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ghoultyrant · 1 year

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Corpse Bride

Corpse Bride is a movie where I always liked the visuals and concept more than the execution; rewatching the movie as an adult has made it easier to articulate why I don't like the story, but hasn't really changed that impression from my childhood -or more accurately it's exacerbated it more than anything else, as stuff I hadn't caught or failed to properly contextualize as a child feeds right back into it.

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Lord Barkis -the villain of the story- is almost impressive in how total the movie's mishandling of him is. At essentially every step the movie relies on contrivance and coincidence, ignoring perfect opportunities to have him actually do things; when Victor goes off to practice his vows and through sheer blind chance stumbles into Emily's death site, the movie could have had it be Barkis talking Victor into going somewhere quiet to practice his vows, with Barkis intending to murder Victor to get him out of the way; in such a case, it would be natural that Victor would end up where Emily died, because it would just be Barkis falling back on a location he's previously had success at literally getting away with murder in, said murder being of Emily. This would make Barkis and Emily both returning to this region at basically the same time natural instead of blind coincidence, provide an actual reason for Victor to end up in a position to accidentally propose to Emily instead of Random Blind Wandering happening to do so through sheer chance, and crucially it would actually have Barkis be actively villainous and antagonistic to Victor; in the actual movie we got, Barkis shows up for no clear reason, conveniently for Barkis Victor vanishes and is seen in the arms of another woman, and Barkis steps gracefully into this opportunity sheer blind chance has presented to him -the movie never attempts to suggest he had an actual plan, even though it's clear we're supposed to look askance upon him showing up for Victoria's wedding, and this would neatly solve this omission, among myriad other benefits.

In general, while the movie clearly wants us to think of Barkis as a horrible slimy person, it spends a shockingly long portion of the movie with him just being kind of randomly present for no clear reason and doing things for no particular reason. It takes until quite late in events for Barkis to have crimes meaningfully pinned on him worse than 'seems to have an epic case of Resting Bitch Face'. Even once it does finally start to really pin Actual Bad Behavior on him, it... does so clunkily and often nonsensically, where sure he's doing unpleasant things, but it's often confusing how a given Actual Bad Thing is supposed to make sense for him to want to do and make sense for him to expect to work out -him trying to push to marry Victoria so he can get the family's money (That they don't have, but he's unaware of this) is yeah Not Nice, but since he doesn't try to murder Victor or anything of the sort, this is just him hoping Victor will in fact stay away long enough to pull this off.

And once it's time for the movie to have Lord Barkis brought to justice, it of course fumbles things for no clear reason -once Emily recognizes him and we see the dead are all offended by his actions and ready to form a lynch mob, we get the dead Elder inexplicably asserting out of nowhere that the dead must abide by 'the laws' of the living (Never mind that the dead coming to the surface to attend Emily and Victor's wedding is a giant violation of any such notion), which is somehow enough to get the dead to back off, at which point Lord Barkis drinks the goblet of poison Victor was supposed to drink, not because anybody tricked him into doing so or anything, but because the movie wants Lord Barkis to die.

And then the undead lynch mob goes after him, because he's dead I guess; this entire sequence of events is wholly unnatural and contrived, like basically everything involving Lord Barkis being on-screen, and it's wildly unnecessary.

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The final conclusion of 'Victor and Victoria getting married is a happy ending', displacing the Emily/Victor romance plot, is incredibly fucked.

The first problem is that Victor and Victoria have as their principle problem that their parents are awful people, with this marriage being clearly just the latest example of their parents forcing them to do something they don't actually want to do. Victoria is being sold by her parents to get money, Victor is being sold by his parents to get a title, and their marriage will forever exist in the awful shadow of both sets of parents. That's not a happy ending; Victor marrying Emily and escaping to the land of the dead could be a happy ending for him and Emily (Though Victoria would be very much left in the lurch by default, since the default assumption is she gets forcibly married to Lord Barkis and then murdered), but 'Victor and Victoria marry' leaves them trapped under the thumbs of their parents.

Related to this is that the story mishandles the issue of affirming the genuineness of their feelings for each other. When a story wants two people to be set up for marriage against their will but still end up falling for each other, the two default scenarios are to either have the would-be couple meet without knowing the other person is their prospective partner so we can see that they do in fact spontaneously get along as a wholly natural thing, or alternatively it's to have the couple committed to hating each other, so that when they ultimately start going 'actually, we rather like each other' we can be reasonably certain this is a natural feeling since it sprung up in spite of their overt intentions. With Victor and Victoria, though, their relationship has cast over it the question of whether they're really fond of each other, or if they're both just so used to buckling under pressure and trying to make the best of whatever their parents are making them do that they are actively working to convince themselves that this is fine; Victoria in particular explicitly talks about wanting a marriage based on love, where it's all too possible that Victor and Victoria are talking themselves into the idea that they love each other not out of genuine fondness but just to try to make Victoria feel less bad about being forced into a loveless marriage. ("Well, we aren't marrying each other because of love, but if we're married and ultimately happen to love each other, that's close enough, right?")

Then there's the issue of the movie's attempts at interpersonal connections; put simply, Victor and Emily spend more time with each other and have stronger evidence within that time of getting along well. The movie has Victor bond over the piano with both Victoria and Emily, but where Emily and Victor are able to spontaneously engage in cooperative piano playing, riffing on each other's tunes and ultimately producing something harmonious, Victoria would like to play the piano but doesn't know how thanks to her controlling mother; Victor and Victoria get a moment of empathy where they commiserate in how awful their respective parents are, while Victor and Emily have a skill and interest in common that ends up showing a less obvious synergy between the two exists. And where the piano scene is basically the only time Victor and Victoria get a connection at all, for Victor and Emily the time in the land of the dead is full of such moments. (In spite of Victor shrieking and trying desperately to get out of the situation, even!)

The movie attempts to suggest that Victor marrying Emily would be wrong because she's dead, plus because her marrying him would be replicating the crime that scarred her so of being denied her marriage, but these both fall very, very flat. (In addition to doing nothing to address the whole 'Victor and Victoria marrying is a Bad End for both of them' issue)

The deadness issue falls flat because Corpse Bride's setting is one in which death is not the end, and in fact seems to be a pretty positive experience by default; Mayhew is the bluntest, most direct example of this principle in action, where Victor is immediately trying to console Mayhew now that he's dead and Mayhew waves it off because he actually feels a lot better now that he's dead. (His deadly cough is gone) But it's very much the default, where the dead are a relaxed and cheerful bunch and it seems that once you're dead you're just immortal and can have fun with your unlife. The worst you can say is that being dead means generally being unattractive and sometimes inconvenienced by things like a limb getting caught on something and being lost, and the dead themselves don't lament any of this (Emily could have complained about having 'lost her beauty' or something, but such a notion is never raised as a possibility by anyone) so it's difficult to take it seriously. You could argue that Victor shouldn't rush to his death because he can't take it back and he'll always end up in the grave with Emily someday, but acting like dying for Emily is some great sacrifice doesn't work in the setting -especially since, as noted earlier, it would get him away from his awful parents.

The 'replicating the crime' issue falls flat because the context is completely different. Emily thought she was making off with someone she loved under the cover of darkness because her father had forbidden the romance; what was stolen from her was the promise of Forbidden Love, something she actually wanted in spite of surrounding disapproval. Victoria and Victor, meanwhile, are set to be married because their parents are shoving their heads together and screaming "NOW KISS!!", where Victoria explicitly wants to marry for love and Victor expresses not-far-off sentiments in interactions with his parents. (Pointing out he's never even met this girl, which his mother considers to be a good thing -she clearly thinks no woman in her right mind would like him on his own merits) If Victor and Victoria had met, been forbidden to marry, tried to sneak off together, and then we got Victor accidentally proposing to Emily, then sure, she'd be inflicting upon Victoria roughly what she suffered and was traumatized by. But that's not what's happening.

This isn't even getting into the classist metaphor undertones where the dead are largely treated as being literally regular folks as contrasted with the living characters being primarily composed of monied individuals; in this context, the Moral Of The Story is 'don't marry people much poorer than you, even if you love them'. Which. Um.

At this point it makes perfect sense to me that Corpse Bride fanfic defaults so heavily to pairing up Victor and Emily -it really is the less fucked couple to cheer on.

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So yeah. I like the visuals and audio, and there are moments of the writing I do like, but... as a kid I didn't like the story, and as an adult I actually dislike the story more. (The weird classism undertone went entirely over my head as a kid)

#corpse bride #movie #childhood memories

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ghoultyrant · 1 year

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Self-fulfailing prophecy

No, I didn't misspell 'self-fulfilling'.

'Self-fulfailing prophecy' is a term I use in my head a lot in regards to video game design and storytelling intentionality to encapsulate a phenomenon whereby the creator(s) believing something to be true of their work directly leads to the work lacking that quality.

In a video game design context, you'll see devs convinced that, say, the mechanics of their game are such that swords are the best weapon type and axes the worst, whereby they proceed to give axes extra advantages and preemptively nerf swords with specialized counters and less access to cool bonuses on the swords. Often, even if their initial belief was right-ish (Which is far from guaranteed), the collective result of their efforts to counteract the intrinsic advantage they consider to exist results in the final state of the game being the exact opposite of their beliefs anyway: in this example, axes end up the best weapon and swords the worst. This kind of thing sometimes persists several games in a row, where you can tell the devs are so convinced of this belief that instead of making Game 1 where axes are king and going 'whoops' and course-correcting, instead Game 2 and Game 3 just stack on still more advantages to axes and still more nerfs to swords.

In a storytelling context, you get creators deciding that, for example, some character is a Heroic Good Person, and having decided this is so they stop scrutinizing whether they're really depicting a Heroic Good Person. Particularly common is deciding that some character is an Unsympathetic Evil Monster With No Redeeming Value, and as a direct result simply not noticing that they've actually written a complete human being in a crappy situation who, understandably, is unhappy with how awful their situation is, where their unpleasant behavior really comes across as, y'know, not evil.

Even aside morality per se, this kind of thing crops up pretty readily; a creator intends a character to be 'likable', so they don't stop and think about how the behavior they're depicting fits into its context, and suddenly what's intended to be an affable and friendly individual ends up coming across as callous or mocking because they keep up their friendly routine in circumstances it's pretty inappropriate for.

