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bryyo-data · 7 years

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Okay I'm pretty sure I swore off discourse when I started planet-bryyo but hey, it's Christmas!

With regards to the Samus-out-of-her-suit discussion, it seems to be a pretty subjective matter. I keep trying to put my opinions into words, and I think I've narrowed down the issues I have. So this is JUST my personal take on the entire thing: what I like from Samus, what I think works well and doesn't work well. Feel free to disagree and even drop a comment in the replies, I'm open to a change of opinion!

(FYI I stole all my images off Wikitroid to break up the text)

Seeing Samus outside her suit is a neat reward. In the original Metroid, it lead to the very significant reveal that Samus was a girl. A lot of games tease the woman-behind-the-suit with stuff like reflections in her visor, or a view of her eyes and expression during a cutscene, so the game culminating with her completely out of her suit can be very rewarding and awesome if done well.

While I have a bit of a preference for stuff like badass suit shots or Fusion's lore endings (which I think were Japanese exclusive so I've only ever see them via the wiki) it can be really fun to see Samus just chilling in her spare time. Zero Mission does this pretty well; she dons regular outfits, goes back to civilisation, and does normal stuff like drink at bars. It's nice to see her get some down time, and hint at what her life is like beyond her missions.

On the other hand, blatant this-scene-only-exists-to-show-off-her-boobs scenes aren’t my thing. Y'know, I’m willing to say a bit of sexiness probably doesn't do much harm. I'd argue that some of the scenes we see in the likes of Zero Mission and Fusion endings (like the above) are acceptably, as youtuber ShayMay puts it, "sexy not sexualised" and detract far less, if anything, from Samus' portrayal. Samus is pretty without it being obnoxiously sexualized. And hey, we're all human, loads of us like a bit of boob. They aren't of much interest to me but plenty of people love 'em. In Metroid, though, it just feels a bit excessive and unnecessary at times, and I think it can impact how Samus and certain scenes come across.

The zero suit segment of Metroid: Zero Mission was a really interesting part of the game, with that stealth mission being challenging and fun to play. That's just about the only thing I ever liked regarding the zero suit, because almost every other instance of its appearance (including cutscenes in Zero Mission itself) is used to scream "HEY LOOK GUYS, SEXY BUTT." Personally, I just don't think those shots mesh well with what Samus is generally portrayed like. There's better ways to go about showing her suitless, like the variety of civilian outfits she's been presented in, or even simply taking off the helmet as in Prime. She can look very beautiful in these shots, without it looking blatantly sexualised and a bit ridiculous. Compare the above bar scene to this thing which always really bugged me because it's literally just butt and sideboob and the way it's posed looks really weird.

I find it a bit jarring when we go from the imposing figure of the power suit to the zero suit, which tends to be used to scream boob and not much else. For the most part, suited Samus carries this gravitas that makes her very impactful as a character. Unfortunately, that gravitas pretty much instantly evaporates when she's put in a blatantly sexy shot on screen, no matter what she's saying or doing. Note that there IS a difference between "blatantly sexy shot" and "shot where Samus is not in her suit" and the latter would be no issue. We see that in the likes of Other M's ending, where she's in civilian clothing and can look nice without the camera lingering on her rear end too long and killing the impact. I have my issues with how Other M did things, but at least IIRC it didn't derail that ending moment with Anthony by making it weirdly sexy, unlike a few other parts of the game which I'll come to in a bit.

I don't think sexiness is automatically bad- see Bayonetta for what I guess is an example of sexiness done in a good, not-disempowering or disrespectful way? I guess? I haven't played those games. But sexiness in Metroid is put in places where it feels out of place. Zero Mission and Other M are bad offenders; the latter two Primes only have like one scene of it, so it's odd but can be more easily passed over if you aren't into the uncanny valley robot tiddy look from Prime 2 that haunts me to this day.

Hunters did the out-of-suit thing quite nicely too. Hunters stands as evidence that even the zero suit doesn't have to be inherently bad (though let's be real, it was designed for tiddy and it will probably be used for tiddy until the end of its days). Hunters was actually my intro to the franchise and the first time I personally saw the face of Samus Aran. If you beat Hunters before developing carpal tunnel syndrome, and if you access the hidden ending by fulfilling the Alimbic prophecy, the monster Gorea is destroyed in its final form and the Alimbic spirits telepathically contact Samus to thank her for what she has done. There's a lack of obnoxious proportions or questionable camera angles, so the scene comes across as meaningful as it's supposed to.

