#wait no there is one scene in 3 that gave me a wtf moment wrt lighting

[myaoiboy]

So i was thinking abt your post on light symbolism in Mgsv and i was wondering if you could talk more on the meaning of the blue lighting? In Peacewalker the red=bad and yellow=good is obvious but what are the examples of blue meaning uncertainty other than in the scene of Ocelot confessing? Is it exclusive to V? i can't find the post rn but i thought it was really interesting!!

Okay so there's a lot of ways i can go about this but I'm also going to be extremely upfront and say that mgs1-4+PW are slightly harder to get good quality screenshots of, and I see fewer recordings of them so I fully admit to having a less-than-perfect memory of them.

V is also easier to pick scenes from because it does the most "WTF, where is that weird-colored lens flare even coming from?" cinematic stuff. The other games have more direct integration into scenes and even the narrative.

The most explicit case of blue as dishonesty/unreliable narrator/dramatic irony/facade cracking/whatever you want to call it, is in the MGS4 novel. I don't really know that it's canon as much as a canon-enhancer, like an art book would be. I know that Kojima has said that Itoh got the spirit of what he was going for more than anyone else, so I'm willing to abide by his interpretation of the snake family (snamily?) geneticist surrounded by blue roses:

tl;dr: the blue of the blue roses is what makes them unnatural. Beautiful, but manmade. Snake is also genetically engineered, manmade, "unnatural," and at times considers himself less than human because of it.

This is sort of the explicit culmination of something that's been going on since MGS1, where the whole map is basically this weird, unnatural, unsettling blue color.

Which, for me, even playing the shadow moses smash level when I was younger felt ~weird~ due to the color and lighting. When I got around to playing MGS, the feeling was definitely still there.

I'll even offer grey fox as an example because he and Snake are basically the same color in their concept art, and Snake's definitely blue in-game. Making him this red-and-blue, murdery-but-something's-up figure...

Was it intentional? Honestly, I don't know. I lean towards assuming it was a palette limitation for hardware/performance that happened to play nice thematically. Add in the fact that straight-up black tends to look bad graphically for the same reason that it works well in actual stealth situations and...yeah, using a lot of blue makes sense. No reason that a medium's "limitations" shouldn't be considered just as meaningful and integral as its benefits though.

Maybe the weakest example I have is in 3, where Volgin's lightning turns the whole torture room blue (or at least, as blue as it can get with that piss filer)

Everyone in this room is fucking over everyone else in this room in impossible to comprehend ways. We've walked in on 5D chess that is only about to be made clear at the end of this cutscene, but the only person in this room loyal to Volgin is Volgin.

Consider:

She feels bad for Snake. Kinda obvious I suppose, but she's also planning to triple cross him. I mean, technically at this point she's probably still planning to kill him. Either way, She's definitely planning to fuck over Volgin and either you or the Chinese Philosophers.

The Boss is being The Boss and not telling ANYONE wtf is going on, (also planning to fuck over Volgin)

And THIS WHORE is over here clutching his fucking LOCKET OF YOUR HAIR (read: the bullet he fucked up with while fighting you that he wears around his neck)

...plus he was actually supposed to be fucking over Volgin in the first place as your contact before Eva got in the way. ...which she also does at the end when she cock blocks him ANYWAYS.

Then we get this lovely little quote that I've been thinking about since playing the game. Something about this feels like it's implying that the color of his eyes are unnatural or make him seem dishonest. Ironic, given the current company.

In Peace Walker specifically it's easy to tell when colors are being used for effect, since there's only really three used in the whole game, red, blue, and gold. Blue is used a lot for grief in this game, as it it's a game that deals heavily with the topic. Like, say, in Strangelove's first cutscene, where she's challenging BB to kill her.

And a moment after that we get one of the brightest pops of blue in the game! There aren't very many of them, most of the blues are dull, like on Strangelove's glasses here. But in this scene, not only are Snake's eyes blue, he also has blue highlights on his face. It really brings the two of them together in their grief over the same woman.

Strangelove also refers to the Boss AI as "[her] morpho," the kind of butterfly that BB references in PW.

Not so coincidentally, this is *also* the kind of butterfly that appears at the end of the Paz questline, which disappears in a flash of blue light, in this sort of combined grieving-and-unreality scene that I think makes blue throughout the series so beautiful.

It's not just one thing, it's many things that are intimately woven together. I guess you could more accurately say that it's mental/emotional hurt and old wounds where red is more physical/immediate hurt?

That's not to say that every single time someone is grieving or lying or is dishonest or is something they don't appear to be that they'll be ringed in blue or anything, but rather that it's something to watch for because there's often a sort of color confirmation. Same as how the snakes don't tend to wear red even when they do a lot of killing

I'm also very much still working out the symbolism of blue in the games honestly. These are mostly my working theories but if anyone has anything else to add I'm all ears!

Sorry that this is kind of short, I had covid this week and am still kind of playing catch-up a bit but I at least wanted to get some really obvious (to me) cases out there.