I often get the impression most people are more willing to 'meet in the middle' than I am, when it comes to characterization and so on, where they see the signals a character is meant to be X, so they read them as X unless the narrative is particularly dissonant on that point. I've never been able to make myself do that, though; you can't 'meet in the middle' on game design. If the devs made axes godly and swords garbage, no amount of respecting the devs' intentions is going to make those facts stop being true -not unless you hack the game to make them true.

And honestly, this applies just as well to storytelling; if you're reading a character the intended way by filling in with things that were absolutely not intended by the creator(s), that's in some sense the storytelling version of a romhack: you're changing things to make them work in spite of the creator(s)'s intentions.

The original material is still a self-fulfailing prophecy.

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ghoultyrant · 1 year

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The Legend of Zelda: Music is Magic

One of the elements I've always found striking about the first six mainline Zelda games, which other fans seem to respond to but not consciously recognize, is that each game places music as having power in its own right.

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In Ocarina of Time, you of course get a magical musical instrument, the title Ocarina of Time. It's easy to thoughtlessly fill in with the idea that it's not that music is magical, but that this specific musical instrument is magical -it is, after all, and you explicitly need it in particular to open the Door of Time, and the most obviously magical set of songs (The warp songs) are simply not available to the player until after they've acquired the Ocarina of Time.

Similarly, it's easy to gloss over several of the pre-adult songs as not really intended to be magical. Epona's Song is just a song Epona likes, and the fact that she teleports to your location when it's used as an adult is pretty clearly a convenience or simplification, with the camerawork and all attempting to make it look like she just came running when called. Zelda's Lullaby is largely used as a password to prove you have a connection to the royal family. The Sun's Song shifting day to night and night to day is easy to read as a convenience for the player that isn't really meant to be true in-universe. Saria's Song invoking telepathy to let you talk to Saria is similarly easy to excuse as the devs wanting you to be able to get hints anywhere, rather than really meant to be in-universe fact, especially since playing Saria's Song prompts Navi to ask if you want to talk to her. (To get a reminder of what to do next)

But actually the Sun's Song, while its day/night effect can be excused as player convenience, additionally has the ability to paralyze the undead; that's not player convenience given a thin in-universe justification. Furthermore, the backstory of the Composer Brothers developing this song makes no attempt to suggest that the song requires a specific instrument to have its power: the song is explicitly said to have this power. And you can use it with the Fairy Ocarina, which is never suggested to be magical.

So actually, no, this song is magical. And there's a fair argument to be made that the warp songs are implicitly in the same boat; the player doesn't explicitly see Sheik warping in with these songs, but Sheik's ability to jump about as needed -including somehow getting to the Desert Colossus without having the Eye of Truth!- makes a lot more sense if you assume these warp songs work for just anyone. And if Sheik has been using them, that neatly explains why she knows them to teach you them; you can run with all the 'destiny' stuff for why, where Sheik only bothered to learn them to teach them to the Hero of Time, but the story really just makes more sense if the magic is inherent to the songs rather than the songs being a passcode to trigger the Ocarina of Time in particular to do magic things.

And I started out by saying music has power in its own right rather than using the word 'magic', because while for example interpreting Saria's Song as not having supernatural power is probably fair, it's still a key part of the game's progression that you use it to get Darunia out of his bad mood and actually help you. Other uses of Saria's Song -like proving to Mido that you're a friend of Saria's- can be waved off as not the power of music, but Darunia breaking out in dance and feeling better is just... the music helped. Simple as that.

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Majora's Mask is both even easier to thoughtlessly fill in with 'I have a magic instrument' and yet is actually more consistent about clearly signaling that the power of song is the power of music, not music as a passcode to activate a magic device's capabilities.

After all, in Majora's Mask you never have a musical instrument other than the Ocarina of Time, and your first task of the game is retrieving it so the Happy Mask Salesman will teach you the Song of Healing to break your curse. It's fair to interpret this as that the Happy Mask Salesman can't break your curse with just the song, where it only works because of the Ocarina of Time. And it's so easy to then thoughtlessly assume all other songs similarly are just causing the Ocarina of Time to do magic stuff because you put in the right password.

But that's not actually how the game presents its songs.

When Igos Du Ikana teaches you the Elegy of Emptiness, he doesn't suggest he realizes you have a magic instrument: he talks as if the Elegy of Emptiness just plain does this when played. The Song of Soaring is presented as a magic song, simple as that. The Sonata of Awakening's effects are not blamed on the Ocarina of Time. The Song of Storms reprises the circumstances of the Sun's Song in Ocarina of Time as a song presented as inherently magical, invented by Termina's Composer Brothers. The Goron's Lullaby and New Wave Bossa Nova aren't presented as magic in the supernatural sense, but their effects are presented as intrinsic: Gorons fall asleep because they hear the lullaby, period, as indicated by the Goron elder talking about singing it to his son to put him to sleep; it's not putting Gorons to sleep by virtue of the Ocarina of Time being magic.

And even the Song of Healing is presented less like 'the ocarina of time's magic makes this possible' than I think players tend to assume. Among other points, the Happy Mask Salesman presents getting your curse broken as payment rendered for returning Majora's Mask to him; it's entirely possible he could break the curse himself, and just isn't because this is supposed to be a trade. (Albeit a trade where he delivers his payment before confirming you've held up your end of the deal, oops)

The Oath to Order is the only major song of the game that probably isn't meant to have power in its own right in-universe, as its only function is to call the Giants. (Who, for one thing, have conspicuously large ears)

That 'probably' is doing a lot of work in that sentence, though.

And let's not forget the Ikana Canyon family keeping the restless dead from clawing at their doors with music. No ambiguity there: the music protects them.

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Like Majora's Mask, Link's Awakening has an obvious explanation to fall back on, but doesn't actually suggest that possibility is relevant. It's so easy to blame a lot of odd things about Link's Awakening as it all occurring in the dream of a magic whale.

But while the game draws attention at various points to the oddness of things about the island, its inhabitants, their experiences, etc, it actually doesn't do that with the songs. Nobody hint-hints that Manbo's Mambo functioning as a teleport is weird or dreamlike, nor that the Frog's Song of Soul being able to bring life to things not alive is somehow 'not canon'.

The only song that could be argued as really falling inside the nonmagical music framework is the Ballad of the Wind Fish, whose one concrete mechanical effect requires the eight Instruments of the Sirens to actually trigger. (You can play the song in front of the Wind Fish's Egg earlier than that and it will trigger your current Instruments to pop in and play, but of course the Egg won't open) But... for one thing, Marin singing the song in the Animal Village entrances the animals, returning to what I said before about music having power in its own right. For another... it's absolutely the case that in real life taking away instruments changes how the rest of the music sounds; there's a fair argument to be made that the Ballad of the Wind Fish only works with all the Instruments not because the Instruments are magic but because you're not actually playing the full Ballad unless you have all the Instruments.

Notably, Majora's Mask has its easter egg/callback where you play the Ballad of the Wind Fish in the Milk Bar. In that sequence, you assemble the song one instrument at a time while Ingo berates your efforts as senseless noise -until you have all the instruments played, at which point Ingo is suddenly swept up in memory and stops being a jerk. There's a consistency there, that the Ballad lacks its full impact when played without all the instrumentation -and in the Majora's Mask case, the power here is nostalgia. You're not making Ingo nice by using the Ocarina of Time's magic to bespell him. You're making him nice by making him recall happier times -with music.

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A Link to the Past, the Adventure of Link, and the original Legend of Zelda have these undertones as well, though I find it more understandable people gloss over their cases in particular. The Adventure of Link only uses its flute twice, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of people who've played it forget it even has a flute. A Link to the Past's flute is used exclusively to awaken and call the bird that acts as the game's primary fast-travel mechanism, and that whole situation is never really addressed by the narrative directly. The Recorder in the original Legend of Zelda is mostly used for the fast-travel of calling a whirlwind to take you places, and it's an old, weird game with lots of oddities, obvious kludges, and so on, where it's difficult to tell how seriously a player should take assorted elements from an in-universe, narrative standpoint. (Is Link really supposed to be using Rupees as arrowheads? Or is that just a programming kludge?)

But they're still consistent with the undertone in Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask of music having power in its own right.

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I said earlier that it doesn't seem to me that fans recognize this even though they respond to it; the Zelda series not only has tons of musical remixes, but the way such remixes get constructed and framed is noticeably different from what I tend to see when looking into remixes from other series that also have excellent music. I regularly run across Zelda remixes that do things like try to tell a story purely in musical form, for example, where by contrast I think Relics of the Chozo might be the only Metroid remixes I've seen explicitly, deliberately shoot for such an effect.

Or I can talk about fanfic; I've read more than two dozen attempts at novelizing Ocarina of Time, and conspicuously not a one of them retained the power of music as a concept. Lightening Darunia's mood with music gets cut. Zelda's Lullaby gets cut. Following Saria's Song in the Lost Woods gets cut, and indeed Saria's Song itself usually gets cut. The warp songs get cut. The Sun's Song gets cut. The handful of these novelizations that got far enough to touch on Bongo-Bongo/the Shadow Temple/the Bottom of the Well uniformly cut the time paradox of Link learning the Song of Storms as an adult by virtue of having used it as a child. Only the Song of Time tends to survive into these fanfics -and even then, it gets limited to being part of opening the Door of Time. Y'know, when it isn't cut entirely.

(No, I don't understand why someone would set out to novelize Ocarina of Time and then endeavor to make the Ocarina of Time wholly irrelevant)

The handful of Majora's Mask fanfics I've seen are similarly extraordinarily reluctant to even acknowledge the central 'using the Ocarina of Time to play the Song of Time to travel back in time' plot element, let alone the Song of Healing, or the Oath to Order, or the Song of Soaring, or... well, any of the songs.

So on some level it seems to me that most fans, though they like the music of the series, they get choked up by hearing the Song of Healing, etc... they don't seem to recognize this undertone. Not consciously enough to think it too important to cut, at least.

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Unfortunately, the series itself seems to have lost the thread on this topic, too. I specified 'first six mainline games' because... it stops after Majora's Mask.

