wfz said:
I'd like to hear you expand on what you mean, actually. I don't quite understand it. Why doesn't this particular characterization, wanting Adam's approval after all she's done, fit with her? Do you disagree that it is a very human trait? Like I just said, I find that trait to be very human. Since Samus is a human, I completely understood and could even completely sympathize with her on that regard. Why do you feel it didn't fit? Is it because of her previous characterization in the Prime games? My view is that we never really got to know her on a personal level before, and we could only see her outer shell. The same goes for numerous people who pass by me on a daily basis. They'd never know that behind my shell is a complex and very emotional person who relies on the praise of those closest to him. The person I am to my classmates is a very different person than my family see me as. I show different sides to people depending on how close I am to them. Going by that, we've seen this new closer side of Samus that is normally hidden behind her shell. As far as the whole "authorizing" situation goes, I agree that it is a perfectly suitable gameplay element but a little crazy on the narrative side. I don't want to get into that discussion however. |
First we need to establish what is and is not appropriate in a given story; assumign that everything is appropriate because it is realistic is not good management of narrative. In the same sense, it would be realistic for Samus to have been sexually abused at some point during her career in the military (the statistics of rape in the Army would terrify you), but we can both agree that such a thing is not appropriate for Metroid. Why? Because the tone of Metroid and its general narrative is not steeped in human drama, which is to say human drama that is rooted in the interactions between people. Samus's primary characterization comes in relation to her environment, and the adversities she overcomes in competing with the world.
The idea behind the drama of Metroid has its foundation in survival; Metroid is like a big haunted house story where you're trying to get into the bottom of the house and kill whatever's down there. It's about isolation, and the only characterization we get is in response to the environment. That makes perfect sense, and it's been the established context of Metroid for twenty years. Outside of Fusion, the most characterization we've gotten for Samus outside of responding to the environment was in Corruption, when she and a Federation general nodded to each other in passing out of mutual respect. One can already argue that this goes too far (Soleron and Demotruk would), but the fact remains that it is there and it's the most extreme the series had. Samus is still internalized, still able to go into the haunted house and find what's waiting for her in the basement.
Every kind of story has different kinds of appropriate characterization, because the different modes of characterization that you have is inextricably tied to narrative form. Change characterization and you change the form of the story, if not its entire genre. By attempting to shoehorn characterization for Samus on a more human level (and shoehorning is what is happening, here) Sakamoto has changed the form of the story, and it's not for the better. It's not appropriate for the tone of the series over the past twenty years, it's not appropriate for the genre it's in, and it's not appropriate for the setting.
More, Samus having this filial piety toward Adam in particular is doubly problematic, because it suggests that Adam is the only father figure Samus has had (which she even says in-game, around the time he bites it). This ignore the fact that Samus was raised, trained, and nurtured by the Chozo, and there are actual preivous Sakamoto expansions showing her growing up with the CHozo (particularly in Zero Mission); her identity up to now has been tied in with her Chozo upbringing and philosophy, not her military years. In many ways this can be interpreted as a retcon of the character, both in the people she values and in the outlook she's been raised to have. Samus was raised to be the lasto f the Chozo, in body and in spirit, nad pretending that she owes filial piety to Adam is ridiculous. If a Chozo suggested she should do some wild shit, you know what? I might actually buy it. I wouldn't, not in the end, but I would have to htink about it for a while because the Chozo actually did shape Samus as a person in every conceivable way. If she owes filial piety to anyone it's to them.
However, even that would be inappropriate. It bears repeating that filial piety, while an intrinsically human trait (like seeking approval) is not appropriate in the established Metroid universe, which is about combating threats from the outside. You can enjoy the expanding on her chracter - that's fine - but that doesn't change the fact that it's a brazen incongruity. I'm fine with changes, but changes hsould work within the established structure of the universe and its storytelling logic. Other M's characterization of Samus doesn't do that, especially in that the game is no longer about her trying to find her way into the basement of a haunted house, it's about her relationship with her stepdad. The form of the story has changed, and that's reason enough to bitch but when the script is bad? Ouch.
Oh, and for the record, for everyone who was tlaking about Mary Sues earlier:
A Mary Sue is an authorial self-insert. Silent protagonists are rarely Mary Sues, and they can't be Mary Sues just because they allow players to act out power fantasies. Adam is a previously unimportant father figure who exists outside of the canonically important formative period of Samus's life but is so prominent that she thinks of him as having raised her instead of the Chozo, she thinks of him as always being right, she desperately seeks his approval in spite of this not being in keeping with prior characterizations or storytelling norms for the series, and he heroically sacrifices hismelf in such a way as to set up Samus going back to retrieve a momento of him, the man who changed her life most.
That's right
Adam Malkovich, the previously absent father figure who's suddenly responsible for everything about Samus, is Sakamoto's very own Mary Sue
