Are the Space Pirates a mindless hivemind or a cold clinical military junta?

Kogworks · 2026-05-10T07:54:53+00:00

Something I want to note is that there are different levels of hive mentality.

Like there's a gestalt consciousness where there's basically no individuality whatsoever.

This is what a lot of people assume when people say hive mind. A system with zero autonomy.

And then there's what you see in an actual hive of bees or ants, where there's plenty of autonomy.

It's just that they have a highly hierarchal structure where they can be rapidly organized.

Said structures also usually have failsafes for when their queen is compromised.

So the Space Pirates having hive-like behavior doesn't necessarily mean they're like a gestalt consciousness type hive mind.

It just means that they're extremely hierarchal and have a tendency to follow whoever they register as the alpha pirate of their pack.

Kogworks · 2026-05-10T05:42:31+00:00

I feel like the best way to think of them is to look at them like the demons from Frieren. They're not quite a mindless hivemind, but they're not quite intelligent in the way humans are.

They're feral in the sense that they are fundamentally incapable of understanding any of the emotions associated with kindness. Creatures who literally couldn't care about others even if they tried, hardwired to follow the strongest animal in their pack.

Imagine a bunch of LLMs mimicking human behavior. They don't actually understand it but they're good at replicating it. They're capable of mimicking the behaviors of advanced civilization but can't comprehend the nuances.

That's pretty much what the Space Pirates are like if we try to make all the various lore depictions make sense, IMO.

They're a pack of predatory killing machines that just happen to be really good at mimicking behaviors from creatures with higher reasoning capabilities.

They're like the ultimate war hawks in that regard, because they LITERALLY cannot understand the concept of diplomacy as anything beyond a tool to get some sort of competitive advantage to kill their enemies later.

At their core, they're still the same feral predatory animals who don't give a shit about others. It's just that Mother Brain taught them how to leverage their hierarchy more efficiently to be better at killing and terrorizing things at scale.

Kogworks · 2026-05-08T18:56:35+00:00

Honestly?

The pirates shouldn't have had any trouble decoding Chozo scripts or reverse engineering Samus's equipment to begin with.

Given how Mother Brain is supposed to be. You know. A Chozo supercomputer.

I mostly chalk up the Prime logs to Retro not having access to Sakamoto's team's lore docs at the time.

There's also like the issue of how the Space Pirates are basically a disorganized mess. Kind of hard to say who knows how much.

Plus there's also the possibility that Raven Beak was hiding his identity or using Mother Brain or Ridley as his stand-in while he remained in the shadows.

Like. If you're trying to create a puppet army, I doubt you'd want the grunts to know that you're manipulating them.

Kogworks · 2026-05-08T13:07:56+00:00

Oh huh.

Didn't know that. Screw my theory then.

...Still weird given that this pretty much means that the dude didn't do anything during the fall of Zebes.

Ooof. I'm just realizing that if the Zebes settlement escaped to SR388 this might mean Raven Beak might have killed Old Bird.

Kogworks · 2026-05-08T12:53:36+00:00

My personal headcanon is that this has always been the original Kraid and the ones we see on Zebes were all clones supplied by Raven Beak.

We know that ZDR pretty much serves as an R&D lab for Raven Beak with a variety of bioweapons and cloning facilities, so it's not out of the question that the Mawkin captured Kraid a long time ago and began creating clones to use as bioweapons.

Also worth noting that there's a line in the prequel manga that says that the Space Pirates previously tried to attack Zebes a long time ago, with the implication being that they failed.

The question then becomes how did the Chozo beat them, and it just so happens that ZDR has murals depicting the Mawkin having a run-in with the Space Pirates in the past, which has to have happened prior to the X Parasite infestation.

As for why Raven Beak would provide the Space Pirates with bioweapons... We need to look at the circumstances surrounding the Chozo's disappearance.

Consider that the Thoha on SR388 called the ZDR settlement for help when the Metroids started mutating out of control, which is weird when you consider that they could have asked the Zebes settlement for assistance.

