The following is extracted from Death Stranding's 'WMG' Tropes page. Essentially an ever-growing compendium of highly intriguing theories (some of which directly link to this sub):
**The baby symbolises Sam's loss of innocence.**
Sam probably *Used To Be A Sweet Kid*, but *war ruined him*, he was once a soldier and killed many. Now he's an *Atoner*, trying to become a *human again*.
**Oil will play a big role in the story.**
Just as Kojima's last game dealt with nukes and nuclear power, this game will have oil as a major theme/object in the story. The trailer looks to be in the aftermath of an oil spill, and the lettering of the title seems to be written in some kind of running black ink, or maybe oil.
**The baby is the same one from Silent Hills**
To give credit where it's due, it all goes to this nice blogger on Tumblr.
To expand on this, Death Stranding IS Silent hills. The reason Silent Hills was canceled is that Hideo Kojima walked into the board room one day like "What's up mother***ers, I lied! It's actually a new IP."
**The game will be a Surreal Horror game based around technology**
The entire trailer gave off a sci-fi vibe, with the high-tech handcuffs, the umbilical cord to the baby looking like an electric cable, the quantum equations on Reedus's neck. And if we accept that this is at least partially based on Kojima's plans for Silent Hills, then that could be very well what this game is going to be.
**Reedus's scar ISN'T a Cesarean scar**
Norman Reedus's character has a strange, cross-shaped scar on his stomach during the trailer, and a lot of people have been discussing the Mr Seahorse implications of the scar, but the scar looks nothing like the scar of a Cesarean Section, which are typically lower on the body and not cross-shaped. So maybe the scar is from something else, or serves a different purpose. This Tumblr user suggests that it is an XY plane, and that its purpose is to be used in combination with the quantum equations on his necklace to help plot out the locations of black holes.
**The game will heavily feature an Assimilation Plot**
The poem at the beginning of the trailer was by William Blake, who has had a work that prominently featured an Assimilation Plot
**Part of the game will be about an Eldritch Abomination trying to make humanity Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence**
Perhaps even doing so inadvertently, and our protagonist will be helpless to resist them.
**The game will have moments where it appears to be Playing the Player.**
You guys remember how PT had that Camera Abuse and Interface Screw part that made the people who saw it for the first time think they broke the game? Maybe this game will have similar moments or even have Fission Mailed moments.
**There is a reason why Norman Reedus' character is naked.**
If that part of the trailer is to be taken literally and he is naked at some point in the game, it may be a Shout-Out to The Terminator because the method of traveling through black holes destroys clothes. In The Terminator, the method of time travel destroys clothes, so people are sent through time naked.
**The oil is symbolic of both death and the connections of the human race.**
Oil. Without oil we would be separate. It gives us power. It gives us civilisation. Without it, we would be stranded, apart from one another. But our plundering of our world for oil is killing it and killing us. Unless we curb our thirst for it and find a way to live more frugally, we will all be as dead as the whales that choke on our mistakes. That is one of the game's major themes. To preserve our world so our children aren't stranded without power or nature.
**The five figures in the sky in the trailer are aliens.**
Well, the gigantic humanoid figure and invisible monsters in the 2017 trailer would certainly suggest either aliens or interdimensional entities.
**The game will allow you to interact with other people's games, but will not have full-on multiplayer.**
Based on the recent descriptions of gameplay and confirmation that there will be online elements. It might be something like Journey where you get randomly dropped into other people's games and can help them in some way. This could also tie in with the hints at quantum physics/black holes playing a part in the game, as that might be how you "travel" to other player's games, with the games standing in for alternate dimensions.
**The title refers to a Non-Malicious Monster Eldritch Abomination stuck in Earth's reality**
The plot will be about dealing with the death throes of a creature that has no business or desire to be here, and figuring out why it happened in the first place to stop it happening again.
