1. Actually, that's almost exactly what subservience is: following orders, particularly with someone who has no actual authority over you.

2. Samus objected to his orders many times and left because she disagreed with him. He was not infallible to her. This creates the problem that she feels like she owes him something because later in life she's decided she's wrong for having disagreed, even if disagreeing was the only moral thing to do from her eprspective. This portrays her as inherently subservient to his wishes and given to filial piety in a way that is problematic in the context of prior portrayals of her character.

3. Being out of his grace should have jack diddly shit to do with how she behaves when it comes time to kill shit.

4. You think it makes sense that she wouldn't activate the Varia Suit when she's going through a volcano area? Or that it makes sense that she wouldn't activate the Gravity Suit when going through an area with intensely harmful gravitational fluctuations, which makes it much more difficult for her to fight? You think it makes sense that she would hold back on using the ice beam when her power beam isn't hurting creatures made out of fire? That doesn't make sense, and if taken in the context of the story it means that she isn't just subservient to Adam, she's completely subsumed her will in favor of his own. Tha'ts not just problematic, it's fucking horrific. That's some Stepford Wives-level shit right there.

5. The way the history is laid out is not in keeping with past portrayal of Samus's character, Samus's relationship with the Galactic Federation, or even Samus's relationship with Adam as portrayed in Fusion.

6. Samus's breakdown made perfect sense in the context of this game, which speaks more to how horrendous the context of this game is in terms of her characterization.

7. There is nothing inherently wrong with a female character who is presented as a blank emotional slate, especially when the few hints we get about her suggest that even though she is a human with human sorrows and regrets she is still an unstoppable bad-ass bounty hunter who wipes out entire species and blows up planets on a regular basis.

There is no defensible position from which you can expect people to find this characterization in keeping with her character as we've come to know here, and there is no defensible position from which you can expect people to not find this characterization problematic from a femininist perspective.

1. He has authority over her because she decided to allow it given the circumstances and her wanting to show Adam that she isn't some wily teen any more. She wanted him to see her as a respectable soldier, which is demonstrated towards his end when he vocalizes how amazing she really is. Its not subservience in a negative intention but in a military order. If she was a man you wouldn't even mention this.

2. Samus states in the story that she objected out of childish reasoning not the level headed logic of a commander. She feels bad about this past and is over-complying with his orders in an effort to make up for these transgressions.

3. Humans seek approval from those they highly respect and Samus' past actions pushed her to strive for that approval. Was it needed? No. but, that doesn't mean someone won't try to seek it for their own self worth.

4. All of this is just part of the game. Does any Metroid game ever really make sense that she loses ALL of her capabilities in the beginning of each game? really? Its just Metroid. Every game has had her tough it without some suit at first and then its far easier on the way back once that suit is earned. In this game the fact is she decided to work with his rules and left everything. Granted, it makes more sense in regards to just the weapons than it does the suits, but that's just part of the game. No different really in terms of finding the 'lost' items later.

5. Never played Fusion so I have no real clue on this except that on the games I've played she was just a silent hero and did take some small orders  from the federation in the Prime games. So I think the story line fits in just fine.

6. It is a bad scene, but really not the way I see the game in its entirety.

7. This game is no different. It adds a human level to her character that has always been missing and I think fits perfectly fine with her identity and does not remove her bad-assed-ness. She clearly can still kick ass and even the cut scenes show that when it sets you up to fight Ridley etc.

I still think the perception that Samus must be a silent killer is a stereotypical portrayal of women soldiers based in Hollywood. There is no reason a strong-willed great fighter that Samus is cannot be feminine.

Not only it did, but it didn't help even an inch to take Wii sales out of the hole. In other words, it failed as a game, it ruined the Metroid franchise, it failed in sales as well as a system seller the Wii so much need now. I hope Sakamoto just gets fired.

1. He has authority over her because she decided to allow it given the circumstances and her wanting to show Adam that she isn't some wily teen any more. She wanted him to see her as a respectable soldier, which is demonstrated towards his end when he vocalizes how amazing she really is. Its not subservience in a negative intention but in a military order. If she was a man you wouldn't even mention this.

2. Samus states in the story that she objected out of childish reasoning not the level headed logic of a commander. She feels bad about this past and is over-complying with his orders in an effort to make up for these transgressions.

3. Humans seek approval from those they highly respect and Samus' past actions pushed her to strive for that approval. Was it needed? No. but, that doesn't mean someone won't try to seek it for their own self worth.