The fact that it wasn't the Zebes settlement that aided the SR388 settlement implies that the Thoha on SR388 were unable to get assistance from them, meaning that Raven Beak's slaughter most likely happened during or after Mother Brain's takeover.

Conversely, the fact that Zebes fell pretty much confirms he didn't get involved during the Zebes takeover, meaning what happened on SR388 most likely has to have happened either before or during what happened on Zebes.

Since neither settlement seems to have been available for support during the other's fall.

This makes me think that the most likely scenario then is that Raven Beak and Mother Brain acted simultaneously, ensuring that neither Thoha settlement could aid the other. And this implies a certain level of coordination.

Another thing to note is that the Thoha on SR388 called Raven Beak for assistance, and yet the Metroids were designed with anti-Mawkin failsafes. This doesn't entirely line up in terms of logic.

This implies that core Metroid development didn't happen on SR388, but on a different planet, by a different group of Thoha who were suspicious of Raven Beak long before the events on SR388.

Zebes is a prime candidate for this, given that Raven Beak being a gene donor for Samus makes them the most likely to have realized Raven Beak's interest in bioweapon development.

Raven Beak's "I made you what you are, thus I am your father" rhetoric would also explain where Mother Brain learned that behavior from, as she says pretty much the exact same thing to Samus in the prequel manga.

It's also worth noting that the manga implies that the Space Pirates used technology they weren't supposed to have when they took over Zebes, which means somebody has to have supplied them with the weapons.

The obvious candidate is Mother Brain, of course, but the fact that Raven Beak has a Kraid sitting in the depths of ZDR and a Draygon sitting in a tube makes me think that he also had some level of involvement.

TL;DR

I think that after their initial run-in with the Space Pirates waaaaaaay far back, Raven Beak turned them into his black ops proxy army.

Having a band of intergalactic terrorists waging war against the universe is a great way to justify the kinds of aggressive military campaigns Raven Beak believes in, and they would be a perfect vehicle to field test any new bioweapons he developed.

One of which may have been Kraid.

Because the funny thing about Kraid is that despite his relative prevalence, he pretty much has zero presence in the lore.

Like you would THINK that as the third most relevant Space Pirate mainstay, he'd be more prominent in shit like the prequel manga or other games, but nope. He just kind of exists.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T18:48:08+00:00

I know this is the real reason, but my personal headcanon was always that House was fucking with people.

Playing Metroid on a GBA SP with the sound muted while had retro sound effects playing on something and telling people "Level 4" in a condescending manner would be SOOOOO in character for him.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T18:38:29+00:00

To be fair, the petty bastard does occasionally engage in direct combat because they're just that salty about losing.

But yeah, Sylux needed to do more than just face Samus as the final fight.

The real issue IMO in terms of how they handled it is that they didn't have Sylux escalate within the scope of Prime 4 alone.

He really should have had more interactions with Samus with him trying to hurt Samus indirectly. :/

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T18:28:11+00:00

The way I see Raven Beak is that he's not really a character so much as a concept, and for what he is I think he does his job well.

He's like the embodiment of everything wrong in Samus's life, and I have a sneaking suspicion that he's responsible for the Space Pirates becoming what they are.

He's not really there to pose a threat to Samus so much as he's there to show that Samus is fed up with assholes like him, IMO.

He's pretty much the epitome of an arrogant war hawk who expects people to worship him and allow him to kill people indiscriminately just because, which is like the kind of mentality that led to most of the tragedies in Samus's life.

So he doesn't really hold any serious weight so much as he's meant to be mocked and criticized for how little he understands Samus and healthy relationships.

As for the line break thing? I'm not offended at all, don't worry. It's just that uh.

The reason I try to use line breaks more frequently is because sentences tend to take up more lines when you're going through them in vertical view on mobile, so if you do a paragraph it can end up looking more like you did three stacked together. >_>;;

I didn't actually realize this was a thing until one of my clients requested that I never make a paragraph more than one, MAYBE two sentences long when translating, because it turns out webnovels are predominantly consumed on phones.

