Other M in extra credits

[MaiAriSquee]

Why does everyone on this forum hate on Sylux and Mental's blog article?

You might disagree with it, but that's no reason to call it some farce, or a giant joke, or a piece of shit, or whatever. It's surprising to hear people say that about arguably the two people most well-versed in Metroid lore on the whole damn forum.

Indeed. I happen to disagree with it very strongly, and think the suppositions are ridiculous in the context. But I still respect those two. Too bad they don't post much anymore.

[Trishbot]

Three things:

The "Elephant in the Corner" article was great. Have you read it recently? It never states that the negative portrayals of Samus are the ultimate end-all, be-all for her, but rather that there are glaring scenes which, alone, are odd but not so harmless, but when taken together they are numerous and troublesome. I mean, why DOES Samus never turn her Varia suit on when she needs it or Adam never brings it up? That aspect of the writing shows that either Adam is cruel or negligent, and that Samus is either an idiot or entirely submissive to his will to the point of suicidal actions. Is that the creator's intentions? Probably not, but that's because the writing was lazy and poor, and the article showed how that lack of care and respect for the game's heroine ultimately resulted in several scenes where Samus's behavior was inconsistent and poorly executed. It's a good article, but don't take it as gospel and you'll be just fine.

The "Extra Credits" article. I loved it. As a woman, I get more and more infuriated at how games try to paint an entire gender with a big, broad brush and say that everything pertinent to being female is inherent to being female. Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I like pretty-in-pink, helium-voiced, cake-baking Princess Peach whose only game has her saving the day with the power of her wildly out-of-control emotions. I like guns, I like motorcycles, I like tattoos, and beer, and big monsters, and dark clothes, and heavy rock music. Metroid was a series tailored for me, playing as an armored-up badass with a big hand-cannon that spoke softly and blasted space pirates' brain matter across the walls. Earlier games, Samus would have been just as good if she had been a man, but Other M focused heavily on her female limitations (NOT her strengths) and it painted a poor picture, like the fact that she was a woman made her less competent. She was more emotional, more lovey-dovey, more in need of rescue, saddled with feelings of inadequacy for being a woman... I mean, she dedicates an entire cutscene to talking about how "they treated me differently because I was a woman and I let that get under my skin" when I was screaming "you're HALF-ALIEN! You have Chozo blood and are physically superior to everyone! THAT'S why they should treat you differently!" Game creators need to know that you can't just pick a problem with being a woman (periods, sexual objectification, typically smaller builds and strength) and then decide to base an entire game around why being a woman is so hard and makes Samus so different from the big, burly space men. Honestly, does Other M present ONE single example of Samus being female as being a POSITIVE? Can you think of anything that her being female does that makes her a STRONGER character rather than a weaker one?

And it's not like it's Japanese culture. There are some amazing female character leads in anime. Appleseed has one of my favorite, with female heroine Deunan Knute being a supremely badass warrior who spent her entire life as a soldier of the battlefield, but then is plucked from her element and taken to a utopia to serve as its protector, and it explores her journey to adapt to a life of normality. She's a fish out of water, she doesn't fit in. She can't sleep on a soft bed because she's used to sleeping on the war-torn streets. She's beautiful, but doesn't really know it, so she feels uncomfortable in dresses and struggles to walk in high heels. She's "in her element" when she's got a gun in her hand and taking care of terrorists, and her true struggles come when she suddenly has to act normal, to be friendly to others, to wear normal clothes, to talk about normal things. In one of the movies, her friend laughs at her for not knowing what a cell phone is. Another scene has her using police equipment and someone says "sorry, but I've never seen a woman use this before... no offense" and she doesn't get offended in the slightest. She deals with issues of her gender, issues of her identity and place in the world, and yet throughout it all she remains true to what she is. She slowly integrates the soldier she was raised to be with the beautiful, kind woman she innately is... but it often takes a lot of mistakes and a lot of help from others.

Was that so hard to do with Samus? She is similarly an outcast, similarly raised for combat, similarly both beauty and beast, but where a character like Deunan Knute has a happy medium, Samus feels like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces are scattered around and doesn't make sense. The pieces don't line up or mesh yet. As so many people have pointed out, we have two Samuses: Gameplay Samus and Cutscene Samus, and it feels like they are two totally different people. Gameplay Samus is the Samus most of us adore, efficient, deadly, stoic, enduring, while Cutscene Samus undermines our actions by saying the very things we the player are doing so effortlessly are terrifying her, traumatizing her, her head isn't in the game, she's thinking about Adam, she's discovering plot points we knew ages ago, she's not really that good, etc.

