[Death Stranding] What the ka is up with the babies

Okay, let's talk about the babies.

Literally from my first post explaining how the whole story of Death Stranding is a version of Princess Himiko, people have been asking "but what about the babies tho." And I haven't answered, because, well, I don't know. But I've been theorizing enough now to have an idea, so let's get into it.

You probably assume that I'm going to reference another obscure Japanese yokai about babies. And you're sort of right... and sort of wrong. They're called mizuko, but they're not yokai, or really anything. They just... came out of nowhere.

https://digpodcast.org/2021/10/10/mizuko-the-history-behind-vengeful-aborted-fetus-hauntings-in-1980s-japan/ Back in the 1970's and 1980's Japanese women suddenly started pouring into Buddhist and Shinto shrines across Japan asking--and paying--for "mizuko kuyo". This puzzled the priests, because they'd never heard of it before. The term translates to "water-child memorial," and apparently women across Japan were terrified that without it, the ghost of their stillborn / aborted children would haunt them. People had stories of seeing visions of red blobs tormenting them and hearing the sounds of children crying at night. It was basically Japan's equivalent of the Satanic Panic. "Mizuko" isn't a term found anywhere in Shinto or Buddhist texts. There ARE child ghosts, but they tend to be lovable pranksters, not veangeful spirits.

There is a yokai that's relevant, but it's not the baby. The "ubume" is the spririt of a pregnant woman who died in childbirth and was deprived of her infant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubume She's described as wearing a blood-stained kimono, and will chase after children and attack those accompanying them.

Now while this BEHAVIOR may sound familiar, the appearance isn't. There are fat BT's and there are red BT's, but otherwise this seems like a bit of a stretch. But that's not the point. The point is that Japanese myth presents a tangible link between infants and mothers, even when dead. It's so strong in Japan that even today, if the mother dies in childbirth, they will go to great lengths to put the baby into the corpse's arms so that the mother's soul will find peace. (In ancient times they even dug up corpses to do this).

Incidentally, you know what they do if they can't, for whatever reason, put the baby in the dead mother's arms? They give her a doll instead.

This relates, to those of you who remember, to the account of the First Death Stranding, where a doctor giving a C-section was recorded as saying "Who is that?" before the entire city being destroyed by a BT. The implication, (which Kojima's Japanese players likely knew immediately from the story), is that the doctor was attacked by the ubume yokai of the dead mother, thus causing the Death Stranding event.

Where this gets complicated is with the "ka" and "ha" stuff, which I'll confess I don't totally understand. A "Ka" is a soul, and a "ha" is a body, but Kojima explicitly identifies each with a specific organ--the Ka with the brain, the Ha with the heart (there's an interview that talks about the way the Egyptians removed the heart). So a BB is technically bound to a mother who's "Ha"--their body or heart--is still intact, but their "Ka"--their soul/brain has left. So the baby is in the physical realm, but can detect the spiritual realm. It doesn't... totally make sense, but hey, that's Kojima.

One possibly interesting wrinkle is that this means that more BB's cause more BT's, and that experimenting around with BB's to create the chiral network is probably what led to the Death Stranding event in the first place. We're frequently told that the BB experiments go way back, and the late-game revelation that BB's are the foundation of the chiral network means that Bridges actually has made a LOT of child sacrifices, resulting in a lot of angry mother ghosts. It's very much a setup where the rush for progress and convenience has caused a massive ecological catastrophe, something Kojima's toyed with in the MGS games as well.

Talking about the babies, I want to revisit a pet theory of mine regarding Lucy, Sam's deceased wife. Post-game interviews reveal that Lucy committed suicide in large part because she was having constant nightmares of the Beach--nightmares, it's revealed, that she was getting via her connection with her unborn child Lou. "Bridget" visited Lucy and told her why she was getting the visions, and the whole thing was apparently too much for Lucy.

What this means is that the unborn Lou certainly had some form of magic ability (DOOMS, they call it in the game). Maybe she was like Fragile and could teleport back and forth to different beaches at will, maybe she was more like Sam--a repatriate who could come back from the dead if killed. Maybe Lucy was experiencing her daughter dying and coming back to life constantly. In any case, that means something important--Unborn Lou might not be dead.

True, Lucy's death caused a voidout that destroyed the entire city she was in at the time--but as we're shown at the literal start of the game, a repatriate like Sam can be at ground zero of a voidout and survive. And we're also very clearly shown that this is true even of a child, since BB-28 is with us and also survives--something that is initially put down to Sam's influence, but is later shown to be a way that BB is special. "Our only DOOMS-compatible unit," is how Deadman puts it.

If that seems a bit too convenient... then that's because by my theory, it probably is.

BB-28, who Sam nicknames "Lou" out of grief, is very likely in fact Sam's original unborn daughter. As a repatriate, she would have survived the voidout caused by her mother's suicide, (which conveniently took place seven months into the pregnancy--the time when canonically many BB's are removed). Bridget might have removed her in utero, or she might have picked Lou up off the wreckage of the destroyed city. One of the things Bridget told Lucy was that their baby Lou was "special"--and Bridget isn't one to let go of useful things.

How is that possible, though, since Lucy died 10 years before the jaded Sam met the clearly-still-an-infant-BB-28? While the game isn't clear about the science of BB's (of course), a flashback shows Cliff Unger presenting the intubated baby Sam with a cake with six candles, saying "Today would be a very special day if your mother hadn't... well..." The implication is that BB Sam has lived six years as an infant without growing out of the BBPod he's in. If so, that implies that BB's don't grow (probably something to do with chiral crystals) and could theoretically be kept in tubes indefinitely so long as they were still "in sync."

This is given special weight by a reference in the latest trailer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX353IaDcGU when Deadman says he's found evidence that officially "BB-28" was actually cremated years before Sam ever met them. So the BB-28 that Sam actually had is a mystery girl who doesn't appear anywhere in the records--exactly the sort of fudgery you'd pull if you didn't want people to realize you'd saved your adoptive son's unborn daughter and plugged them into a ghost-detection network.

So this leads naturally to speculation about Elle Fanning's character in DS2. I've speculated before that she's Lou. Do I still think that? Well... sort of yes and no. I think I've got a... more interesting idea for that. But I'll save it for the next one of these.