much of MGS's female representation leaves more than a little to be desired, the strength of the good women is so pronounced that it smacks of actual feminism, which is quite radical out of a Japanese writer, if you think about it. One can only hope that Kojima's future projects will continue to push the envelope and bring us more of the good and less of the bad. And yes, I don't mind a little eye candy, but for god's sake, if you're going to have the entire female population fail to do up their shirts correctly, at least master breast physics a little better.

No, Sunny! Resist! We are not beholden to our genes! You can rise above!

Previously:

The Top 10 Best and Worst Metal Gear Solid Women (Part 1)