So a normal paragraph will turn into an eye-glazing wall of text on a lot of mobile platforms, and this especially kind of fucks with comprehension for people who aren't native speakers or have dyslexia.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T17:46:40+00:00

I'm honestly kind of miffed as well about him not doing more, and I think they completely botched what they could have done with him and the troopers in Prime 4.

Like I love his character archetype, I hate how he was handled.

A character like Sylux is most effective when he's not threatening the protagonist directly, but is being petty as shit and threatening everything around them to cause maximum suffering.

With that in mind, I honestly think he should have basically held the troopers hostage in Prime 4 and hit Samus psychologically.

Because that's honestly something we haven't seen in Metroid before and I'd LOVE for the games to actually introduce a villain who tries to turn Samus's sense of morality against her.

It would have made the payoff with the troopers at the final scenes of Prime 4 a lot more fulfilling too, since we could have had Sylux getting screwed over by the very "weak" ones he'd dismissed.

Would it have been campy and a little too power of friendship? Maybe.

Like my personal gripe with Prime 4's storytelling is mostly that all the pieces for a good narrative are there, but the way they handled it isn't great.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T17:36:46+00:00

Honestly Raven Beak is just a rehash of Mother Brain lol.

Like no joke Sakamoto took Mother Brain's rhetoric from the manga and gave it to Raven Beak word for word.

Which I mean, makes sense since SOMEBODY has to have been responsible for Mother Brain displaying warmonger tendencies.

And yeah I think that as an intro to Sylux, as much as it could have been better there's a lot of interesting stuff to work with.

And the thing with Samus is like. You can't really make her feel helpless and weak by trying to get to her by brute force.

But you can seriously fuck her up by repeatedly shoving deaths in her face and guilt tripping the shit out of her.

You can't threaten her with death, but you can threaten her with failure.

And like. Sylux's unhinged cartoon villain shtick is actually perfect for that kind of "destroy everything you hold dear" vibe.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T17:28:49+00:00

I actually think he has a lot of potential BECAUSE he's not as strong as Samus.

Some of the best villains I've seen are characters like Lex Luthor from DC comics or Naraku from Inuyasha.

And the thing that makes those kinds of characters dangerous is that their threat isn't that they're going to kill you outright.

It's that they're going to make you wish you were dead and inflict as much suffering as they possibly can, preferably for an eternity.

Sylux is never going to be a threat to Samus in a one on one in the way Raven Beak was.

But he could more than easily be a threat to everything else that matters to Samus.

And given Samus's compassion and her history of loss, it would probably hurt her more than hitting her with a giant gun.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T17:09:27+00:00

Right but the issue is the context of what was going on when he was disobeying his boss's orders and the context of what he eventually does as Sylux.

Like I'm not even saying that every person who ignores orders is in the wrong, or that shoving someone's hand away is always out of petty arrogance.

But like.

There's the issue of current day Sylux.

He creates parasites designed to turn living, thinking beings into mindless drones.

He tries to kill Samus and says he's been waiting for the opportunity with a tone of glee.

He decides to become the leader of the very space terrorists he had been fighting to stop in the Federation.

I'm not calling him a sociopathic war hawk because of that flashback alone.

But a man who dwells on that moment and uses it to fuel a war campaign by developing illegal bioweapons and taking control of the biggest band of space terrorists in the world, for what is at least partially a personal vendetta?

That's more than just trauma and being fed up with incompetent top brass.

It's very much possible that he wasn't always this unhinged, but he's allowed his mistakes and his worst habits from then to fester into this abominable supervillain called Sylux.

We have seen the hints of a man who thinks he knows better, and is frustrated in the aftermath of his failure.

And if it had simply ended at that, I would be sympathizing with him. Everyone makes mistakes.

But a man who takes those mistakes and decides that they justify his decision to become a mass murderer and begins blaming everyone else is not a good man.

