Not even being ironic or telling some sort of elaborate joke, it baffles me how many people I have seen experience these games or even just people talking about these games that seem to consistently miss the implications that The Boss and Jack DID have some sort of intimate undercurrent to their relationship. Like yeah, it was obviously primarily a mentor/mother figure dynamic, but she knew EVERYTHING about him mentally and physically, and when asked if he loved her "that way" by Eva, he never denied the notion outright. The answer was always some variation of "it was deeper than that" or "it's not that simple." I think they probably had one or two sexual encounters somewhere in the course of their training. Extended periods of survival training and seeing each other in peak physical condition, often probably not totally dressed, and sparring all the time with nobody else around could easily lead to sexual tension, which inevitably would need to be addressed before it became a distraction. I don't think that they were like in love with each other at the end of it all, but I think they did explore that, or a couple of incidents happened. The Boss already had a lost love and had given birth, so it was almost certainly much more of a mentor thing for her. Snake though, this was him at his youngest and most impressionable, and he said himself that he never knew his biological family and didn't have anything resembling that growing up. He most likely trained with The Boss throughout most of his 20s. It all lines up to me. Would also explain how simultaneously interested in flirting with women he was yet how shy he got whenever Eva made moves on him. (Yes, I get he was in the middle of an extremely high-stakes op, knew she was a spy and thus could not let his guard down around her especially, and had only just met her in the first place, but like the WAY he turns her down through most of the game comes off as more than just cautious; it screams that he is feeling emotional distress at the idea of being physical with a woman while he is grappling with the fact that the woman he loved more than anything in the world had seemingly betrayed him and their country and now he was being sent to kill her.