The Queerness of Samus Aran

[haley]

my two samus headcanons are ptsd-addled avian-gene-modded power-lifter and

ball

[haley]

okay im being dishonest the best queer samus take was actually a samus x f!alucard AO3 fic which i am too much of a coward to link

[eat_it_vid_boi]

you cant bring this up and not post it

[eskaibo]

i absolutely posted this in a thread a year or two ago

[haley]

ok fine i tried to extract some relevant not-horny parts

The woman was fastidious, cataloging every bit of flora and fauna from the myriad of worlds she had traveled to over the course of her career. It completely blindsided her from the self-assured image she projected. Alucard had let herself think again that confidence meant a lack of empathy. Bad habit…

There were hundreds of logs… They painted a portrait of an innately curious, devastatingly competent woman who was maybe - and there was a chance she was projecting here - there was a good chance she was projecting here - just a bit lonely.

“Your logs were very interesting, by the way.”

“Oh good, they didn’t bore you?”

“I especially liked the part where you called the Federation, I believe, a ‘bunch of rat-fuck cops.’”

Lunch was chicken katsu, courtesy of Alucard’s culinary skills and the compact nursery disguised as a kitchen cabinet that stored and grew fresh sheets of vat-meat. Samus dipped into her precious physical stock of rice just for the occasion.

“You can replicate it,” she explained, “but it fucking sucks.”

“I appreciate it,” Alucard said. “I’m just assuming it’s not weird that you eat bird - vat bird? - despite your whole deal considering it’s your kitchen these are growing in.”

“Chozo are omnivores! We eat meat, sparingly. Humans too, I guess. It’s not like the gene therapy restricted my dietary options.”

“Huh!” replied Alucard. Samus grew more animated when she talked about her adoptive culture, she noticed. She didn’t have a whole lot to say but she wanted her to continue, so she smiled at her and started trimming the sheet of vat-poultry into vague fillets for breading.

“We have a song about it, every time we make a meal with meat in it. At least, the ones who raised me did. This one would go sort of like, uh-” She cleared her throat, looked at the ceiling for a moment, and seemed to relax as a wave of nostalgia spread over her. She launched into a lilting, melodious sequence of chirps and clicks, then fell silent just as suddenly, conscious of her enthusiasm.

“That’s lovely!” gushed Alucard. She intended it to reassure her, but it seemed to only make her more embarrassed. “That was Chozo you were singing in?”

“Yep!” said Samus. Her embarrassment was clearly no match for her love for them. “It translates roughly to… uh…”

Alucard waited, rapt, while Samus mulled on the nuances of translation. “Something like: Oh, meat, thank you, emphatic thank you. Oh, bird meat - uh, poultry? Is it quite the connotation? - thank you, emphatic thank you, you sustain us, you sustain us.”

Alucard laughed softly, fishing the fried filets from the oil and cutting them into strips.

“It’s-” sputtered Samus. “There’s a lot of reverence for life that gets lost in the translation. I’m not a poet.”

“I mean, it’s a tribunal. I destroyed a planet. Countless ecosystems, priceless Chozo ruins… not to mention, though they’d never admit it, I denied them a bioweapon. An abomination no one could wield. It was a matter of necessity.”

Alucard said nothing, but squeezed her talon.

“I’m not separate from any of it. I never want to separate myself from it, either. The Chozo, the Metroids, the X - everything I’ve ever loved, everything I’ve ever killed, it’s all a part of me. I carry it with me. I feel everything. There’s nothing else I could do in the face of what I’ve done… I’m not human. I missed my chance on it. Every step I take and every being they splice me with takes me further from it and I don’t care. I like it this way. But I still love them, you know?”

i guess to (badly) summarize: i like the idea of samus identifying more with her dead alien adoptees than other people and playing up the demi-human aspect that shows up in Fusion by having her gene-therapy herself into a bird person, that’s pretty queer to me

[haley]

i remember lol

[eat_it_vid_boi]

Samus is cool…just imo.

[8128]

i feel like if they put metroid prime out on switch i might play all the way through it in one sitting

[VastleCania]

y’all

horny

i had horny dreams about a large tall woman last night who told me that i could finally see her “without all that blue stuff” and i didn’t put it together until mid-morning that this thread is to blame

i never have horny dreams, wtf y’all how could you do this to me

[idiot]

does prime hold up well? haven’t played it since just after release

[aderack]

The theme music sure as fuck does.

[Felix]

the controls are very difficult to go back to and even with the Wii version emulated to use mouselook it’s pretty slow and linear save for a handful of genuinely exciting side paths.

still aesthetically very good though, I don’t find it even close to engaging overall at this point but I think that’s 100% the result of Nintendo managing to ship an accessible mainstream pre-dual-analog FPS at the perfect time and not any fault of its own

[aderack]

It controls like Super Metroid, basically, but in 3D, instead of like a FPS.

[daphaknee]

ive played prime up til they take all your equipment away like ten times and never went past that

the tech demo was all i needed

[haley]

i was pretty obnoxious at the time i tried it and the “gimmick boss you hit three times that the camera pans away to tutorialize” was incongruously nintendo enough for a metroid game that i quit a little while after

but i nearly did the same thing with Fusion for having too many words so lol

[aderack]

The whole intro to Prime, on the space ship, is ass, and it takes forever and puts me right off the game. I keep forgetting it’s there; my brain blocks it out and thinks things just begin on the planet. Once you get there it’s awesome. It’s like Riven, with guns.

[BustedAstromech]

Oh I love that intro, it’s some of their best art direction and the stage setting of the disaster is excellent

I love all the maimed space pirates and space cockroaches rippling in front of your approach and cryptic logs

My longstanding position is that Prime does Super Metroid much more successfully than Super Metroid, which I find to be at a real awkward transition between lonely cave adventure and signposted journey with constant friction when the game switches its expectations of how much the player should be poking at the environment’s edges. Prime drags in the back half, though.

[morkitten]

the takeaway from this thread is that every woman and trans person taller than 6 feet is a blessing and we should all thank them for their service. thank you, tall troops

[aderack]

Horses for courses, but I just enjoy puttering around, looking up database records for Zoomers, and trying to reverse engineer in my head the ecosystem, the civilization built on top of it, what happened here, and how everything works.

If it were all like the intro I would have bailed within an hour and not gone back.

[BustedAstromech]

I agree with that, it’s real important that the intro wraps up quickly, and it could be a good 40% shorter if they didn’t have the additional controls and gameplay systems tutorialization they are also doing at this point. But I think it’s a very good type of engagement while the player is struggling with their new body.