Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-78.20.137.17-20131119192351/@comment-247250-20151107080047

This thread is a bit old but if anyone wanders here and sees this, I hope I can maybe shed some light here. This is what I think is supposed to be the canon related to Ocelot, Liquid, and motivations. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Spoilers ahead, but that should be obvious. I haven't played MGS V (yet!) so I don't know if there's something in there contradicts what I'm about to say.

MGS1 - Ocelot loses his arm and Liquid dies. Liquid is killed by Solid Snake carrying FOXDIE to Liquid and infecting him, as well as 1 and a half BRUTAL boss battles. During this time, Ocelot is covertly working for Solidus, manipulating Liquid. In truth, I think Ocelot may have even been playing Solidus at this point, and may have been working with Big Boss or at least following what he thought Big Boss would have wanted.

Between MGS1 and 2 - Ocelot has his missing arm replaced with Liquid's arm. At some point in time after this transplant, Liquid's ghost begins actually possessing Ocelot through the arm.

MGS2 - Ocelot is being off-and-on possessed by the arm. Ocelot has goals in line with Solidus, but Liquid's ghost is coming in with his own goals and mucking up their plans. At this point, the Patriots AI "GW" is just being tested as a manipulation of people and the events of MGS2 are largely orchestrated by GW.

Between MGS2 and 4- Ocelot has Liquid's arm removed and the possessions stop. He has his now missing (again) arm replaced with a cybernetic arm. Under direction from Big Boss, Ocelot undergoes extreme hypnotherapy and drugs to re-adopt Liquid's persona. More AIs (TJ, TR, AL, and JD) are built to control the world from behind the scenes and the remnants of GW are put back together, later to be put on Liquid Ocelot's ship: Outer Haven.

MGS4 - Ocelot's mind has been overwhelmed by Liquid's persona, which has been transplanted on top of his own. Although the real Ocelot, who knows Big Boss's plan, is somewhere deep inside, Liquid's personality is the dominant and controlling force.

Big Boss's reasoning is thus: the AI's can see and read human history, and see what happened and what worked to defeat Liquid the first time. As such, since Liquid's goals are essentially the same as the ones transplanted into Liquid Ocelot, and obviously the personality is the same, Big Boss reasons that the AI will try to manipulate the situations to use the same solution: get Solid (now Old) Snake to infect Liquid (Ocelot) with a version of the FOXDIE virus, and then have at least 1 kick ass boss battle with him.

If Snake can stop Liquid from destroying JD, even better. What the Patriots AI did not account for was that Naomi and Sunny were in on Big Boss's plan. They altered the virus that Snake put on GW not to erase GW, but to use it as a conduit to cripple the entire AI network. Neither Snake nor Ocelot could have been in the loop about this, since if they had been then the Patriots would have read their altered behavior and known that something was going on behind the scenes, hence why Snake was lied to and Ocelot had the whole hypnotherapy thing.

tl;dr: Before Ocelot had the arm removed, he was really possessed. After he removed it, it was basically chemically-induced dissociative identity disorder.