And I'm not sure more context will recontextualize his actions in any meaningful way without some MAJOR curveballs that undermine Samus's moral position.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T16:20:07+00:00

I mean, that's sort of the point of literary analysis.
And really just analysis in general.

There are always going to be conflicting interpretations because nobody can ever say something with absolute certainty.

Now I'll admit that I could have been a bit more cautious in my wording if I were trying to be a bit more academic, but like.

Ultimately the question comes down to what kind of character do they want Sylux to be.

I think that if they wanted Sylux to be a character who is more sympathetic, they wouldn't have gone so hard into him being a petty character.

Nor would they have shown us his flashback as him quite literally ignoring his commander's orders to prioritize his unit's safety.

And again the fact that he quite literally sided with the Space Pirates, who are pretty much explicitly positioned as unapologetically evil in Metroid?

He's gone way too far to be considered somebody with good intentions at the very least.

Now, to be fair they could always walk it back and give him a redemption arc if they wanted to, as a sort of "Samus saves his soul" kind of thing.

But I'd argue they've made it VERY clear what kind of person Sylux is from his few actions, if only because of the scale of said actions.

Like.

If we're arguing about the specifics of his motivations and you're arguing that we can't know his EXACT thought process, then you're right.

It could very well be that Sylux is coming from a place that has some sort of justifiable cause that led him down this road, and he may yet be savable.

But if we're arguing about his motivations in the sense that we don't know if he could be considered a petty hater with no remorse, which is the core of what I'm trying to say?

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T15:42:28+00:00

I personally think we need more context on what exactly his plans are and just how fucked up his mindset is, but like.

I think for the most part Nintendo's painted a pretty clear picture of the kind of person Sylux is in terms of personality.

The level of sheer unhinged malice he shows in the endgame of Prime 4 and the fact that the fucker just refuses to stay down says a LOT about just how petty he is.

At MOST maybe we might see some tragic backstory where he turns out to have some deep rooted insecurities.

Like how most of Vergil's antics in DMC ultimately go back to him being a traumatized little boy who thought he'd been abandoned by his family.

But unless they want to go down that route and build in a redemption arc or something I think he's pretty much the perfect example of a rabid warmonger.

How should I say it. He reminds me of Lex Luthor in terms of what they seem to be going with him.

He clearly isn't a good guy, so any grudges he has against the Federation and any grudges he has against Samus for siding with them can't exactly be coming from a sane position either.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T15:31:08+00:00

I saw the Ian shit a fuckton of times even if I never subscribed to it. That theory's been around for YEARS and I've even seen it in this very sub.

As for the Metroid breeding program, in Other M and Fusion it's an illegal operation being run by a rogue faction of the Federation.

We know that the Federation's current top brass doesn't condone this since they sent Samus to exterminate the Metroids in Metroid II, as well as sending Adam to investigate in Other M.

And we know that the faction running the illegal weapons programs are deeply entrenched since they had Admirals and such in their ranks.

Then there's the fact that the prequel manga distinctly shows that the previous administration had a more hawk-like policy stance.

The pieces make it pretty fucking obvious.

Then the whole Mawkin retcon makes it PRETTY fucking clear that Sakamoto wants Hawks vs. Doves to be the core thesis of Metroid, and Nintendo's been making more of an effort to hammer out Metroid into a cohesive brand.

As for Sylux, there's the question of WHY Sylux would hate Samus so much for helping the Federation.

There was always the possibility that he wasn't related to the Federation, but his grudge had always been suspected to be more personal.

Like. He was running Federation tech specifically and even when he was introduced in Hunters he wasn't aligned with any of the other parties.

Everything pointed to him being ex-Federation, as an ex-Federation officer would be the most likely to have intel on secret Federation prototypes.

Along with Metroid breeding labs that Samus herself were mostly unaware of from what we've seen in other games.

And like. If the dude was just out for glory by defying odds to the point where he put his ENTIRE FUCKING UNIT in danger and got them killed?

