Between life and death: the questioning of dichotomies in Death Stranding

At the beginning of Death Stranding, you are certain of two things: you must walk long distances to deliver a variety of packages and you will need to deal with some kind of ghosts that will try to kill you. Simple as that. Whilst it gets along and characters are presented, it is possible to distinguish a characteristic among them. Kojima’s characters have names that sound very obvious and cheesy. Nonetheless, their obviousness has a role: to lead the player in a way of questioning the duality of key notions from their own world.

 Before starting Death Stranding, I knew about the character played by Guilherme Del Toro, but I thought he would just be a special guest who would appear for ten minutes. However, his character, Deadman, turns out as a special element in the whole craziness that Death Stranding introduces us. His importance in how the story unfolds is the same as in what he, as well as other elements, represents. Even though the way he is presented, as a type of monster of Frankenstein, makes the fact of his name is Deadman risibly, he still pretty much alive in front of you.

While in Death Stranding, we find it difficult to define what is alive and what is dead, the rest of the world questions the difference between nature and technology, as well as human and nonhuman for example. However, unlike the former, the latter are confined in academic contexts, encrypted by the intellectual vernacular. Kojima’s newest work may not be the first game to question dichotomies, but its strength may be positive to the discussion.

A dichotomy is a division between opposite ideas. Life and death. Good and evil. These are found in most of the western societies and they function as a base for how we see the world. It is after considering someone as a human and someone or something as a nonhuman that things such as the human rights start to make sense. Although, accordingly to the philosopher and feminist Rosi Braidotti’s work, the division between what is human and what is not is a dangerous practice. The idea of a human as an unquestionable truth was challenged by the movement anti-humanist lead by some French intellectuals, like Foucault, which helped to demonstrate some power relations and inequalities sustained by it.

Death Stranding’s world, in a sense, provides a prolific context to keep with the anti-humanist movement, since it is constantly pushing dichotomies to its maximum. Among its characters, we have Deadman and Fragile. While they are playing with words with their names, we must push forward the idea of what is a man who is dead but also alive? And what about a girl whose name gives us a description which contradicts how strong and tough she is? Their existence contradicts the duality on which they connected.

There is another point where we can visualize this whole idea of deconstructing dichotomies. Whenever you are going through an area of BTs and you are caught by one of them, the whole area transforms. A giant BT appears and you can only run or fight. After the fight regardless of the choice you made, many fishes lying on the floor will appear and that can only be explained by the notion of the convergence of worlds. Two places become one and during those minutes you are throwing blood grenades it is too difficult to say where exactly you are.

Nevertheless, the BBs are the most significant element in the whole game to represent the exercise of questioning dichotomies. A bridge baby is taken from their mother’s womb who are called “stillmothers”, since they are brain dead, although their bodies are sustained by the UCA. Deadman specifies in Chapter 6 that bbs are in a zone between the world of the living and the world of the dead. They represent as much as life, being newborns, as death, since they are still connected with their mother’s.

Besides that, after Sam receives his bb, he is told that he should not consider it as a human being, but as a tool, a hardware. As a player, you comprehend bb’s function in showing the BTs. On the other side, the game calls your attention to bb’s humanity since you are supposed to calm them down if their stress level gets too high. While they are crying and Sam shakes them in his arms, you can no longer see them as just a tool. They are people.

Notwithstanding how different and most of the times hard to understand Death Stranding is, it is unquestionably how the work of deconstructing dichotomies is done well in it. In a world where we fight every day to change the current social order, the simple exercise of exposing alleged truths is a good place to start.