#samantha america “amelie” strand

[myaoiboy]

Hi I saw that you answered an ask* the other day and I wanted to know if you continued with your analysis or if you could continue. I was really interested and curious to know more about it. I really wanted to know what you had to say, seriously, I could read a bible of Death Stranding reviews!

*https://www.tumblr.com/myaoiboy/739740134244794368/death-stranding-gender-talk-you-say-count-me-in?source=share

Hi! I totally can keep talking about Death Stranding forever (I know it's a very divisive game but imo on the whole the writing is like a well-oiled machine in ways that MGS just barely started to scrape askdjfh)

For the most part I haven't talked a *ton* about it at length because the series is just getting started and I feel weird making assertions that are likely to be fully subverted within a year or two. MGS has like. well, now, 25 years of shit going on. Sequels, prequels, fanon, etc., that Death Stranding...hasn't really had time to grow into yet.

I also tend to intentionally only post for dead series because the fandoms tend to be chiller lmao

Plus the fact that I got into DS right around the time that DS2 was announced, so I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs knowing that there's about to be more content and context that I just don't have access to yet. I already feel like there's a lot more to be learned about the first game, just from the latest trailer drop.

Honestly I think the thing that really gets me with DS is that despite the borderline insanity of the setting, to me, there's a lot of dramatic irony and meta knowledge that makes DS pretty easy to follow compared to, like, any single MGS game. Maybe I'm just the exact target audience that the writing was intended for, but most of the big reveals felt less like a sucker punch and more of a dramatic swell.

Some reasons for this (please be gentle i am taking cutscene SCs from youtube videos, they're gonna look like shit):

First of all, this is basically frame 1 of being formally introduced to Amelie, we see...this lens flare. Look familiar?

...how about now?

We are introduced to her instantly with a sign of danger. A pretty one, but a sign of danger nonetheless. The fact that it's an inverted rainbow is important! It shows up around timefall because of chiral air disturbance. We don't know that yet in-game, but if you know about how light works you know that there's something Wrong(tm) about this.

A regular lens flare shouldn't be causing an inverted rainbow if it's causing one at all. I think in this cutscene Amelie's presence is causing that inverted rainbow. Throughout the game, people come up with various theories of their own to excuse her connection to the beach. Little do they know at the time how right they are...

She's also heavily backlit, which hides her features in an unsettling manner. In fact, I really can't think of anyone else that this happens to throughout the game (if anyone knows of another example PLEASE let me know!!!)

She gets pretty damn close before that rainbow disappears, but this is where I very quickly lost my initial trust in her (as the player).

I jokingly called called this her "Fox News reporter look," but it's very much constructed in a way that made me suspicious.

Let's talk about that red dress.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Kojima fucking LOVES using color language, especially red, blue, and gold. It's been super obvious and explicit since like 2012.

The fact that we meet her wearing a red dress is not a coincidence!!! It's a great big flashing warning sign! It says "hey, this person is going to betray you! Do Not Fucking Trust!!!"

Compare Amelie's name card to Paz's from Peace Walker:

The art styles are different, but there are a couple of main throughlines. Namely, both have an emphasis on the color red, both are young (looking) women who are lying about their identities in order to ask the main character a favor. Characters vouch for them, from trusted advisors, to the main character himself in DS. And then they try to bring about armageddon.

Basically what I'm saying is that they're both the embodiment of white woman tears a wolf in sheep's clothing, if the sheep's clothing was still dripping in blood. We (characters, and maybe the players) believe that she's on our side because we want to believe she's on our side, and because other people that we ostensibly trust tell us she's on our side, while the extremely dissonant narrative and imagery of the scene are SHAKING US BY THE SHOULDERS TELLING US TO SNAP OUT OF IT.

Add to that the fact that we kind of vaguely, through that intro cutscene post-central knot explosion, know that the beach is connected to dying somehow, and that amelie seems to be on it, doing very stereotypical little girl in horror things there, like singing nursery rhymes slowly while walking into the ocean.

So we've basically been told that Amelie is Not Good, but we have to spend the game piecing together what kind of Not Good she is. The first hint is (surprise!) also in this cutscene!

I don't recall off the top of my head if I knew at the time how heavily egyptian mythology plays into DS, but I do remember this cutscene giving me a bad gut feeling about the concept of the West.

