#ds amelie

[losthiqhway]

[astrandofgold]

My traditional and digital styles have converged and I think that’s really cool

[beefosaur]

happy mother’s day!

[sanctaignorantia]

I'm so crazy, I replayed the fight with Higgs and it looked like his hair was already white even before the last part. It's really strange, because when he's wearing a hood, his hair should be darker, not lighter, I don't know…

Also, does anyone have any idea what that white, illuminated arch on Amelie's beach might be? I've seen it before, but never really stopped to look at it. It reminds me a lot of the lighting on the BB pod support…

[little-red-fool]

I’m probably overthinking it but do you think Higgs has a strong resemblance to Amelie in DS2 because the only time he felt powerful and that he had some semblance of control was when he was with her. Since she abandoned him and stripped away his powers do you think it’s a way of him trying to desperately hold onto her after everything. Do you think his fear of being weak and vulnerable is keeping him from letting go.

[eurydia]

I'm a sucker for a liar in a red dress Her eyes come alive in the sunset She knows I can't help myself I'm in love with the madness

pose insp: Paolo e Virginia by Alessandro Puttinati color ver, notes

I've always thought they were an interesting pairing, and drawing them has been on my drafts for a while! if Higgs is the masked character, my headcanons are:

He worships Amelie so much that he decided to start a religion around her

He thinks he can be Amelie but better

Higgs was "seduced by her powers", but he could've been seduced by her in general. She's beautiful and powerful, and also happens to be blonde. (If Higgs and Fragile dated briefly, we see her old hairstyle is similar to Amelie's)

His powers are triggered by death, while Amelie can be interpreted as death/extinction personified. So it makes sense that he would idolize and/or be drawn to her. This is why I drew her in color and gave her a golden halo, like in religious paintings.

I've wanted to draw this gorgeous statue for a ship ever since I saw a picture of it:

I also hc that under their fatalism and talk of extinction, they both long for connections and companionship still.

I'm so excited for DS2! I don't know their ship name but maybe GoldenEntity for now?

[higgs-the-god]

Trying so hard to upload this… internet …. Pls…..

[ceo-of-sloppy-men]

You ever think about how Sam and Higgs are reflections of each other? Like purpose wise. Sam was raised by the E.E. As a way to stop extinction. Higgs was manipulated by the E.E. As a way to ensure extinction. It was just a “who’s going to win?” Situation while the E.E. Sat back and could rest on her laurels that “it wasn’t her choice” because someone “made her” do it.

[higgssupremacy]

From @LadyMarinne

Death Stranding Photo Mode

[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.

[cardiaccadillac]

Themes of (presumably) Higgs’ appearance and transformation in Death Stranding 2.

1. The Rebis: the final product of the alchemical Great Work where male and female, two opposing aspects following a process of putrefaction and purification, are united in a single being. While this would appear in many ways to be (cyborg?) Higgs, it certainly isn’t wholly him, with elements of Amelie seen in the hair, the quipu, and the thematic colour of red.

2. Rubatosis: the uncomfortable awareness of your own heartbeat, where we see (cyborg) Higgs’ organs uncomfortably on display, intestines reminiscent of tentacles writhing in a BB pod.

3. Rubedo: a reddening. The final stage of the alchemical Great Work. Here corrupted, as rather than bringing Higgs/Amelie closer to the final transformation into gold, the Golden Mask has decayed into red.

Bonus 4. Rebirth: for obvious reasons.

[astrandofgold]

I reeeeally wanted to try out my new Posca markers, and since I don’t really care what happens to Amelie, I figured she was a great subject to try them on 🤷🏻

[goldmolamola]

extinction is an opportunity

[vyragosa]

[sanctaignorantia]

There's something in Death Stranding about parallels that I still don't understand???

I mean, in the first game we already had a sense of Amelie and Higgs being linked and we barely realized it…I mean a connection beyond the obvious.

So why would we doubt who was behind the mask in the first place?

Higgs doing the same moves as Cliff.

And then in the first trailer Higgs sings the same song that Cliff sang to Sam…

Cliff and Fragile…

Tar tears in a hellish world… The way to light a cigarette.

Father and son with the "Repatriate mark".

And still both father and son with literal connections through the umbilical cord…

Here my theory is, if Cliff is so connected to his pain and loss and that becomes these connections with the soldiers, it was the way he translated everything he felt with the loss of his son and his wife. On the other hand, when I see that Sam was literally connected to Lou in the first explosion we went through at the beginning of the game, it tells me that, if he really lost her, if breaking that connection could cause Sam to create things in the same way that Cliff created, perhaps even unconsciously, because it's all a spiritual and emotional thing…