4. All of this is just part of the game. Does any Metroid game ever really make sense that she loses ALL of her capabilities in the beginning of each game? really? Its just Metroid. Every game has had her tough it without some suit at first and then its far easier on the way back once that suit is earned. In this game the fact is she decided to work with his rules and left everything. Granted, it makes more sense in regards to just the weapons than it does the suits, but that's just part of the game. No different really in terms of finding the 'lost' items later.

5. Never played Fusion so I have no real clue on this except that on the games I've played she was just a silent hero and did take some small orders  from the federation in the Prime games. So I think the story line fits in just fine.

6. It is a bad scene, but really not the way I see the game in its entirety.

7. This game is no different. It adds a human level to her character that has always been missing and I think fits perfectly fine with her identity and does not remove her bad-assed-ness. She clearly can still kick ass and even the cut scenes show that when it sets you up to fight Ridley etc.

I still think the perception that Samus must be a silent killer is a stereotypical portrayal of women soldiers based in Hollywood. There is no reason a strong-willed great fighter that Samus is cannot be feminine.

Not only it did, but it didn't help even an inch to take Wii sales out of the hole. In other words, it failed as a game, it ruined the Metroid franchise, it failed in sales as well as a system seller the Wii so much needs now. I hope Sakamoto just gets fired.

And on that point, it really would have broken the authorization system altogether, because the suits in the past have worked like keys.

"This room is too hot." "Don't go there."
"I can't jump or move well in here." "Don't go there."

In this game's case, they were trying to demonstrate the significance of the absence of those items (like the dash through the volcano, health steadily ticking down, or the events before and during the fight with Nightmare). If the system were followed logically, it would break the usefulness of the suits, as you wouldn't really understand what the gravity or varia suits *did* without knowing what life was like without them.

The authorization system was not a poor game mechanic, because in terms of pure gameplay, it was much the same as all Metroids before it: you encounter stuff you can't do, get the item, and suddenly you can do it, just that this game took all the discovery out of it. This game *told* you that you needed a Power Bomb to open this long before you could possibly get them, and *gave* stuff to you once you were ready for it, but the latter is something that all other games did. After giving you a taste of how much life sucks without this item, they would *give* it to you, just in previous cases, you had the sense of having discovered it.

Like with the Varia suit. Without Authorization, there would have just been a chamber near the top of the volcano with a Chozo statue or whatever where the Suit would conveniently be, then it would devolve into that boss fight. In Other M's case, it was just "oh, here it is."

I do not argue that Authorization is a bad mechanic in terms of gameplay, but in terms of narrative it is atrocious.

Mine is not a direct disagreement, rather i'm saying that they were irreconcilable (though that means they should have either changed the mechanic or changed the story). I'm saying it was impossible to have Authorization make sense *and* demonstrate the usefulness of the suits (or the grapple beam for that matter), so that he mangled the story a bit in order to justify the continued existence of those items

Which does demonstrate his poor skills as a writer. The paralells to George Lucas are unnerving, actually, given that his previous work with oversight, has been excellent, but when given total control, not so much.

1. I would mention it if the man had been previously established as a lone and solitary bad-ass who was subservient to exactly no one. But since you agree that she is behaving in a subservient way, this point can safely be dropped, save to say this: Samus being in a situation where she's agreeing to be subservient for no real reason doesn't make sense for her character, and it reeks of a situaiton that was drummed up specifically to portray Samus in that light. It's ridiculous.

2. Samus stating it does not justify it, it just further illustrates how big a departure this is from her established character.

3. That doesn't justify the decision to take the story in that direction either. In fact, it just highlights how ill-fitting it is in the context of Metroid. "The word he intentionally used - outsider - pierced my heart." No.

4. You can't use game mechanics to handwave shitty narrative when Sakamoto has stated explicitly that narrative and mechanics are intrinsically intertwined. Samus doesn't use her Varia Suit, Gravity Suit, Speed Boost, Grapple Beam, Ice Beam, or any other primarily non-destructive weapons because Adam didn't tell her to, even though not using them has the potential to kill her. You can't rationalize that. There is no defense for that aspect of the narrative.

5. Samus took orders because she was being paid, and because her employers (they are not commanders, they are employers) never attempt to limit the way in which she operates. That is a large and stunning distance from what happens in Other M.

6. It fits the rest of the game perfectly.

7. It changes her character significantly in the addition on unnecessary plot elements that were engineered specifically to eradicate previous assumptions about the character (something which Sakamoto said very explicitely in an interview with Gamespot).

8. That's not the typical portrayal of female soldiers. The typical female soldier is the "tough bitch" whose sexuality is a sticking point and is constantly trying to prove herself to the men around her, or constantly trying to one-up them. There was nothing stereotypical in Samus's prior portrayals unless you think silent protagonists are a stereotype (they're not; they are a trope)