Hideo Kojima has unveiled a new figurine of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain‘s heroine Quiet, and it features soft boobs that you can squeeze. Yep.
The Metal Gear creator posted images of the new figurine alongside the caption “PlayArtsKAI’s Quiet is coming soon. Yoji, a supervisor says some soft materials enables to be pushed & lifted. lol.” Quiet’s design has already stirred up some controversy in the past, with her outfit (or lack thereof) drawing complaints from many who believed that her appearance was unnecessarily sexualized given that the standard attire for expert snipers isn’t traditional a bra, panties and some torn-up tight. Kojima responded by saying that she was designed to be “sexy” so fans would be more inclined to want to cosplay as her, with cosplay being a huge thing in Japan (and steadily increasing in popularity in the west).
But surely adding squeezable breasts onto Quiet’s action figure is a step too far? While making her overtly “sexy” in order to entice cosplayers to dress like her is one thing, encouraging people to actively squeeze her figurine’s boobs is another.
Japan is a different country with a vastly different culture, and it’s not as if Kojima is the only one soliciting the creation of these types of figurines, with there being a big market for these types of figures in the region based upon video game and anime characters. But that doesn’t mean that it should be immediately accepted that the major female character in one of the year’s biggest, if not the biggest, video game release has an official action figure with squeezable boobs.
Kojima previously stated that Quiet’s outfit would make sense in the context of MGSV, and that “once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds.” He also said that he “created her character as an antithesis to the women characters [who have] appeared in the past fighting games who are excessively exposed.” So a good way to show her as an antithesis to these overly exposed fighting game characters was to give her figurine tits that buyers are encouraged to fondle? I’m not sure I follow the train of thought here.