Wind Waker superficially hearkens back to Ocarina of Time, with the game named after the musical instrument that is plot-important and you use regularly -but Wind Waker really seems to be operating under the conceit that the Wind Waker is magic. Not music. The Sages have to play music to empower the Master Sword, at least, but on the whole Wind Waker seems to have a similar attitude to the topic as fanfic has to Ocarina of Time -not that music has power, but that the Wind Waker is a divine artifact that responds to the right passcodes by doing magical things, where said passcodes happen to take the form of music. Notably, it doesn't have a sidequest -or a substep of a main quest- where music is used in a non-magical way to get a result. You don't lift someone's mood with music, or remind them of better times, or get them to break into dance out of enthusiasm over the music you just played. You mostly use the Wind Waker for the very utilitarian purpose of getting from Point A to Point B.

Twilight Princess doesn't even have a musical instrument in your inventory, unless you're generous and count Epona's whistle. Which I don't, because there's nothing musical about it. You do play some songs from prior games in the form of howling as a wolf at stones, but only to make Ancient Skeleton Link appear somewhere to teach you a new combat technique. Just like Wind Waker, there are no plot beats where song has power, not in the main plot, not in a sidequest.

Skyward Sword actually does give you a musical instrument and make using it plot-important, but it's even more extreme than Wind Waker about putting the emphasis on the instrument and treating the individual songs you learn as passcodes to trigger specific results -once again, Link never plays music to affect people. It's especially striking given all the stuff with Fi singing and dancing without explanation while otherwise comporting herself as a Pop Culture Robot Character; it would've been so easy for the game to subtly reframe things and make it so music moves Fi emotionally when nothing else does, where she sings and dances because that's just the natural thing to do when hearing music, but... she just does it for no clear reason.

And on and on.

Which makes me sad; a big part of the strength of the games using this undertone is that they so clearly feel music has power, enough so to bake the idea into the story and (very effectively!) use music as a major part of influencing the player's experience of the game, and I think the games not running with this undertone are weaker for the loss.

Alas.

#Music #the legend of zelda #ocarina of time #majora's mask #link's awakening #games #power of musics

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ghoultyrant · 1 year

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Other M: Less Terrible Than I Thought

So I recently stumbled across a video digging into Metroid: Other M's localization, which argues that the localization is a strong part of Other M's issues; that the original Japanese has nuance that is lost in the official translation, and the localization straight-up inserts problematic changes and whatnot.

And... they make a pretty good case on this topic, more so than I was expecting at the start of the video. Particularly striking to me was actually the video touching on Phantoon, who came across to me as a plotless bonus boss you weren't supposed to think too hard about, but actually the Japanese manual for Super Metroid has a bit where it asserts that Phantoon is Mother Brain's 'consciousness' in physical form. (Which I've actually read elsewhere years ago, though I'd forgotten before watching this video) So... a Mother Brain variant dies over the course of Other M's plot, and along comes a Phantoon variant. That's actually a very sensible easter egg! Too bad being able to make sense of it relies on a detail that official translation excised. Oops.

A similar point is the 'hell run'; in the official localization, we end up with... well, this:

Whereas the video argues that the original intention is actually the player-as-Samus being led to deliberately subvert the spirit of Adam's orders: that he says basically "Restrict your search to places appropriately accessible with already-authorized upgrades", and then Samus/the player stays to the letter of this order (You can access the lava zone without the Varia Suit active, it's just a self-destructive idea) while violating the spirit of it. (Adam pretty obviously means "places that are reasonable to explore with your current kit")

Which... I actually buy? For starters, Fusion has pretty directly comparable elements, where eg the Diffusion Missile data gets sent, but the Federation has decided Samus is doing too good a job of killing things so they want to avoid her powering up enough to be able to kill their precious bioweapons so Adam doesn't mention it. And then the gameplay absolutely demands you collect it, at which point AI Adam tries to play it off like he has no idea what happened there. Fusion's story involves Samus increasingly getting, in-universe, 'off the rails' while her handler and their bosses are trying harder to keep her on the rails.

Alternatively, I could draw a comparison to Zero Mission, which has a standard Metroid linear route you're expected to take your first time, and then deliberately constructs all kinds of sequence breaks and item skips that an experienced player can figure out, emulating the kind of thing people have been doing in Super Metroid and Metroid Prime and so on for years. In particular, I'm thinking of the aspect where eg Metroid Prime's successive versions actively tried to close off such tricks, while players kept looking for (and finding) new ways to subvert the game's intended route, vs Zero Mission embraced players working to subvert the intended route. Samus 'sequence breaking' in the narrative and performing exactly the kind of 'hell run' sequence breakers do in other Metroid games is... very meta-appropriate in a way consistent with Zero Mission's handling.

In turn, this video led to me watching an alternate sub of Other M's 'movie mode' where this take on the translation is the basis, and... Other M's story does work better this way. I was surprised at how regularly stuff I found inane in its handling was due to the localization's handling: that for example I always found Furby-Ridley flagrantly suspicious to an eyeroll-worthy extent, and it turns out that's not 'the creators inexplicably expected you to be caught off guard when it turns out to be a threat' but rather is 'Samus herself is sure this thing is probably hostile/dangerous/suspicious'.

There's also a number of subtle implications that went over my head originally where I'm not sure how much of that is 'the localization directly butchered things such that it was hidden' vs how much is 'I was too busy reeling at the latest botched writing to be in the space for recognizing implications': that for example this time I caught that the narrative implies but does not actually spell out explicitly that Actual Madeline sicced the Metroid Queen on the traitor when said traitor came for her. (By a similar token, I caught this time that Melissa-pretending-to-be-Madeline fails to react to "Hi, I'm Samus Aran" while Actual Madeline is reassured that Samus is thus not one of the conspirators here to kill her: this makes sense! Melissa is an AI that's lived for, what, a couple years? On an isolated space station. Madeline is a regular human with a full life experience, so presumably she's heard of The Famous Samus Aran where Melissa might not have)

This isn't to suggest Other M has no problems in the original writing. The most glaring two are of course...

... the sheer indefensibility of this encounter in particular being the one where Ridley's appearance causes Samus to break down. The video tries to argue the game tries to justify this in a way that got lost in localization, and while I don't think that's untrue, in the end I don't think it matters much: this was a busted idea that would never have worked.

The other issue is Adam Shoots Samus In The Back For Her Own Good, of course.

It's less terrible in this version. Adam is not so clearly presented as a heroic good guy doing a smart and good thing Samus should be grateful for. The narrative logic for why Adam thinks it's a bad idea for Samus to go into Sector Zero is more coherent. (And why Adam is going inside at all has an actual suggestion of a reason) Adam and Samus' relationship is presented as more complicated than 'she looks up to him to an unreasonable extent', where there's less a built-up assumption we're supposed to back Adam's view, and in fact there's a fair amount of evidence we're supposed to side with Samus against him overall.

But it's still really, really dumb that Adam shoots Samus in the back when there's a Metroid right there, and the writing is hampered by the fact that Adam is just assuming the Metroids in Sector Zero are immune to freezing while the game fails to depict freeze-immune Metroids. I at least caught this time there's an actual implication he's right on this supposition, where Samus, much earlier in the game, reacts to a corpse as "That looks like a Metroid killed it! Oh crap! Wait, no, this area is too cold for that, and also they're extinct. There's gotta be another explanation."

Buuuut there still should've been stronger evidence of Sector Zero Metroids being immune to freezing.

And also even if that was fixed, Adam shooting Samus in the back to stop her is stupid, and absurdly stupid when there's a Metroid right there that he expects to be unable to hurt. The alternate translation doesn't change these problems.

More subtly/generally, the vibe I get from this translation is that the core story person/people (Yoshio Sakamoto, going by how the credits present things, but... credits are always an incomplete picture, and can be very misleading) were too aware of the themes they were trying to write.

That is, in watching this version, it was a lot clearer to me that Other M has as one of its main thrusts be about parent/child relationships, and more specifically that it's trying to argue that, basically, being a controlling jerk of a parent is going to blow up in your face someday so please consider not doing that. And honestly, the bits that are just the story doing that tale work okay-to-pretty-good.

But then there's all the secondary signaling thrown in that largely doesn't add anything or actively detracts from the story: the (baby) Bottle Ship name, Nightmare being given modified human baby cries and its face animated to more directly evoke a crying human baby, and so on; lots of stuff that is consistent with 'this game is trying to make a point about human parent/child relationships', but which aren't actually contributing to the message and all.

At this point I do suspect that if Other M had been given a less borked localization, it would've gone over better, but by 'better' I mean 'more like Hunters, which people mostly don't actively hate but they also are largely pretty unenthused about it'. (I liked it, and I still totally understand this reaction) The baseline handling absolutely has a number of pretty big flaws (I'm not even reiterating stuff like the camera work focusing way too much on clearly-intentional titillating shots, for example), where even a different translation doesn't iron them out.

But I am glad to have watched these two videos, and I think they should be seen by more people.

#Metroid #other m #games #surprising

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ghoultyrant · 2 years

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Explanatory image that will probably mean nothing to people following my Tumblr.

#Metroid #neon genesis evangelion #Phazongelion

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ghoultyrant · 2 years

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Nothing to see here, just cover art for my Zelda fanfic.

#the legend of zelda #art

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ghoultyrant · 2 years

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Thanks to ongoing drama with my new apartment (A leak that really should’ve been dealt with weeks ago), I ended up taking a fairly nasty fall, and now my left shoulder is in bad shape. I can still type one-handed, but the pain is a rather large distraction, so I don’t know when I’ll be up for writing in a serious capacity.

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ghoultyrant · 3 years

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Detective Pikachu: the arena

One of the unexpected Favorite Things for me with the Detective Pikachu movie was actually the underground fighting ring.

When an underground fighting ring was first being brought up, I was cringing: I was expecting Edgy Pokemon Fanfic memes where abusive trainers force their Pokemon to battle each other for entertainment even though they don’t want to. I was expecting a Criminal Underworld that treats Pokemon badly, etc etc.

Instead, I got...

... Pokemon as part of the audience.

Lots of Pokemon in the audience, getting excited by the fighting just as much as the human portion of the audience.

A wide variety, too, including traditional ‘cute’ Pokemon like Togepi.

This is great. Rime City being a place that publicly ‘has no Pokemon battling’ while having an ambiguously-legal underground circuit actually makes perfect sense with what the games tell us: that Pokemon like battling. If you accept that as true, I really would expect any place that very publicly said ‘we don’t have Pokemon battling’ to just drive Pokemon battling underground, and I’d specifically expect Pokemon to be driving this process, possibly more so than their trainers.