Very few Big Concepts in these games (the West, strand(s/ing), patriotism/nationalism, etc) are only symbolic of one thing. That's also true across the board in basically all art, but I feel the need to point that out in public posts because I don't want someone to eg, think that I say something means one thing, and then back that up, and then people think that means it can't mean something else! It can (and often does) mean both! and sometimes that additional meaning is super important!

Anyways, Die Hardman refers to Amelie going West. We don't really use that phrasing much, so it stuck out to me as euphemistic. Especially since we saw her after we died, and there's so much euphemism going on from the bridges team anyways. I mean, cufflinks "symbolize our connection?" Girl, you locked me to my bed with them. You drain my blood with them to turn into weapons. Call 'em what they are.

You'll even notice in the same cutscene that Amelie says "we made it to Edge Knot City" and Sam replies with "all the way to the Pacific?" Not "all the way to the west coast," or even a single question about why she was on the/his beach.

If you know anything about egyptian mythology, you might know that west is considered the direction of death and the underworld. ancient egyptians buried dead people on the west side of the nile river. Osiris, god of death and mummification, and king of the underworld, is referred to as "foremost of the westerners" among his epithets.

So the vibe that I got instantly was "Amelie is already dead, she led her team to die, and they are basically sending Sam on a suicide mission" though I didn't realize exactly how I was right at the time.

The other big thing I recall setting off my alarm bells as the game went on was the fact that nobody you meet has ever met Amelie in person. It's a very slow reveal, especially since most people seem to see online meeting and in person meeting to be mostly the same, and we're told that she set out with bridges one. That she went west. Turns out that...also wasn't literal.

I don't remember exactly when I started wondering if *sam* had ever even met her outside of the beach, but I do remember thinking that there was something off. For a little bit my guess was that she was entirely fictional, some sort of AI (pretty influenced by all the "dead person brought back by AI/hypno bullshit ngl), or maybe that Higgs could somehow disguise himself in the Beach in ways i didn't understand yet.

But I didn't feel *worse* for being able to figure things out ahead of time, I felt clever that I could piece together all the little hints and have a good idea of what was going on. It made death stranding feel more like a coherent sci fi narrative rather than a cheesy action story that's expected to follow certain strict genre conventions.

Not that I'm saying mgs or action in general are bad, but rather that imo Death Stranding feels...more mature and confident in some ways (and also isn't bogged down by 20 years of previous work. which. i don't even like my own shit from a year ago half the time, i cannot imagine having to write within the constraints you created TWO DECADES prior kjhksjfh). Maybe it's that it feels like less of a genre subversion and has more genre utilization? dunno. Now I'm thinking too much like an english major lkajshdf

But yeah anybody who wants to talk about anything totally feel free. Or if you want to give me prompts to write about. I will always be willing to talk about things for way too long on the internet. I just don't always reply quickly because I start rambling....Like This.

[pedroam-bang]

Death Stranding (2019)

[m-rooster]

another study, a portrait of Amelie this time

[gamingladies]

Amelie | Death Stranding

for @durtystars

[xxaequitasxx]

Playlist: || Samantha America Strand ||

I couldn't use the picture you can scan because it wouldn't load for some fuckass reason RIP

So, most the songs I picked for this playlist are more ambient, and eerie in tone. Most of the songs don't have any vocals and tend to run between ten to twenty-five minutes in length. Sun O))) is my obvious favorite, I like drone metal a lot, and I felt their songs would fit Amelie's vibe perfectly considering she isn't exactly human. And obviously I will add songs down the road when they find me. Happy listening!!

[vyragosa]

higgs is a SHEEP sam is a WOLF

sam is NOT a docile sheep to BRIDGES, he is a LONE WOLF that is forcefully dragged back to the pack he himself left for failing him and pushing on him his wife's suicide. the fact that sam complied with BRIDGES was because bridget was DYING there were no other reason than not living with the regret forever of having done nothing for amelie as well, refusing to face her true nature

on the contrary, higgs is the one obsessed with facing death in earnest, his adoptive father's death, his partners' death screaming as they are taken by BTs, killing people to cultivate his "gift", he FOLLOWS the scent of death and it leads him to DEATH HERSELF, miss samantha america strand much like a preacher to a forbidden goddess of destruction, he is the SACRIFICIAL RAM to the homo demens, on the altar of america reconstructionism to be discarded once sam got to amelie!