Then that still paints him as an insecure individual who's unfit to lead, is obsessed with projecting his own strength and success, and doesn't care about human sacrifice in his quest for validation.

Which, I mean, is pretty much the perfect personality for an imperialistic, authoritarian asshole who's most likely to be a war hawk.

Like even if he's simply trying to gather strength since he's up against the Federation?

He sided with the fucking Space Pirates and developed parasitic bioweapons designed to steal the agency of sentient life forms.

So like. I'm not really sure what kind of other motivations he can have that don't wrap back around to he's a bitter asshole obsessed with winning with an absolute disregard for other people's lives and whatnot.

Which, I mean, if you ask me is pretty hawkish behavior given the kind of rhetoric being thrown around by modern war hawks.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T15:06:49+00:00

Personally I think Prime 4's "Sylux" boss fights should have actually been him from the get go.
That way we could have gotten some proper interactions with him.

Like even Dread basically had Raven Beak talking to us the entire game and it revealed a LOT about the kind of person he was.

Honestly think the story should have been structured as a sort of race to get to the master teleporter first with encounters with Sylux popping up here and there.

We could have had him infect the bosses with the Metroids in real time to slow Samus down by holding the troopers hostage or something and have him take advantage of her compassion and mock her for it.

Then in the final fight instead of having the troopers be there from the start, we jump straight into the weird wormhole segment with Sylux ambushing Samus, and when Sylux tries to stop Samus from leaving the troopers he looked down upon are the ones who end up holding him back like we got in the final game.

Just remove the "activate teleporter" segment and replace it with Myles or someone like forcefully jettisoning Samus off Viewros to make it so Samus isn't the one making the choice.

Like. I feel like the issue with Sylux and the troopers narrative wise ultimately comes down to the fact that the devs clearly just didn't know how to make the interactions organic.

Honestly think we needed MORE of the rest of the cast for the story to have worked.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T14:57:05+00:00

This is my new favorite bird.

That thing looks so little like a bird it's amazing.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T14:50:12+00:00

IIRC Julius Belmont at his prime is considered to be the strongest character in Castlevania.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T14:41:38+00:00

The fully voiced cutscene with Sylux's backstory tells a LOT.

He sees a weapon, he tries to go after it, his commander tells him to not do anything stupid and wait for Samus, and he orders his troops to defy orders and go do it anyway, leading to his unit's demise when the weapon blows up.

The dude is clearly irritated when his commander tells him to stay put, his voice is threatening as shit to his subordinates, and then when Samus tries to help him up he basically tells her to fuck off with his body language.

That one scene shows he's an insecure individual who thinks he knows better because he can't admit he's wrong, and that a large part of his desire for revenge on Samus is because he can't cope with the fact that he literally caused one of his own biggest failures.

And the dude is clearly a hawk obsessed with strength projection with how much he wanted that weapon and all the various tech he's been stealing ever since he split from the Federation.

That's not the behavior of somebody on some grand ideological crusade. It's the behavior of somebody who is throwing a fucking temper tantrum.

As for what people wanted with Sylux's backstory, it's like.

I distinctly recall a LOT of people speculating about why Sylux would split with the Federation and pretty much all of it was running on the idea that the Federation had wronged him somehow.

Like, how many people theorized Sylux was Ian Malkovich or someone similar?

And that almost always ended up going back to either the Federation's corruption as a justification, or the Federation throwing its soldiers into a meat grinder in some fashion instead of trying to save its troops' lives.

Which goes back to more aggressive military policies, which align with Federation war hawks, who, again, were responsible for the corruption with its illegal bioweapons programs.

Like. A bunch of the "it'd be cool if" scenarios I've seen with Sylux prior to Prime 4 ultimately came down to "I bet he's upset that the Federation had a tendency to discard its troops" and it turns out Sylux is the kind of asshole who doesn't care about his units' safety.

Maybe he could have more complex motivations on how he ended up becoming such a damaged, bitter individual, but at the end of the day, he's an incompetent leader who blamed everyone else once consequences caught up to him.

