Welcome back to our second installment on the male characters of Metal Gear Solid. Today we'll be looking at those characters who fall just short of greatness but still manage to redeem themselves enough as human beings to overcome most of their failings.

As before, these characters are ranked according to gender representation, which is an issue of concern for men just as much as women. Like the previous list, lower numbers equal a higher score.

Note: heavy MGS4 spoilers are sectioned off with bolded warnings.

 

THE MIDDLE RANK

 

6. Ivan Raidenovich Raikov
Appears in: MGS3
One long, drawn-out Raiden-hating running gag, Raikov wouldn't appear to have much going for him at first glance. He's the effeminate lover of Colonel Volgin (more on him next time) and little more than a short-time MacGuffin for the sake of moving the plot.

However, when you think about it, what we have here is an openly gay soldier in the Russian military in the 1960s, who uses his sexual charms to gain preferential treatment with his superiors. Look at that stride of his-- that's a man who sees upward mobility in his future and a good way of getting there.

To his detriment, he's... well, he's a MacGuffin and a running joke. Not to mention a huge Japanese cliche: the effeminate, slighter man paired with the taller, more conventionally masculine guy. It goes pretty much without saying (although Secret Theater sheds additional light on the subject) that Raikov plays the passive role in the bedroom, and with a violent sexual sadist, no less. I'm more than a little ambivalent about a young gay man who sees pain and suffering as a necessary trade-off for career advancement. It's hard not to feel sorry for him, in fact. He's trapped. Which leads us into one of the two primary gay character cliches in these games: gay-man-as-victim.

(On the other hand, maybe he likes it. We may never know.)

 

7. Solid Snake
Appears in: Must I list them?
I hear you back there. "What? Number seven?!" you cry. "The hero of all things Metal Gear? The legendary badass who defeats giant robots with his bare hands is ranked at the bottom of the upper half?!" Bear with me here.

First, recall how MGS1 went.

Snake: O hai.
Campbell: Hey, here's some set-up.
Snake: Sweet.
Campbell: And here is your support team: the hot British woman, the hot Russian woman, and the hot Chinese woman.
Snake: OH HI LADIES I SEE YOU HAVE TWO X CHROMOSOMES WANT TO HAVE RADIO SEX?
Women: Tee-hee, oh Snake, you're such an action hero! Of course we'll excite the virgin teenage boy contingent of your audience!
Snake: Sweeeeet.
Campbell: Finally, here's my dau-- niece, Meryl MacGuffin.
Meryl: Hi, I'm going to be an aggressive tomboy.
Snake: Uh. Sure. With those breasts?
Meryl: I TOTALLY AM! I have no sexual urges HEY SNAKE PLEASE HAVE SEX WITH ME.
Snake: Now we're talking-- I mean, SORRY I NEED CARIBOU TO GET IN THE MOOD IT'S SORT OF AN ALASKAN THING.

And so on. His performance is a little better in future games, if only because being forced underground means his support team isn't quite so bodacious illustrious. But one thing is essentially constant: Snake will not respect you unless you're a good fighter, and that goes especially for women. Meryl in MGS1? "Great, I saved the princess, let's go have sex." Meryl in MGS4? "I seem to be relying on you as an actual ally; how strange." He thinks very little of Olga when he first encounters her in the tanker chapter of MGS2, but when she comes back as an ally in the plant chapter he has far more regard for her as a warrior.

MGS4 SPOILER: Conversely even though his accelerated aging in MGS4 should mean he has little interest in sex anymore, his pervert habits shine through long enough to try to peer up Naomi's skirt. Even though she's a dangerous and mysterious individual who should be worth at least some small measure of respect. Classy, gramps. END MGS4 SPOILER.

It's hard to pin Snake down simply, but as the main protagonist of most of the Metal Gear games to date, Snake exists for the pleasure of the assumed player. A veteran of the battlefield only warming to characters who are skilled and useful is only to be expected; the sexual tomfoolery, however, tries for James Bond, and James Bond really isn't a good model for the 21st century man. Especially one running around in games where there are gay characters all over the place and enough badass iconoclastic women soldiers to make your head spin. Snake isn't a suave and debonaire agent of her Majesty's Secret Service; he's the antiwar, Libertarian Chuck Norris, working for the UN, and he and Otacon have a secret handshake hug. Do we really need this slice of misogynistic crap layered on top?

MGS4 SPOILER: On the plus side, he's living and raising a kid together with his bestest guyfriend, which tells us that he's comfortable, at least. And we know he's not afraid of showing off his fantastic body. On the negative side, however, he is afraid of showing it off when said body isn't so fantastic anymore. Putting so much stock in one's appearance has its price. END MGS4 SPOILER.

And he is so lying about his 180 IQ.

 

8. Drebin 893
Appears in: MGS4.
(There are MGS4 spoilers throughout this entry.)

There aren't all that many racial minorities in the MGS games, and when they do show up they seem to be predominately black. (Mei-Ling is the only Asian I can think of, in fact, and I'm having trouble thinking of a single Latino-- the South American rebels aside.) Drebin earns kudos for being a person of color without encountering some of the easier pitfalls you might be inclined to associate with his occupation: that of the utterly unscrupulous black market man whom you would never want to be seen in public with, but he gets you what you need, yanno what'm sayin'?