Prime did well in combining the thrill of "IT'S HER, IT'S THE PROTAGONISTS FACE" with the badassery of suited Samus, giving the scene quite a good impact. People remember that scene with fondness. It's a shame that so few scenes with non-suited Samus have managed to capture the same thing- like, imagine Samus standing on a hill in a long coat or some other awesome piece of apparel, gazing over a futuristic city like a watchful guardian. That would be sweet.

I personally liked the more realistic look they went for in Prime, despite technical limitations on the face model; it suited the tone of the game and the personality of Samus better than the weird anime kinda thing in Prime 3. You can get away with that look in the 2D games where everything has that art style, but all the other humans in Prime 3 were more realistic so it just looked out of place (we don't talk about Echoes...) but that's verging on a different issue entirely.

Zero Mission is one of my favourite games, possibly my favourite 2D game on par with Samus Returns at the minute. It did really well in a lot of stuff, but it also has a degree of booty with bad timing. The moment after Samus crashes and is left with nothing should be a fairly serious one- the situation is bleak, the task up ahead is daunting. The only hope you have is Samus' confidence and skill- and your skill as a player, which, if you're anything like me, you're starting to question in a moment of utter oh shit. This is also one of the few moments where Samus actually has some dialogue, which is all pretty straightforward with a hint of her good humour and personality.

That entire scene is framed over a very blatant butt shot. Maybe it's just me and I ought to care less, but I find it a bit harder to take the scene seriously because of it. Sexiness isn't inherently bad, there's a time and place for it, but is this serious scene really the time and place? I'm not even gonna pull up big words like objectification and such, I don't really know enough to say about those things, I just think it looks really silly there. If it needs to be included, couldn't it stay as the under-five-hours reward as per usual?

I could just be really bitter about that one, though.

Buff Samus is another related issue. I've seen loads of people saying "Samus looks good as she is!" and there's nothing wrong with that. I just thought I'd try and justify my own reasons for being a bit let down with Samus' current out-of-suit design. It's not so much the design in itself, nor the fact that she's not what the fandom fantasizes her being like. It's more related to the design's history and trends of change.

Personally, I'm just a little bitter that they felt the need to change Samus from the design they gave her in Super, because of WHY they changed it. In Super Metroids manual- and visibly in-game- Samus is toned and tall. These days, the media is gracing us with more tall and buff lady characters (Zarya from Overwatch, Brienne of Tarth from GOT, etc.) but when I was a kid I don't think I could name a single muscular lady outside of joke cartoon characters. Maybe sportswomen, but even then I can't think of any popular ones whose names I haven't learned in just the last few years. Doesn't mean there weren't any, just that I never came across any widespread ones, and I'm inclined to believe there weren't many around in popular media. Which made a taller, buffer Samus a little bit more of a revolutionary concept, important for the sake of seeing varied body types and such. It's important for people with those body types as much as it is for everyone else SEEING people with those body types and lifestyles.

Basically, as far as I can tell, Nintendo decided that "sex sells" and their major lady protag wasn't good enough without the sex appeal that comes with being skinny and shapely. They decided buff wasn't attractive, so they had to do things like cut her height down, slim her waist, bring out her chest, and make her ass stick out half the width of Zebes. Everything she was allowed to be before was stripped away and swapped out for your standard sexy woman's frame so people could titillate over her.

This only increased over time. Going from Zero Mission to Other M and the Smash Bros franchise, you can see this increasing trend of Samus getting promoted in-game and in pre-release material as sexier, up to Smash Bros 4 where so many Zero Suit promotional screenshots had her bent around like the token sexygirl in a forgettable Hollywood movie poster, posed for good view of her assets, or even put in freaking bunny ears which have their own set of connotations. Then there's the whole heels debate, which I'm not even gonna get into.

Her boobs are orbs.

If I'll say one positive- Samus Returns didn't do badly. Actually, big kudos to Samus Returns. All of its ending poses were all nods to other stuff for fans to recognise and they took time to make three different out-of-suit Samus outfits. Samus genuinely looks pretty cool in each of them. I really dig it!

I think some people in the fandom have the misconception that me- and others who share my opinion- don't like the idea of sexy women, or feminine women, being badass heroines. And that's simply not the case. People bring up Bayonetta as an example of "you can have sexy/pretty heroines" and while I can't really say a lot about her, as far as I can tell, her game really works well with it and is designed around her having the appearance and personality she has. Metroid is designed around a different sort of protagonist, in a different sort of atmosphere, and the sexualisation is kind of jarringly different from the surrounding material.

If Samus had always been a shortish, big-breasted woman with a strong personality and whose ass and boobs were never/scarcely highlighted in a sexy way, indicating that they exist just because she is a shapely person rather than because people won't survive the game without a boner, that would be sweet. In fact, I could really get behind that because I'm short as hell myself. It's secretly every short person's dream to have a cyborg suit which makes you tall enough to reach the top shelves and fight off everyone you're otherwise too small and weak to handle.

