Fair warning folks, this is gonna get long.
I've been thinking about all this Other:M Business for awhile now, and today's Extra Credits episode really re-kindled a lot of those thoughts, mainly the ideas of characterization. I've heard this from just about every corner of the Internet, how everything Other: M did was contrary to what we know about Samus. I contest this: It's contrary to everything we THOUGHT we knew about Samus. I'm approach this from a different angle then most, though. I don't think Samus was a complete Tabula Rasa, but rather I think we were given hints and surface clues to who Samus is, and we supplied our own assumptions as to her motives and emotions. I'm going to breakdown a few key elements of discontent from the game, the first being Samus's reaction to Ridley.
Many have complained about how Samus freaks out and becomes helpless in the presence of Ridley at his return. I think this deserves some context though: Ridley murdered her entire planet. Yes, I realize she's killed him a dozen times by now, and I think that's the point: She's killed him in the original game, and he had to come back as a robot for most of his tenure through the other games. But now? Here he is, fully-formed and back to normal, as if nothing happened. She accomplished nothing. The monster that she's killed a thousand and one times is not the slightest bit phased by her attempts, no matter what she does. To me, that would be-speak a certain inevitability: Your enemy always returns, no matter how many times you kill him. Someday, he will kill you. This is getting later in the series, right after Samus's encounters with Dark Samus, whom she narrowly defeats, and further back Mother Brain, whom she only defeated because of help from something she was supposed to be trying to kill. Samus lives in a world where everything that's against her is inherently stronger than she is, but she perseveres in the knowledge that she's always toppled her greatest foe, that she always leaves him with scars to pay for everything he did. But when Ridley appears in Other: M, the game has changed. He is as good as new, maybe better, and that's terrifying to her.
I don't think it would be terribly remiss to say that Samus has some form of PTSD, considering everything that happened to her. As someone who used to suffer from several psychological disorders including Multiple Personality Disorder, I can personally attest that the only thing more terrifying than the condition itself is the thought of relapsing into it. Whenever I get into a particularly stressful situation and I hear anything that even remotely sounds like a voice that shouldn't be there, I panic. I can barely breathe, and I can't see straight, because the prospect of going back to that hell-hole I used to call my psyche is that scary to me, and I only had a few years of sleep deprivation to blame for it. In Samus's case, she has genocide and years of fighting to be afraid about, and before her is living proof that everything she has done is a waste of time. If for even a second she believed that that made her helpless, that would be enough to trigger the fear of relapse, which in turn would only spike the chance of relapse higher. Thus from a natural, human perspective, everything we see in her encounter with Ridley is perfectly understandable.
But maybe it is how this encounter ends that rubs people the wrong way, with the much hated character Adam coming out to save her, implying that the "little girl" needs a "big, strong man" to save her. Specifically, everyone hates that it's THAT big, strong man who saves her, because he's pretty much a douche. To that, I would agree whole-heartedly, Adam is an asshole. Then why is Samus trusting him and respecting him? Well, again, let's look at her psychological profile and history. Ridley kills her family when she is fairly young, and she's raised by a race that isn't human. Her main male figure for most of her life is Adam. See, I think people mis-understand the undertones of their relationship. I don't think it's meant to be a purely romantic relationship. Rather, Adam struck me as her father figure, or at the very least an older brother. Does she possibly have some romantic feelings for him? Maybe, that's not all-together uncommon in surrogate father-brother relationships of this nature, especially for someone who is as psychologically damaged as Samus. I also don't think Adam reciprocates this relationship with anything more than begrudging acknowledgement. That's not to say it's a good relationship, but I think that Team Ninja's background has led some people to skew the relationship dynamic: We envision an abusive boyfriend when we see Adam, but he's real more an abusive/absentee father.
There also seems to be a consensus that everyone assumes that this relationship is supposed to be laudable or good because Samus says so. Why? I think Other: M is playing the unreliable narrator card on the sly, and no one caught them. We take everything that comes from Samus as the opinion of the creators, but that's simply not the case in my opinion. Rather, I think that due to Samus's stunted development and fractured childhood, she is drawn to abusive relationships and danger. I think, in the back of her mind, she thinks she deserves all of it. It's classic survivor's guilt. To me, that would explain why she pursues the Space Pirates so vehemently. It's more than revenge to her, it's a no-lose situation. If she kills them all, her people rest in peace. If she dies, then she gets the fate she always feels she really deserved. There's an inherent clash there, though: She's trained to kill, and the whole point of her surviving was to do just that. Yet she wants to die. Instinct vs. Desire, a conflict that is very confusing to the human body because it's incredibly rare. I would call that another factor in her reaction to Ridley, but deeper still it explains her relationship with Adam. She knows, deep down, that he's abusive and dismissive of her, but she secretly feels like she deserves it, so he's the perfect man to her.
