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ashkav · 9 months ago

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Rainy, her baby, and the Laughing Samurai theory

So Shioli Kutsuna's character has been revealed! Rainy, a pregnant woman on the crew of the Magellan who has the ability to cause rain fall (Shioli said this during the Tokyo Games show, though I can't find the relevant clip.)

several very interesting things are said during this cutscene, and when combined with what else we know from the promo materials and also from DS1, I think they can be combined to form some ideas. And boy, do I have Ideas about Rainy.

First, the foundation, all (very few) info from previous media that I think is relevant to Rainy.

a) The Songs:

We have so far had three songs about babies/ children in the promo material. Lou's lullaby twice, both connected to Higgs, on the electric guitar and then again with Troy Baker singing it very ominously. And then the broken down rock-a-bye baby tune right at the very end of the state of play announcement trailer during the credits. Obviously, songs to do with children that are usually happy or peaceful now inverted from comforting to something scary and unsettling = Bad Things are going to happen to the kids.

But Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head is not a song that has been made sad or unsettling - yet.

I absolutely feel this song is going to be called back to at a climatic moment in the story, possibly at Rainy's own death, possibly as the last thing she says to her baby. The song itself seems like a bad omen to sing to a fetus, what with Rainy's name being what it is and the lyrics being about perseverence through hardship - difficult not to instinctually think Rainy and her baby are about to suffer some pretty awful trauma that ends with one or both of them 'falling' to the Beach.

Raindrops keep falling seems very likely to continue the same pattern of a comforting song for children introduced at a peaceful time only to warp into horrifying due to a climatic moment - the only reason it hasn't already been warped is because the audience has to hear it the first way first and it didn't exist in the last game to be set up the same way, unlike the other two.

b) 'I just can't wait.'

This is a pretty innoccuos statement for a pregnant woman to say irl, but within the game verse, Rainy is literally the second woman we've ever seen who has expressed an actual desire to have children.

Let's very quickly run through the list of female characters who have children in DS1:

Lucy, Sam's wife who killed herself because the visions she was getting from Sam's DOOMS afflicted baby were so horrible she couldn't continue living.

Lisa Strand, Sam's bio mother who became brain dead early on in her pregnancy due to a car accident and who we never hear from, even in supplementals, and is shot in the head by Sam's dad.

Bridget Strand, Sam's adoptive mother who revived him after accidentally killing him and kept him to raise out of guilt, traumatising Sam so badly throughout his life that he suppresses his memories of her and doesn't really want to speak to her even as she lays dying of cancer in front of him.

A whole host of unnamed still-mothers, impregnated after brain-death and farmed for the BBs they produce.

and finally, Lockne, who actually wanted a baby not because of the baby itself, but because she wanted some part of her lover to live on even after his death. Due to issues with her uterus, she is incapable of becoming pregnant, and even when her twin agrees to surrogate, the baby and Mama both die in a terrorist bombing at the hospital.

(for the purposes of this list I am not counting the mountaineering couple, since they don't matter except to create stakes for that one timed mission.)

There's a pretty clear trend here - almost no one wants children, and those that have them are in incredible danger of losing the child or themselves. This makes sense in a world where hospitals no longer exist and the very act of childbirth is incredibly dangerous and mostly everyone is pretty much asexual anyway, so it's a massive outlier that Rainy expresseses wanting the baby, even if it would be a normal thing to say in our world.

Maybe this is a stretch, but I can't help but feel there's some thematic parrellel here between Rainy, who wants her baby to be born very much, and still-mothers, who are made pregnant but never truly give birth and who cannot ever consent - not that they don't consent, but that they are incapable of consent in the first place. All their children, except three (Sam, Lou, and the BB Coffin managed to save), die in the womb. They're always bridges and never babies, never born, never really living or dead. They are nearly unanimously incompatible with the concept of life, or growth, just the same as their still-mothers are incompatible with the idea of wanting them.

More on this later.

C) The Samurai

The Samurai is visibly pregnant. There is only one pregnant character in the cast (so far). There HAS to be a connection here.

This is not the first time we've seen a visibly pregant character do crazy insane shit - Sam, for instance, is 'pregnant' with Lou's glass womb for the whole first game and probably the second too, and he does some intense stuff.

