Is Lou actually dead in Death Stranding 2?
In this Big Friendly Guide, I'll give you some self-inflicted spoilers to help you know if your BB is safe. Or will, at least, end up safe.
If you think the headline for this post is a Death Stranding 2 spoiler ... it only kind of is. Kojima's many trailers for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach made it very clear that Lou, the BB from first game who appears as an almost-toddler in the second, would be in mortal danger. That danger comes at Lou quickly in Death Stranding 2, and it makes for a very painful opening to a game that promises dozens of hours of "entertainment "fun." (GOTY 2025 for me personally, but Jesus Christ, Kojima).
If you, like me, were very distressed by what happens to Lou at the start of the game and are questioning if you'll be able to carry on, I'm here to help. I've now beaten Death Stranding 2, and have what I think to be a pretty solid grip on what happened at the start of the game.
In this Big Friendly Guide, I'll give you some self-inflicted spoilers to help you know if your BB is safe. Or will, at least, end up safe.
[Spoiler warning: Obviously there are spoilers incoming for this post. If you somehow made it here and don't want that ... go away. Wait! Support us on Patreon and then ... go away.]
Does Lou really die at the beginning of Death Stranding 2?
The short answer is no. At least I don't think so. I've read some interpretations that suggest she does and comes back, but that's not how I read the scene.
If you JUST want the most basic answer to your question "is Lou dead," then, yeah, the answer is no. Lou does not end Death Stranding 2 dead, and it's up for debate whether she dies at all.
I'll explain more about Lou below. But just a warning for the rest of the game: there are other kids of varying ages that DO die in Death Stranding 2, because Kojima is a sick, sick man. This includes like a 9 year old who dies of straight up parental negligence. It sucks. So if you're also a parent or someone who is just squeamish about kids getting hurt, prepare yourself. The "good" news is that the kids that die are introduced minutes before they're killed, so they're not really named characters like Lou that you have a big attachment to.
Wait, now I want to know more, explain yourself and the end as it pertains to Lou
OK, pull up a chair.
So, when Fragile and Lou attempt to escape (and that horrible motorcycle accident happens, which Kojima is obsessed with showing you like three times, I hate it), she's stopped by Higgs and the Ghost mech army. She attempts to Jump with Lou, but can't. So she focuses real hard, we see a gun put to her back, and then the screen goes black. The next thing we see is Fragile lying on a weird looking bit of dark sand, with Lou crying a few feet away. Lou then stops crying and appears dead. It's left a little ambiguous at the start, but if you read the "story thus far" section of the Corpus, or just ... listen to the way other NPCs treat Sam and his obviously empty BB carrier, the game is very clear: Lou is dead.
But games are liars sometimes, and Lou is not, in fact, dead. Instead, the cutscene with Lou "dying" cuts off just before shit gets a little weird, and you don't see the rest of it until right before credits.
Instead of dying, it seems like Lou just passed out from the trauma of it all. Fragile's Ka (her soul) is killed by the shot as she jumps, but her body lives on – albeit with a ticking clock, which runs out after the final battle. As her Ka is departing, it picks up the passed out Lou (who was transported with Fragile to the same dark sand area but has no visible injuries) and carries her through the various battlefields where you fight Neil Vana. Fragile's Ka then leaves Lou in the care of these spirits – seemingly the spirits from the void out "caused" by Lucy and Neil. Because time works differently on the Beach, Lou grows up to become Tomorrow during the time skip, and she returns to the land of the living when Sam first encounters Neil in "Nirvana," the Beach Lou grew up on. Short note here that this is likely Neil/Lucy's beach, as it takes place in the memory of the area where both of them were burned as children.
The actual mechanics of how all that works is a little fuzzy, and I've seen contradicting ideas from people who've all seen the same source material. So it's a little up for interpretation. But the important thing is that Lou is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is Sam's biological daughter (that's a whole other can of worms I'm not going to write about here, but rest assured that it does actually make sense).
Before I call it on this post, I do want to posit one other possibility here, which is that Lou's Ha (body) does die and Fragile's Ka takes Lou's Ka to the spirits – rather than Lou's intact being, body and soul, as I suggested above. This would be a little confusing, as we know that Kas – even living ones like Amelie in the first game – can't leave the Beach and can only project themselves into the living world. However, there is a possibility that Lou/Tomorrow is a Repatriate, like her dad, which would explain her ability to re-enter the world of the living even if her original body died. That's all pure speculation, but it is something I expect to get explained in Death Stranding 3, as it's heavily implied that Tomorrow will be taking over for Sam as the main character. And when you consider the Repatriation is just an in-universe way to explain respawning after a death ... it seems very likely that Tomorrow also shares Sam's unique trait. Food for thought.
This post originally appeared on BigFriendly.Guide
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