The Women of Death Stranding 2 Are Stuck in a Sad Cycle

By Maddy Myers  |  July 8, 2025 | 9:00am
Video Games Features Death Stranding 2
The Women of Death Stranding 2 Are Stuck in a Sad Cycle

In Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2, gender essentialism is load-bearing. You can’t take it out of the games without the entire supernatural mythos caving in on itself. 

By gender essentialism, I mean that in these games, men are one way, and women are another way. People are defined by these roles, and said roles are immutable, intuitive, destined. There is no spectrum in between; queerness is functionally nonexistent, save for one mention of it as a problem, because of the low birth rates in the wake of the in-game apocalypse.

The gender roles in the world of the Death Stranding games are not exactly the classic “man active/strong, woman passive/weak” dichotomy. Everybody here has the ability to fight. These women are not shrinking violets. Several major female characters in both games have some form of cool superpower that aids them in battle or at least self-defense.

But in these games, the male characters’ abilities—if they have abilities at all—tend to be more grounded and based in sci-fi discoveries and hardware, rather than the fantastical, mysterious, or unexplainable powers that the main female characters possess. The game’s protagonist Sam does have a more magical-seeming power—repatriation, the ability to come back from the dead an infinite number of times—but this power is very notably bestowed upon him by a female character, Amelie.

The most important thing about women in the world of Death Stranding is their wombs. Unlike other science-fiction representations of supernatural pregnancy, which often present it as a violation or horror visited upon its unwilling (often female) host, pregnancy in the world of Death Stranding is a universal good. Like many other conservative works about the post-apocalypse, the lower birth rate in the world of Death Stranding is repeatedly emphasized, and the main characters are actively concerned about it. Furthermore, Death Stranding and its sequel both include plotlines in which a baby can and must be saved but its mother cannot and does not survive; in both situations, each baby becomes an extremely important character, whereas the mother only matters as a character whose death motivates a male character. So, although female characters are always associated with the idea of the womb and with the elevated and prized idea of motherhood, that doesn’t necessarily mean those female characters are as important as the babies that they can create.

This is a classic sci-fi trope with conservative roots. As Natasha Ochshorn wrote in “Apocalyptic Pregnancy” for Unwinnable: “It reveals a dark wish… that end times could be freeing, clarifying even. That without the distractions of modernity we could re-focus the nuclear family; a deeply conservative desire echoed in the rhetoric of white supremacist doomsday preparers and ecofascists… These apocalypse narratives demand so much justification that it inevitably sidelines the pregnant person and their wishes.” (Real-life parents in modern-day America are currently battling the fear that doctors will prioritize the life of an unborn child, even against parents’ wishes.) 

But again, in Death Stranding, women—and, again, it’s only and specifically women, not trans men, not non-binary people who have ovaries—are inherently associated with the idea of the womb. Associating women primarily with motherhood and, specifically, with having a womb is a keystone of biological essentialism and, by extension, gender essentialism as an ideological stance. It’s a way of defining womanhood that ignores the fact that many women don’t have the ability to get pregnant, while others lack the desire, and are no less women because of it. This pattern of thinking also lines up with the harmful presumption that women are inherently, intuitively nurturing and meant to reside in the domestic sphere, and that there’s something tragic about them if they fail at these things, or don’t wish to do them.

All of that is on display in the Death Stranding games, sometimes in ways that are very literal. (In Death Stranding 2, there’s a set of female side characters who are part of a faction called The Motherhood, headed up by a woman who has supernatural OB/GYN powers). But also, there’s the idea that along with the mystical power to give life, women also represent death. This duality is a persistent theme for the major female characters across both games. 

The rest of this article contains full spoilers for Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2.