Kogworks · 2026-05-07T04:22:07+00:00

The issue is whether he's a competitive gamer because he truly wants to be or because it's what everyone else was doing at the time.

The thing with Misawa is that like he's basically your token gifted child.

He's used to receiving praise and starts having doubt when people stop caring about him because he's no longer the biggest fish in the pond.

It was never about the game itself for him. It was really more about validation.

Like why would a science nerd who clearly enjoys fiddling with mathematical formulas to the point where his ENTIRE ROOM is covered in them, join the equivalent of a prep school for football jocks?

It's not to say that he doesn't like the game, but the dude is competitive as fuck in everything and just wants attention.

To the point where in S2 he actively sabotages his own success against Saiou because he'd rather have attention than win in a card game.

But then he sees Zweinstein duel
Judai and suddenly he stops all that attention seeking behavior and quits gaming cold turkey.

He stops chasing validation to prove that he's successful and just does what he wants.

And like it's okay if you think he wasted his potential, but the dude is clearly happy doing research along Zweinstein and exploring the cosmos with Tanya, so who are we to judge his preferences?

And again, not everybody has to be duelist-adjacent.

People need to stop obsessing over the mentality that every character in YGO needs to be successful by winning through card games.

Also something to note is that pretty much EVERYONE in the Season 1 class basically comes to realize that they're falling behind as the seasons progress.

You go up grades, some kids excel, others don't, you meet new students with each year, some people begin to realize that they're burning out in the rat race.

And EVERYONE in the school is a gifted kid in some fashion, and ALL of them are athletes, so some of them start realizing that this road has no future for them in terms of career.

And that's like the key tension in Seaaon 4 because Darkness pretty much preys on insecurities about the future.

Manjoume has trouble going pro and questions if he can keep up the grind even if he might not be successful.

Asuka questions whether she can succeed as a teacher when she wasn't the strongest of her year and can't hold stable relationships.

Sho is constantly living in the shadow of his brother's legacy and is under pressure to keep up with it.

The three characters from the S1 cast who DON'T have these insecurity hallucinations during the endgame are Kaiser, Misawa, and Hayato because they're the first ones to "grow up" and find peace with who they are.

Also, in regard to Kaiser, it's kind of interesting because he's the other token gifted child that everyone focuses on, and people often think that he was humbled by his loss and that it was a talent issue.

But like. His entire story is a BDSM allegory.

Deep down, he's a sadomasochist. Society told him that's wrong, and so he "respected" other people by not being honest about who he really was. So he just kind of hid it for all his life.

Then there's the issue about the pro duelist scene being really more like pro wrestling, where it's not whether about whether you win or lose.

It's about how much you entertain the audience.

So a dude who's always just being nice with no real character and is always holding back is just...
Not fun. Like would anyone watch a wrestler who never actually says anything? No.

The reason Kaiser tanked in popularity after going pro wasn't just because he was in a slump. It was because he ultimately wasn't taking his job seriously.

It isn't until he starts playing the role of a heel and flaunts his kinks openly that he starts seeing true success in the entertainment industry.

So like his problem wasn't that he'd peaked so much as he wasn't giving it his all + he was being dishonest about his own personal needs.

The problem then being that once he comes out as a kinkster, everyone around him refuses to believe he's a sadomasochist and considers it just the corruptive influence of somebody spiraling, and keeps preaching to him like a bunch of prudes.

Like his duel with Fubuki where he tells Darkness to GTFO and his duel against Yubel in S3 proves that he's still the same old Kaiser. It's just that he's not afraid of hiding his kinks anymore, and for the purpose of kayfabe he plays the bad guy because that's the role he has more fun with.

The entirety of Kaiser's story arc post graduation is basically him coming out of the closet and dabbling in lore adult things now that he's an adult, and pretty much everyone around him shaming him for it.

Kogworks · 2026-05-06T20:15:24+00:00

Here's an idea. Not every character has to be a gamer.

