TheMaddestHatter said:
1. My information comes straight from the games. Especially in the Prime Series, where he primarily appears, Ridley is Meta-Ridley for every appearance save his last, where he has been enhanced to Omega Ridley by Phazon corruption, and is still technically more machine than man. If you've played the games, you should know this, it's a major plot point and it's how all his data entries read when you scan him.
2. Again, you misconstrue what I've said. Nintendo has given us plenty of clues as to who Samus is and how she operates, but we've mis-interpreted them because we want our heroes to be unstoppable stoic space marine badasses instead of actual people who are just trying to hold it together for one more day.
3. She worked with them in Prime 3, and I believe in "Hunters", and I believe at their behest in Super Metroid, as well as Fusion. I not 100% about Super Metroid and Hunters, since I didn't play the latter and it was roughly the Cretaceous Era when I played Super Metroid, but she has collaborated with the Military more than once.
You are assuming someone suffering from psychological disorders is going to act as a rational, consistent being? That's a new twist on how psychology works. Yes, that's made clear from Samus's point of view . As we've already established though, waaaaay back in the original post, I believe Sakamoto is employing the trope of Unreliable Narrator with Samus. What she says and does doesn't add up because it's not supposed to add up. We aren't supposed to understand or relate with her. The reaction you are having is exactly what he was going for, right up until the point where you decided the game just must be bad because your beloved heroine (whom you know less about than we know about the average celebrity) isn't a strong, independent woman, but an emotionally flawed wreck whose life is just paradox after paradox. That's the only outcome that makes sense when you consider what we do know of Samus. I mean, being trained to be a killing machine, set to what is basically genocide, by a race of professed pacifists? That's not something that's easy to rationalize in one's mind.
1. The title "Meta-ridley" alone doesn't have any meaning beyond what you and I assign it. Ridley was not scan-able in her first appearances in Prime and Prime 3, when he looked just as he did in the original, in Super, and in Other M. As you said, with Super you're assuming. If you were writing Other M or a sequel, you could use that to take the plot in the direction you want, because it's really not defined either way. But, you'd have to blur some lines since in most of his reappearances he looks the same as the original, and you'd still have the hole in that logic created by the fact that the Ridley that triggers the freak-out episode is not the same Ridley that Samus first fought. - you see it as an infant earlier in Other M.
2. I'm confused as to what you're trying to argue. Did Nintendo leave it all up for conjecture, as you stated in your last post, or have they given us plenty of clues? Again, you may look to the bolded text above for my opinion, or re-watch the video for more specifics. While it is true that certain details, especially superficial ones, will be projected onto any silent protagonist by the player, both my point of view and the one presented by Extra Credits focus on what we know for sure based on past games. If you've been watching Extra Credits for a while or have spoken to me about movies or comics before, you know that we both like our characters flawed. Not everyone is a post-Halo adolescent who interprets the silent hero the way you described. The "betrayal" that so many people have discussed regarding Other M, that of Samus' character, hasn't been discussed because of misinterpretations on the part of gamers and reviewers. It has been discussed because the way that Samus was portrayed in Other M
contradicts what we know about Samus, without extrapolation, based on previous games. Most of the big, dramatic moments in the game involve Samus having to get her ass saved or submitting in a way that defies the same logic that got her to leave the military in the first place. You said that you strongly believe Sakimoto was intentionally using Unreliable Narration as a literary device. I think it would have been obvious, in clearly definable ways, if the writers didn't want us to take the narration at face value. Narration itself is, in almost all cases, a means of exposition and nothing more. If we are told not to accept the sole means of story progression in the game, I think it would be only at specific points and it would be glaringly obvious (again, in clearly definable terms). There is no reason to believe that a story is analogous to fallen angels if there are no familiar archetypes or motifs specific to them, and no other indicators.
This would seem like projection.
3. As I said, Samus did work with the military in Prime 3. And she was commissioned by the federation to do what she did in the NES and SNES games, and probably all of them. That's not the same as being under the military's employ, and since she's not an outlaw, it doesn't make sense for her to go around blowing up planets and killing sentient beings without legal sanction.
PTSD is an argument that has come about only because of the need Other M's proponents feel to defend the Ridley freak-out scene. At the very least, you have to admit that it's left-field. I believe it was done for dramatic effect alone, and was done without much consideration for all that came before it. In the narration in Fusion, emotional problems resulting from the deaths of her parents were never described as anything manifested in endangering herself while fighting a creature she had killed four times. It is inevitable that such bad writing will beg the questions: Why hasn't this happened before? Why have we never even heard of this?
I'm curious as to why we are not supposed to understand or relate to Samus, as you stated. Is this not supposed to be an empathetic character?
You're still assigning far too much of your own meaning in interpreting this story. I wouldn't call Samus my beloved heroine. I don't even think about her when she's not here! But if you're going to delve into a character, why not make it interesting? When talking about the "genocide" of the pirates, I think you forget that Metroid was very influenced by
Alien and its sequel; Hell, the reason Samus is a woman is the character of Ripley (though Ridley was much more likely named for the director of the first film, Ridley Scott). Ripley's goal throughout the entire series is to exterminate the aliens, and it's never seen as genocide (though the Xenomorphs aren't sentient, the Pirates are just as dangerous as they are).
It's interesting that you think of Samus as a "wreck." Why can't she be flawed without being a wreck? And, if she is indeed a wreck, how has she pulled off all of the things she has done, without being saved as she was in Other M, or ever having a freakout episode which nearly got her killed? This is not rational. It's like stating "paradox after paradox" without really naming any. So, looking at this epistemologically, in the absence of absolute truth, we must proceed with what the strongest evidence suggests. Even though it is art and every detail has not been clearly spelled out, there are things that we can reasonably infer and there are assumptions that really don't make any sense. If the Chozo were ever presented as pacifists, it was only in the scan-narrative of Prime 1, and you could reasonably state that either they lived apart from other Chozo colonies, both in location and in lifestyle, or that although they were pacifist they didn't think their selves above defending their lives against enemies. And no one ever said that Samus was trained to be a killing machine. We never see her even attack another sentient life form other than the pirates (except maybe rival bounty hunters in Prime Hunters, maybe?).
