Board Thread:Metal Gear Solid V/@comment-4913740-20140331092208/@comment-1672596-20140331121934

Misterbunnsy wrote: But to retcon the fact that Big Boss is in command of FOXHOUND while also leading the Outer Heaven Uprising completely disrupts the story of not only the Metal Gear game, but also the series. Regardless of whether other details have been erroneously changed when they had a bearing on the continuity, this detail is too big to change.

The whole point of Portable Ops, Peace Walker and MGSV is that it's the lead up to Big Boss's big one: the one where the army he builds isn't just a private militia or whatever. It's where Big Boss really fights back, rebels against Cipher, and ultimately leads Solid Snake along his own path to becoming a veteran soldier. Everything leading to Metal Gear has a bearing on the rest of the series, so changing this detail will ruin everything. The problem is that thanks to Peace Walker and especially Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, despite pretty much all the games taking place after Metal Gear (ie, MG2, MGS, MGS2, and MGS4) explicitly stating that Big Boss's status as the founder and leader of Outer Heaven was not even known until the conclusion of the Outer Heaven Uprising (in MGS4's case, the discovery devastated Zero to such an extent that he actually developed AIs to dominate over humanity due to not trusting human successors), apparently Big Boss's status as such was very well known by the world at least since Paz hijacked ZEKE (especially when Paz strongly implied that Cipher, in addition to playing both the CIA and KGB for its own purposes, also had control over the DIA, NRO, CSS, and NSA), and by the 1980s thanks in large part to Cipher and XOF's meddling, Big Boss was hated enough for the world to "want him dead" as Ishmael and Ocelot put it, so they already did ruin it.

I think if he is creative with this idea, it could unfold very much in a way where Zero is utterly incapable of pointing out that Big Boss committed atrocities and not Skull Face, since he's constructed BB as a legend, and never acknowledged him as an enemy publicly.

And why would Zero have any trouble with pinning Big Boss with the atrocities he committed instead of Skull Face? He had absolutely no problem with tarnishing MSF's reputation and Big Boss's by launching a nuke at the US, not to mention ensuring MSF's reputation was ruined with the IAEA inspection that resulted in MSF literally being killed off, having the news blithely refer to MSF as being "money-hungry private militias," and even going as far as to instigate a huge scandal among both the East and the West and among the UN just to force them to be hateful of Big Boss. Even the Mother Base attack was more or less done on Zero/Cipher's orders. Heck, despite similarly building up Solid Snake to be a legend with his exploits in Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land, even Shadow Moses to a lesser extent, the Patriots still insisted on doing a smear campaign against Solid Snake in 2007 and ensuring his name alongside Philanthropy was permanently marred (I don't think Snake ever had his name cleared, BTW, though correct me if I'm wrong. MGS4 certainly never gave that impression.).