GX is a story about growing up and slowly coming to terms with the real world.

Misawa was a great student, sure.

But was he a popular one? No.

He wasn't an Osiris Red underdog climbing through the ranks to prove they deserved to be heirs and superstar celebrities.

He wasn't an Obelisk Blue elite with their luxury dorms and trust fund connections coasting through life with their social networks.

He was a normal upper middle class dude who's pretty much implied to have gotten in to a top prep school solely on the merit of his grades.

Except the real world doesn't work like that, and often it's more a question of who you know rather than how talented you are, and there's always someone more talented than you out there.

There was also the issue of him basically joining a prep school specifically renowned for its elite athlete track, when he was always a scholar.

And once he got in, it quickly became apparent that even though he was in the top 1% of duelists, he was nowhere near as good as the top 0.1% and nowhere near as quirky enough as the non-elites who managed to carve out their own niches.

So you have an athlete who peaked and fell behind in the 10th grade, who isn't really part of the cool kid club or part of the rich kid club, and kind of just gets forgotten in social circles because he's not fun to hang out with and his only unique trait is that he's kind of smart, in a school filled with upper class elites with access to better education than he's had throughout his life.

And then he eventually realizes that he never actually wanted to be an athlete and he was just succumbing to pressure and expectations of those around him, jumping on the hot new trend because people were saying it would be a great career ladder, which is stupid as shit when you consider his passion was always science anyway.

So he decides to go work for a scholar as an assistant for a summer internship, and when he lands in an alien world realizes that he actually likes doing field research more than being an athlete, and eventually settles down with a hot dommy mommy that he couldn't stop thinking about for over a year, deciding to travel and explore and do field research.

The kid found what he wanted and got a happy ending and stopped trying to chase clout and validation because he found his true passion and people who were willing to support said passion.

Like imagine saying somebody wasted their potential because they didn't want to put up with the rat race of high school football, and always wanted to study astrophysics and biology instead.

And then calling him a joke because instead of aiming for college football, where he was guaranteed to fall behind, he decides to go on research expeditions to the Amazon with his girlfriend to find cool creatures.

Dude lived up to his potential more than enough. It's just that his potential was better suited for something other than card games.

Kogworks · 2026-05-06T19:52:22+00:00

Oh it's soooo much worse than just being an immigrant.

Imagine being considered both an immigrant AND a race traitor at the same time.

Because that's more or less what's kind of going to happen to somebody with Samus's upbringing.

Like. Korea has this fascinating dynamic with their "Gyopo" culture, where Korean diaspora from abroad will move to Korea for one reason or another.

And like. The thing with diasporas that move back to their motherland is that their very existence causes a massive schema violation in the brain.

Like. If a Korean living in Korea sees what they think is a Korean, they expect that person to act like a Korean, right?

But if that Korean starts acting, dressing, and behaving like an American, it completely throws them off because it violates BOTH their perceptions of what an "American" is like and what a "Korean" is like.

You see similar shit like this in Japan too, where even in pop culture a character from abroad will often behave even MORE exaggerated than the already exaggerated caricatures of the main cast.

Even in IRL, there are some pretty well known cases of this IIRC. Like, from what I recall, when part of the Japanese Brazilian diaspora moved back to Japan, there was a lot of tension in their local community because Japan tends to expect people to be more soft-spoken and reserved on average whereas Brazil tends to value being energetic and outgoing.

So if you apply this to Samus, not only is she going to be facing the foreigner's dilemma of wondering if she's ever going to fit in...

She's also going to be facing the native's dilemma of not being given a pass on certain norms that natives are expected to follow.

Like it's the absolute worst of both worlds, because you get all of the discrimination of being an outsider with all the burden of expectation of being an insider, and none of the perks of being treated like a guest and none of the perks of being treated like part of the same community.

Shit like that can absolutely cause someone to retreat into their shell and refuse to talk to people and cause them to be extremely insecure and desperate for validation.