[nek-ros]

death stranding is my first kojima game so im not sure if the others are like this but each character's over-the-topness in their own aesthetic is so funny. imagine having a president who named herself after america twice. president samantha "amelie" america strand

[roguishknight]

[ignorantarmiesclashbynight]

[sunsetagain]

Death Stranding fancomic: TRIANGLE

SPOILERS ALERT!

just a little headcanon before i beat the game. 12 pages below the cut.

中文版

[myaoiboy]

Death Stranding gender talk you say? Count me in.

Oh, I'm so glad someone asked about MPreg: A Hideo Kojima Game :3c

I'm going to put a quick CW in here for a medical-setting image of an umbilical cord. It's pretty mild, but I think doing side-by-side images will be helpful for illustrating what I'm talking about. Also, big spoilers for anyone that hasn't finished the game, obviously

Literally everything in Death Stranding is so very tied to parenthood and especially the pregnancy and birth parts. Yes it's technically a metaphor for the creative process but also it's, uh, incredibly visceral. So I'm gonna start here with Sam, but damn everyone in this game has some gender going on.

Can we talk about how Bridget chose the same name for both her other half/fictional daughter AND for her adopted son? I feel like not enough people mention the fact that "Amelie's" "real" name is Samantha America Strand, and everyone just calls her Amelie. Maybe because it's fucking weird to have two kids named Sam and Samantha?

The fact is too, that the two Sams aren't the only ones with gender-ambiguous names in the game...we don't know Lou's gender until the very end! The use of gender-ambiguous names for the only two main characters that you as the player can actually interact with feels hella meaningful.

In fact, the game intentionally lets us think that Lou/BB is a boy for most of the game! Cliff refers to his BB as "him" in one of the first cutscenes we see of him, very early on. The game also lets us believe, for some time at least, that there's a chance that the memories are BB/Lou's, and that Lou is Cliff's baby. We don't know this isn't true until near the end of the game! Why didn't any of the characters point out this contradiction before then? I'm not sure, at least not yet. Very open to thoughts on this. It doesn't feel like the MO of the game to have a gender reveal at the end for shock value.

Anyways, let's get in on point one obvious: like I already said, this is an mpreg game. There's...there's no way around it. A dudes carry a fetus attached to them by an umbilical cord (which they make VERY viscerally look like a real umbilical cord btw, between the color/texture/the additional cable along the outside).

I feel like "haha it's the mpreg game" has probably been done to death but I love it so much specifically because of the implications that it makes and the puns that it plays on.

Sam is a delivery man. He's called "The Great Deliverer" or "The Man Who Delivers." And the last scene of the game, the last line before we flash-back for the postgame, is...?

Literally childbirth! It's...delivery. It's Sam delivering his own child, after making a trek by foot across the continental US carrying a difficult pregnancy. "The Man Who Delivers" is a double entendre throughout the game, just like "strand" is ('strand' like rope or hair, 'strand' as in a portion of a larger network, 'strand' as in stranding, like the beach, etc).

So like, what the fuck, right? Why do we have Mpreg: Hiking Simulator? What the HELL is going on in there?

So. America, right?

If there's anything Kojima really loves to talk about, it's America. American identity, imperialism, national myth, etc. Death Stranding is just the most recent and blatant of these. And, of course, one of the most popular American Myths are the story of the founding fathers, right up there with manifest destiny.

So we have this game where Sam is both literally becoming a father after carrying a surrogate pregnancy, and also metaphorically becoming a father by re-founding America. In that way we can see, through his experience of pregnancy, the trials of (re-)founding America.

Okay, great, cool, Sam is a male mom, wonderful, so glad that technology has progressed to this point, we stan. Maybe we don't stan the use of American nationalism as a tool so much but look at the healthy baby glow <3.

But I also want to contrast this with the only other BB we really see in the game. Yeah, baby, it's Higgs time!!! And I am going to make a comparison that is going to seem batshit insane. Bear with me:

I was skeptical myself when I first saw this comparison, but I've been converted into a believer for a few reasons.