This explains the final and most often cited example of Other: M's failure, the Varia Suit encounter. It's been said that there is no reason Samus would risk her life to obey a stupid order from someone who isn't even really her direct superior anymore, and if it were isolated to just that, they'd be correct. But when you combine the surrogate father figure effect with that survivor's guilt, you get a perfect storm where keeping the suit off is the ONLY possible outcome. It's a sequence where she will die in the line of duty, following direct orders, so it is complete justifiable and almost certainly fatal. It also involves the one person she would take said orders from, so there is no point in refusing. Now, if Samus had turned on the suit? That would have been incredibly out of character.
It's funny that we hold Samus up on this pedestal of strong, well characterized female protagonists. We call Other: M exploitative, but we forget how we first found out Samus was a woman in Metroid: She did a little strip-tease for us at the end of the game by taking off her armor and showing us her leotard. Face it everyone, the reason games like Dead or Alive: Beach Volleyball exist is because of sequences like that. Samus was exploited in her very first outing, and to depths much lower than the ones in Other: M. In the end, we've let our Nostalgia blind us on this one. Was Other: M a great game? No. Did the story work? Not at all. But that wasn't because of Samus's characterization. I can agree with the EC crew that every other character needed to be developed, and that over-all the game was terribly compelling to me outside of giving me enough material to finally finish my psych profile on Samus(I like profiling my characters, okay? It's entertaining). That doesn't change the fact that all the rage against Samus's actions and relationships isn't justified.
In the end, Other: M is a passable game that gives us valuable information about Samus. We don't like that information, but it's truth. It's a hell of a lot more plausible than the opposing characterization I've heard from Other: M's detractors, and far more human. I think the biggest lesson we can learn from Other: M is that sometimes, our characters aren't as unshakable or heroic as we'd like to think, and that's a reality we're going to have to live with if this medium is ever going to advance. Sometimes the good guys really are just flawed people with good reasons and strong resolve, but most of the time every good guy is one breakdown from becoming a victim. It's the acknowledgement of that fact that prepares us to deal with it and prevent that breakdown from coming, rather than ignore it and pretend we're bullet-proof. Just my two cents, though, and I welcome any further thoughts/debate.
I've been thinking about all this Other:M Business for awhile now, and today's Extra Credits episode really re-kindled a lot of those thoughts, mainly the ideas of characterization. I've heard this from just about every corner of the Internet, how everything Other: M did was contrary to what we know about Samus. I contest this: It's contrary to everything we THOUGHT we knew about Samus. I'm approach this from a different angle then most, though. I don't think Samus was a complete Tabula Rasa, but rather I think we were given hints and surface clues to who Samus is, and we supplied our own assumptions as to her motives and emotions. I'm going to breakdown a few key elements of discontent from the game, the first being Samus's reaction to Ridley.
Many have complained about how Samus freaks out and becomes helpless in the presence of Ridley at his return. I think this deserves some context though: Ridley murdered her entire planet. Yes, I realize she's killed him a dozen times by now, and I think that's the point: She's killed him in the original game, and he had to come back as a robot for most of his tenure through the other games. But now? Here he is, fully-formed and back to normal, as if nothing happened. She accomplished nothing. The monster that she's killed a thousand and one times is not the slightest bit phased by her attempts, no matter what she does. To me, that would be-speak a certain inevitability: Your enemy always returns, no matter how many times you kill him. Someday, he will kill you. This is getting later in the series, right after Samus's encounters with Dark Samus, whom she narrowly defeats, and further back Mother Brain, whom she only defeated because of help from something she was supposed to be trying to kill. Samus lives in a world where everything that's against her is inherently stronger than she is, but she perseveres in the knowledge that she's always toppled her greatest foe, that she always leaves him with scars to pay for everything he did. But when Ridley appears in Other: M, the game has changed. He is as good as new, maybe better, and that's terrifying to her.
I don't think it would be terribly remiss to say that Samus has some form of PTSD, considering everything that happened to her. As someone who used to suffer from several psychological disorders including Multiple Personality Disorder, I can personally attest that the only thing more terrifying than the condition itself is the thought of relapsing into it. Whenever I get into a particularly stressful situation and I hear anything that even remotely sounds like a voice that shouldn't be there, I panic. I can barely breathe, and I can't see straight, because the prospect of going back to that hell-hole I used to call my psyche is that scary to me, and I only had a few years of sleep deprivation to blame for it. In Samus's case, she has genocide and years of fighting to be afraid about, and before her is living proof that everything she has done is a waste of time. If for even a second she believed that that made her helpless, that would be enough to trigger the fear of relapse, which in turn would only spike the chance of relapse higher. Thus from a natural, human perspective, everything we see in her encounter with Ridley is perfectly understandable.