After the 2017 trailer, I think we can pretty much rule out the "non-malicious" part (unless of course the game will invoke Blue and Orange Morality on the creature). The Eldritch Abomination part we can pretty much confirm, though.
**This title might never truly make sense in any comprehensible fashion until the later and inevitable DLC.**
The oil we see in the trailers isn´t really "oil", it's "ink", octopus ink, and who do we know have those traits, sleeping in the ocean?For added points, the game takes place in a future where mankind actually discovered Cthulhu sleeping in its city and, humans being humans, the oil companies tried to exploit him after discovering that his ink turned out to be a superior alternative to oil, as they discovered that he could produce infinite amounts of it without depletion.Of course, it spiraled out of control and the oil companies ended up waking it up and after a failed bombing on the eldritch abomination, destroying its city and releasing his ink into the oceans, starting the nightmare seen in-game.The goal of the game might be to find a way to put him back to sleep again, with the hope that it will at least halt the destruction of the world, somewhat...
**The game takes place at a point in the future where virtual reality and "real" reality are collapsing on each other.**
Humanity is about to sever its mortal coil and merge into The Singularity. There is Schizo Tech everywhere because time is being mashed up and "downloaded" by the universal "server". The only thing keeping humans attached to the real world is the cycle of "Death" and "Birth". The game will be about trying to escort new lives (the babies) back into real world so that humanity is not completely assimilated.
**The world is polluted and humans have mutated into horrible monsters.**
The Del Toro character is a scientist who is trying to engineer humans that are resistant the worlds pollutants and the Baby shown in the trailers is his last experiment. And the Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen characters are failed experiments.
2 theories about the story.
- So my first idea of the plot is that an eldritch abomination or some other creature that does not belong in our world is somehow trapped in our world. The main evidence that I have for this is that supposedly the title refers to when whales are washed up onto the shore and die if no one helps them. So the idea is that a creature not of this world is trapped in this world and the government decides to exploit the creature. The black "oil" is not actually oil but rather the blood of this other worldly creature. The blood of this creature allows the government to bioengineer stuff beyond what is currently capable. The blood of this creature leads to a future where there is wide spread biotechnology. The tank that we see covered in whale insides is not covered in whale insides rather the tank is a fusion of biology and technology. So basically an other world creature is stuck in our world, it's blood allows people to bioengineer beyond what is currently capable. As the creature begins to die, this leads to the government to stop exporting the creature's blood to stock pile it for themselves. This leads to a war where the government creates super soldiers like Mads Mikkelsen's character that are used to fight in the war. The skull faced soldiers Mads Mikkelsen's character sends out are either used to be human or not humans at all being directly controlled by him trough the wires comping out of him. Guillermo del Toro's character is just simply a refugee from the war that has destroyed his home. The baby he holds is either a hybrid of a human and the creature, or a clone of the creature (which is human like) that both sides of the war wants to capture so that they can have more of that miracle creature blood.
- Same as the first except that the exploitation of the creature has led to a corruption like effect on humanity. Humans in the future are nolonger pure humans but rather like Mads Mikkelsen's character are inflected with the blood of the other worldly creature. No pure humans remains and the humans inflected with the creature's blood wage war on the each other with a combination of technology and organics (tank that looks like it has fleshy bits growing on it) to try and get more of the creature's blood. Guillermo del Toro's character is a scientist that is trying to escape the war zone and the baby that he has is one of the last pure humans on earth, or has a cure to the infection. Norman Reedus' character is actually the baby as a grown up (so the baby is Norman fetus haha) sent back in time to stop the war and corruption of humanity however the possess goes wrong, stranding him in a time during the war where it is too late to stop it. As is stated above me by another user, the scar on his belly is not a c-section scar but rather the scar on his belly and the equations on his dog tags are suppose to be his ticket back to his own time line when the job is finished. The game will be about Norman Reedus' character trying to stop the events that lead to the what I am now calling blood war.
So is this like Bloodborne except with black blood and it's set in the modern era?