The visual. While imo it wouldn't be enough on its own to make a case, I have to admit that his hood is similar to some popular depictions of Mary

Higgs is literally a male prophet of a goddess of extinction. He essentially considers himself her messenger,

While Sam gets his BB from another person, and it's also a live fetus, Higgs gets his from Amelie, as how god gives mary jesus immaculately

Much like Amelie's reveal that her "soul is a lie," the "baby" that she gives higgs is a twisted effigy. He carries his god(dess)'s physical form, but as she is a goddess of extinction with no remaining soul of her own, it will never grow.

i'm willing to believe higgs is a virgin, for the bit.

Okay okay I gotta stop for now because it's 1 AM but like, consider it, mayhaps.

[pedroam-bang]

Death Stranding (2019)

[m-rooster]

my other Amelie painting! this one's my favorite

[gamingladies]

Amelie | Death Stranding

for @durtystars

[ikariokami]

Amelie: *On her beach with Sam, explaining how she’s an EE, her relationship with Bridget, how Sam became a repatriate and the entire plot of the fucking game*

Sam:

[aspoonofsugar]

Hi! I'm happy to find you reblogging something about Death Stranding. I love this game especially the story. It conveys the importance of the connection between people. I'm curious about who you like most in this game and your thoughts about the story.

Hello anon!

Thank you very much for this ask! I have recently watched the game’s cutscenes and I love the story and the characters!

In this answer I won’t be able to touch on every aspect of the story, but I will talk of some things I liked and of my two favourite characters:

I am fond of Fragile and love her with all my heart, while I like how complex Amelie is as a character and the perfect equilibrium they managed to obtain with her characterization and story. Basically I love the first with my heart and I like the second with my head.

Both women are representative of different aspects of society and to be more precise Fragile represents society’s positive traits, while Amelie society’s ambivalence.

This ambivalence of society is well represented by the cuff links. As their name implies they both connect (links) and control (cuffs) people.

This same ambivalence is conveyed through the entirety of Amelie/Bridget’s story and character.

Amelie’s name, as it is explained in the game itself, has multiple meanings:

On one hand it means “a soul that is a lie” because Amelie is nothing more than a part of Bridget and not her own person. To be more precise she is Bridget’s Ka:

This works for the wordplay Amelie-Ka aka America:

“Have I ever told you my real name? It’s Amerigo, after Amerigo Vespucci, the man who discovered the continent”

“I thought it was Columbus?”

“Except Amerigo was full of it. He lied. America is a lie”.

So America (aka society) is a lie just like Amelie is. However, things are not so simple:

This is highlighted also by Amelie’s final speech to Sam. In this speech she keeps contradicting herself to the point that it is not even clear what her true objective and motivations were.

On one hand she claims that as an EE she has realized extinction is impossible to avoid and that she has done her best to try and make it faster, so that she won’t be stuck alone on the Beach.

On the other hand she claims that all her experiments as Bridget were an attempt to find a way out using the knowledge of the universe to stop the Death Stranding.

Basically, Amelie came up and implemented a plan which worked both to save humanity and to destroy it and she herself is probably not sure of what she was hoping for.

This is made clear also by her act of saving Sam:

When she is the one narrating the story the whole scene is portrayed as sweet and as Amelie being able to feel sympathy and warmth for another life hence her resurrecting Sam and developing a bond with him.

However, later on, when we see what actually happened in Cliff’s past, we are shown this:

It was Bridget who killed Sam and Amelie’s resurrecting him ends up acquiring a more utilitaristic spin since Bridget was interested in Sam because of her experiments. That said, Bridget decided to bring Sam up even if he can’t be useful anymore in the BB experiments suggests a genuine attachment on her part. In the end, it is through this redemptive action and through her bond with Sam that the Last Stranding is postponed since Amelie chooses to believe in him.

In short, Bridget/Amelie is an extremely ambiguous character, just like society is and this is why what Sam tells Die-Hardman in the end is so important:

As Sam implies, Die-Hardman unwillingly represents the old ways which need to be overcome if there must be hope for the future. He is a character as ambiguous as Amelie is since he too appears thorn and to be more specific he is thorn between his loyalty for Cliff and his loyalty for Bridget. In this he is similar to Sam and in his last speech to him, Die-Hardman tries to reconcile these two loyalties, but this reconciliation is only partly possible for both him and Sam. In the end, Die-Hardman did not actively kill Cliff, but he did so thanks to his passivity and at the end of the game he is shown encouraging the narrative depicting Amelie and Bridget as heroes and concealing everything negative she did. In other words, he is still telling and spreading lies.