And the thing is, ‘Pokemon like battling’ really is one of the best explanations for the Pokemon world we see to be what it is.

If Gyarados doesn’t want to battle, what’s a ten-year-old kid going to do? Scold it? What’s an adult going to do? Anyone dumb enough to think they can use abuse to bring their Pokemon in line is going to be in for a very rude surprise.

The little things did a lot to sell the whole thing: the Charizard clearly remembering Pikachu and very clearly wanting that rematch was great.

I’d enjoyed the movie more than I expected to up to this point, but this was where the movie really got me thinking the people making this movie got it.

#detective pikachu movie #pokemon

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ghoultyrant · 3 years

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Craftworld Context stuff

I first got into 40k primarily via Dawn of War, the relevancy to this post being that I was initially not even aware Warhammer Fantasy was a thing at all. Furthermore, even when I did become aware of Warhammer Fantasy being a thing and in fact 40k is first and foremost Warhammer In Space, I wasn't terribly interested in digging into it, as the things I found most striking about 40k had no chance of being replicated in a more traditional fantasy context.

More recently, however, Total War: Warhammer caused me to become fairly significantly familiar with Warhammer Fantasy as a setting. (Among other points, the Total War framework made certain aspects of the setting really obvious from right off the bat, like that Warhammer Fantasy is very directly fantasticalizing the real world, including much of the geography paralleling reality and assorted political entities being Real Nation But Wacky Fantasy Version)

This has, in turn, caused me to see what the root cause of an element in 40k that's bothered me basically the whole time: the way Craftworld Eldar tend to be written by secondary and tertiary materials. (ie novels, video games, fanfic, etc; basically anything that isn't a Codex)

See, I've always seen people broadly describe Craftworld Eldar as High Elves In Space, in the same way they describe Orks as Orcs/Greenskins In Space, or Tyranids as Lizardmen In Space. (And Crossed With The Starship Troopers Bugs) Before I had relatively direct exposure to Warhammer Fantasy lore, this seemed reasonably natural and logical, and the handful of times I bothered to look up factoids about the High Elves this seemed to be born out, such as how High Elves and Craftworld Eldar both have much of their fighting force as essentially reservists rather than professional soldiers. This, in turn, made it difficult to pin down exactly why it bothered me that Craftworld Eldar tended to be written as, well, fairly close to High Elves. (Or more precisely as a very specific subset of High Elves, but that's a whole other thing)

With more direct, significant exposure to Warhammer Fantasy, it's become obvious to me that this is... more or less completely missing the point, in a manner that suggests to me that the majority of people writing Craftworld Eldar are either entirely unfamiliar with Warhammer Fantasy or are technically familiar with the relevant bits but completely failed to contextualize the implications of drawing these connections to Craftworld Eldar.

First of all, the Craftworld concept is, itself, Black Arks In Space. That's a Dark Elf-proprietary concept, note, not a High Elf one, and even more glaring is that Eldar Corsairs are a thing, using the same terminology as Black Ark Corsairs and associated with Craftworld Eldar. This is some strong meta-signaling right there that Craftworld Eldar aren't High Elves In Space at all, so I'm genuinely baffled why I've never seen it pointed out.

Second of all, Khaine. Playing Dawn of War and reading up on Eldar lore made him sound like the overall Eldar god of war, and when I saw references to him existing in Warhammer Fantasy as well they tended to also make it sound like he was the overall Elf god of war.

Um, no. Khaine is a god of murder. Like, that's not me going 'war is murder' or something, I mean that it's literally the case that Khaine is all about killing people in general. Killing in combat is an option, the one we see lore on most heavily, but that's because Warhammer Fantasy is a wargame, not because it's a particular focus of Khaine's.

Furthermore, he's one of the 'Cytharai'; in Warhammer Fantasy, Elven gods come in two sets, with the other being the Cadai. The Cadai are the Good Pantheon, worshipped by High Elves. The Cytharai are the Evil Pantheon, known to exist by High Elves but only openly worshipped by Dark Elves. (Also Wood Elves in later editions, but shhh)

Put another way, Khaine is an Elf Satan figure, literally an evil fiery god in charge of the underworld pantheon.

Warhammer 40k doesn't do anything to signal that its Khaine is particularly different from Fantasy's Khaine, either, and indeed explicitly retains major backstory moments of being a terrible person, like murdering a fellow god, blood eternally dripping from one hand as not-even-a-metaphor blood on his hands.

Which means Craftworld Eldar worshipping Khaine, using him as the basis of literally their entire warrior system, is a clear meta-signal that Craftworld Eldar approach war in a deeply concerning way, and is also consistent with the broader undertone of Craftworld Eldar codices that they are a people driven to desperation by their circumstances, which is to say they're doing terrible things because they feel they have no other choice.

This all makes blood sacrifice to summon Avatars of Khaine a pretty concerning thing to be part of Craftworld Eldar toolkit, but it gets even worse if you dig into the details. The 40k backstory for Avatars of Khaine is that back in the day Khaine got beat up so bad him and his sword -Widowmaker- exploded into a bazillion itty-bitty pieces, where a fragment is used as the basis of summoning an Avatar. Back in Warhammer Fantasy, Khaine's sword is an actual physical object within the setting that is credibly believed to be capable of destroying the world if drawn, and there's this whole thing where an Elf by the name of Aenarion wielded it for a bit back in the day so now his entire lineage is cursed for, apparently, eternity. So, uh, Craftworld Eldar periodically summon a literal murder god's avatar using, in part, his cursed sword of the apocalypse.

That's very metal, but it also makes it pretty clear Craftworld Eldar are not a good and gentle people who do their utmost to be moral or the like. They clearly have a distressing amount in common with Warhammer Fantasy's Dark Elves.

This kind of thing also puts a whole different spin on the Exodite Eldar really, really disliking Craftworld Eldar. I'd been given the impression, historically, that this was more like 'take your technology away from our Amish community'. Now I'm pretty sure it's more like 'The only reason we're not killing you Satan-worshippers on sight is because our people are already so few... but if you give me an excuse I'm getting my shotgun regardless.'

Notably, when you dig into the army lists themselves, the Craftworld Eldar-Dark Elf connection continues to exist. For example, Howling Banshees are basically Witch Elves In Space, in terms of female (-presenting, in 40k's case) melee berserkers worshipping Khaine. (Less blood-drinking and whatnot, admittedly) There's not a clearly equivalent unit on High Elf lists.

Third of all, an element of Craftworld Eldar that tends to be downplayed or ignored by secondary materials (Again, including fanfic) is that using Soulstones to run their war machines is considered to be an act of necromancy, basically calling the dead back from their slumber. Broadly speaking it makes sense to me this doesn't tend to get people villainizing Craftworld Eldar -it's viscerally less repellent than conventional necromancy, for starters- but Warhammer Fantasy is quite consistent that necromancy is Very Bad, and every time 40k deliberately invokes the comparison it's once again treated as Very Bad.

This is, of course, another example of Craftworld Eldar driven to terrible actions by how desperate they feel their situation is, which certainly sets a different tone than Dark Elves revelling in suffering for its own sake and all...

... but for one thing 'driven to desperation' is more a part of Dark Elf character than I usually see people acknowledge, with their lands being a miserable hellhole filled with monsters and not a lot of arable land and so on, among other issues.

More importantly, this ties fairly directly into my point about why I've long been frustrated by secondary materials depicting Craftworld Eldar: everything the codices tells us, explicitly and more implicitly via callbacks to Warhammer Fantasy, is that Craftworld Eldar are, as a collective people, driven to a dark edge by deep desperation, with an extra layer of miserable to the whole thing from the fact that they have to stoically control their emotions because if they vent about how much everything sucks this may literally get their soul eaten.

Which is thematically consistent with 40k as a whole! There's a reason 'grimdark' can be traced to 40k; it's supposed to be pretty widely a darker, more terrible place than Warhammer Fantasy.

Nonetheless, secondary materials are strangely prone to writing Craftworld Eldar as more like rich dilettantes, their lives secure and the most stressful thing they have to deal with being a feeling of aimlessness. Which. What?

Even when I’ve seen fanfic that hated Craftworld Eldar, they’ve stuck with Snooty Bored Dilettante Eldar!

It’s not like the bored dilettante angle makes for more interesting societies or characters...

#wh 40k #Craftworld Eldar

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ghoultyrant · 4 years

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Dicing characters up

So I’ve recently gotten back into the swing of developing The Wild Hunt, in between puking and other such happy fun times, and of course I ran into the issue of needing to generate original capes. I moaned, I groaned, I made minor notes about general direction, resigning myself to further massive delays in the writing process because making a properly Worm-like power is actually pretty hard-

-and then I abruptly remembered that I actually have an established process for how to do so, and just haven’t used it in a couple of years for various reasons. And lo, this piece of the writing is coming along much faster and more fun.

Then it occurred to me that I could share this process, and explain the reasoning behind it. Maybe others will appreciate it.

Which brings us to now.

First step: write up all twelve canon Worm power ratings. Or I suppose you could use a different system, such as my own stab at making the rating system function, but the canon set is perfectly fine for this purpose. (I’d only personally turn to my own system if I noticed I’d completely failed to make any Othala-esque support capes in a long streak, and felt that was a problem that needed correcting) The order doesn’t matter, you can do whatever in this regard, just make sure you write up the list you’re using first.

Step 1.5: Decide whether you want rolling high to be ‘good’, or rolling low to be ‘good’. I’ll explain this in a minute, but it’s important you do this before you actually roll any dice. Which direction you choose is irrelevant’ I historically went with low=good, and this last session went with high=good, for whatever arcane reasons my brain changes its mind about such things, and it all works out the same so long as you’re consistent within a given session.

Step 1.75: If you’re making multiple characters together, decide ahead of time which set of rolls will ultimately go to which character. ie ‘this is Parahuman 1, so they get Dice Roll Set 1′. Or ‘this is Angry Parahuman, and they get Dice Roll Set 2′. Don’t do all your dice rolling and then assign batches to whoever you prefer. I’ll explain this more later.

Second step: roll an appropriate number of dice. I personally use this site, but it’s not terribly important. My personal model is to roll 12 100-sided dice; this gives a level of granularity and randomness I find useful.

Third step: Plug the die rolls into your list in the order you made each. Your first die roll goes into whatever power rating you placed first in the order, your second die roll goes into whatever rating was second, and so on. No cheating; I’ll come back to this in a minute.

