Death Stranding Is About the Fracturing Soul of America

It foretells a future where the country’s institutions can no longer hold its fabric together.

Sam — played by Norman Reedus- in what looks like a government office, with the American flag clearly visible. Courtesy of Sony and Kojima Productions.

Hideo Kojima had infamously made it a point not to show any gunfire in Death Stranding’s E3 2018 trailer and was quite proud of it. To make a grand statement on the gratuity of violence in video games from the get-go was bold enough already, but it seems as though Kojima is well-intent on putting the screws further to an idea a plethora of jingoistic military shooters are historically courteous towards-that of American imperialism.

Think of the Bush presidency and what it did to radically alter the cultural makeup of Western entertainment. The foreign policy positions taken by the Bush administration came to define an entire generation of jingoistic self-critical pieces of media that either aggrandize the failures of America abroad and vilify the supposed savages they were to civilize, or put it under fire scolding streams of fire for being the heinous crime against humanity it was. The latter approach tells us there was always resistance to ideas of hatred when the elite put their own self-interest before people, and the former is an ever-persisting reminder that patrons of an oppressive government will always be there no matter how much of a moral dilemma supporting…