**The game takes place during humanities final judgement.**
Because of greed and selfishness, mankind has let the planet they were given go to waste. We keep seeing images of dead wild life and oil all over the place. The oil could represent the current wars that are happening all over the world and how resources like oil seem to be the most important prize. Meanwhile, industry is slowly destroying the plant due to Global Warming. The cables attached to everything could represent how every thing on the planet was connected, but its now dead and it's humanities fault. So now, the remaining humans are being punished for failing the creator of the universe. However, those remaining humans are tying to fight back and not accept their punishment willingly. Those humans must face off against Deities whom are Reality Warper's. During the struggle, the remaining humans (similar to Skynet and the Terminator story line,) figure out a way to resist by creating a baby that can duplicate the reality warping abilities of the Deities, but with a limited amount of time and with the baby being attached to the human body to form a mental link. The humans whom fail are either killed or capture, and when they're captured, their belly buttons are surgically removed.
**Heroine casting WMG**
Kojima mentioned that casting for the game's heroine is underway, here are possible actresses that he might cast:
Winona Ryder - Kojima enjoyed Stranger Things a lot.
Elle Fanning - He continously praised The Neon Demon, so he might be considering Fanning to be cast.
Jena Malone
Emma Stone - It's no secret that he LOVES La La Land that the chance that Stone would be cast is probably high.
E3 2018 has confirmed Léa Seydoux as a heroine.
**Director Neill Blomkamp is involved with the game.**
**The Uterine Replicator represent the player character's extra lives**
My guess is that the game won't allow saving or restarting from checkpoints. Instead, continuing on will be represented by the player growing a clone of themselves as a fetus inside their Uterine Replicator. Upon dying, the clone will begin to grow to maturity. This is why Reedus' character has a cross-shaped scar instead of a belly button — all of the clones have that, and the trailer depicts him waking up on the beach after respawning. A highly twisted in-game explanation of one of the most common video game mechanics.
**The theme of the game is a darker take on the concept of rebirth.**
The amount of umbilical imagery in the game is mixed in with the concept of people avoiding Rapid Aging and A Fate Worse Than Death. Perhaps people are being "reborn" as the type of undead soldiers Mikkelsen's character has strapped to him through his own umbilical cord.
**There will be Marathon Bosses that will take weeks to defeat.**
Kojima tried to do this with one of his Metal Gear games, but Konami shot it down. Now this is Kojima unchained.
**The skeleton soldiers are related somehow to the rain that causes Rapid Aging**
My guess is that the rain aged the soldiers to the point where nothing was left of them but skeletons, and it also either caused them to continue living past the point where they should have expired, or they were resurrected by Mads Mikkelson's character to serve as his mooks. Though it's pretty far-fetched, I also think that the rain may have somehow had this effect on their equipment, such as their rifles, uniforms, tanks, and planes. Rather than causing these inanimate objects to decay, the rain had some effect that caused them to revert to older versions of themselves, which is why they're all using World War II-era weaponry. This theme of aging and entropy would form a nice thematic contrast with the infants the protagonists are evidently trying to protect.
**There's some kind of very symbolic reason why an unborn baby is the only thing that can detect the floating umbilical cord dead/zombie/monster things.**
Because they're both attached to umbilical cords, or a unborn baby is technically not "alive" yet...I don't know.
The scene from the very first trailer shows the aftermath of Sam's "power" mentioned in the E3 2018 trailer.
Sam has dark handprints all over him, meaning that he had probably been captured by the monsters. He's fine, but the area around him is destroyed, which matches up with how his power is described.
Also looking back at the first trailer, the baby being "born" or taken out of it's capsule thing caused it to become one of the monsters.
When the baby vanishes, tiny black handprints are shown walking down Sam's body and out to the floating figures. This is consistent with how the invisible monsters move.
Alternatively, the baby being stolen and transported to another dimension/timeline thingy left behind a monster.