A better game would eliminate that disconnect. Why did Miyamoto call Legend of Zelda's hero "Link"? Because he wanted the character to be the "link" between the player and the game, to let us fully inhabit the role of Hyrule's hero and to become the game's courageous protagonist. Samus filled the same role for years, but Other M puts up a wall, pushes the player away and keeps us at arm's length, never letting us invest ourselves AS Samus except during the gameplay, but every cutscene and every bit of dialogue jarringly sucks us out of the experience, and by narrowing Samus's characteristics and focusing a great deal on her womanhood (of all things they COULD focus on), it only further pushes the player away and reminds players that this character has very little in common with the people playing as her.

But, again, Other M is just one game. As Extra Credits points out, Samus always succeeded beyond our wildest dreams as a pioneer and trailblazer for women in games, spending years as the pinnacle of female heroism that defied gratuitous sexual objectification or conforming to expected gender stereotypes. About three or four years ago, when Halo 3 came out, IGN did a poll to see who was more popular: Master Chief or Samus, and Samus absolutely TROUNCED him, which came as a bit of a shock seeing as how Halo 3 was just being launched and Master Chief fever was in the air, and yet I remember reading all the comments about why people voted for her, praising her for being such a great, strong, resourceful character, for being a better link between the gamer and the game, for facing even more dire odds and greater dangers with defiance, courage, and intelligence. Nobody mentioned how hot she was in a Zero Suit. Nobody mentioned it was because she had "more personality" than Master Chief. Nobody mentioned anything about blasted "maternal feelings". Samus was more liked because she was simply a better character for players to play as, someone who both empowered the player yet held enough soul, just enough, to allow people to invest into her experiences and struggles. The fact she was a woman was almost secondary or even non-existent. She was just a good character, gender be damned. The last thing she was ever defined by was her gender role and expectations.

[KingBroly]

Who said your not experiencing Samus' struggles in Other M? You're basically putting up with Adam's shit throughout the entire game. The Hell Run is something based on that. We get angry at the authorization system because it's really designed for you to hate it, and in Fusion Samus says 'fuck orders' basically. Would I have loved to see her slap Adam silly for his shit? Yes, but considering the girl can barely move I doubt she could've lifted a finger against him at that point.

So don't say we're not seeing or experiencing her pain. We're just wondering why she's suffering and why she doesn't do anything about it.

[cross307]

I like samus the games never make a big deal of she being a woman, I mean is the future so gender roles shouldn`t be a great deal to begin with.

I think what sumarize the article is that a character shouldn`t accept all the gender roles imposed by society nor denied them all.

thinking in other females characters that do it right, I think in jade from beyond good and evil like samus she is a woman, they both are brave and find themselves in very dangerous situation and eviroments, they both have a father figure that move in some way the actions of the main charactes and both deal with some sort of motherhood role but the differece are:

1) while 80% of samus monologes are about adam we really never conect with him as a character, we are told that he is a great man but the game never really show us anything to belive that except for a brief shot of a picture in his desk showing samus and his younger brother in a very awkward hug. I kind of like the subtlety there but the game is trying to emulate Hideo Kojima so they should have try to be one or the other but not both.
In beyond good and evil we have a Pey'j he like adam, serve as a father figure but in this case we actually get to know him as a character we learn about his past and motivation, the game show us that he doesn`t like dangerous situation but he alway follow jade in order to protect her. [spoiler]by the time he gets capture by the bad guys we care about him as much as jade does.[/spoiler]

2) is funny how while samus speaks a lot in this game we really never get into her brain, we know that she care about the baby as is show in super metroid and other m and she regrets its dead, but we really don`t know the context of their relationship did she felt attachment to the baby since the first time or the regret she suffer in other m is because of the realitiation that the baby sacrifise itself to her because the baby saw samus as her mother?.
jade was acting as the surrugate mother of some orfants of the war, there is one point in the game were those children are kidnaped by the alpha section, jade overcome her doubt and weakness in order to rescue them.

what fill one character with doubt and weaknesses let the other overcome her own weaknesses and made her stronger and that is kind of sad, when samus overcome her own doubt afther sector 0 it felt forced because we really didn`t where given a proper explanation of she felt like that.

Im sure the bad writing in the story in other m was more a miss step that a actual intend to make female characters look weak, when you see all the interviews, and see the concept art you can see that they probably had great ideas an interesting back story for the plot of the game but for some reason or another they couldn`t put all they wanted on the disk.
you have to rememeber that this was the first time nintendo made a game with heavy enfasis in to story show by cutscenes maybe if they didn`t show all the story with cutscenes or made the first person view a medium of story telling the game shouldn`t have been so controvertial. maybe some day the oringinal script will be show a we would see what kind of story could have be.