(Had Samus always been a sexy Bayonetta-esque character, I think the franchise would be very different in general. If that was part of the design, it would’ve worked, I guess.)

It's not Samus' size, shape, and proportions in themselves that have the effect of changing the scenes and character portrayal; it's the blatant fanservice and the way they're framing of these features to obviously have a very sexual appeal, and to me that doesn't sit well alongside the rest. When serious scenes are played over what looks like a SFW alt version of a porn pic you glance over while scrolling down the Metroid tag, it’s hard to see any of the impact that Samus had one scene earlier in her power suit. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little for effect, but the point still stands.)

This peaks in games like Other M (disclaimer: I'm not a fan, apologies to fans of the game) where tragic and meaningful scenes are played over shots of Samus’ butt… like, it’s obvious what they were going for here. I’ve never been a straight male member of the obvious target audience for this so I can’t attest to whether the dual boner-and-tears method works at making a scene memorable, but for the most part it just looks silly from my point of view.

When Samus loses her suit in Other M- e.g. when Adam dies- and all the subsequent shots focus in on her rear end, it really doesn't feel like just about any suited shot in any Metroid game ever, and not in a good way. Like I think I said before, it strips Samus of a degree of gravitas that is integral to her character. Then it tries to play the moment off with a degree of seriousness and dignity that framing her ass like that just doesn't quite have.

(Then again, Other M Samus' lack of gravitas comes across even in the scenes where she's in her suit; this time it's nothing to do with sexualisation or anything, just that her postures and movements don't display any confidence in what she's doing, which is weirdly different from her normal presentation but persists throughout the entire game. Some people like it, I don't think it works, each to their own.)

I've sorta lost track of where I was going so I'm gonna round off here. I'll emphasise that this is all my opinion and interpretation, I don't expect everyone to agree and I completely respect that. I think it's absolutely fair to love Samus while being critical of how her designers portray her and the wider impacts of those choices- at the end of the day, she is fictional and doesn't make these choices for herself. As the audience, we are the ones who feel those choices, for better or worse depending on your own view.

I'm a bit salty about how Samus is portrayed outside of her suit and wish the Samus on the inside was allowed to carry the weight that Samus in the suit does. That doesn't mean she can't be beautiful, but the active increase in her sexy traits and highlighting of those traits over the years is a little bit infuriating, especially considering what they were willing to do with her design early on in the timeline.

Feel free to drop comments, I'm going to try and steer clear of my own salt for the rest of the holidays but I'm keen to know what other people think!

#Metroid #Salt

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37h4n0l · 7 years

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1) Don't worry, I (aka the anon who started it all) don't think your reply came off as hostile at all. It's just so tiring when you want to get some things that bother you off your chest and then the obligatory 'but not all xyz do this or that' happens. Yes, I do know that, but it's a generalization. Not all, but enough to make you think it may even be the better part of the fandom. That being said, I agree with all your points against YOI. OK, so the victuuri relationship may be a cute and

(Rest under the cut) (I also hope no one will lynch me for being lazy and putting this out without doing anything about censoring shipnames but I’ll spam it with all the possible anti tags, fear not)

fluffy one that makes you feel good and warm inside or whatever, but is there really a need to write essays analyzing every single gesture or facial expression and then feel proud of your analytical skills, as if you've just discovered a new planet? No, there is not. It's not that deep; it's actually as straightforward a show as it can be. The bashing of otayuri and pliroy is one thing and it has more to do with the general moral poilce anti trend that is spreading everywhere, so I wouldn't attribute it solely to the YOI fandom. Now on the other hand, the bashing of pliroy just because it's contradictory to otayuri, one of the holy doublet of YOI ships, is something that bothers me personally. It's almost as if shipping anything that directly contradicts victuuri/otayuri is a blasphemy in this fandom and generally looked down upon. I've actually seen someone outright ask why would anyone ship pliroy when otayuri exists/is canon/is clearly a better and more healthy option for Yuri etc. So, this and the constant victuuri/otayuri wank, while all the other characters/smaller ships are mostly a background noise to it; it really seems to me as if 5 fanarts out of 10 on my dashboard would feature victuuri, 4 would feature otayuri and there's only one left for other pairings (one-track-mindedness at its finest). And there's of course the fact that most YOI fans seriously think that victuuri is the first canon gay couple in the history of anime, that the anime itself is revolutionary and progressive, that victuuri is a prefect representation, that YOI is the actual anime of the year, because popularity doesn't lie, and if you dare to disagree with all of those, then you're clearly homophobic and whatnot. Plus, there's the invading of the tags unrelated to YOI (not even for the purpose of recommending other titles but to say something along the lines of 'if shit like xyz got a second season, then YOI deserves at least seven' - actually seen something like that with my own eyes) or hijacking of the serious topics (like the oppression of sexual minorities) and making them all about YOI. And that's just the top of the list of what the YOI fandom is guilty of. But hey, it's alright, because it's 'not all' YOI fans. Siigh. Sorry it got so long, but ugh. Sometimes I wish someone would just delete YOI from existence so that we would be spared of all this saltiness. As for 91d, you're probably right about everything but still, I'll never be able to understand why anyone would just voluntarily turn off their thought processes and comprehension skills just because of some personal biases, especially when it comes to a show such as 91d, that requires at least the bare minimum of thinking and analyzing. But whatever, I guess people nowadays are just too used to having everything spelled out to them and handed on a silver plattter (ex. they should've had it explicitly stated on-screen that Avilio and Nero didn't hate each other).

