LinkMarioSamus posted... Honestly yeah that's a real head-scratcher, Samus idolizing a glorified Hate Sink so much. But from what I gather half the accusations of sexism aimed at Other M are more aimed at seeming desecration of a feminist icon than they are at actually making women look bad...not that Other M is free of that though.
Honestly I feel like you can rationalize a lot of the weird aspects of the game's plot but it amounts to doing the director's homework for him. No thanks. For those of you wondering how I did a complete 180 with Other M...look, sometimes you get excited for the hot new thing and it takes you a while for your hype to die down and realize it isn't that good. Plus I've seen a lot more movies since and I have a better grasp of good and bad storytelling. And Other M's plot is one of the few cases where I'd say calls of "character assassination" and "plot holes" are fully warranted since people bandy about those terms so much nowadays they have basically lost all meaning.
Part of it is also I feel like the game was never THAT hated, only marginally more than something like Jurassic Park III or Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and certainly nowhere near as intensely as something like The Last Jedi. It's just Nintendo rarely makes such a big misfire that continues to fascinate me somewhat, but even then they took Metroid back to the drawing board and it wound up paying off for many. And even then, I wound up watching Batman & Robin for a lot of the reasons I'm seemingly obsessed with Other M and didn't remotely regret it.
When I played Other M and completed all of it and experienced all of it's story, I never once felt it was "desecrating a feminist icon". I just looked at the story in this way: Samus didn't have a normal family growing up. Her family was Adam (who she viewed as a father, despite him not being a biological father, the guy is just her commanding officer) and the rest of the soldiers in her platoon as her brothers.
Now...
With that said...
Is Adam a good father figure? Oh, hell no. LMAO. I'd say he makes a very poor father figure. He's a commanding officer and makes it known he's a commanding officer. Samus is so eager to have a father figure she just latches on to this guy who she views as an unofficial father because he's really the closest thing she has to that. But in reality, he sucks as a father figure.
Hell...
He sucks as a commanding officer (several of his orders throughout the game are straight up incompetent as all hell. Especially during the infamous volcano scene where he orders Samus to go into the Volcanic area
WITHOUT any sort of special heat covering to keep her from overheating and dying and she's in that volcanic area for at least a good 20 minutes (I almost overheated and DIED several times playing as Samus in that area) and when she's about to leave the area and fight the boss, that's when the asshole decides.... "oh... oh, yeah... hey Samus... you have this special thing that will protect you from the heat and keep you cool. Look for that and turn that on". Like what the flying fuck?!? The asshole couldn't have told Samus that 20 minutes ago?!? What the fuck!!! That right there is just ONE example of his incompetence as a commander AND as a father since a good father would have
noticed she was near death several times and would have told her about the special shield that protects her from the extreme heat. The story of of Other M isn't about feminist / sexism stuff... the story of Other M is about extremely shitty fathers and shitty mothers and the daughters that have to put up with their bullshit. It's a deconstruction of Samus as well as a huge deconstruction for
Madeline Bergman Jr, A.K.A: Mother Brain, who gets resurrected but in the form of a young female human and in a way she is the unofficial child of the male and female scientists who resurrected her and see her as a new entity known as the young Madeline Bergman (NOT Madeline Bergman Senior who is held captive, but Madeline Bergman Junior). They see her as naive and figure they can take advantage of that. However...The IDIOT scientists who resurrected her into the form of a young woman... The fucking IDIOTS don't realize that Madeline Bergman Jr, despite being a human now, is still the evil MOTHER BRAIN!!! Her form may have been changed to a human and she was made young again and they raised her... but The IDIOTS don't take into account that she still has the same brain and is still Mother Brain and they all get fucked up, most straight up MURDERED, when Madeline / Mother Brain decides to take everything over for herself. Then, in a weird way, Madeline Bergman Jr / Mother Brain, is a HORRIBLE mother to all the other creatures with her... she is a shitty mother herself. Hell, they even have NIGHTMARE (one of the later bosses) screaming like a satanic BABY during the boss battle. In a weird way, Madeline (Mother Brain) is his mother, but she doesn't assist him and leaves him to die at the hands of Samus.and I won't even get started on Samus and her entire "The baby... the baby... blah, blah, blah" endless monologues. That's another can of worms that adds another layer to the overall concept of dealing with shitty mothers and shitty fathers in this game.
It's as if the writer of this game has issues with his parents and added in multiple layers of bad parenting into Other M
(which not only stands for "Other Metroid", but also "Other Mother Brain"). Other M isn't about feminist / sexist stuff and sexism was never the intentions of the writer. However, a weird.. very weird .... pseudo commentary of shitty mothers / shitty fathers / and their daughters is pretty much the center theme of the game. It's not a good Metroid story, even though some of it is pretty interesting from a psychological stand point.