u/Sad-Tip4963

Hey all!

So, around this time last year I medically separated out of the Marine Corps. While I was in, I did a lot of exploration with my identity and came to the VERY private realization that I identify as a woman. Only my closest friends OUTSIDE of the military knew, and they helped me grow to be a lot more comfortable with who I wanted to be. Flash forward to now, and I just recently attended my first VA appointment. The first session was essentially just a "hey, how are you doing, what are your goals?" sort of thing as I expected. But being out of the military and able to truly be myself, I've decided that I want to lay it all out on the table with my mental health provider and get all of the support I can get from them.

I noticed that the current administration has put a lot of limits on what the VA is able to medically provide to transgender veterans, but I haven't been able to find a clear-cut answer on what mental and physical health treatments are available. Does anyone have any experience working with them since March of last year, and, if so, what should I expect when I meet with my provider next?

Hear me out:
At the end of MG2, Solid Snake literally incinerated Big Boss. His death animation incorporates his sprite exploding. No corpse. No phasing out of reality like the guards or other bosses. One must assume that Big Boss was, in every possible sense of the word, nothing more.

Flash forward to MGS4:

Big Mama is holding on to the braindead remains of Solidus Snake from MGS2. He was, by every definition of the term, the Patriots' "perfect" clone of Big Boss from a physical standpoint. However; during the Harrier fight, Solidus lost the opposite eye that Big Boss lost during Operation Snake Eater.

During the final cutscene of MGS4, Big Boss returns in his full physical glory. He explains that the corpse that Big Mama had and Liquid Ocelot torched in Eastern Europe was, in fact, Solidus, and Big Mama had kept him around to slowly but surely "recover" Big Boss to consciousness and full physical rehabilitation by removing "pieces" from Solidus and surgically grafting them back onto Big Boss.

The question:
What exactly remained of Big Boss after his whole "being incinerated and spontaneously exploding" incident?? He is still missing the proper eye that he lost during Operation Snake Eater, so that part of him can be assumed to have stayed intact. If you look at Solidus while he is encased in his... bag, I guess, he is missing a LOT. Skin, a significant amount of muscle, essentially everything aside from his nervous and skeletal system. Yet Big Boss is just fine. He's up, he's walking around, he's got everything in its right place. But obviously, there wasn't a whole lot of him left after MG2. If anything at all aside from his brain and his one good eye. You can make the argument that it was simply a limitation of both Kojima's knowledge of the franchise's direction at the time and technology. But that's cope, and you know it.

I prefer a literal standpoint when it comes to this series. There's conjecture on what Ocelot's true motives were even to his final moments. There's conjecture regarding who was truly the dominant clone between Solid and Liquid. There's conjecture that MGSV is a finished game. There is very little that we can truly say that we do know, but I believe we need to take facts at face value. One of those facts is that Big Boss was no more, then, all of a sudden, he was again. But physically, is it really Big Boss, or is it Solidus? Is there a true Solidus beyond the identity that he had when he had brain activity? Whether that is or is not the case, can we truly say that, in his final moments, Big Boss was living in his own skin, or was that the identity of Big Boss living within a shell of his clone?