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Rahxephon91



Joined: 08 Jun 2003
Posts: 1859
Location: Park Forest IL.
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 10:25 am Reply with quote
I don't know why people keep bringing up Fusion and Zero Mission as a counter point to the character not be stoic. Stoic dosen't mean silent. Even with her personal narration in both, Samus is dry and to the point. Mentioning her problems(such as the damage to her suit, losing the armor and being stuck with only a pistol) with little complaints. She just narrates them and is very frank with her current predicaments. She endure's these problems professionally. She is the definition of stoic.
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
Posts: 3442
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 10:50 am Reply with quote
Here's what we know of Samus, she's the kind of character who hear that a planet is crawling with alien and space pirate and goes "yep I'm totally going to go there alone, with minimal equipment and no back up and kill all the alien myself" which would be incredibly reckless except for the fact that she totally pull it off.

You don't need any text crawl or internal monologue to understand that she's a pretty badass courageous character. In most of them she could have gone back to her ship and run away at any point but she never did (nor did she ever started to cry in front of a strong enemy and then needed to be rescued). The story can be told trough gameplay, and wether the maker of the video game thought about it or not is irrelevant, if they decide to change that character to something else it's just not consistent with earlier game.
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Paul Soth



Joined: 06 Jul 2010
Posts: 140
Location: Columbus, Oh
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 10:58 am Reply with quote
That's the point. She had plenty of characterization in Fusion and Zero Mission, and neither pointed to her being a wilting flower with daddy issues or some sultry sexpot. She wasn't emotionless, but she also wasn't emotional. She was a space adventurer who happened to be a good-looking woman under all that armor.

The issue is the excessive focus on the "good-looking" part at the expense of everything else. The fact that she was given a whip in Brawl and now magic stilettos is just tacky and tasteless. Why? Because she's not meant to be that kind of character.

Compare her to Bayonetta, who was designed from day one to be sultry and hyper-sexualized to the point of self-parody. If she was given these kind of silly accessories, no one would bat an eye since that's pretty much her thing that completely goes along with the tone in her games.

Being a space dominatrix was never part of the Metroid games. And that is where the issue lies.
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Mister Ryan Andrews



Joined: 28 Jan 2014
Posts: 219
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 11:46 am Reply with quote
Rahxephon91 wrote:
Well it's hard to discus this with someone who wants to spin Ripley from Alien from not being an actual strong female, but this strange subservient character just like Samus.


Because people always forget Ripley didn't become the poster child for gun-slinging female action movie heroines until the sequel movie seven years later. It's like how people often ignore the more subdued 'First Blood' set in a small podunk town and go straight for the set-in-Nam sequel movie 'Rambo' for the Rambo franchise.

Zac wrote:
Reminder: you are arguing with the person who said this:


Uh, you're taking statements out of context and trying to spin them for your agenda. I think I said that in response to all the people complaining about this on internet forums when someone mentioned it.

The Legend Tenpouin wrote:
However, some folks here are claiming that a lot of the original Japanese hyper-sexualization was lost in translation, and that Americans just don't understand how she was originally intended to be portrayed. I'm not sure how much of that is really true or just hair-splitting, but all I can say is that the character I thought Samus was is a heck of a lot cooler than how I'm seeing her portrayed recently in Japan (Other M comes to mind) and being led to believe here by some commenters.


There's definitely two arguments going on here. 'badass' and 'sexualized'. Neither of which is mutually exclusive from one another.

Samus's sexualization has been present in every American version of the game, to my surprise. Ending scenes which prarade her in skimpier clothes depending on how well you beat the game were kept in were kept intact, as were cutscenes like in Zero Mission where Samus watches a ship from the distance while the camera focuses on her highly detailed zero suit buttocks. In Zero Mission/Fusion we get a few looks into her civilian life. One scene in Zero Mission's ending shows her hitting the town in a skimpy outfit and hanging out in clubs and bars. She seems comfortable with her body and has no problem going out to relax and unwind. We also see this in some of the manga adaptions as well.

Badass, well not sure what to say. Nothing in the Japanese version goes against this unless showing some emotion every now and then and not being this silent, cold-hearted sociopathic murderer means your not a badass. People love to cite Other M like she's some helpless damsel but this is the same Other M where Samus kicks Ridley in the face and fires a missile down his throat to save her friend. You can show vulnerabilities and still be badass, at least I sure hope you can, because that's what makes a dynamic character. It kinda sucks people are so hard on a woman going through PTSD.