Fourth step: It’s time to engage in deduction about the character you’ve kind-of-created just now. Treat your die rolls as a combination of two things; an indication of how the PRT would rate them, if they know everything reasonably obvious about their power, but also more importantly as an indication of how relatively dominant each element is in their power.

This is the part where actual creativity is involved, and I’m not going to tell you there’s any ‘right’ way of doing things in this regard, beyond that I’ve been emphasizing ‘don’t cheat’ by shuffling rolls about in any capacity, or allowing yourself to assign rolls after they’re made. The reason I’ve been emphasizing ‘don’t cheat’ is that you’re undermining your own creativity if you ‘cheat’; if you have an Angry Cape in your list of tentative characters, and you find yourself prone to doing stuff like giving Angry Capes Blaster powers that are all variations on ‘elemental blasts’, ‘cheating’ means you’re liable to fall right back into that pattern (Or any number of other patterns you’re trying to avoid falling into) instead of forcing yourself to think outside the box. At which point this whole complicated shebang is a waste of your time, honestly.

Now that’s all a bit abstract, so let’s provide an example! Just one cape, even though I really use this system primarily for producing batches of capes, because this is already going to be long and I don’t have infinite time.

Before I start, I’ll arbitrary say this example cape is meant to be a low-tier villain cape in Brockton Bay who Coil recently hired in an imaginary fanfic due to butterfly shenanigans. I’ll also arbitrarily say I vaguely want this cape to think Coil is a great guy, so I have some starting point of a personality beyond the range of possibilities implied by being a Coil hire.

So first I’ll write up the list of ratings;

Brute:

Blaster:

Breaker:

Trump:

Striker:

Stranger:

Changer:

Master:

Mover:

Shaker:

Thinker:

Tinker:

I wrote that off the cuff off memory, for reference.

Before rolling my dice, I’m just arbitrarily saying high is good.

Then I roll my dice...

90 - 45 - 97 - 56 - 8 - 48 - 20 - 94 - 23 - 88 - 46 - 74

... and what I’d normally do is just enter those in order in the above list, but for the purposes of this example I’ll instead enter them into a new copy of the list right after this sentence.

Brute: 90

Blaster: 45

Breaker: 97

Trump: 56

Striker: 8

Stranger: 48

Changer: 20

Master: 94

Mover: 23

Shaker: 88

Thinker: 46

Tinker: 74

So first I note the extremes: whatever this cape can do, they’re not a Striker. And if there’s any Mover or Changer elements, they’re really low-key, the sort of thing that would get a PRT threat rating of 1 if they made it into documentation at all.

At the other extreme, Breaker is the highest number, followed closely by Master, Brute, and Shaker, in that order. That implies Breaker is the foundation of this cape’s power (In the framework of ‘Breaker states’, to be specific; if you take a different interpretation of Breaker, you’d interpret this differently), with them either having all their states include Brute/Master/Shaker elements, or that their most powerful/useful states are the ones that merit those ratings.

Tinker is also pretty high up, but not the highest up. If it were the highest rating, I’d probably interpret the cape as a Tinker whose devices all come back to breaker effects in some capacity. Since it’s the lowest of the relatively high ratings, I instead infer the Tinkering is somehow an outgrowth of the Breaker rating; maybe they have a state that can copy tinkertech?

That brings us to the middling ratings of Blaster, Stranger, Trump, and Thinker. These are all high enough I’m not willing to write them off as non-existent qualities, but they’re low enough relative to the main high numbers that they’re clearly not of primary importance, either being not distinct powers at all but a side effect of the primary aspects of their power, or being distinct powers that are weak or inflexible such that the cape doesn’t make much use of them. In this case, the high Brute rating suggests the Blaster rating may simply be an acknowledgement that super-strength is a great tool for turning anything in your environment into an impromptu projectile.

Taken altogether, what comes to mind is that Coil Patsy here has a Breaker state they can turn on that lets them suborn people in an area around them while also making them fairly resistant to harm. At this point I interpret the low Mover number not as, for example, ‘Mover 1′, which would be an indication of mildly superhuman speed or super-jumping or something, but instead as an indication that the Breaker state involves a loss of mobility, which in conjunction with the high Brute rating suggests their Breaker state is something solid and slow, such as turning into solid iron. Said aura of control makes it so everyone in their control is capable of low-tier Tinkering, with the overall versatility and quality of the tinkertech rising the more people in their control are working together. The Trump rating is now obvious; actual Tinkers can be tapped for their full Tinker ability, spontaneously providing this cape brand-new options if they get a Tinker under their control. The Blaster rating is now interpreted as an indication they have a propensity for producing tinkertech rifles and other ranged weaponry, which their thralls use reasonably competently, but which are not stupendously threatening. The Thinker rating is interpreted as an indication they tap the senses of their thralls. The Stranger rating seems to require inventing a new power or major Tinkertech specialty in the context of how canon Worm uses the Stranger rating, but here I lean on the advantages ambiguity provides and choose, in this case, to interpret the Stranger rating as indicating that any signs of control are subtle enough Coil Patsy can have eyes on the inside without people noticing if stringent Master/Stranger protocols aren’t in effect.

By blind coincidence, this cape sounds like a really plausible explanation for where canon Coil got his tinkertech underslung lasers. (That never actually got used...) So now I know that in my imaginary fanfic, this cape is supposed to exist in canon and in canon was hired to make some underslung lasers, but the fanfic’s butterflies led to Coil working to get this cape in his pocket in a more substantial way. I also now know that my original arbitrary decision to make him a fan of Coil indicates Coil used the carrot, rather than the stick, as part of the recruitment process; where Tattletale was recruited with a gun to her head, this cape was recruited by Coil solving his problems and throwing wads of cash at him to do the same basic kind of thing he wants to do anyway.

Now, this sounds like a pretty powerful power, which might seem inconsistent with my earlier arbitrary assertion that Coil Patsy is a low-tier villain, but I can take the interpretation that, yes, it is a strong power, but the cape has been lying low in part because creating a long-term operation is insanely risky. At this step I assume he suffers Thinker headaches if he runs his Breaker state for too long, and that his thralls all remember what happened just fine and are liable to hate his guts and try to kill him once he ends the state, in the scenario where he uses his power to gangpress random citizens; he’s been low-tier because it’s dangerous for him to try to freely abuse his power...

... but for this imaginary fanfic, he’s probably about to turn into a big threat as Coil hires a bunch of people to act as his intermittent Tinker thralls.

From there I do more standard character creation stuff of deciding on his basic personality (And gender, for that matter, though apparently at some point I decided he was male without thinking about it in this particular case), assigning a name and possibly cape name to him, and then put a pin on it and am now free to go forward with writing scenes with this character.

And there you go; a methodology for pushing yourself to come up with weird, creative power sets.

#Worm #Story Design #Randomness #Fanfic

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ghoultyrant · 4 years

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Because I absolutely cannot keep my own mental image straight with these guys, I finally decided to try drawing a Gatekeeper. Less cockroach-ish than I’d prefer, but I’m going to pretend my art is slowly improving.

#Quest #Monster Marriage Quest #MMQ #Art

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ghoultyrant · 4 years

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FoZ Notes 22

Okay, here we go, final volume of the series. Not likely to be much added value here, but I took these notes regardless, so I’m posting them.

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We open with a bit about Brimir and Sasha, showing he put the Lífþrasir rune on her to potentially avert catastrophe while really hoping he didn't have to do so. It seems to be implied he doesn't want to get Sasha killed, but it's ambiguous and could be taken as him not wanting to nuke the Elves or something of the sort. Looking back after reading the rest of the volume... I honestly have no idea how this is meant to be taken.

The narrative refers to Colbert as being one of the 'rare realists' of Halkegina. That's... morbidly comedic in how grossly wrong it is, but there you go: Colbert is supposed to be a realist in the pessimistic sense of 'that sounds too good to be true, so it probably isn't true'.

Vitorrio apparently already knows that the place Saito comes from is 'the holy land'. I... have far too many questions...

Vitorrio dumps on us a backstory about how Brimir being God or Jesus-analogue is a lie and actually Brimir came from Earth and all magical nobles come from Earth having fled from the technology-using humans who are our ancestors. This is dumb nonsense, but foreshadowed dumb nonsense. Much worse is Vitorrio randomly claiming commoners haven't awakened to their magical power as an inevitable consequence of 'the blood thinning', where returning to Earth is supposed to be a solution. HOW???

If magic is a genetically inherited thing where breeding with non-mages is 'diluting' magical blood and reducing the portion of the population who can do magic, going back to Earth with it's technophile non-mage population is the OPPOSITE of a solution to magic power fading. Furthermore, how did we end up with mages in a minority in the first place? Did the original mages actually run away with a massive population of non-mages? If so, why? Were they slaves? SO MANY slaves that Halkeginia is predominantly non-mages? 'cause if so I have zero sympathy for the population that became Halkeginians.

Furthermore, Halkeginia is FILLED with magical races! If Vittorio wants to make magical humans the default form of human and the narrative is going to invoke magical eugenics while making Vitorrio entirely amoral in pursuit of his goals, the correct solution is to fight to overcome human prejudice against elves and orcs and other demihumans and in fact attempt to institutionally encourage cross-species breeding between commoners and assorted magical species. It's not like this series has been shy about sexualizing eg Tabitha's dragon when she's in human form, so you can’t tell me the series is shying away from bestiality undertones!

But no, Vitorrio's True Plan For Real This Time is literally to conquer Earth in some insane, nonsensical attempt to Get Magic Back. And of course nobody calls him on this being utterly insane nonsense that cannot POSSIBLY accomplish his stated goal.

Okay, and he also wants to conquer Earth to escape the Wind Stone-based catastrophe, with eyebrow-raising logic about how surely nobles will survive it just fine and only commoners will die, but seriously the magic genetics bit is blatant, horrifying nonsense, and it’s Vittorio’s inner thoughts so there’s no room to headcanon it as a lie or something else that would excuse this awfulness.

Also Vitorrio magically gets to drain Saito's life force as a side effect of opening the door. No explanation or justification provided. Just... loldrama.

This conveniently causes Saito to go into an Expositional Flashback™ in which he meets Brimir again and Brimir conveys that he's trying to kill all elves everywhere because "we can't understand each other", with this somehow supposed to be connected to magic stone catastrophe stuff. So, you know, stuff we already knew that doesn't make any more sense than last time.

