Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4913740-20130619152258/@comment-1672596-20140331072722

Bluerock wrote: Weedle McHairybug wrote: Yeah, though unfortunately the way Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, and the Phantom Pain has set things up makes it so that Big Boss would have to do a hail mary to even get back into FOXHOUND and somehow hide Outer Heaven from Cipher/the Patriots/Zero, whom by this point not only know about its existence but also even attempted to have all the international community to basically have Big Boss assassinated. It's the U.S. government that requests that Big Boss lead FOXHOUND in the 1990s, not necessarily Cipher. In Peace Walker, he's still on good terms with U.S. government officials, such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is still seen as a hero. Cipher may have had powerful influence over the government, but it never outright controlled all its actions all the time. Yes, except by the time of The Phantom Pain, pretty much the entire world hated him enough to actually want him dead. Ocelot and Ishmael explicitly mentioned this, and considering they went as far as to attack Princess Mary's hospital in Cyprus and slaughter anyone present, I'm doubtful they were using hyperbole or exaggerating. Not to mention, thanks to Cipher's/XOF's actions regarding the attack on MSF, not to mention the mainstream media's scathing report on MSF in the aftermath due to Cipher's influence, the US Government, alongside the Western allies and even the Eastern Bloc, were caught in what was implied to be a very costly scandal for their ties to MSF being discovered, enough for them to either deny or otherwise plead the fifth so to speak, there's little chance the US government's going to give Big Boss the time of day.

And even if the US government managed to pull off Big Boss getting into FOXHOUND with no strings attached, that doesn't explain how, despite Zero allegedly being unaware of Big Boss being the leader of Outer Heaven in MGS4 and devastated by this betrayal (enough to actually create the AI network due to distrusting humanity as a result), he was apparently fully aware of Outer Heaven since at least 1974, either as MSF or as Diamond Dogs (we know they were at least aware of the latter's existence and ties to Big Boss due to their capturing and interrogating Miller in 1984).