First of all, I want to state that your opinions, while reasonable and understandable, are really only your opinion. So it’s really just conjecture that you state. I’m sure you won’t deny that and I’m not saying that you are. It’s just a bit much that your rant came off as that. You made many claims and stated them as if they were law and irrefutable.
I made very sure to only state that certain points, ones which might have been toeing the line between objective and subjective, were not matters of opinion, but of set-in-stone portrayal by the various designers of the series. Everything else was clearly either objective or subjective.
First, I’ll discuss the issue of her reaction to seeing Ridley. You state that her reaction was unprecedented because she has faced him before on numerous occasions and in numerous forms and never flinched. Well, first off, we all know that the canon of the manga wasn’t inserted until much later.
The manga section was purely to make the point that involving the manga, which many like to do to support the PTSD theory, hurts Other M more than it helps. The rest of the argument mostly ignores the manga.
And second you have to understand that the creators only had so much they could work with. Almost all metroid games are 2D games with a small amount of frames to work with. I’m pretty sure the creators didn’t feel like wasting their time with having Samus show large amounts of reactions and stances. Now you’ll probably debate that they could have shown that in Prime, and Echoes and that they did show her react in corruption and in Fusion. Well if you mean that little eye bulge when she finds out that Adam is in the computer well, that’s pretty much all we get. I don’t think the creators want to show a second eye bulge when she meets Ridley or anything else. You can just chock that up to “They didn’t feel like it” they probably felt it was pointless an unnecessary as to save more time on gameplay. And as for Prime and Echoes, I blame it on the software limitations. It was designed for the Gamecube, we see very little from Samus as it’s entirely in first person, barely much of her face, and there are so many scan items, hell, she never even utters a word and the endings are so bland that I’m pretty sure that’s all they could squeeze into it.
Corruption wasn't much further along than the first two games. It made everything prettier, and introduced new liquid physics for the Fuel Gel, but it wasn't that different. And besides, Samus's face isn't the only way to show fear. Body language is a very powerful tool in the right hands, and Retro certainly could have done it with the Gamecube hardware, no problem.
Now in corruption maybe it’s a little different. They have much more software to work with since it’s now on the Wii. They offered many interactable features to let the player feel more like they’re in Samus’s boots. You can push and pull levers, and even navigate your ship with motions using the wiimote. So for the first time, we see her reaction to seeing Ridley, as you stated, she does get scared, just because her duration of fear is different, it doesn’t matter, she can get scared.
Actually, it matters a lot. As I said in my rant, I don't have a problem with Samus showing fear, I had a problem with the extreme they took it to. That really was the main point of most of my complaints; not that they did those things, but that they went overboard with them.
You stated that because of her “brief” service with the Galactic Federation and being raised by the Chozo should have molded her into a hardened killing machine. I don’t think so. The chozo are a technological race, and not fully warbound to always want to battle. They gave Samus chozo DNA that helped make her stronger and more athletic in order to merge the Power Suit to her. They saw a potential in her to be a savior. Besides, even if she had a lot of experience, even Rambo broke down and started crying at the end of the movie, so you can’t tell us that her PTSD can just go away. Besides, that didn’t stop her from finding her courage afterward and proceeding to kick Ridley’s butt with a fury.
Again, the PTSD thing is manga-contained. Other M never states that it's PTSD, only the manga makes it clear. And, as I said in the rant, regular human soldiers might not be able to just "get over" PTSD, but the manga shows Samus doing just that. Samus recovered mentally a few years after the initial incident, and even if PTSD could make a comeback by way of Ridley seemingly being able to come back from the dead, Samus would quickly get over that, too. As for the "hardened killing machine" comment, I never once stated that this would make her immune to fear or emotions, I'm just saying that, with the manga demonstrating her superior ability to recover mentally, it stands to reason that her Chozo and military training would provide the mental toughening that could make that a feasible character trait. By the way, Samus is a hardened killing machine, but all that means to me is that she can take a life when she needs to, without hesitation, and without freaking out about it afterwards. Oh, and "machine" because, in her travels around the Galaxy filled with hostile creatures, she ends up killing quite a lot, sometimes dozens and dozens of creatures within only a few minutes.
Now let’s talk about her power suit. It seems that you’re under the assumption that it’s made out of some sort of impenetrable diamond hard substance. It’s been shown many times and even within the games such as the Prime series, that her suit is not a ceramic suit of armor, it’s not a robotic hollow suit that she can slip in and out of like clothes. It’s a biological organic exoskeleton. Fusion even states that it’s so integrated into her biological system that removing too much of it would be fatal. Her suit is flexible and even has joints. That’s why she’s been infected on several occasions. By Dark Samus and by the X. In fact, her suit itself is not what protects her from death, it’s some sort of unseen energy field that the suit produces, perhaps within the suit. That’s why you collect energy tanks in the game to extend the shield’s duration. The very fact that an enemy can bump into her and make her grunt with pain from the injury shows that she feels pain through the suit. I’m not talking about a lazer beam, or acid, but a mere bump! She feels the cold, and she feels the heat, it’s like a skin to her. So it’s completely understandable that when Ridley grabs her and is crushing her (You’ll notice that this is when her suit fades) that her suit starts to falter, her pain is causing her to lose her mental focus which must be deactivating the suit. We’ve seen multiple times that she removes the suit without so much as touching a button or speaking some sort of activation code. So I believe the suit is activated mentally. So when Adam shoots her spine, I think that’s enough of a shock to her system to also deactivate her suit, afterall, she falls unconscious. We’ve seen her suit fall apart even in Super Metroid so this shouldn’t be such a surprise.