When we cut back to Louise and company, we learn they immediately screwed off to wring their hands over Saito's unconscious form, instead of fighting Vitorrio’s horrible plan. Really?

Louise is explicitly willing to DIE to prevent Earth from being invaded... but no one entertains the notion of eg killing Vitorrio to stop his nonsense. Nah, they're going to try to talk him out of his insane plan. Really?

Henrietta is now using -dono when referring to Saito. Are you kidding me?

Henrietta and Vitorrio magically recognize a relatively modern pistol as being better than Halkeginian firearms... by just looking at the pistol laying around. Not testing it and seeing it has superior performance, or even remarking on something like it being made of parts too fine for a smith to pull together so precisely. Just... magically knowing it's good on sight.

Vitorrio also reveals that Earthlings have somehow invaded Halkeginian in ages past via a never-before-established natural portal between the world's, and now claims he wants to hit Earth before Earth figures out how to harness the Void (Why he thinks non-mages will be ABLE to do so goes unexplained) and attacks Halkeginian. This is ALMOST like a sensible, coherent motivation, but requires ignoring how contradictory and insane the premise is.

Turns out Vitorrio somehow knows for a fact that Louise can cancel the Wind Stone catastrophe, but is withholding this information from everyone to try to force people into going with the Conquer Earth plan. This is dumb, but plausible human dumb. Much dumber is the narrative talking directly to the audience to reveal that Julio is being left out because he's totally unsuited to deception and is actually a naive innocent sort... in utter contravention of literally EVERY prior scene Julio was in.

The Romalian church steals a nuke from under the sea, and Julio magically surmises its principles and informs Vitorrio that it's operating on Void principles. So... Void magic is now supposed to just be atomic shenanigans? I'm pretty sure the narrative previously heavily implied they're quantum shenanigans and regular magic is somehow atomic shenanigans. Consistency!

Pegasi are apparently a thing in Halkeginia. I don't think such came up before and it feels like a poor fit, but it's been a while since I last read so I might be forgetting something is all.

It's now being retconned in that Saito being the Lífþrasir familiar means that A: ANYONE using Void magic will tap Saito's life, and B: he will die in a matter of days for no good reason even if nobody taps his life force any further. Really? That admittedly makes the earlier bit of Saito collapsing into an Expositional Flashback™ a part of this retcon instead of pure arbitrariness, but this is a blatant, stupid retcon that cannot possibly be reconciled with prior events.

Derflinger is continuing to absorb magic while 'asleep', which I'm pretty sure contradicts what happened in prior volumes.

Also, Saito is perfectly willing to attack Romalian forces in an attempt to stop them from using nukes... but people continue to completely ignore any possibility of attacking Vitorrio himself. What is this garbage?

We get introduced to the Vysendal, Tristan's royal flagship built to carry dragons for the fight with Albion... which we somehow never heard about the many volumes ago it should've cropped up in. It’s basically a fantasy aircraft carrier airship.

Three loud knocks followed by two quiet knocks is how Agnes announces herself to Henrietta, apparently, and it's apparently forbidden for anyone else in the Tristainian palace to use this knock. O...Kay?

Bizarrely, Henrietta is of the opinion Saito would never cause trouble without a good reason. Attempted-rapist Saito, you mean? The Saito who has picked fights with people over issues of ego? That Saito? Mind, she barely knows him to be honest, but that just shifts the issue elsewhere. Hell, she even describes him as 'not hot-blooded', which is just laughably wrong.

We get introduced to Château d'If, which is an Elven prison. This is a little confusing given Elves have always solved these kinds of problems with exile or murder historically, but okay. Really, I'm more baffled by the French-sounding name, given Gallia is Not-France and the Elves haven't previously had Frenchness to them. In any event, it's an island prison off the shore of Eumenes, which... seems unlikely...

Also, it's directly named after a real place. Oh, and the narrative draws attention to the French naming, saying the name means 'prison island's in Gallian... but doesn't explain WHY it's named in a language Elves sneer at.

We get explicitly told only Elves that have committed serious crimes, such as treason, get locked up here. You know, the kinds of crimes we previously got told got Elves exiled. We also get told the island has been nearly totally abandoned by the Great Will (for some reason...) so Elves can't use Ancient Magic on it... except apparently the guards can due to making contracts of some sort, in contravention of prior Ancient Magic mechanics.

... and now Guiche is joining in on the 'Saito wouldn't make trouble without a good reason' nonsense train. He actually kind of knows Saito! Not only that but he's repeatedly projected his own shitty behavior onto Saito! He's very nearly the last character I'd buy this belief from!

The 'Great Will' is supposedly a giant chunk of magic rock (I forget if this already came up or if I’m getting mixed up by having run across some spoilers in earlier note-taking), and it grounding arbitrarily accumulating spiritual energy periodically is what causes the Wind Stone disaster stuff. We get this info from Brimir, with no explanation of how he drew this conclusion.

The story also throws in a line about how even blowing up the Wind Stones with Void magic isn't a valid answer because yadda yadda exhaustion. Honestly, this looks like a Suspiciously Specific Denial, like readers raised exactly this possibility, and the author is going 'shit, that's a really good point, but I can't have my intended drama if that's a valid answer so I've gotta invent a reason why it isn't'. Because seriously, with the scale of destructiveness Void magic is capable of, particularly considering how much the story is playing it up... yeah, blowing the Wind Stones up really ought to be a valid answer.

Compounding this is that Brimir explains his plan to prevent the Wind Stone disaster was... to blew up the Great Will. And it apparently worked. So the story is just contradicting itself; which is it? Explosions aren’t helpful, or explosions are helpful? It can’t be both.

Oh, and there's drama about how Brimir tried to explain his plan to the Elves, but they refused to move their city away from the Great Will so he could nuke it without killing them, with Elven leaders saying that if the Great Will wants the world destroyed then so be it and Brimir also remarking arbitrarily that the city at the foot of the Great Will would be the only place safe from the Wind Stone disaster so the story is kind of implying the Elves are actually going 'well, we'll be fine, so we don't care if you all die'.

Anyway, Brimir was pushed over the edge into nuking the area because his home village was slaughtered by Elves while he was trying to talk the Elves into letting him nuke the Great Will. So honestly this is revenge in part. (No explanation is ever offered for why they slaughtered his village, incidentally)

We also learn Sasha killing Brimir was in response to nuking the Elven city, and that Brimir let himself be killed, at least in part to free Sasha of her Familiar runes so the arbitrary death-by-being Lífþrasir won't kick in.

A recurring thing in this final volume is that the Gandalfr boost for just holding a weapon lets Saito function in spite of being heavily weakened. As in, he literally cannot stand, and then holding a weapon let's him walk, and in fact fight athletically.

There's a surprisingly clever moment during Tabitha and Saito's escape where she summons some water to use it as a reflective surface to check around a corner. It's just a variation on using a hand mirror to check around corners, but if characters had been using magic in this kind of way the whole time I'd be a lot more willing to overlook the series' many, many flaws.

We get told the Knights of Parterre are good at casting spells undetected... no explanation for how this works... and that Tabitha has mastered this skill, too. Ambush spellcasting is a neat idea, admittedly, but the context this is being invoked in is just confusing to invoke it in.

There's a bit about Elves being helpless if they can't complete magical chants. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure previously part of what made Elves scary-powerful was that Markey needed to chant and Elves did not. Certainly, I remember for sure that Markey were chanters the whole time, which is conspicuously failing to be mentioned in this volume...

Aaaand now the story is saying Saito being emotionally moved by his rescuers (Louise not being among them, note) is helping to power his Gandalfr abilities, trampling on that whole 'powered by love' thing. Really? Like, it’s a dumb plotpoint, but undermining it by making emotions-in-general provide power has a lot of thematic and practical problems.

Vittorio's other name is Serevare, apparently. I presume that's his personal name, though it's not actually clear. I don't think this has been alluded to before. In any event, him spending a night praying is able to make mountains rise from underwater. 'cause Void magic. The exact justification provided is that he's specifically manipulating the magic Stone with Void magic, but this just raises obvious questions about the potential to use this capability to address the Wind Stone catastrophe, since those are also magic stones of the exact same sort. Sure, Vitorrio is lying about being unable to deal with the crisis, but nobody within the story notices this. Even with how low my opinion is of the intelligence of these characters, I can't suspend disbelief over this. It's a gaping hole in the argument Vitorrio is using to coerce Louise into helping him invade Earth. The story HAS to address this, and it doesn’t, instead stacking on drama scene after drama scene even as it rips out their foundations as they’re being pushed.

We get told Gandalfr powers can't actually compensate for lost vitality (even though that's exactly what Saito has been doing for a while now), but Derflinger can do so. (Never mind that he was re-acquired only minutes before this claim) Gandalfr powers can 'only' make Saito light as a feather. Yeah, just ignore this nonsense, it's just a crappy attempt to say Saito is even closer to death than ever before without actually impairing him in combat scenes any.

You remember how Derflinger has Convenient Magical Memory Loss? Yeah, while he was 'asleep' he got rid of that. Gosh. How convenient. And no, the story isn't going to try to explain why he didn't do this sooner, or explain how he knew how to do it now. Admittedly it's completely in-character for Derflinger to create problems for no actual reason while claiming to be helping... with the qualifier that's clearly not meant to be part of his character.

This is dumb and arbitrary, is what I'm getting at.

"Wow, even swords can cry." "No I won't, because then I'd rust." Wow, that's actually a great exchange that legit got me to laugh.

Holy crap, the story also remembered about crow familiars being used as serial scouts. That last showed up, what, 15 volumes ago?

Vitorrio apparently deliberately aims the portal at a US army base. At least, that's how Saito's internal narration presents it, but I'm pretty sure this is just the writer talking directly at the audience. This is presented as a sensible and intelligent course of action, which is confusing given I'd think Vitorrio would want to get his entire army on the other side before they had to face resistance. Even considering how intrinsically dumb his entire plan is, this is just confusing.

Turns out the Gandalfr killing their master makes Void magic go away. Because Reasons. So naturally Louise has committed suicide-by-Saito, to save his life. I cannot express in words how thoroughly I hate this stupid, monstrous, lazy culmination.

Then the story doubles down on the stupid, lazy, monstrous writing by having Derflinger commit suicide to revive Louise.