If the theory about the synced-up trailers is right and that is the same baby, then del Toro's character taking that baby somehow caused a monster to be left behind in it's place. Maybe the monsters are echos of people who have been taken from their own dimension/timeline, the umbilical cord representing their connection to their own world that got broken. The monsters power to age the world around them comes from them/the universe trying to reconnect them to the right time/place and put them back where they're supposed to be.
**Sam transports dead bodies to stop them from being claimed by the monsters or to save to spirits of the people that have been taken by them.**
Sam is transporting or will transport cargo that is pivotal in stopping the monsters or the Timefall.
Stopping what's going on would fit as the plot of the game.
**Death Stranding is related to Simon Stålenhag's Things from the Flood, and Tales from the Loop**
Let's see, a tank filled with organic organs and stuff? A lot like the art in Things from the Flood, showing organic growths coming out of a gameboy. A theme of water? Death Stranding places a lot of emphasis on the ocean and water, while Things from the Flood, deals with a flood that brings anomalies to a ordinary world. Sam's dog tags having quantum equations on it? Tales from the Loop deals with a particle accelerator, which is used to discover subatomic particles (that quantum physics govern) bring anomalies to a simple town. It would not surprise me at all if the world of Death Stranding was the future of the world presented in Things from the Flood and Tales from the Loop.
**Mads’ character and Sam will plug into each other at some point in the game.**
Mads has umbilical cords that he uses to control/manipulate skeleton soldiers. It may be possible for him to use the cords on living people. Sam has a cord that allows him to use the baby jar to see eldritch beings. According to Kojima, connections will be an important element to the game. So the idea that you’ll be able to plug into other characters, not just baby jars and skeletons, doesn’t seem far fetched to me. Sam and Mads probably plug into each other out of necessity. Since Mads is the antagonist, Sam most likely won’t want to do this, but will for survival reasons (However, since Mads has stated that his character isn’t evil, it’s possible that Sam’s reservations about doing this won’t be too high). Here are a few related speculations of what might occur if this happens:
**Connecting with another human being will be painful and/or more intense. In the fourth trailer, Sam shows a bit discomfort when he plugs into the baby jar. Plugging into another human being will be a much more uncomfortable and/or extreme experience.**
Mads might attempt to control Sam when they’re connected. Sam will have to fight to keep control over himself. Whether or not Mads succeeds, this event will solidify animosity between the two characters. Alternatively, Mads will not attempt to take Sam over- though Sam will be concerned that he will- because the situation they’re in is too dangerous to do something like that.
**Plugging into Mads will allow Sam to see some of Mads’ past, which will allow Sam to understand Mads’ motivations. This will either make Sam more sympathetic or hostile towards Mads.**
Mads has plugged into other humans in the past, while Sam hasn’t. This will put Mads at an advantage if he chooses to use their connection to manipulate Sam.
This event will change Sam in some way. Maybe it will be in the form of a new ability (for example, he might learn to control skeletons), or he’ll be changed mentally and emotionally, but the event will be a keystone in Sam’s character development.
**A character will crush one of the baby jars.**
Not necessarily Sam’s baby jar, but a baby jar will be crushed, destroying the thing inside. Most likely this scene will not be too graphic. If, for example, the jar is crushed by someone stomping on it, the scene will show the person raising their foot and then a Gory Discretion Shot will keep the audience from actually seeing the jar destroyed.
**Why Sam has dog tags in the first trailer.**
It’s a red herring. It was only put there to misdirect fan theories and the tags won’t be there when the scene happens in game.
Though Sam is an average man now, he used to be a soldier and doesn’t remember that for some time. The moment shown in trailer one happens after Sam regains his memories as a soldier.
Those tags belong to other solders and were given to him or taken by him. One of the tags could’ve belong to Mads’ character at some point.
They don’t belong to soldiers and aren’t real dog tags, but were made to look like dog tags in order to hide and carry important information in a discreet way. That would explain why the "dog tags" are engraved with quantum equations.
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