The duality of womanhood, according to Death Stranding

Take, for example, Amelie, also known as Bridget Strand, surrogate mother for the games’ protagonist Sam Porter Bridges. In the first game, she has been literally split into two entities. There’s the aging Bridget whom we first meet on her deathbed, and then there’s the eternally young and beautiful Amelie; they’re both the same person, one appearing to represent death, the other life. Amelie is actually Bridget’s soul, separated from her body and consigned to living eternally on the mysterious Beach that exists between the world of the living and the dead. Although Amelie/Bridget is a mother figure who literally gives Sam life—she’s the one who bestows upon Sam the power to come back to life every time he dies—she also represents death, because she turns out to be an Extinction Entity. This means she has a supernatural death drive; she’s been cursed by fate to inexorably bring about the end of humanity, at some point. She ends up being kinda both the “good guy” and “bad guy” of the first Death Stranding because of all of this. Sam’s kinda Jesus, so Amelie’s kinda the Virgin Mary (the purest expression of a holy womb and giver of life), even as she also is Eve with the apple (the fruit that burdened humans not only with knowledge but with mortality). She represents all that is good and bad about womanhood, at least according to Christian allegory and gender essentialist stereotypes, anyway.

Amelie and Bridget are far from the only female characters that are written with a life/death duality at their center. In the first game, there are the twins Mama and Lockne; one dies, and the other lives on, but her dead sister’s spirit merges into her own, making both twins one woman. In Death Stranding 2, there’s a Fragile who dies in another dimension, and then a ghost version of Fragile who is still “alive” in the main characters’ dimension. And then there’s Rainy, a side character in the sequel who has a baby inside her that’s stuck in a time vortex that keeps it at seven months old, no more no less. This means that Rainy is perpetually pregnant—perpetually “two people,” one who’s alive, the other suspended in time and therefore incapable of being “alive” as we know it. Last but not least, there’s Lou—the name Sam gave to the baby in his wife’s womb in events that pre-date the first Death Standing. His wife died, and Sam thought the baby died too; in her honor, Sam named his BB “Lou” in Death Stranding. In Death Stranding 2, the BB named Lou turns out to actually be the baby named Lou that Sam thought had died many years ago; the dead Lou and the living Lou are one and the same.

Those stories are all pretty cool on the surface. These are all fun, surprising twists, and they unfold in thrilling ways in the games. Unfortunately, all of it gets a bit more disturbing when put into the context of the way womanhood is reduced to being about motherhood, with motherhood being inherently linked to having a womb.

Mama and Lockne’s story, for example, actually revolves around Mama acting as a surrogate for her sister’s baby; the baby dies and becomes a BT (a ghostlike entity) that haunts Mama and never grows old, nor moves on from the world of the living into the spirit world where it belongs. Mama dies because she asks Sam to cut the BT baby’s umbilical cord, which does allow the baby’s spirit to pass on, but also takes Mama with it. She only “lives” because her spirit ends up combining with her sister’s. In a vacuum, this story might be sort of interesting, but it’s going to end up being a pattern—female characters whose entire storylines revolve around their womb, either as a means for telling a tragic story like this one about a child who dies (and a mom who dies too), or a “happy” story about a baby that survives (even as its mother dies).

The tragedy of Fragile

Fragile’s story is one of the failed mother. She’s presented as a child-free career woman for the duration of the first Death Stranding, although her lack of a child could be due to the torture she suffered at the hands of the game’s over-the-top sadistic villain Higgs. Prior to the events of Death Stranding, Higgs sets up a bizarre situation through which Fragile is forced to run through a torrential downpour of Timefall wearing just a helmet and her underwear. In the world of Death Stranding, there’s no normal rain in the post-apocalypse, only Timefall, which causes people to rapidly age if they touch it. So beneath Fragile’s pretty face, which was protected by the helmet, is a haggard old lady body. Can she still even have kids? Signs point to “no,” since Timefall ages more than just the surface of someone’s skin—it ages everything.