Bafflingly, Louise mourns Derflinger. I honestly cannot think of a single even marginally positive interaction the two had to justify this response. Like sure fine I can buy her feeling grateful for his sacrifice -ignoring how garbage everything about the sacrifice and its leadup is- but the story has her reminiscing about how he was 'always helping' and all. Conspicuously, where Saito flashbacks to a bunch of Actual Prior Events when mourning Louise's death, Louise doesn't name even a single incident in which Derflinger was helpful. So the writer can't remember any such moment either, and just hopes readers won't notice the lack.

Also, in literally the final volume, the place Saito was originally summoned finally has a name: Austri Plaza. Uh. Sure?

Cattleya gets convenient 'secret Elf medicine's to cure her incurable condition. So never mind that bit of respect I had for the series.

Louise permanently awakens to wind magic, because of course she does.

The elemental siblings show up, and we get told they're... vampire-human hybrids??? What? Did that crop up before and I just totally forgot?...

Oh, and Louise and Saito go live Happily Ever After in Japan after a bunch of drama is wrung out of Saito intending to first stay in Halkeginia and then more drama was wrung out of him deciding to go home even though it meant being separated from Louise. The story conspicuously fails to address how this could possibly work out well; Louise has pink hair, and is unlikely to completely avoid using her magic. She’s going to end up on an MiB dissection table in no time flat, frankly, not live happily ever after. This isn’t even touching on how messed-up it is for Louise to throw away her life in Halkeginia to follow Saito back; she has responsibilities of myriad sorts in Halkeginia. Heck, so does Saito at this point! Whereas back in Japan, the story has consistently indicated Saito’s parents are literally the only people who will notice or care about him going missing.

For that matter, there was this whole thing with Siesta, Louise, and Saito working out a three-person relationship, and while I found it cringe-y and was dubious because of the likely motives, this is just throwing that out by summarily cutting out Siesta. And also trashing the creepy, stupid crap with Tabitha and Henrietta loving Saito for no actual reason.

This ending is awful and antithetical to what lead up to it on so many levels.

-----------------------------------------------

So that’s it, I’m done taking notes on this series. I have a few things I’ll be saying in the coming weeks, but the note-taking is done, finally.

#FoZ Notes #Familiar of Zero

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ghoultyrant · 4 years

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timer for toilet cleaner setting: *beeps*

me: *eyes bathroom door from downstairs and tries to summon Motivation*

-----

75 minutes later:

my toilet: *sparkling; even pumiced the damn thing*

my bathroom floor: *sparkling*

my bathroom baseboards: *no longer dusty*

my bathroom mirror: *the Windex is setting*

empty shampoo/lotion/etc bottles: rinsed and drying to go out as recyclables*

bonus: *a load of laundry in the washing machine*

my knuckles: *angry*

You see, the reason I am reluctant to clean my own house, especially when anxious, is that if I clean ONE DAMN THING there is about an 80% chance it will mutate into anxiety/hypomanic *compulsion* cleaning and I will clean until /my body won't move and my hands bleed/.

I've stopped myself for now. Hnnnng. MODERATION, COR!

Uh, I don't have anxious/compulsive/other tendencies, and that's exactly how I approach cleaning my space for medical reasons. If I'm going to do one gross thing, I'd rather do a bunch of gross things all together, then clean up. That lets me contain consequences, minimizing how much impact they have on the rest of my life; if I have three things I can do, and they'll all take twenty minutes of showering before I stop feeling sick, doing them altogether and then showering once is better than, say, doing one, showering, then later in the day doing another and showering again, and then doing the third even later and showering AGAIN.

And a lot of the time cleaning means doing stuff like getting mold into the air, which I'm breathing in, and this directly impacts my health. I can do fairly physically demanding work for a couple hours in a row without feeling all THAT tired when I'm done... but if I'm clearing out black mold, or something else clearly fairly bad for human health, I can be ready to collapse of exhaustion within twenty minutes even if the actual wiping and so on isn't particularly strenuous. Sometimes I force myself to keep going anyway, because I'd still rather get other accumulated problems dealt with, especially if whatever I'm cleaning is so bad I don't even want to keep the exposed clothes anymore -which has happened multiple times when dealing with the accumulated grime in closets and whatnot from previous tenants.

Like okay I don't usually scrub until I literally bleed, but... for one thing, that should be rendered as 'I don't usually scrub until I literally bleed... ANYMORE', because when my health was much worse my skin tore and bled much more readily. I used to pretty constantly have minor bleeding wounds from a variety of sources that nowadays barely even register. One time I ended up bleeding from carrying GROCERIES, because the weight of the bags cut into my hand; nowadays I can carry MUCH heavier loads than that incident, and it's tiring and unpleasant but it doesn't literally cut open my skin. And similarly it used to be the case that scrubbing with peroxide or similar would cause weird, not-usually-bleeding wounds to open up on my hands, where nowadays they can take that punishment without visible damage.

... point being, I do the same thing and no mental health concerns drive it at all, so, uh, here's a second opinion on what might be driving this? Take with a grain of salt since I'm a random internet stranger etc, of course, but... I've known a few people who had behaviors they had no conscious explanation for why they did them and interpreted these behaviors as 'irrational' or 'compulsive' or otherwise 'a bad practice I shouldn't be engaging in but my brain doesn't work right so I can't stop myself' where the behavior in question was completely sensible but they'd been primed somehow or another to interpret the behavior negatively.

And with Coronavirus running around and its exact transmission capabilities not clearly established -as far as I'm gathering we don't know what kinds of surfaces it can grow on or how exactly it jumps from one host to the next and all that other important information, it's just 'thought' to be 'primarily' transmitted by sneezing and coughing- the cleaning you're specifically describing seems... straightforwardly sensible? The toilet is inevitably going to hold and cultivate anything that passes through the body and can survive in the toilet, the rest of the bathroom is going to be the next-most-exposed simply by proximity, and clothes are going to be exposed to anything you were exposed to while wearing them, so if they can act as a re-infection vector... that's all the stuff I'd first try to clean if I was trying to deal with an unknown infectious agent.

(Though yeah obviously you should rest when necessary, and bleeding is Not Good, especially if you're cleaning toilets or otherwise risking germs getting inside the wound; moderating yourself is good regardless of whether this approach to cleaning is driven by a brain bug or a reasonable-but-not-consciously-articulated motive)

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ghoultyrant · 4 years

Photo

So I discovered how to actually have transparency in Paint images and decided to have a stab at drawing Caras using that as a foundation.

It, uh, it turned out a lot creepier than I’d expected it to.

#Monster Marriage Quest #Art #Creepier Than Expected

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ghoultyrant · 4 years

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I mean, on the one hand Debbie is the villain precisely because the Addams Family is playing around with appearances vs substance; the Addams Family taps stereotypical imagery of creepy horror movie stuff. Their mansion is the dilapidated old mansion surely haunted by ghosts or at least lived in by a creepy rich recluse, Wednesday is the Creepy Child that in a horror movie would be doing terrible things to an adult who can’t convince anyone that they’re the victim here, Morticia is dressed very similarly to eg Maleficent, Lurch is literally Frankenstein’s monster, Thing is a disembodied hand...

... but then in the movies and cartoon they’re largely a very sweet and loving family. (Aside Wednesday and Pugsley’s relationship, which is a morbidly lighthearted version of sibling hostility, the kind fiction often treats as cute and harmless even when realistically it’d be deeply unpleasant) And in fact a recurring element is that a big part of why they creep people out is because they’re a great family, where the superficial elements are a great excuse to latch onto and point at to try to get other people on their side. (And then in Addams Family Values we also have Wednesday drawing attention to how Thanksgiving is kind of a horrifying holiday when you look at the history between colonists and natives, and how the issues in question haven’t even gone away, which all the ‘normals’ in the movie really don’t want to acknowledge, which is a similar idea from a different angle)

So there’s something of a theme in Addams Family stuff that many people wear normality as a mask that doesn’t really fit: they make the right noises to seem nice, wear the right clothes to be respectable, keep up with the Joneses to fit in, etc, but seeming nice isn’t the same thing as being nice. Looking respectable isn’t the same thing as being worthy of respect.

Debbie being an aggressively normal-seeming actual factual serial killer is the most extreme, in-your-face version of this, with no softening of the message. (Unless one counts the comedy factor of her being increasingly frustrated by the family)

On the other hand... if you reframe things as if Debbie is the protagonist, the movie is kind of tragic. She wanted to actually be loved and couldn’t properly see or engage with the Addams Family being genuinely loving because she’d long since become embittered and wouldn’t know love if it embraced her in a bear hug. She was murdering for money because she’d given up on being loved -that she apparently lacks a conscience merely made that emotionally easier a path, it wasn’t actually the driving reason for her making that choice. And she’s Aggressively Normal not because that’s her aesthetic, but because that’s what other people respond to positively -you can even make a case she’s aggressively normal in an attempt to be loved For Realz on some subconscious level if one wants, instead of assuming it’s purely a part of her black widow routine, in which case the tragic-ness is magnified; in that scenario she’s desperately trying to be loved even to this day, but honestly doesn’t know what love looks like (Which, by the way, is thematically consistent with the larger Addams Family themes, in that ‘normal’ people engaging in the rituals of loving couples may simply be going through the motions; Debbie may not know what real love looks like in part because ‘normals’ are so often faking that looking to them for guidance is a fool’s errand), and that’s why her appearance and mannerisms are so sculpted, because it’s literally never crossed her mind someone might actually love her for who she is, herself.

(It’s been a bit since I rewatched the movie so while I want to say she explicitly says she hates the routine she’s put on I’m not 100% sure that’s actually correct, so I’ll not delve into it beyond noting that if I’m recalling this correctly it’s consistent with the above)

This makes Debbie integrating with the Addams Family a lot more interesting than just Pastel Goth Wednesday (Though that’s certainly an intriguing image), in that Debbie integrating with the family would be a journey of self-discovery for Debbie. What does The Real Debbie even like? What would she wear, if she wasn’t picking her clothes for best effect for her black widow routine? What would she do with her hair, as prior? How would she carry herself? How would she talk? What would her hobbies be? It’s easy to imagine Debbie first throwing out aggressive normality in favor of something more like the Addam’s Family’s aesthetic, only to, over time, bring back the bits and pieces of what she actually did like about her appearance. (Which could potentially organically lead to the pastel goth aesthetic, incidentally) It’d also be interesting exploring her and Fester’s relationship, in that Debbie’s entire adult life -and possibly much of her childhood- was apparently based on molding her appearance and mannerisms to what she expected to please others, and it’d be interesting exploring the process of her coming to realize she doesn’t really need to do that with Fester and having to actually think about what elements of her behavior are a mask she actually dislikes vs what elements are things she genuinely likes about herself.