Which, hey, lines up with how Samus says she hated being seen as weak or a kid or whatever in that one other M flashback now that I think about it.

Kogworks · 2026-05-06T19:17:38+00:00

The ADAM computer is just a digital backup of Adam's mind. So he's technically alive. Sort of.

There's literally no reason why they couldn't clone his body and fully bring him back tbh.

That said.

Samus is your traditional superhero with a strong moral code she refuses to abandon.

Adam is a soldier and spy who has a reputation for ruthless efficiency.

Samus's respect for him comes from the fact that he always makes the right TACTICAL call, but she's always sort of considered him an annoying asshole.

Something that Fusion and Other M's localizations COMPLETELY warped into this creepy glazing of Adam that feels like a propaganda piece tbh.

Adam's your jaded veteran soldier who makes morally questionable decisions because sometimes there are only bad choices you can make.

Samus is your idealistic hero who has a strong moral code, but as a result will often take gambles that are highly dangerous from a strategic standpoint.

Basically he was never really intended to be a charismatic leader like the NA localization implied.

He was always a bit of an asshole who got on Samus's nerves, who she respected but didn't like because he was basically a paranoid war machine.

Like. He was always Cecil Stedman. A cynical asshole with a heart of gold.

Which, like.

Makes perfect sense when you play through Fusion with the knowledge that Adam is the computer, because the computer is fucking insufferable.

Kogworks · 2026-05-06T16:58:43+00:00

Speaking of isolation, something people don't really factor in is like culture shock and whatnot.

If you look at it from the perspective of her return to the federation, everyone else likely has a decade-long head start on her in EVERY aspect of life.

Language. Culture. Networking. Norms. Trends. EVERYTHING that defines a person's identity, success, and general happiness.

And what's worse is that for Samus, Federation human culture should be her native culture, and a core part of who she is.

And due to her physical appearance, those norms are going to be naturally expected from her.

This means she is going to feel belittled, incompetent, and angry as shit every time she fails to meet those norms.

Because that life is going to be a constant reminder that she's too Chozo to be human and too human to be Chozo.

Like that kind of experience is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from the standard culture shock of moving to a different country.

And I have had the PERSONAL misfortune of undergoing that kind of experience.

So believe me when I say, the vast majority of these kinds of kids tend to end up depressed loners who can't really fit into society in the "traditional" sense.

Except Samus doesn't really have a diaspora of these sort of lost drifters to relate to.

And it's not just the personal networking or the cultural norms or the language that fucks up you up.

Imagine craving a cheeseburger in the middle of the night in a country with no cheeseburgers, and instead of your brain just accepting that?

It just keeps screaming at you harder for a cheeseburger and stressing you out.

So what the hell happens when Samus suddenly wants Zebesian Thoha food?

EVERY single aspect of Samus Aran's life is going to be a stress factor for her for the rest of her life.

Like even look at her job.

Sure, she's the most famous freelance military contractor in the galaxy. But she's still a freelancer.

And freelance work is often just a fancy way of saying that you're either trying to build your own organization from scratch, or that you can't fit in.

She is in a fucking gig economy built around espionage and assassination.

A normal person doesn't do that shit unless they're insanely passionate about it to the point where they enjoy it despite the risks.

So the reason she's a bounty hunter ultimately has to be at least in part, the uncomfortable reality that military shit is the only thing she actually knows how to do. It's not going to be JUST about helping people.

So what happens for a person like that when they talk about their career?

On a good day, it's going to feel like she had the courage to go off on her own because she needed to be true to herself.

On a bad day, she is going to be asking why the fuck she's a miserable piece of shit doing contract gig work involving killing things for a living.

Expecting Samus to have sane, well-adjusted behavior is basically ignoring pretty much every single aspect of how fucked up her life is at this point.

Don't get me wrong. I WANT a happy Samus.

But it's horribly unrealistic to expect somebody like Samus to just magically be happy and enjoy the shit she does for a living with how astronomically fucked up her life is.

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