RolStoppable said:
Seeing Samus without her armor at the end of a game hardly differs to seeing bigger mansions in Luigi's Mansion after completing the game with more money. The former can be interpreted as reward for men who like to look at women while the latter can be interpreted as reward for people who like to look at big houses. Taken to the extreme, the former is sexist while the latter makes greedy bastards who like to walk all over others to get richer feel good. But...
They are just video games. Essentially, you get to see more the better you played. And that's it.
We live in the age of the internet which is full of porn. It's outright ridiculous to view Metroid games as designed for men just because you can see Samus without her armor at the end of the games. The implication is that guys play a video game for a couple of hours to see a short scene or picture of a woman without her armor. What a load of nonsense. That's not why anybody plays the games. It also doesn't make Samus worse as a character. She's a woman, why shouldn't we be allowed to see her? What's wrong with her being portrayed as beautiful on top of being powerful? The only people who could have problems with this must be feminists or ugly chicks.
But this defense only applies to the first three Metroid games and the Metroid Prime trilogy. When Samus hops around in her Zero Suit or when she talks during the middle of the game as in Fusion, Zero Mission and the worst offender Other M, that's when her character is damaged in various ways. The games shouldn't be interrupted by dialogues and monologues, because these things weren't in the first batch of games. They do not belong in the Metroid series and additional information must be fed to the player like it was done in the Metroid Prime. Echoes and Corruption have characters that give you instructions which is still acceptable, although preferably Metroid games should be without them. Isolation and loneliness are staples of the series, after all.
As for the Zero Suit specifically, it's easily the worst section in Zero Mission. I don't think anyone really likes it, it's simply accepted because it doesn't take away too much from an otherwise well made game. Other M is wrong on so many levels, but that has been talked about enough in the last couple of years. Simply put, Other M is a different game in a Metroid coat.
Lastly, I have no idea where I am going with this post, but I have written all this and don't want it to go to waste. So here it is, all posted. |
The fact that you didn't really know where you were going with this is pretty clear by the end of it, yeah; you don't seem to have a larger point to make.
More, you hitched onto a single instance, one paragraph, in the original post of this thread, and are replying specifically to it. Congratulations! You jsut narrowed the scope of the discussion by 95%. Instead of having a frank and earnest discussion about the part of this that I and a few others found legitimately interesting - that Samus at her best is essentially without gender - you're trying to turn this into a conversation about the idea of male privilege as pertains to video games as a medium. This particular topic is larger and more far-reaching than this topic or my hands or my patience are able to support, but since you seem to be so keen on that particular point I will reply to your post to the best of my ability, but this is the only reply you will get about this jittery load of neuroses.
These parts I will reply to in segments, for the sake of ease of reading.
| Seeing Samus without her armor at the end of a game hardly differs to seeing bigger mansions in Luigi's Mansion after completing the game with more money. |
Absolute hogwash. You have acknowledged that both of these things are framed as rewards, but that is not enough to say that there is meaningful equivalency between the two things. There is thematic consistency in Luigi's reward for skillful play being a more lavish version of what he was promised in the first place. No such consistency exists in the case of Samus with her armor off, so the argument of "It's a reward for its own sake" cannot be supported by parallels with an ending in which there are no real parallels.
This is, in fact, an excellent example of how the sexualization of Samus's character in the endings goes specifically against the thematic strengths of the character presented up to that point.
The former can be interpreted as reward for men who like to look at women while the latter can be interpreted as reward for people who like to look at big houses. Taken to the extreme, the former is sexist while the latter makes greedy bastards who like to walk all over others to get richer feel good. But...
They are just video games. Essentially, you get to see more the better you played. And that's it. |
This is just what I wanted: a discussion about privilege. No, wait, that other thing, why would you do this
The former is a reward for players who play skillfully, the latter is a reward for players who play skillfully; however, the latter is also a reward for Luigi, and our fulfillment is exemplified in his fulfillment. No such parallel exists with Samus. The use of Samus's sex as a prize is problematic in a very real sense - though that's not where I wanted to take this conversation - because it commodifies the character. I'm not making an argument against rewarding people with sex, I'm arguing against the idea of that particular reward in the context of Metroid, because it doesn't make any sense when looked at the goals of the player and the character oevr the course of the game.
Why should sex be a reward in a haunted house game where you're fighting your way to the basement to kill the fucking devil? That is what Metroid is, but in space. Samus is the only character there; when she addresses someone else, it is me. We are not served by being thus addressed; she is not served by addressing us. The only thing we gain is Samus in her underwear, and that is not enough. The game needs to give us more than that; we need to demand better than that.
| We live in the age of the internet which is full of porn. It's outright ridiculous to view Metroid games as designed for men just because you can see Samus without her armor at the end of the games. |
Holy shit are these two sentences unrelated how did you manage to drop them right next to each other!
If they are related, your conclusion is intellectually bankrupt; Metroid and this reward system predates the popularity of the internet, and even if it didn't that doesn't actually take away from the idea that this reward system is tailored specifically for men. You're not arguing that the reward system isn't set toward men: we know it is. You acknowledged that already! What are you even arguing? If the reward system is tailored for men, then the only people being rewarded for playing are men, which means that either the designers thought it unnecessary to reward women or oh wait that's the only explanation by default.
| The implication is that guys play a video game for a couple of hours to see a short scene or picture of a woman without her armor. What a load of nonsense. That's not why anybody plays the games. |
You're doing yourself no favor by arguing absolutes. That's not why people pick up Metroid, no, because sex has never been leveraged to sell Metroid outside of Japan (and Other M) but it is why many people try over and over to cut down their times. This was much truer in the NES and SNES eras than it is now, but it definitely happened.
| It also doesn't make Samus worse as a character. |
This is where we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this conversation is about. This is what we are driven to: you are os hooked on the idea that I'm solely trying to villify the sexualization of Samus that you've missed out on what actually matters in making Samus effective.
The sexualization is problematic on its own because it reduces the character to a reward in and of herself, which is bad for a hero of this type. However, it's only a single component of the fact that Samus functions best as a non-character, as a slate onto which we project oruselves and our own understandings of the game and the environments in which we participate. We are the ones fighting the monsters. We are the ones who defeat Ridley, we are the ones who kill Mother Brain, we are the ones who face down the Metroids. Samus is a platform on which we operate. Ideally when Samus takes off her helmet and reveals how much hair she has (like a lady), it doesn't actually remove us from the experience: it is like Metroid Prime, where she reflects what we are feeling, and we are still Samus in that moment.
Samus is not a character. The more we see of her, the worse off we are, because invariably the people in charge of her manage to fuck up what makes her effective. THey have managed to make it work properly all of once, and that was in Metroid Prime.
| She's a woman, why shouldn't we be allowed to see her? |
I kind of just did a spittake. Are you aware that you jsut phrased that as you being entitled to seeing what a person looks like with their clothes off because they have a vagina? You cannot mean this. You're talking about the idea that there's no reason for us not to look at her, rather than the idea that we're entitled to look at her because she's a woman. I already addressed that, but this sentence is terrible.
| What's wrong with her being portrayed as beautiful on top of being powerful? The only people who could have problems with this must be feminists or ugly chicks. |
There is nothing wrong with marrying beauty and power. That does not mean it belongs in Metroid.
I'm trying to figure out if you actually mean the second sentence, here. It is making me very sad.
The rest of your post can be summed up as "as it was in the beginning, so should it be forever." That is pretty much your argument as it exists now, for the entirety of this.
But it's not good enough. Metroid Prime did it better than Metroid. When it's done better, the way that does it better needs to be adhered to.