[KingBroly]

The thing that strikes me odd about the whole Samus-Adam relationship is that final cutscene. When Samus says Adam is her "best friend" we see her giving him a thumbs down. We see him getting up from his desk like nothing's wrong. Now either that's a REALLY bad way to show caring for a character or it's a misdirection. There's no real physical interaction between them, even in those flashbacks. They're always apart. Even in Fusion they're apart for so long, and even when Samus confronts Adam he acts like a bully, even for an AI that may or may not already be sentient. When they do physically touch at the end it seems forceful, not caring or tender in any way. A lot of people, myself included, think that a hug, no matter what's come before it in the game thus far would go a long way into showing that Adam is a good person because hugs are emotional and personal, especially when the game is apparently all about emotions.

And yes, you are right about Samus' brain in this game. We never really delve into it which is very peculiar. I feel like you could re-write her monologues a couple dozen times in this game and get something new out of it every time.

[FacelessGriffin]

... Uh yeah, guys.

It's great you like talking about this and all, but...

Shouldn't we avoid turning this into another one of these kind of debates, since we have already gone over this before? Just saying.

[Cosake_Solrac]

I don't know to be honest, for all I know, there never is a strong person that ever had 'a weak moment'.

Well, have you played any Japanese role playing game in the last twenty years? They pretty much all have that plot twist. Even Zidane of FFIX, whose defining characteristic was that for once the hero wasn't an emo twit but a likeable lecher who enjoyed life to the fullest, had to go through an emotional breakdown and act completely out of character at about the 80% mark of the story. Fortunately his only lasted ten minutes instead of a the majority of a game installment.

Best thing you can say about Other M is that Samus goes back to normal after that whole Sector Zero business.

Yeah, I played quite a fair share of RPGs (GASP I DIDN'T TYPE THE 'J' lol), but well, when it comes to Zidane and FFIX, it's kinda more of a story w/ theatre motifs and the characters 'playing a role' that don't exactly suit them, and at the end, they come to terms to w/ what's comfortable w/ them. Simply speaking.

Well, all in all, I think it's because i'm just open minded when it comes 'weak' moments and well, i've seen quite a fair bit of awesome people (well to me, anyways) that have their own 'moments'. I won't go much into it, but this sorta stuff leaded me to well...be calm w/ Samus in Other M.

Another thing is, I wasn't a fan since NES Metroid so I didn't have a LONG moment of filling in the blanks because there's not much of a persona to go w/. So from Super Metroid (first Metroid I played, Prime came after), aside from repertoire, reputation, actions, 'resume', etc on Samus, I never did once felt I 'knew' her. Hell Other M is the main reason how I got into Metroid.

Other M to me is one of many missions, and particularly just the one mission that has had Samus in a fragile state. Something that is perhaps natural in both humans and characters. Hell, ain't like she 'cried' or apologized during the course. And she still toughed it out (what w/ all the bosses, enemies, and vice versa) regardless of setbacks lol.

The hellrun especially lol, it's like those things where someone tells you to do something but you lack certain equipment or whatever that would make it easier but you do it anyway, and upon others it's, "wtf man, complain!".

The normal response is usually, "I can deal."

So whatever. Samus is still one of the strongest fems there, and doesn't seem to be shy to even be fragile.

She can be sad and crack the neck of a Space Pirate w/ style and finesse, not many can do that. And that, is awesome.

...Great this felt like a preaching post LMAO.

Actually, what would be neat as an idea between two characters, is have one female badass and the other is a young man/woman that truly looks up to that person, but only knows her past actions, the legend of her; but upon seeing moments of weakness (whatever that may be) he/she bluntly asks/complains towards her 'why? how can you be like this when you did all that?' and there is no clear answer. It would be a good way to explore the extent of badassery and fragility in a person.

[KingBroly]

The confusion we have about Samus being fragile is that after Adam dies she doesn't seem fragile. She goes all commando on everyone. She was a jerk for not informing us that she was using power bombs without authorization. She was kind (yet hilarious at the same time) by tapping on the glass instead of pounding on it to get Madeline's attention. She was assertive and brave and had her noodle working at full throttle. In addition to that, she doesn't seem fragile during the Metroid II flashback either. It comes across as a regression, betrayal of character, etc. It's just NOT explained.