This goes for all the ‘not all’ arguments; the important thing is, as you said, how widespread a behaviour is statistically within a community, but also whether the other members acknowledge that it’s happening or not. I know it’s easy to take it personally when you hear someone complain about a fandom you’re in, but at that point it really only depends on wording (which is deliberately harsh when someone is just venting, it’s just the way it is).

About meta; yeah, I find a lot of it superfluous as well, as I’ve said before. And by this I don’t mean it should be eliminated from the face of the planet, just that I don’t personally put the 2934892348th detailed explanation on why vn and yk love each other so much in the same ‘tier’ as, say, speculations about the second season or character parallelisms and stuff like that. It’s shipperwankery in the end and I don’t think me making fun of it harms anyone? The only thing I worry about is that it’s hard to separate banter from an actual serious opinion from time to time (could be about how I express myself? Probably yes). No, for the record, I don’t want to exterminate anyone who makes extensive posts about vn’s lustful glare. It’s just... There’s too much of it. Way too much. By the way, the ring controversy and the reaches made there will never not be funny, sorry not sorry.

A bit of a tangent on the otayuri-pliroy conflict; it always seemed so weird to me how similar the two ships are aesthetically? (Considering people keep confusing the two on fanart, I’d say that’s a major fuckup in terms of JJ’s and Otabek’s character design, but that might just be me). I keep getting the impression that they wanted the pliroy bait to go somewhere but then changed their mind for whatever reason and created otayuri as kind of a ‘tamer substitute’. But this is besides the point; it all brings me back to my personal beef with this tendency of positing ‘sugary sweet’ as the only acceptable standard for a relationship because... people are more sensitive nowadays? I can only guess. Viktuuri and otayuri got tied together for some reason, it’s like they come in a package and everyone who ships one has to run with the other as well.

I grieve for the background characters and smaller ships as well, anon. Just imagine the sheer crack potential; and instead, everything gets pushed in the back in favour of the same things over and over. The things that could’ve been: victurio (the underage ship that tumblr will fucking lynch me for), emil/michele, sara/mila, georgi/yurio (yes I do love my crack), chris/victor, chris/that guy we saw in his room, yuuri’s sister/literally anyone (because I like her) and the list could go on and on. But this is not even always about the ship itself; it’s the dynamics, those are what popularizes things. Even when there are ships in other fandoms that have been popular for a longer time, there’s a tendency on tumblr to make them very mild and fluffy. I’m not saying there’s anything we can do about this, nor that something should be done about it, all I’m in opposition to is people who claim it’s the ‘right’ way to do shipping because it’s ‘healthier’ or something, as you put it.

Because popularity doesn’t lie

Thank you, this is exactly how I’d word it as well. The crux of this issue isn’t yoi being objectively good or bad, it’s whether popularity implies that something is good, or not. Or what ‘good’ even means in this context. My personal (salty) opinion is that there are anime that could be enjoyed just as much as (if not more than) yoi if only they got more exposure. I’m not talking about 91d either because I’ve already explained in detail what the problem with advertising it was in the previous post. And yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re talking about that certain addition to the Chechnya post. I can see it was well-intentioned but it was... well... a little bit out of place, to put it in euphemisms? ‘Too soon’, as they say? But, in the end, I’m sort of glad that yoi exists because if not anything else, it can be considered a massive social experiment, an example of fandom behaviour. And if it made some people happy, then I wish them all the best. The fixation with it will go away with time too, eventually.

#anti yoi #anti viktuuri #anti vikturi #anti victuuri #anti victuri #anti yuri on ice #anti otayuri #not really anti otayuri but im tagging it for safety #rambles #thank you anon #Anonymous

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