On the contrary, Drebin is smartly dressed, intelligent, even meditative. Infodumps though they may be, his histories on the B&B Unit show a great deal of empathy and reflection. Not to mention, despite his repeated claims to apolitical greed, we know by the end that he has a specific agenda that aligns him with Snake's crew, and that he has a personal emotional stake in what Snake ultimately is able to accomplish, being a war orphan himself.

That all said, the stereotype is hard to overlook when you get right down to it: here is a dangerous trickster-character who represents that dark, scary underworld. He's Mephistopheles, an agent of the Devil or maybe the Devil himself, who embodies a kind of amoral darkness-- one that he, by and large, tries to goad Snake into. At the very least, the nanomachine injection Snake receives during their first meeting has "Faustian contract" written all over it. So if you have a character like that, you better make him a scary, sneaky-looking black man, right? Where're the cloven hooves, while you're at it?

Let's not even get into the animal abuse.

 

9. Revolver Ocelot
Appears in: MGS1, 2, 3, 4 and PO.
(This entry is also smothered in MGS4 spoilers.)

You have to respect any antagonist of Ocelot's caliber, who somehow outcrazies Sephiroth and at the same time is more all-knowing than God. You just know that he's involved in more global conspiracies than should mathematically be able to exist, and that he'll continue to be behind things even after his death-- dying never stopped his dad, after all. By MGS4, it's also more than apparent that he's very likely homosexual (his 50-year-old unrequited love for Big Boss being the reason for everything-- everything), making him possibly one of the most illustrious and competent gay antagonists in storytelling.

So, what's the problem? Well, lots of stuff. Even though the timeline makes sense, it's still a pretty tough pill to swallow that this actually-a-good-guy tortured, raped and mass-murdered for decades in Big Boss's name. Surely there were more... consistent ways to achieve his ends and still be sufficiently Machievellian. Not to mention, his entire set-up ultimately relied entirely on guiding Solid Snake through his latest machinations to undo all of his work for him. I mean, that's approaching Joker-esque levels of frivolous.

The sexuality-and-violence issue can't be overlooked either, between his erotic comments while loading his revolver and taunting about raping (or at least overseeing the rape of) Meryl in MGS1, and the headlock-plus-kiss moment in MGS4. EVA makes no secret of Ocelot's less-than-pure fixation on Naked Snake in MGS3, which only seems enhanced while he watches Snake getting brutally beaten by Colonel Volgin. Ocelot picks up his trademark torture techniques from this same shady character, an affirmed sexual sadist, and though there isn't much hint he's deriving actual carnal pleasure torturing Solid Snake in MGS1... well, you can never really know.

As for the opposite sex, young Ocelot is shown to have no particular regard for women, feeling up EVA without a flicker of consideration. That's fine by me, honestly, since I imagine he'd go right for the private parts of a male suspect as well. However, in general, he seems distrustful of women, while at the same time thinking very little of their abilities. Only his mother seems able to humble him, though it's unknown to this day if he even knew at the time who she was. As an older man, as mentioned, Ocelot's treatment of Meryl is far beyond the pale of anything that could be called defensible; however, on the other hand, he seems to trust Naomi Hunter and the all-female elite soldier group, the FROGs, with his operations in MGS4. How much of these executive decisions come from his own persona as opposed to Liquid Snake's is up for debate.

 

10. Raiden
Appears in: MGS2 and 4. (3 in Secret Theater.)
Having come late to the MGS party, I really don't get all the fuss about Raiden. He isn't my favorite character, but he isn't my least favorite either. His sins in MGS2 seem to mostly boil down to "he's a rookie, and that's annoying," which is rather unfair considering that Snake was a fresh-faced 23-year-old in the original Metal Gear. (Well, all right. Another reason is evidenced in his picture above.) His boasts about VR training are actually a critique of you, the player, for presuming to know the first thing about combat just because you play video games. But oh no, the point was clearly not gotten, and Raiden-read-Kojima took your criticisms so close to heart that he knew he couldn't come back until he was so hardcore he made Snake look like a pansy.

MGS4 SPOILER: Which he did, indeed, do in the last game. Everyone loves a cyborg ninja, and Raiden managed to outstrip even Gray Fox as the best ninja of them all. He fights when his blood goes bad. He fights when he doesn't have any arms left. He commands lightning with his brain. What's the problem, then? The problem mainly stems from the moment in MGS4 when we learn that Raiden is so obsessed with seeming cool in the eyes of the player that he actually breaks down in front of Snake, literally clinging to his leg and begging to be allowed to throw his life away fighting the good fight. It takes Snake the whole game to finally drive home that kicking some ass isn't the only way to live honorably, and that Raiden does, actually, owe some modicum of respect to his wife. Raiden redeems himself a little in the epilogue, by promising to finally give this whole family man thing a decent go, but it remains to be seen whether he's able to actually pull himself together and grow up this time. END SPOILER.

 

Don't see your favorite character yet? Tune in tomorrow when we conclude with the five MGS men you should really not consider an appropriate male role model.

Source for the non-canon images:
-Raikov: Amanita (site no longer available)
-Solid Snake: Metal Gear Awesome 2
-Revolver Ocelot: The Last Days of Foxhound

Previously:

The Top 15 Best and Worst Metal Gear Solid Men (Part 1)

The Top 10 Best and Worst Metal Gear Solid Women (Part 1)

The Top 10 Best and Worst Metal Gear Solid Women (Part 2)