But maybe it is how this encounter ends that rubs people the wrong way, with the much hated character Adam coming out to save her, implying that the "little girl" needs a "big, strong man" to save her. Specifically, everyone hates that it's THAT big, strong man who saves her, because he's pretty much a douche. To that, I would agree whole-heartedly, Adam is an asshole. Then why is Samus trusting him and respecting him? Well, again, let's look at her psychological profile and history. Ridley kills her family when she is fairly young, and she's raised by a race that isn't human. Her main male figure for most of her life is Adam. See, I think people mis-understand the undertones of their relationship. I don't think it's meant to be a purely romantic relationship. Rather, Adam struck me as her father figure, or at the very least an older brother. Does she possibly have some romantic feelings for him? Maybe, that's not all-together uncommon in surrogate father-brother relationships of this nature, especially for someone who is as psychologically damaged as Samus. I also don't think Adam reciprocates this relationship with anything more than begrudging acknowledgement. That's not to say it's a good relationship, but I think that Team Ninja's background has led some people to skew the relationship dynamic: We envision an abusive boyfriend when we see Adam, but he's real more an abusive/absentee father.
There also seems to be a consensus that everyone assumes that this relationship is supposed to be laudable or good because Samus says so. Why? I think Other: M is playing the unreliable narrator card on the sly, and no one caught them. We take everything that comes from Samus as the opinion of the creators, but that's simply not the case in my opinion. Rather, I think that due to Samus's stunted development and fractured childhood, she is drawn to abusive relationships and danger. I think, in the back of her mind, she thinks she deserves all of it. It's classic survivor's guilt. To me, that would explain why she pursues the Space Pirates so vehemently. It's more than revenge to her, it's a no-lose situation. If she kills them all, her people rest in peace. If she dies, then she gets the fate she always feels she really deserved. There's an inherent clash there, though: She's trained to kill, and the whole point of her surviving was to do just that. Yet she wants to die. Instinct vs. Desire, a conflict that is very confusing to the human body because it's incredibly rare. I would call that another factor in her reaction to Ridley, but deeper still it explains her relationship with Adam. She knows, deep down, that he's abusive and dismissive of her, but she secretly feels like she deserves it, so he's the perfect man to her.
This explains the final and most often cited example of Other: M's failure, the Varia Suit encounter. It's been said that there is no reason Samus would risk her life to obey a stupid order from someone who isn't even really her direct superior anymore, and if it were isolated to just that, they'd be correct. But when you combine the surrogate father figure effect with that survivor's guilt, you get a perfect storm where keeping the suit off is the ONLY possible outcome. It's a sequence where she will die in the line of duty, following direct orders, so it is complete justifiable and almost certainly fatal. It also involves the one person she would take said orders from, so there is no point in refusing. Now, if Samus had turned on the suit? That would have been incredibly out of character.
It's funny that we hold Samus up on this pedestal of strong, well characterized female protagonists. We call Other: M exploitative, but we forget how we first found out Samus was a woman in Metroid: She did a little strip-tease for us at the end of the game by taking off her armor and showing us her leotard. Face it everyone, the reason games like Dead or Alive: Beach Volleyball exist is because of sequences like that. Samus was exploited in her very first outing, and to depths much lower than the ones in Other: M. In the end, we've let our Nostalgia blind us on this one. Was Other: M a great game? No. Did the story work? Not at all. But that wasn't because of Samus's characterization. I can agree with the EC crew that every other character needed to be developed, and that over-all the game was terribly compelling to me outside of giving me enough material to finally finish my psych profile on Samus(I like profiling my characters, okay? It's entertaining). That doesn't change the fact that all the rage against Samus's actions and relationships isn't justified.
In the end, Other: M is a passable game that gives us valuable information about Samus. We don't like that information, but it's truth. It's a hell of a lot more plausible than the opposing characterization I've heard from Other: M's detractors, and far more human. I think the biggest lesson we can learn from Other: M is that sometimes, our characters aren't as unshakable or heroic as we'd like to think, and that's a reality we're going to have to live with if this medium is ever going to advance. Sometimes the good guys really are just flawed people with good reasons and strong resolve, but most of the time every good guy is one breakdown from becoming a victim. It's the acknowledgement of that fact that prepares us to deal with it and prevent that breakdown from coming, rather than ignore it and pretend we're bullet-proof. Just my two cents, though, and I welcome any further thoughts/debate.
