Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-86.46.22.35-20130403153709/@comment-64.33.250.214-20150626212330

0nighthawk0 wrote: I'll still say that they mistook Solidus for a normal man with the Make it Right trailers and thus picked a middle aged man to play the roll. I mean he was about 18/20 or so during that time, yet in the Make it Right trailers he looks to be well in his 30's.

But as for Ishmael, no it wouldn't make sense. Ishmael claims to have been watching Big Boss for 9 years, aka, the coma time. Meaning that he's been watching Big Boss since 1975. Solidus was born after Liquid and Solid, somewhere in late 1972/early 1973. Are you going to tell me he was an adult at 2/3 years old then? Because I highly doubt they'd let a toddler watch Big Boss.

I'm still going with the theory that Ishmael is only in Big Boss his head, considering we never see him again ever in any trailers aside from the Hospital scene, and he practically disappears there too once Big Boss meets Ocelot. I'm not going to claim 100% that Ishmael is Solidus, but knowing Kojima I can't bring myself to rule out the possibility. To me, it's no more a stretch of the imagination than Boss having visions of imaginary friends. There are several problems with the hallucination theory. 1: Why give a name and dialogue to the hallucination if he isn't going to appear in the entire game? 2: Why does Ishmael appear real, compared to the visions of Volgin and the horns coming out of the ground, which look much more dreamlike?

When it comes to the cloning business, keep in mind that Kojima is a fan of science fiction, as well as Hollywood movies. There's an infamous film called "Jack", directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the same guy who directed Godfather and Apocalypse Now. In "Jack", the title character is a 10-year-old with the body of a 40-year-old due to accelerated aging. Incidentally, Jack is the name that Solidus gives Raiden. He also says, "I was your godfather, I named you."

You can tell that Kojima has seen Francis Ford Coppola's films because A: Ride of the Valkyries played from gunships in both Apocalypse Now and Ground Zeroes. B: The plot of Snake Eater is similar to the plot of Apocalypse Now. Both plots involve the main character on a mission in a jungle to assassinate a superior officer, which changes them mentally and spiritually by the end of the story.

If that was Liquid and Solid at the end of the e3 2015 trailer, then it's highly likely we'll see Solidus in some capacity. Thematically, it would make more sense for Solidus to appear older than the other clones. If we were to use the film "Jack" as an example, Solidus could appear 40 by the age of 12, which he'd be at most by 1984.