LogFAQs > #970936705

I know what you're thinking right now, looking at this topic. "What a quaint little scenario. Why is this being debated? It's just baking a cake. How hard could it possibly be?". And it's not a terribly unreasonable question to ask. It's something normal people do every day. So, how hard is it, really? The answer to that is:

NIGHTMARISH

Many culinary fields allow for easy experimentation and deviation without much penalty. Baking is not one of those. It is regulated, precise, mathematical. Small imprecisions compound quickly to ruin baking attempts, and realizing something has gone wrong wastes lots of time and effort. Have you ever seen something like The Great British Bake-Off, perhaps (or any of its variants)? If so, then you know just how quickly things can go sideways over small mistakes. And this happens to professionals, people who've practiced the craft and mastered it over a period of years. They were taught, tutored, and given many chances to try and fail while learning, plus were working with recipes to guide them. Raiden has none of these things. In fact, he has little experience with anything resembling a normal person's life at all.

I believe that, at this point, it's pertinent to recount his life history: Raiden was a Liberian child soldier, taught to fight and kill from the age of six, then kept on the battlefield until the Liberian Civil War ended. After that he spent several years in counseling, then was released to a foster family when he seemed stable. Once he was old enough, he joined the military and met his wife, Rose -- and when Rose snuck into his room after repeatedly being rebuffed from getting too close to Raiden, all she saw was a bed and desk. Raiden's life was so empty, prior to the events of Metal Gear Solid 2, that he lacked anything resembling a sense of normalcy, such as books from which to learn how to bake. After, he kept on fighting the patriots, then was captured and turned into a cyborg ninja, his human body replaced with an exoskeleton from the lower jaw down. Even though he later got a more humanized replacement body, it wasn't, and still isn't, enough to allow him to lead a normal life. A quote from MGR's codec calls should serve as good illustration (since many of the conversations with her savegame recorder Courtney involve food chats):

Raiden: ...Never mind. Probably can't "capture" any food down here anyway - not that I'd need to. My muscles run on fuel cells. And I've got enough blood sugar to keep my brain running for another week.

Would a man who's never had anything resembling a normal life, who doesn't even have a human body, who's never had the time nor inclination towards baking be able to bake a delicious cake, given how difficult it is? The answer is clearly no. He's simply not prepared. For Raiden, his baking career starts...and ends...here.

PS: I'm sure some of you may be unconvinced as to the difficulty of baking. Seeing is believing, goes the saying. So for that reason, I'm just going to link an illustrated explanatory post that demonstrates how you can fail to bake correctly at the preparatory stage, before you even actually get down to baking anything, and how much time this can lose you: https://qr.ae/prCUNK

That is all, my friends. I hope your evening is filled with delicious cake IRL. Lord knows Raiden's won't be.