Sex and the Zero Suit: Why Samus was Great Only in Metroid Prime

[Mr Khan]

Khuutra said:

Mr Khan said:

Long hair wouldn't really have done enough, though. It was the 80s, the age of Conan the Barbarian among other things, long haired he-heroes were in vogue.

I still think you're making mountains out of mole-hills, here (and that Rol is kicking your ass quite thoroughly in this engagement). One especially valid point of his is that how many gamers even see that suit, or know that she's a girl? In the age before the internet was around to spoil all this, it was probably enough to know from your friends that beating the game quickly or thoroughly enough revealed who it was under the armor, and that was probably cool enough on its own. I sincerely doubt very many people went around saying "dude, you get a chick in pixellated black-and-white panties if you clear out Metroid II quick enough."

"All of that is beside the point," I said.

These discussions are not fights, and they are not competitions whereby eahc participant is awarded points to build up toward a "victory." They are free exchanges of ideas where, ideally, we are made to look at our assumptions about the topics at hand and reconsider our positions in light of the perspectives provided by other people. I started this thread and wrote the OP specifically because what the women quoted in that article said about Samus made me consider why I thought of her as an effective character. Just above these posts, Rol steps back and reconsiders his assumptions about gender in a few key ways, and I am immensely proud to have been part of that exchange, even though he could only come to those conclusions on his own.

Whether or not the reward was widespread is not material to the discussion. It's the fact that it exists, as incentive for high-level play, that is at issue.

The further Nintendo moves away from the core of what makes Samus engaging (she is the ultimate solitary ass-kicker who just happens to have lady bits) the more people are removed from being able to identify with her, and the worse the games become as a result, or at least the less Metroid-like they become.

Samus is not a great female character, she is a great character period in that she is the ultimate embodiment of the faceless hero who anyone can identify with. The more Nintendo loses sight of that, the more it erodes at what made her great in the past.

I still contend that high-level play is its own reward, and the suitlessness is merely there to signify as such, and has no deeper meaning intentional or otherwise. That could just be me, though. I'm the kind of person who often-viciously lambasts literary thinkers and some writers for trying to make every cigar into a symbol, with that being the reason for my distaste of such so-called "classics" as Catcher in the Rye

Your other points i agree with.

Nor did i mean to frame this in the form of a competition, just that i took issue with your initial assertion in a way that i could not identify, but that Rol verbalized perfectly. We all hopefully learn something here.