The only thing America didn't get are the manga, the commercials, and the promos. Manga which fleshes out Samus backstory and shows her origins (worth a read, it shows why she hates Ridley so much), and promos like the official narration of Super Metroid which is narrated by Samus' seiyuu and sheds some light on the story and characterization in that game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quR5-FEaM9c

I'm not sure what people in the west think Samus is at this point, but I know how she's been portrayed in the manga, promos, and the games she actually has characterization. None of which depict her as some kind of emotionless sociopath. In fact the first time we ever see her display emotion (outside waving to the player in her skivvies at the end of the first game) is when she spares the Baby Metroid. If she was truly a stoic badass she'd have murdered it in cold blood in a heartbeat and finished her mission. For better or for worse given all the events that stem from her sparing that Baby Metroid.


Last edited by Mister Ryan Andrews on Fri Apr 11, 2014 11:49 am; edited 1 time in total
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor


Joined: 05 Jan 2002
Posts: 7912
Location: Anime News Network Technodrome
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 11:49 am Reply with quote
Mister Ryan Andrews wrote:


Zac wrote:
Reminder: you are arguing with the person who said this:


Uh, you're taking statements out of context and trying to spin them for your agenda.


Hahahaha. That's what you said. You followed it up with even more nonsense like it, but that was the real corker there. It isn't out of context, that's what you actually believe.

Unless you're just trolling, in which case my eyes drift toward the ban button...
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Animehermit



Joined: 05 Aug 2007
Posts: 964
Location: The Argama
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 11:52 am Reply with quote
Mister Ryan Andrews wrote:


Because people always forget Ripley didn't become the poster child for gun-slinging female action movie heroines until the sequel movie seven years later. It's like how people often ignore the more subdued 'First Blood' set in a small podunk town and go straight for the set-in-Nam sequel movie 'Rambo' for the Rambo franchise.


Did you forget the entire movie leading up to the part where Ripley is naked?

She was always an independent person, she never cowed to voice her opinion and never comprised it, even when everyone else disagreed with her.

Your initial point is correct though, Metroid takes a lot form Alien and Aliens, it's just you completely misread Alien.
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Mister Ryan Andrews



Joined: 28 Jan 2014
Posts: 219
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 11:59 am Reply with quote
animehermit wrote:
She was always an independent person, she never cowed to voice her opinion and never comprised it, even when everyone else disagreed with her.


You mean like how Samus spared the Baby against GF orders and also blew up the BSL against Adam's orders?
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Lavnovice9



Joined: 23 Oct 2012
Posts: 276
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 12:13 pm Reply with quote
Mister Ryan Andrews wrote:


I never seen that before that's informative, thanks! I wonder if there's more like that?
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The Legend Tenpouin



Joined: 10 Apr 2014
Posts: 4
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 12:40 pm Reply with quote
AiddonValentine wrote:

Because "legendary badass" is about as shallow of a description as you can get. That isn't even close to how I describe truly great characters like The Man With No Name, Bruce Wayne, Shinji Ikari, Aya Brea, Lenneth Valkyrie, Lupin III, Revy, Himura Kenshin, Kanji Tatsumi, Fei Fong Wong, Ashley Riot, James Sunderland, Denam Mowne, Aigis, etc. In fact, I actually tend to focus on their more negative qualities first.

It's a description that isn't made for HER benefit but for the player's. It's made to stroke your ego because, like most silent protagonists, the player is meant to project onto her in the name of that ever-so-meaningless term "immersion." Blank slates aren't characters and no amount of out-of-game decriptors is going to remedy that. She doesn't make any actions of her own accord 99% of the time because she lacks free will. The actions of the player and the character are not one and the same. Never will be.

I can name, at best, a handful of instances where Samus expressed herself outside of Fusion and Other M:

Super Metroid: Exposition dump at the beginning. Flashback where she hesitate to shoot the Baby

Metroid Prime 3: Clenches her fist, shoots at Dark Samus when she's absorbing Ghor, moves back when she sees Gandrayda transform into Samus during her death animation.

That's it. That is literally all I ever saw. I cannot guess a personality on that. Samus had a history, but no character. She was blank slate, meant as an escapist avatar for the player. She might as well have been a statue. And no amount of WANTING her to have a personality will ever change that she never had one in the first place.