That's all good and well, but it still causes a problem within Other M. Specifically, the fact that Ridley squeezed the life out of her, then slammed her into a wall and scraped her across it. Her suit faltered here. And yet, even with her broken concentration due to the freakout, and Ridley's assault (which I imagine would be capable of some serious spinal trauma, when combining the squeezing with the slam against the wall) her suit never fully deactivates, and she's able to quickly recover after he drops her, whereas Adam's one shot knocked her out, disabled her suit, and temporarily rendered her a weakened, hobbling wreck. Oh, and the suit being disabled renders the magic shot further implausible, due to the following: she's been shown a couple of times unconscious with the suit still active, meaning that if the suit only functions while she focuses on keeping it functional, she's probably trained enough that sustaining it is as natural to her as breathing, which would mean that Adam's shot would have had to hit her extra hard to cause her to lose her ability to sustain the suit. Either that, or, more likely, the suit toggles on and of with a thought, which again would have to mean that Adam's shot had to hit extra hard in order to actually cause a malfunction in the suit. Either way, that one shot had to be amazingly powerful, and probably hit an absurdly precise point at the same time, to do the kind of ridiculous damage it did. Ultimately, it just boils down to cutscene convenience, and if you asked Sakamoto about it, I imagine he'd be tripping over his words while attempting to come up with an explanation. I honestly think you put more thought into it than he did (quite impressive, actually; I hadn't put much thought into how the suit functioned until now)
Now about how Fusion is better at emotions than Other M. Seriously? This response will be pretty short. All we get is a momentary outburst of anger towards the computer and an eye bulge when she finds out the computer is Adam. The rest is all text. You can’t show much emotion through text.
My response is equally short, and consists of two points:
1. I said that Fusion is BETTER at Samus's emotions, not that Fusion had a MORE emotive Samus. It just comes down to the point that Fusion's Samus, as a character, stayed very true to the Samus we'd seen in the other games, but still managed to grow quite a bit as a character.
2. You can show TONS of emotion through text. Books have proven that for hundreds of years.
Now onto the “Following orders” problem. On Adam’s part, I am under the assumption that Adam was the deleter. I know I have no way to prove this since the game never reveals it, but this is my guess, think about it for a second, the galactic federation wanted to preserve their biological weapons. The metroid’s that were genetically enhanced to resist being frozen. I believe since adam was secretly trying to destroy the metroids he had to stop anyone from preventing his mission. I think the other members he dispatched were part of that retrieval unit. Since the beginning, he knew his mission was suicide, the only way to disconnect section zero was from inside, there’s no way out after that. Knowing that Samus was the only one strong enough to save the universe, he made that sacrifice and chose her over himself. So I’m assuming that the reason Adam had restricted her suit’s features was to keep her from reaching the location, to slow her progress. Now as for her following his orders blindly. Besides the fact that she trusts him so strongly, how many times has she done something “Stupid” as you claim? Many times! She goes to planet SR388 to eradicate EVER SINGLE METROID except one!? “Hmm…this one’s cute! I’ll call it spot!” Her act was illegal as stated by the general at the end of Other M, plus the fact that it caused all kinds of hell in Super Metroid. And the fact that she fights herds of giant monsters, dives into pools of lava relying on the guess that her varia suit “MIGHT” protect her from the heat. (She doesn’t know until she tries. Who else would willingly do that?) Does that seem rational to you?
First, James is the Deleter. After talking to "Madeline Bergman", Samus leaves, and someone approaches "Madeline", the screen goes black, then there's a loud noise. When you go back to that room, James lying there, dead, with his visor smashed in. The Deleter is also shown, in the scene where he kicks K.G.'s body into a lava pool, to have the 07 on the front of his helmet noticeably worn and faded, something only James seems to have, as the other members helmets have the 07 in good condition.
Anyway, Adam does indeed want to keep Samus from discovering the secrets of Sector 0, but wanting to keep her from figuring it out is still no reason to not immediately authorize her suits, as he wouldn't want her to die.
As for the stupid stuff... well, first let me say that, no Samus would never have to jump in lava to test the limitations of the Varia suit, as Prime shows that her HUD warns her when extreme temperatures or corrosive substances are detected in the immediate area, a noise indicating when she's in the danger zone. When the Varia suit is acquired, the HUD's meter still rises to indicate these things, but the noise no longer plays when she's in superheated rooms, although it still plays when she's too close to lava, indicating that her suit knows its temperature and corrosion limits, and so Samus would know about this without having to jump in. By the way, this is a very silly response to a very silly accusation.
And as for the baby Metroid, while I certainly wouldn't have let the thing live, the factor that is a woman's desire to be a mother is something that I couldn't say Samus is beyond. PTSD, as I said, is manga-contained, and the manga itself shows that Samus could and did recover from it. Maternal instincts, however, are not something that have been shown to be incompatible with her character in any way. Certainly, looking back on it objectively, it seems like a stupid decision, but not unthinkable from Samus who had basically no experience in this area, whereas something so combat-related (combat being the field in which Samus is the most well-versed and logical) as using your best armor is something that Samus would not act stupidly about.
You’re just going to have to get used to the idea that she followed orders because she wants to.
Now this is a rather unnecessary thing to say. I could just as easily tell you to get used to the idea that she didn't want to follow the orders, as Fusion says she doesn't. I'm not even sure what the point was.
I'll respond to DH later. For now, WWE Raw is on.
