Welcome to the Zeroskull Shrine!
this shrine is dedicated to a very very obscure rarepair from the metal gear solid series that has completely taken over my life since around late 2021. zeroskull is the ship between major zero and skull face, and yes i know it sounds ridiculous. but if you clicked on this you may as well humour me, right.
the zeroskull manifesto
this is the part where i try to justify and perhaps also convince you to join me in appreciating this weird and awful ship between two characters who interact once in canon material (and in audio format only).
first, let me explain who they both are. skull face, having suffered a horrific early life involving being burned alive, watching everyone he knew die in the fire, being repeatedly tortured, and having his native language and culture - the last real markers of his identity - stolen from him, eventually leaves hungary and ends up in the SAS where he meets major zero. zero is so impressed by him, he exhibits his usual tendency to gravitate towards weirdos, and makes this weird skull man his trusted XO.
obviously this doesn't go too well! skull face eventually comes to resent zero for a number of reasons - partially because of the blatant favouritism he shows towards big boss, but also because it turns out zero's planning to control the world through the suppression of all languages other than english. so skull face does the natural thing and infects him with a parasite that will slowly render him brain dead. such a lovely couple.
so moving on to the part where i have to now convince you they actually did get along at some point. skull face has practically nothing. he's a weird hideous monster man. but zero didn't care. he made him his right hand man, trusted him with his own unit, trusted him enough to conduct the most secretive of operations, shadowing the FOX unit he leads with his own inverse XOF unit, the fox's tail, the perfect counterpart.
he never calls him skull face, only ever referring to him as XO in their phone call - and i think that's significant of how he views him, for once, as a person. it makes sense that zero would be the only real companion skull face ever had. ocelot himself calls him zero's confidant in japanese. which only makes it more sad that in the end he grows so secretive he ends up ghosting him too, surely adding to skull face's resentment by ground zeroes.
i love zeroskull because there's so much tragedy in it; skull face finding himself essentially taken under the wing of this deeply caring, deeply unusual man who is likely the first to look past appearances, trusted with so much, joining him to a foreign country where he changed his manner of speaking and dressing. and then in the end zero becomes so overtaken by grief and obsession he moves on to someone and something else, his goals showing so little respect for everything skull face has endured.
and the saddest thing is that zero's complacency isn't inherently malicious, but it exposes the fact that he never really understood him - he insists that faces won't matter in the world he's building, his idea of a utopia where everyone is seen for what they are, communication between souls. but to skull face his face is a reminder of who he is, the only real identity he has left.
i'm obsessed with the complexity between them, the power imbalance, skull face coming from nothing to end up with one of the most powerful men in the world, and so used to having no control over his circumstances i imagine he didn't question him or the nature of their relationship for a good many years. and zero, so caring in all the wrong ways, so overconfident in his loyalty he can't see the cracks until it's far too late.
i know this paints a pretty bleak picture, and though i will admit i absolutely love all the most ~problematic~ aspects of their relationship, i also have to imagine there were plenty of good times too. skull face deserved to have some happiness and have somebody care for him even if it wasn't particularly healthy in retrospect.
zero speaks so fondly of him even when he has no reason to, calling him "a very special man" when he talks to the comatose big boss, and i think that's the most telling part of all. zero never really understood what he did wrong even to the end, and admitted to not really caring what skull face did to himself. i think it reveals the kind of relationship they might have had before everything went so wrong.
so despite the horrible ending, i like to imagine all the years of happiness they must have had together. it's my favourite kind of ship, really, just two strange people with very different personalities somehow coming together and finding something in common, and skull face finding someone who won't judge him. even if he does offer him far too many unwanted cups of tea.
🦊💀