Your point is tantamount to saying that Link isn't really brave because we don't know his psychological state going into battle with Moblins and Tektites, or that Mario isn't really a good-natured friendly hero because for all we know, lurking deep in his psyche he's a two-faced psychopath, so until we have concrete data they're just brainless shells we "project" ourselves into. And by extension of this flimsy self-congratulatory psychobabble, Samus being a kick-butt legendary outer-space bounty hunter heroine is questionable, because she doesn't lay it out for you explicitly in dialogue and cutscenes? RIGHT. You're just being facetious and arguing for the sake of arguing. The fact that you think Samus being a "legendary badass" is as shallow as it gets, as opposed to her being a male-manipulated sex-toy to sellout to hormone-crazed adolescents, speaks volumes to that point.

I'm going to be honest with you because you seem to be painting with a wide, wide brush on anyone who disagrees with you, but I DON'T CARE AT ALL if Samus has high heel rocket boots. I just don't give a flying flip, I'm not even a huge fan of the Metroid series in the first place and I only have a passing respect for Samus' place in video game history. When I first posted here I thought it was funny and just put my two cents in, and so far as I'm concerned it's the developer's prerogative to do whatever the heck they wish with their franchises. The only reason I've lingered here as long as I have is because of your goading, hair-splitting, exagerrated reading of nonsense into my comments. Anyone who would castigate certain Metroid fans as displaying "mean-spirited, pathological, borderline sociopathic HATRED" as you have, clearly has some terribly IRONIC grudges and emotional baggage of his own. I say let's let sleeping dogs lie, I'm frankly irritated by all these semantic gymnastics for something I'm not even emotionally or intellectually invested in.


Last edited by The Legend Tenpouin on Fri Apr 11, 2014 7:31 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Rahxephon91



Joined: 08 Jun 2003
Posts: 1859
Location: Park Forest IL.
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 1:01 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
It kinda sucks people are so hard on a woman going through PTSD.
And now this spin happened, the "actually you guys are down on women" spin.

Like no.

Also, people have problems with that scene because it makes no real sense for her to have that reaction.


Last edited by Rahxephon91 on Fri Apr 11, 2014 1:20 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Ultimatum



Joined: 03 Mar 2013
Posts: 162
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 1:07 pm Reply with quote
I've seen a lot of posts saying essentially "why are you guys getting so worked up about the high heels? what do they take away from the character?"

Well, I'd just like to ask the same question: Why are the high-heels necessary? What do they add to the character? what purpose do they serve?
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Chagen46



Joined: 27 Jun 2010
Posts: 4377
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 1:30 pm Reply with quote
I already asked them that and they just did a bunch of tonetrolling and goalpost shifting so blatant I could see the holes in the ground.
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Jave



Joined: 08 Aug 2013
Posts: 198
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 1:38 pm Reply with quote
Ultimatum wrote:
Well, I'd just like to ask the same question: Why are the high-heels necessary? What do they add to the character? what purpose do they serve?


Being rocket high heels. Plus they make her look good Wink
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Chagen46



Joined: 27 Jun 2010
Posts: 4377
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 1:56 pm Reply with quote
"They make her look good" is exactly what we're talking about. They serve zero purpose besides sexying her up.

Also, "they serve as rocket boots" is a poor justification. They don't HAVE to look like high heels to do that. Stories do not spring from the nether, they are crafted by people, and Samus' crafters decided to make them high heels to sexy her up. The design has nothing to do with them being rocket boots.

Your absurdly strong denial of this incredibly simple fact is stunning.
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Mister Ryan Andrews



Joined: 28 Jan 2014
Posts: 219
PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 2:08 pm Reply with quote
Rahxephon91 wrote:
And now this spin happened, the "actually you guys are down on women" spin.


No, I'm saying you guys are down on someone who has PTSD. Her gender means jack all in this instance. Stop trying to spin everything to be about gender.

Quote:
Also, people have problems with that scene because it makes no real sense for her to have that reaction.


How? This is the second time she's displayed PTSD so its consistent if nothing else. Who are you to tell someone if they're allowed to have PTSD or not or if it makes sense for them?

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/81909/ptsd-or-weakness-real-experts-on-why-samus-didn't-shoot/

Read this, please. It's an interview with a vet who suffers from PTSD and his comments on the game. Maybe people should ask themselves why Samus might go into dangerous areas alone without a care for her well being and is seemingly is a loner. Everyone she knows ends up dead and it leaves her more and more disturbed with each passing game.
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