In short, the ambiguity of society is conveyed through characters like Amelie and Die-Hardman who have sacrificed babies (aka the symbols of the future) to a plan which could have potentially both saved and destroyed the world. Despite this, society is still the only chance humanity has to survive.

And society still has beautiful things and these things are embodied by Fragile who is   clearly a very important character thematically:

Fragile is a person whose time has been taken away from her and this is why her body has aged prematurely. However, she has never given up and has kept trying to do the best she can with the little time she has left. This is literally what all humanity must currently do as it was stated by Amelie as well:

The only thing humanity can do is to try to evolve and to survive. After all life itself is:

Life is fragile, but not that fragile. It fights to survive and Fragile embodies exactly this. This is why she is a porter just like Sam and she is specialized in taking care of frail cargo. She protects fragility and makes sure it survives. This is something symbolized also by her powers which let her teleport through the beaches of people she knows and understands. In other words, her ability is a physical embodiment of the ability of becoming connected with another person.

Of course, because of society being a double edged sword she too has been used to create damage and in particular Higgs used her to destroy a city. However, even if she was betrayed in such a way she did not give up and managed to save another town in exchange of a high personal sacrifice.

So Fragile is the life which struggles under adversities and her arc in the game is symbolic of this. After all, she starts the game in a similar place as Sam:

She too does not care about America and she is simply motivated by the loyalty towards her father and her feelings of revenge against Higgs just like Sam is motivated by her bond with Amelie. However, by the end of the game she has changed:

She has decided to implement her father vision and as Sam says she is “going on with the world”. She is evolving and has found a new place within society through her newly found connections.

However, this is specifically why her path diverges from Sam who, like her, finds a new purpose through his father’s words. That said, this purpose is different from Fragile’s:

Thematically speaking Fragile is the good about society and it is not by chance that she is the one that, since their first encounter, offers Sam the possibility to be part of a group aka to be part of something bigger. And she repeats her offer to Sam at the end of the game.

However, by that point Sam has two problems. The first is what he himself states:

He is still grieving and is scared of creating bonds or to better say to enjoy his bonds since by that point he has clearly created strong bonds with the other members of Bridges. As a matter of fact his whole speech about how he still has no bonds is clearly false considering that in the end it was his bonds with the others which saved him from a lonely existence on the Beach. However, it is true that he has gone through a highly traumatizing experience.

What is more, this experience has casted a shadow on the way Sam sees society. This is made even clearer by the fact that society still plans to use and dispose of BB. This is something Sam can’t accept and his wish to try and save Lou is what motivates him to leave the others.

The fact that the last scene between Sam and Fragile is so sad is probably because she represents his chance to go back to be a part of society, but by that point Sam has already chosen to escape society hence him pushing her away.

Basically, while Fragile has found new bridges to put society back together and will keep working to obtain this result, Sam has found a different kind of bridge:

It is a bridge to the future aka a child and as Cliff stated:

Louise has become Sam’s bridge to the future. She has become a link he must accept and take care of because Lou is completely dependant on him, so he does not have the luxury of leaving her behind. In conclusion, Sam himself has become the Cliff which needs to be connected to the future and given courage by a little bridge. This is why babies are bridges. It is not because they are connected to death, but it is because they are connected to hope and the future.

So, Death Stranding is a story which explores the beauty of living even in desperate situations and the beauty of different kinds of bonds both in the present (among peers) and in the future (parent-child relationships).

I loved basically all characters. Cliff’s story is heartbreaking, but his last moments with Sam are beautiful and I loved Deadman, Mama and Heartman. Their stories were all interesting and were used to explore different aspects of the worldbuilding and of the themes and foreshadowed different plot-points (like Amelie being Bridget’s Ka in Mama’s story and Cliff using the Beach to search for his lost son like Heartman using it to look for his family).

Thank you for the ask, I am sure I did not do justice to the complexity of the story, but I hope my thoughts were interesting! Feel free to ask something more specific and have a great day!