In 2013, Hideo Kojima said he designed Quiet as an antithesis to the [way] women characters appeared in the past fighting game who are excessively exposed. He argued Quiet fits into the games larger theme about misunderstanding, prejudice, hatred, conflict caused by the difference of language, race, custom, culture, and preference. In the best light, Kojima has consciously chosen to make Quiet a symbol of sexuality, even as she doesnt seem to have any of her own. All as a way of showing how superficial peoples responses to hollow signifiers can be, jumping at the sight of potentially offensive material and using it as a sawhorse for negating both the work and the person who made it.
Negation is the minds first freedom, Emil Cioran wrote, the Romanian philosopher who served as Kojimas muse for The Phantom Pain, and from whom the games epigraph comes. At the same time, negation requires struggle to avoid becoming imprisoned by its proscriptive visions. Kojima argued that the negational response to Quiet is exactly what MGSV itself is. Quiet seems to have been designed to both provoke and deny negational criticism, leaving Kojima in a paradoxical position of essentially agreeing with his critics even as he defies them, reproducing the anatomical clichés of female sexuality not as a vehicle for male desire but as one for male shame.