I think Samus is a very strong person, but there is a perception that she's weak and a pansy because of Other M, not even taking into account the lack of context for everything. Any sign of weakness = Total Pansy apparently. That's basically what "the King's Speech" was about. The guy wanted to overcome his stammer, not only for himself, but for his people since a speech impediment is considered a sign of weakness. He overcame his stammer (for the most part) through training and was then viewed as a strong person. Samus could take down any fictional character if she wanted too. But as I've said before, we shouldn't take this as the 'OMG, weak bitch forever' moment.

Like it or not, we as gamers are short-sighted. When people look at Other M they immediately forget that Samus is clearly a different person in Fusion. But we'd still like to know why she was emo in Other M. A lot of pieces doesn't help. We need the glue.

[Cosake_Solrac]

Yeah. We can't exactly expect everyone to tie things up themselves, some things have to be told than just hope some would get it (for better or for worse).

[cross307]

If there is something good who came from other m is madeline bergaman, I think that while her story was rush at the end she is the most interesting character in the game. and she is the one that gives the maternity themes in the game that has M:OM as an acronym.

Returning to the topic, who think in others females character that make a good job at breaking stereotipes?

[Cosake_Solrac]

There is the classic, Chun-Li, and a few others that came along from Street Fighter.

Say, what about Jun Kazama of Tekken?

[cross307]

For me: jade (of course), tron bone(megaman legends), tetra(legend of zelda) and Bayonetta(umm...bayonetta).

[Xscapist]

This is the most BLATANT, SHAMELESS ripoff of the Whiteboard on 1up.com. Like, disgustingly so. (You want to watch fun, worthwhile, thought-provoking, videos that are actually written by an actual, intelligent person? Watch them.)

I particularly like the bit in the 2009 Whiteboard episode Escapism where he's listing examples of how games are more reliable than life in not letting us down, and one of his examples is:

"I mean, if Samus reached the top of a monster-filled vertical shaft, only to discover a sign informing her that, we're sorry for the inconvenience, but the double jump boots are temporarily unavailable, you can bet that lady would be writing an angry letter to somebody."

Oh, wait.

I'm not going to sift through 17 pages of pure MOM argument, as I'm sure that's what it is, but I'll just take your word for it.

I didn't hate it. I just ignored it. I don't see a point in reading through 10 pages of fan response. Actually, there are few games I would read 10 pages about. I'm not going to watch Extra Credits either.

Ignorance is bliss.

But it makes sense...I suppose trying as hard as you can to ignore all the problems with the game (in regards to both story *and* game mechanics -- I've played through the game myself, finally) is the only way to keep this hot mess of a game from forever tarnishing your enthusiasm for the character, the way it has for me and a bunch of other people who no longer post here much.

Returning to the topic, who think in others females character that make a good job at breaking stereotipes?

Jade (Beyond Good & Evil), Joanna Dark (Perfect Dark...but not PDZ), Chell (Portal)...

[mental]

Why does everyone on this forum hate on Sylux and Mental's blog article?

You might disagree with it, but that's no reason to call it some farce, or a giant joke, or a piece of shit, or whatever. It's surprising to hear people say that about arguably the two people most well-versed in Metroid lore on the whole damn forum.

Indeed. I happen to disagree with it very strongly, and think the suppositions are ridiculous in the context. But I still respect those two. Too bad they don't post much anymore.

I think we've pretty much run out of things to say. Fanfic and analysis of the games were always the major things that brought us here, and we haven't had much inspiration in either area lately.

With respect to the "Elephant in the Room" article in particular, I appreciate it when people (like you and a few others) are willing to thoughtfully disagree with the article after reading it, but a lot of people on the board either take criticism of Other M personally, or refuse to read the article carefully (or at all) while still criticizing what they think it says.

Most of our future writing is likely to be on our own website(s), and not about Metroid. If we do end up doing any more Metroid stuff, I'll certainly come by and drop some links to it. Just prior to Other M coming out, we were actually working on a fan comic retelling part of MZM, with the artist who draws Unsounded. That probably won't happen now, but I may clean up and post some of the material I have from that eventually.

[defrost]

I suppose trying as hard as you can to ignore all the problems with the game (in regards to both story *and* game mechanics -- I've played through the game myself, finally) is the only way to keep this hot mess of a game from forever tarnishing your enthusiasm for the character, the way it has for me and a bunch of other people who no longer post here much.

Not everyone is going to see the same problems or find many problems at all with Other M's story when it comes to how it deals with Samus's character. I have read the article once, and have seen arguments bring out points from it, and I don't agree with it at all. I see it as an alternate interpretation, one that I would not expect fans of the series to be too clingy to. I personally did not find much wrong with how Samus had been presented, but that's mainly due to me throwing in my own interpretations for events of the story.