Skull Face is an incredibly fascinating character to analyse - for what is essentially a one-off villain he has so much depth and such a brilliantly crafted backstory and set of motivations.
Above all, Skull Face is hellbent on revenge. On the surface it's just pure hatred: vengeance against those who made him suffer. But as
this tape shows, it goes a lot deeper than that. Skull Face believes himself to be the last hope of his people. His goal isn't selfish revenge, it's
justice for his people, and by extension, justice for all those who have suffered as they have.
This is why he singles out English as his target for the vocal cord parasites to destroy - English would never have been one of the languages he personally was forced to speak, but Zero's plan in essence means he'd be inflicting Skull Face's pain, and the pain of his people, on the people of every non-English speaking country. Skull Face is completely earnest when he calls the parasites a "liberator" rather than an ethnic cleanser; his motivation is ultimately noble.
It's even conveyed in his outfit that Skull Face sees himself as a hero, a vigilante. He dresses like the morally grey heroes of spaghetti westerns, who ignore laws to enact their own sense of justice. The mask alone has various different connotations all with the same central concept. It's reminiscent of the mask of Zorro, a vigilante who protects the weak and the oppressed (particularly indigenous peoples) and punishes the corrupt. It's equally reminiscent of the mask of the Lone Ranger, another defender of justice, and a believer in bettering the world. He even works alongside a Native American, Skull Face's forced alliance with Code Talker could be seen as a twisted version of this relationship. A black mask is also associated with highwaymen, robbers who have long been romanticised similarly to Robin Hood. Though they don't share the same iconography, Hungary had its own highwaymen (the betyár, or social bandit) that became famed through folklore for fighting for social justice.
I'm not certain there was one specific origin in mind for Skull Face's look - and that's what makes it so well-designed. The mask as a symbol of justice and heroism has little basis in anything
real, only in fantasy. Even worse, the Zorro and Lone Ranger influence are specifically
American fantasies, a symbol of America's grip on the world through English-language media. Much as Skull Face sees himself as fighting it, he's been consumed by it as much as anyone else. It's a paradoxical relationship, much like a lot of Skull Face's personality and traits. It's impossible for him to escape the things he's trying so hard to destroy, and I'd argue his selflessness in his ambitions is such that he sees becoming the things he hates - a destroyer of culture, an oppressor of indigenous people, a destroyer of identities, and above all, a big representation of America itself devoid of any markers of his real heritage - just a worthy sacrifice.
Skull Face sees himself as just a vessel - he has nothing else left to lose, really, so he'll become whatever he has to in order to liberate the world. The novelisation of
The Phantom Pain uses an interesting wordplay at one point that builds on the game's script describing him as a "void" beyond Zero that's even darker. It describes Skull Face as a yorishiro, a Shinto concept of an object that attracts spirits and lets them embody it, giving them a physical form and place to occupy. I absolutely love this interpretation of him: he's just a hollow void with no real identity of his own, an embodiment of the dying will of his people, the only thing driving him forward.
The novel also touches on another fascinating element of his character: Skull Face represents nature. Where Zero represents change, control and technology triumphing over man, Skull Face represents passivism, the acceptance of his own role in the world and his own lack of freedom. He's deeply fixated on his own lack of choice in his youth, and sees the rest of the world through that lens. Where Zero seeks to change the world and remake it in his own image, Skull Face seeks only to "let the world be". The vocal cord parasites, the nuclear proliferation, it's all an attempt to put the world's countries on equal footing, reset things to a false "natural" state where cross-contimation of culture cannot occur and one people cannot ever be truly superior over another.
He sees the cycle of revenge as a part of nature, accepting his role within that cycle just as he accepts his role as a vessel for the wills of the dead. He sees enacting revenge as a role he was created to play, and one he cannot challenge. Yet again, it's paradoxical - he poses himself as a rebellious hero challenging the status quo, a powerless cog in a machine, and a figure close enough to God overturning Zero's Tower of Babel all at once. He cannot earnestly be one without contradicting and betraying the other parts of himself. His identity has been destroyed so thoroughly he can hardly even construct a new one without becoming a walking contradiction, a mess of all the things his life has made him, and all his desperate attempts to justify himself, to take control while remaining passive because it's all he's ever known.
I love this disaster man.