Fragile’s myopic goal throughout Death Stranding is to get revenge on Higgs. In theory, she’s after him because he simply loves to kill people, but it’s also clear she’s out for personal revenge. Because of the way the plotline has been written, this unfortunately makes Fragile seem like a superficial person who wants revenge on Higgs for making her body old. There are plenty of reasons for Fragile (and everyone else) to despise Higgs and want to fight him; giving this additional reasoning to Fragile is unnecessary and places undue importance on her physical appearance and beauty. Fragile also clearly has great shame about how her body looks, as she keeps it completely covered up for the entire game, which only furthers the implication that this is what she’s really angry with Higgs about.

In Death Stranding 2, though, Fragile has at last been cured of her old-lady body. Fragile’s friend Rainy, introduced in the sequel, unwittingly creates Timefall everywhere she goes, but she can also create something called Corefall, which heals and revives whatever it touches (women have the power to either give life or take it away, remember?). So, in Death Stranding 2, thanks to Rainy, Fragile is finally hot and young again. This means, of course, that she instantly needs to become a mother. A surrogate mother, but a mother nonetheless.

After Death Stranding 2’s very brief opening scenes in which Sam is shown to be the single father of child Lou, he then passes the baby off to Fragile and gets right back to being a porter again. Fragile takes Lou but admits she has absolutely no idea how to do childcare, and says she’ll figure it out by simply looking up how to do it online (this is probably not intended to be hilarious, but it is). Fragile’s past soon catches up to her, though; she is doomed to fail as a mother figure in the end. Higgs finds her, kills her, and leaves Lou stranded in another dimension where Lou grows up to adulthood without Sam there to be her dad (or Fragile to be her mom, for that matter). For the rest of the game after this moment, Fragile is actually literally a ghost; she is despondent, hollow, and chain-smoking at all times. Having failed at motherhood, her life has no meaning. It’s not even a life at all—she’s eventually revealed to have been dead the entire time, after all.

Dead moms, distant dads

Death Stranding 2 tells the rest of the story of Sam’s dead wife (and child) (or so we think). Her entire storyline intentionally “rhymes” with the story of Sam’s own biological parentage, told to the player in the first Death Stranding. Here’s how that story went: while Sam was still a fetus growing in his mother’s womb, his parents got into an accident that his father Cliff survived but which rendered his mother braindead. In the world of Death Stranding, babies in the wombs of brain-dead mothers have a magical connection to the Beach. This all ties into the theme of wombs being magical representations of both life and death. Scientists from an organization called Bridges convince Cliff that his brain-dead wife might still be saveable (she’s not), but they’re lying so they can study the baby in her womb and its connection to the Beach. When Cliff finds out that the scientists were lying to him all along and that his wife could never be saved, he tries to steal baby Sam and shoot his way out; both Cliff and baby Sam end up getting shot. (When Amelie finds dead ghost-baby Sam on the Beach, she gives him the power to come back to life again, which he retains into adulthood.)

In a strikingly similar turn of events, Sam’s own wife—as revealed in a series of cutscenes in Death Stranding 2—was also going to be experimented on by enterprising scientists. Because it’s Sam’s baby in his wife’s womb, the scientists want to study the baby and see if it’s got the same repatriation powers that Sam has. Once again, the wife dies in the process of the scientists trying to take this baby for themselves, and the baby appears to die too, but she doesn’t really. Much like her dad, Lou miraculously survives, going on to have mystical life-and-death powers and even turning out to be an Extinction Entity like Amelie. 

Given the way that this game reduces women to be either mother figures or daughter figures—with both being in constant danger of death, or perhaps even existing in a quantum superposition of being both alive and dead—you’d think perhaps Death Stranding is a story about fatherhood or manhood. But it’s not exactly that either. We don’t really get to see anybody just being a dad, because the kids (and wives) keep dying. Several other major male characters have boilerplate dead-wife-and-kid backstories that are strikingly similar to Sam’s. Dollman has a dead wife and daughter; we already knew Heartman had a dead wife and daughter in the first game, and his obsession with their deaths is what drives him to continue to research the Beach. Tarman gets a dead son; that’s at least a little different (no mother is mentioned). But again, Tarman’s backstory is what draws him to a constant search for understanding the nature of life and death, similar to Heartman. Men would rather connect Australia to the chiral network than go to therapy.

