I need to start this by saying I’m a fake gamer. I’ve been a fan of the Metal Gear series for four years before actually playing any of the games. I didn’t own any gaming hardware before getting a Switch in university, so up until the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection was released for the Switch last month, I had just resigned myself to watching 12-hour cutscene compilations on YouTube to get my Snake fix. And I got a lot of Snake, I had that “snake eater all cutscenes” playlist bookmarked at one point. But I’m actually playing the games now, it’s making the story feel so much more real. Especially the parts I don’t like. 

Meryl never really stuck out to me. I had nothing against her, but she fell into the same category as Quiet and a lot of other Metal Gear women, where most of their character is just Being A Woman. They have more to them than just that, but that’s what the game chooses to keep beating you over the head with via butt shots and awkward scenes about hitting on them. So, when I was starting an actual real playthrough of the first Metal Gear Solid, I was like, “Yay, Snake and Otacon and Liquid and Grandpa Ocelot! … and Meryl is there too, or whatever.” But as I’ve been playing it every scene with Meryl has gotten stuck in my throat like a really bony piece of fish. I just can’t get around it. 

The other important thing about my relationship with Metal Gear is that it’s really tied up with masculinity for me. I started getting capital-R Really Into it the week after Covid shut down my final year of high school, and in that weird lockdown limbo I was sitting there staring at my laptop thinking, “God, I wish I looked like Venom Snake instead of being… this.” Then in a moment of insanity I took kitchen scissors to my hair over the bathroom sink, and I’ve never regretted a choice less. The masculinity of Metal Gear, and how badly I wanted it, was like the last piece to a puzzle that had been sitting incomplete on a coffee table for years. I don’t have a really neat word or a set of pronouns for it, I’m just some kind of weird gender-ambiguous lesbian thing and I wanted to be Solid Snake. Or Venom Snake. Or Big Boss. (There’s a lot of clones). Short story is: Snake(s) is kind of a transmasc icon for me. He was there with his shitty mullet when I needed something to show me the way. And that’s why I’m struggling so much with Meryl. 

Meryl is literally introduced via a zoomed-in shot of her butt while walking. That’s… pretty regular for Metal Gear Solid. Most female characters are introduced with some sort of really obnoxious zoom. I’ve been stanning EVA from Snake Eater for years and she’s introduced with a button that lets you point binoculars at her boobs. I’ve written about the objectification of women before, you know my thoughts on it, it’s pretty unavoidable in gamer/weeb circles and for feminist reasons I think we should be demanding way less of it, et cetera. There’s nothing about Meryl I haven’t seen before (literally, I’ve watched videos of this game). But it was the context for that butt shot that made me feel sour, and when you’re first-person playing the game, you’re in the context, much more than you would be otherwise. 

Meryl’s butt and the way she walks is what tips Snake off to the fact that she’s a woman. He sees her walking with a really exaggerated polygonal hip sway, and then says things like “You won’t be undercover for long with the way you walk.” And when he meets Otacon and they talk about Meryl, it’s again about her butt and the way she walks. And then there’s a section of gameplay where you have to pick out which soldier is the undercover Meryl by looking for which one of them has that Feminine Hip Swing, which culminates in a cutscene where she’s in her underwear and Snake talks to her about, among other things, her butt and the way she walks. They really drive it home as a core theme of the game. Shoulda called it Tactical Ass-pionage Action. 

This sucks, for obvious reasons, but it really, really sucked to me because it felt like an outing. It felt like when an ex told me I have a “really feminine way of carrying myself.” It felt like every time at my cashier job when a customer would greet me as “sir” and then stare at my body and go “Oh, I mean ma’am.” It felt like that second right after someone calls me “sir” where I’m too scared to move or talk because is my voice going to give me away? Is the way I gesture going to give me away? Am I going to get that look that says “I thought you were a guy but you’re actually just an ugly girl?” It doesn’t feel very good, to say the least. And it felt especially bad coming from this game, because when you’re playing as Solid Snake, when you identify with Solid Snake, having Solid Snake scoff at Meryl for thinking she could pass as a man is like a reminder that games like this weren’t meant with people like you in mind. Which is really what every instance of misogyny and racism and transphobia and the like in a piece of media boils down to: a big neon sign that tells certain viewers “You weren’t the audience for this.” 

It sucks, having my special little guy Solid Snake say things that make me personally dysphoric. And he has a lot of lines in this game that do that. I don’t have any neat and tidy answers for this, either. The point I’m making is that man, this kinda sucks, because I think it sucks in a way that wouldn’t be this personal to a lot of people. Aside from all of the other people who had their genders changed in some way by Metal Gear, because there’s like way more of us than you would think (shoutout to transmascs named Dave). I still love Metal Gear Solid, it’s still a positive thing in my life, I just wish I could like, play a video game with a woman in it and for once not have to hear about her butt. It would be pretty nice.