Marina
Off the Hook, DJ and engineer
- Species
- Octoling
- First seen
- Splatoon 2 (2017)
- Affiliation
- Off the Hook
...Stay off the hook!Off the Hook sign-off (second half), Inkopolis News
The brilliant Octoling DJ of Off the Hook. A former Octarian army engineer who deserted after hearing the Calamari Inkantation, champion of Order, and creator of the Memverse.
Marina Ida is the first Octoling most Inkopolis residents ever met, and they met her on the news. Tall, gentle, and terrifyingly competent, she is the DJ, producer, and engineer of Off the Hook, and the emotional counterweight to Pearl's noise. She is also a deserter from the Octarian army, which in Splatoon 2 was still a secret.
The domes
Marina grew up underground, trained as an engineer in the Octarian military and, by her own account, gifted enough to be building weapons before she was a teenager. Then the Calamari Inkantation leaked into the domes. Hearing it, she felt for the first time that there was a world worth climbing to. She walked out, reached Inkopolis, and was humming to herself in the Square when Pearl found her. Her past came out during the Octo Expansion, and the surface world shrugged. That shrug is one of the series' quiet triumphs.
The engineer
Marina's skill is central to the Octo Expansion. She hacks the Deepsea Metro's systems, supports Agent 8 by radio, designs the hyperbombs used against the NILS Statue, and coordinates the final assault with the calm of someone who has done this in a simulator a hundred times. She is the reason the sea creatures beat a twelve-thousand-year-old AI.
Order
In the final Splatfest of Splatoon 2, Marina championed Order: harmony, safety, a world where everything works. She lost to Pearl's Chaos, and she took it gracefully. But the question stayed with her. In Side Order, she builds the Memverse, a virtual world modeled on her memories, to explore what Order would mean. The experiment gets away from her. A program calling itself Order takes over, strips the color from the simulation, and traps Marina inside her own tower. Agent 8 and Pearl's drone have to climb it to bring her back.
The expansion never treats Marina's wish as villainous. She wanted safety because she grew up in a barracks. What she learns is that safety without a self is just a loop.
Character
Marina is soft-spoken, self-deprecating, and quietly funny, with a fangirl streak (she adores the Squid Sisters) and a habit of overpreparing. Her friendship with Pearl is the series' longest-running love story in all but name, and her connection to Acht, her old friend from the army days, gives Side Order its heart.