The circumstances with Rainy are different though. For one, her womb is made out of the squishy human stuff, not bulletproof glass, and she can't take it off. Rainy doesn't seem particularly athletic either: in her and Tomorrow's intro, where they're stacking boxes into a shelf, she moves slowly and with effort, not to mention that the Samurai is taller than even Higgs (Troy Baker is 6'3), where Rainy is shorter than Sam (Norman Reedus is 5'10, and Shioli Kutsuna is 5'3). Plus, the Samurai suit has no way to see out of it, so even if somehow it augmented her height, strength and speed, she still wouldn't be able to see what she was doing.

It is very, very unlikely that she is the one inside the mech suit. No, instead, I think it's her baby in there.

Sounds insane, but listen: we've already seen Higgs' robots have some connection to BT's, floating like they do and having visible strands leading up like they do and potentially being vessels for them. Dollman is explicitly stated to have been a normal adult human person who used his medium powers to possess the doll and got stuck there when his human body died. Even Lou seems to have the ability to haunt her old pod, with the ghostly winged BT form and tentacles. The technology and precedent for soul-to-machine connection exist, the Samurai makes baby noises, it looks pregnant. And thematically...

Remember that earlier section, where I was talking about Rainy wanting the baby vs still-mothers who cannot want and produce babies who cannot live? Also remember how parents with DOOMs very often pass the trait onto their children, and that an adult with DOOMs (Sam) and a BB with DOOMs (Lou) connected through the umbilical made some very strange things happen?

I think that Rainy's desire for a child interacting with both of their DOOMs will produce something very strange. I have two major theories about what could happen to get the baby in the machine:

The baby and mother cannot both be on the same plane at the same time. Rainy's baby suffers some strange accident while Rainy is giving birth (maybe she gives birth as the Magellan is travelling through the Beach?), and the connection between them becomes like a still-mother and BB, but only in some aspects. The connection between the living and dead is swapped constantly between mother and fetus instead of mother alone tethering to the world of the dead. Metaphorically, you could compare this to a Drawbridge, evolving out of the previous Bridge-style that BRIDGES created with the still-mothers. With Rainy and her baby, either side can be 'drawn up', and the burden is shared between them. The tragedy of this is that even though both Rainy and her baby survive, they can never truly meet or meaningfully interact, as one must always be on the Beach when the other is in the living world. Possibly this could be made more extreme, where instead of being seperated in mind only they are also unable to interact physically - one must physically be in the Beach if the other is in the land of the living. We know it's possible to live on the Beach because Tomorrow confirmed it, even if Sam described it 'like hell', so maybe they build the baby a suit that it's pod can slot into to help it survive the time it has to spend on the Beach - we know BBs are quite smart and have an abnormal amount of dexterity and also increased senses that allow them to see BTs, so it could be possible that the BB became skilled at piloting the suit because it was literallly fighting for it's life on the Beach. This would thematically mirror Bridget/Amelie, or at least the lie that Bridget/Amelie told the world - that Amelie was Bridget's daughter who couldn't be removed from the Beach.

The baby is psychic pre-birth. The baby is believed to have died inside Rainy because it stops moving and scans show that it's funtionally brain dead - plot twist being that the baby is alive, but has just accidentally astral projected into a machine. The Samurai is an upgraded version of Higgs' BT robots that either Higgs built or Drawbridge built after they'd studied some of his work, and the pregnancy bump is an unconcious change that the baby makes to the robot, like how Dollman can minorly alter his appearance when he's mad.

I think this would give Dollman an interesting double - adult in a small, powerless puppet vs baby in a big, deadly, hypermobile machine. Brain vs brawn, thought vs impulse. It even fulfills Jester vs Sage if we want to get Jung's archetypes in here, what with the Samurai laughing and Dollman being an expository friend you carry with you, like Mimir from God of War.

The second one is the one I feel is most likely - it ties in so neatly and honestly I'm not too sure that Rainy would survive her time swapped out on the Beach if whatever the baby samurai was fighting was strong enough to make it so skilled against Higgs, even if there does seem to be a community there to help her.

Whatever ends up being the case, Rainy absolutely definitely is not going to have a 'normal' baby. There is no such thing as a normal baby in Kojima land.

#feeling super vindicated that i made the prediction that shioli's character had some connection to babies back in FEBRUARY #way before we knew her name or saw she was preggers #and no one noticed cause the post i made about it was pretty incoherent and also only got 4 notes.#death stranding 2 #death stranding #rainy ds2 #tomorrow ds2 #sam porter bridges #ds2 #doll man #rainy #tomorrow #higgs monaghan #theoryposting

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