Jokes aside, the act of going to therapy is presented very poorly here. Death Stranding 2 reveals that Sam’s wife was actually cheating on him with another man named Neil. Importantly, this woman was a therapist; Sam was once her client, and so was Neil (her affair with Neil appears to begin while Neil is still her client—they did know each other prior to their first therapy session, but even so). This unethical behavior on her part is the extent of the characterization we get of this woman before she gets shot to death. 

Neil dies trying to protect this woman and the baby inside her; he ends up serving as a sort of ghostly surrogate parent to Lou in the other dimension where she grows up without Sam or Fragile there to help. Yet we never actually see any scenes of Neil raising Lou and acting as a father to her. He basically just shoots at people to “protect” her from extra-dimensional outsiders. It’s not entirely clear if he can even interact with Lou, or whether his ghostly manifestation can’t really do anything other than attack people. Somehow, though, baby Lou grew up, although the matter of how she survived to her late 20s in this other dimension that’s full of silent ghosts is never entirely clear. When Dollman asks her if she had “friends and family” in the other dimension, she first says, “I don’t know,” and then later, “I don’t think I ever had a family.”

Much of the work of “raising” Lou in Death Stranding 2 falls to Fragile and Rainy, not Sam, who gets a couple of key interactions with her but mostly stays out of it. Despite Lou being an adult woman physically, she spends the first few days in this new dimension acting and talking like a child, throwing tantrums, refusing to wear shoes, and so on. She then rapidly starts maturing over the course of just a few days, speaking in full sentences and almost immediately learning how to use her superpowers. Most of this maturing happens offscreen while Sam is doing delivery jobs, with periodic cutscenes of him swinging by to see Fragile and Rainy still doing a great job transforming the River Tam-esque super-powered waif into… well, basically still River Tam, but better capable of carrying on conversations in between bad-ass balletic fight sequences.

At the end of the game, when Lou and Sam realize who they are, Lou looks into Sam’s eyes and tells him she remembers their entire journey across the United States during the first game. This would have to be magical, because a seven-month-old baby can’t form full memories. This scene serves as shorthand to allow Sam to have had a presumed parental relationship with this adult woman, even though the two of them don’t actually know each other at all, and have only had a couple of full conversations in total. Doesn’t matter—bioessentialism rules the day, he’s her biological dad (which is presented as a great and beautiful reveal, as opposed to her simply being his surrogate child), and now she even has magic memories of a few months they spent together when she was a literal baby. This is supposed to come off as sweet, I think, but it rang hollow for me. Lou is barely even presented as a fully realized human being in this game; she’s basically the same baby from the pod, but now she’s an adult woman who is also beautiful and karate-kicks people in the face while wearing a cute little cocktail dress for some reason.

There’s one male character who doesn’t conform to Death Stranding’s strict gender roles, and it’s Higgs, the sadomasochistic villain whose unyielding desire to kill, kill, kill carries over from the first game to Death Stranding 2. But unlike in the first game, here Higgs has decided to dress like Amelie, wearing a mask of her face, her necklace, black winged eyeliner, and long feathered hair. His glam rock-inspired appearance makes him look cool as hell, but since he’s a sadistic villain who kills Fragile and extensively tortures Sam, it’s clear from the framework that I’m supposed to think that being androgynous is a bad thing. After all, the only character who gets to be gender-nonconforming in any way is the person who’s the most unrepentant villain of the entire series. That said, can’t wait for the Higgs cosplays, folks. He has some great looks in this game.

Death Stranding 2 has bizarre, surrealist dance sequences, funny fourth-wall breaks, samurai mechs piloted by the dead, and electric guitar-guns that you fire by performing sick solos, so it might sound strange for me to be saying it’s actually real basic. Its story and art direction are so inventive and creative, after all. Yet, when you look down deep at what the game’s saying about gender, it’s not very creative at all. It’s truly just the same old.

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.

 
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