This can even ‘humanize’ Debbie, as the sharp distinction between the mask she wears and her hidden intentions probably warps her underlying psychology in ways she doesn’t even recognize. That is, Debbie does a lot of Nice And Normal things explicitly as part of wearing her mask, and her awareness of this fact would obscure from her whether any given case has other motives. Maybe Debbie has a habit of being nice to children as part of her mask, and so doesn’t realize she actually likes being nice to children. In such a case, Debbie would presumably start out believing she actually dislikes or even hates children, and slowly work out that it’s not quite that straightforward.

So you could quite naturally have sweet, heartwarming moments that are an organic outgrowth of Debbie’s journey of self-discovery that grow out of her serial killer history, instead of contradicting it.

That’s a very interesting possibility in and of itself...

... and even better, it’s a natural argument that she is, indeed, a perfect fit for the Addams Family, combining sweet and loving with dark and dangerous exactly like, say, Morticia.

And returning to thematics for one moment, it’s even a thematic victory for the Addams Family... well, values. Embrace the strange and disturbing! Shower it with love! Normal values say Kill It With Fire To Protect Your Family, but we make it a part of our family, and quite successfully.

...

And then one day, Debbie sees someone who, like she once did, cloaks themselves in normalcy because they see no other way to get people to like them, and she reaches out to them to show them a different way...

ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES (1993) dir. Barry Sonnenfeld

#the addams family #fanfic

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ghoultyrant · 5 years

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I've tried a few times to write Samus' pov before and I've had a lot of trouble. I feel like she is fairly inscrutable as characters go, being largely voiceless, and taciturn even when she does speak (not counting Other M). A lot of her dialogue is also removed from social interactions, being internal memos in scan logs. Idk. Maybe this is just me.

Samus as a character isn’t so much a cipher as an archaeological mystery.

The point of that comparison being that the Metroid series actually tends to tell a large fraction of its story through its environments, and does so quite well. Metroid II makes it clear that the endgame area is some manner of laboratory where the Metroids were apparently created, probably by the Chozo, but at some point control was lost. The laboratory is their nest because that’s where their existence as a species started, rather than the Metroid Queen selecting it as a good brooding ground for some other reason. Notably, the laboratory is unusually isolated and difficult to reach, even by Metroid II’s standards of travel distance, suggesting that the lab was deliberately cut off from the rest of the planet, and also probably explaining why the Metroid Queen didn’t wander off elsewhere to nest; she very possibly couldn’t.

In turn, this grounds a detail many players probably never questioned, but which is slightly odd on its own: that Metroids can apparently only grow into their Alpha and so on forms on SR388. As a consequence of natural evolution, this is certainly possible, but seems odd. But given that they’re clearly artificial, it’s easy to guess that the Chozo put that in as an artificial constraint; most likely the Chozo had plans for shipping them out to other worlds, and for some reason or another didn’t want them to change form once they were off the planet. (There’s a lot of plausible reasons for why they’d want this, but that’s a bit of a tangent)

Furthermore, this also grounds the Metroid Queen itself. Most players probably never question the fact that there’s literally only one Metroid Queen on an entire planet, because after all she’s the final boss. There’s obvious video game design reasons involved. But actually, it makes perfect sense in-universe: while fandom frequently assumes that any Metroid could potentially molt all the way to being a Metroid Queen, and that’s not an unreasonable assumption, it’s also entirely possible the Metroid Queen was one-of-a-kind because the Chozo carefully designed things so she’d be unique; that the Metroid Queen was built to be a Queen from the ground up, and is not supposed to be capable of producing more Queen-capable Metroids. That would be a logical thing to do to limit the damage in the event of a containment failure, and neatly explains why the planet has only one Metroid Queen even though Metroids themselves are running rampant across the planet.

Speaking of the Chozo and environmental storytelling, the fact that we saw their statues on two different planets back in the original trilogy was already a strong indication that the Chozo were a spacefaring species. Metroid Prime using scan logs to spell it out was a confirmation of an already-likely-true thing, not a state of canon invented by that particular entry. Again, I imagine a lot of players never questioned it because there’s game design reasons that are obviously applicable (eg that Chozo statues are frequently used to mark Important Power-Ups), but it’s extremely good environmental storytelling.

Anyway, that’s just some bits from Metroid II. Aside Other M and let me be brutally honest Samus Returns (I enjoyed it, but it mostly doesn’t try to do environmental storytelling, and probably-accidentally heavily retcons things, with the Metroid Queen’s nest no longer being set deep inside a laboratory being the most blatant example), the Metroid series does this heavily and constantly. The player is expected, if they care about the story and the world it takes place in, to look at the details they can see and make inferences.

And if they don’t care about any of that, it’s not intruding on their experience: they can just play a fun little game with blasting aliens and whatever.

Looping this back to Samus, though: yeah, we mostly don’t get Samus’ voice, both in a literal sense and in the writing sense. What we get is a ton of secondary information hinting at the kind of person she is, supplemented with concrete facts (eg that she was substantially raised by the Chozo), and then are expected to draw inferences.

As one of the more obvious examples: the first two games implicitly establish that Samus has to have a high degree of confidence in her abilities, or if she doesn’t she’s got a literally suicidal streak. She twice accepts missions to travel alone, deep into hostile territory, with the interstellar bounty hunter equivalent of nothing but the clothes on her back. Metroid II’s manual tells us that some elite corps of soldiers was sent to SR388 and never heard from again, and this didn’t dissuade Samus from going in completely alone.

This strongly implies she earnestly believes she can do the job when a literal small army couldn’t even survive: it’s not just that the Egenoid Star Marines failed at the mission, it’s that they were so completely out of their depth that none of them were able to escape the planet to report their failure!

Important and related is that starting from Metroid Ii it’s very normal for Samus to unambiguously have the option of just turning around and leaving. Her ship is on-planet, she uses it to leave at the end of a given game, and nonetheless she sticks each given mission out. She doesn’t encounter Omega Metroids and go ‘no, this is too dangerous, I’m out’. She doesn’t rampage across half of Zebes in Super Metroid and give up in disgust when she fails to find the stolen Metroid reasonably quickly. She doesn’t report the Space Pirates on Tallon IV to the Federation and leave them to clean up that particular mess while she goes to get a drink. Echoes and Fusion are the only games that actually trap Samus on-site temporarily to justify her ongoing presence, and even then if you bother to visit and scan her ship regularly in Echoes you’ll discover it’s ready for liftoff well before it’s time for the endgame, while in Fusion it actually doesn’t take that long to get back access to the Main Deck and thus her ship.

A lot of games that place a player character alone and far from civilization are very careful to explain that the player character was stranded in this strange place, and implicitly or explicitly sets the player character’s goal as escape back to civilization. The implication is generally that these are people who would never willingly inflict such a situation on themselves, and if they ever accidentally found themselves in such a situation with the ability to back out, they’d take it in a heartbeat.

Samus, meanwhile, keeps ending up in these situations and sticking them out. She doesn’t mind being alone with her thoughts for long periods of time.

It’s worth mentioning that the Japanese version of the original Metroid tracked how long you’d played, only your hours of play were presented as how many days Samus had been on Zebes. If you treat this ratio as canonical to all future games, which are generally designed so a first-time player will beat them in 4-20 hours... yeah. Samus has repeatedly spent several days or weeks in a row far away from civilization, and is just fine with sticking those situations out, and even inflicting them fairly spontaneously on herself if she has a specific reason for doing so. (eg she goes to Tallon IV in pursuit of Ridley)

Now, since this is inference there’s a fundamental ambiguity here. I personally tend to interpret Samus as being someone who finds socializing with her fellow sentients to be a stressful experience, such that going out into the wild for a week is a form of decompression and relaxation, but this isn’t the only plausible interpretation, and honestly I probably go to that interpretation because I don’t cope well with that kind of social interaction, rather than it actually being a better interpretation. One could plausibly interpret Samus as someone who, say, is actually fairly intensely social and just rates (Insert mission objective here) as more important than her own personal comfort. (In this interpretation, it would be assumed she instead decompresses from her missions by partying with her must-exist-in-this-interpretation large circle of friends) That’s certainly an excellent justification for her chasing Ridley in Metroid Prime, for example, and if we ignore Other M entirely I can’t think of a Metroid game that could be said to contradict that particular interpretation. (And Other M doesn’t count because it contradicts literally every other game on so many levels; if one game doesn’t fit while the rest are consistent with each other, you toss that one game as an inconsistency)

(Well, actually, another reason I take my interpretation of Samus is that she was raised by Ascetic Space Bird Monks, but then again plenty of people rebel against their upbringing. It’s perfectly possible to say Intensely Social Samus was driven crazy by the Chozo expecting her to be an Ascetic Space Bird Monk But As A Tiny Human, and even suggest that she takes being Intensely Social even farther than she would’ve otherwise as pushback against that whole thing)

BUT

While there’s room for interpretation and murkiness on details, Samus across the games has a fairly clear sketch of a certain range of plausible personalities. This range is also further reduced if we actually, for example, acknowledge Samus’ monologues from Fusion, which make it clear Samus concerns herself with the big picture (Suggesting that she sticks out her missions at least in part because often The Fate Of The Galaxy hinges on them kind of thing), and also seems to indicate (Consistent with her observed behavior), that Samus isn’t someone inclined toward negotiation as a problem-solving mechanism -that is, she doesn’t even countenance the possibility of trying to talk the incoming Federation goons into not trying to weaponize the X, going straight to ‘I need to make sure it’s not possible for them to try’- and that she’s got a bit of a philosophical streak to her, of exactly the sort one might expect of someone raised by Ascetic Space Bird Monks.

But even without the Fusion monologues, it’s not actually that hard to dig up a coherent personality for Samus, consistent with what we see across most of the games and compelling in its own right. It just takes a mentality that, while unusual for most writing/reading, is completely consistent with how the Metroid series prefers to convey its stories.

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