the memes of "Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance"

Perhaps it was the generation I was born in, but I never actually realized that "meme" meant something outside of funny images and videos on the internet. So when I played Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance for the first time, and Monsoon began monologuing that "we are all pawns, controlled by something greater: Memes. The DNA of the soul," I couldn't help but giggle a little bit. But this theme of cultural memes becomes a driving point of the game, as well as the rationale behind a lot of the main villain's motives.

https://www.pcgamer.com/metal-gear-rising-revengeance-review/, Raiden posing with his sword because he's a cyborg-ninja. He's awesome.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a spin-off game from the popular Metal Gear Solid series. The player takes control of Raiden, a titular character from the series (namely Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots). The plot of this game follows Raiden as he hunts down members of the PMC (private military company) "Desperado," all of which are bent on destabilizing peaceful nations and creating conflict. One of these members, Monsoon, is renowned for the speech he gives Raiden about memes.

Meme theory, coined by one Richard Dawkins, proposes the idea that some units of culture self-replicate, similar to how genes replicate. This is why Monsoon refers to memes as the "DNA of the soul." Memes are, in a sense, a way that cultures preserve themselves and communicate amongst their members. Memes, then, are a naturally occurring part of being human. They shape the will of the people they inhabit; or, as Monsoon says, "they are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they will learn to hate." Monsoon shares this "kill or be killed" mentality with most of the members of Desperado, claiming that "it's only nature running its course."

By the end of the game, it is revealed that an American Senator, Senator Armstrong, was planning to frame Desperado for killing American military personnel, and turn the American people against them. As a result, Armstrong was planning on winning the Presidential election and returning society to a "survival of the fittest" mindset--similar to what Monsoon is outlining in his meme speech. In Armstrong's America, the weak will be purged while only the strong survive. Raiden doesn't have any of this, and the final boss fight (and probably the most well-known from the entire game) begins between the two.

But, in real super-villain fashion, Armstrong has to give his own speech to Raiden. He only reaffirms what Raiden has been hearing from the many antagonists of the game, leading up to this point. Armstrong claims that "America is diseased. Rotten to the core. There's no saving it--we need to pull it out by the roots... The weak will be purged, and the strongest will thrive."

Is this natural selection in of itself, a meme? We see the same ideas tumbling out of the mouths of multiple antagonists--perhaps their reasoning differs slightly, but their claims remain the same. Perhaps if there were more people under Desperado's control, there would have been a more wide-spread belief in natural selection. Monsoon said it best, that if someone is exposed to something long enough, they will learn to do/react to said thing. If enough enough people believed that America was rotten, as Armstrong said, then there would be a lot of Americans backing Armstrong in his pursuit to cleanse America (he even ends one of his main points by stating that the remaining strong individuals will "make America great again." Eerie. This game was released in 2013, for reference).

Ironically, this game erupted due to its "meme" content. It has a lot of goofy line delivery, very colorful characters, and the nature of the game itself is a little bit ridiculous (I mean, this whole time the player has been playing as a cyborg ninja). So admittedly, it is hard to take the game seriously at a lot of the story beats. But underneath the story (which has since been meme-ed into oblivion), there is a really haunting story on political warfare through the spreading of harmful memes.

You just have to get past lines like "we're making the mother of all omelets here, Jack. Can't fret over every egg."