for part one of this article, go here: SAMUS ARAN – DEEP HELL (deep-hell.com)

Seems like only yesterday it was 2015 and the news first broke: everyone collectively rejoiced, Samus Aran was a queer icon. 
The internet (and all of those big leftist Facebook groups that swell and convulse, everyone swinging knives at each other) exploded in ferver.

She means so much to so many people. I remember vividly the reaction to that mary sue piece. Everyone’s got their own view of who Samus is and who she should be – Nintendo’s been making games starring her since the late eighties. With the emulation boom of the 2000’s, it’s no wonder different generations of alienated kids grew up having memories of their battles with nefarious Space Pirates.

She’s easy to identify with, huh? Samus is as one writer puts it, an excellent example of the way society seems hell-bent on refusing anyone who’s trans an identity. People opposed to queers existing anywhere mined into the archives of series lore to make sure they were equipped with references to Samus being born as a cisgender woman.

We need out heroes to look like us. Samus is trans, Samus is my girlfriend.

I don’t know if Samus is a human. It looks like Samus is a creature or a power suit: so keyed to her emotional state of well being does it only appear when she’s doing what makes her calm and at ease. Killing. It is the only way we see her react in and through to her surroundings.

Samus is some kind of woman, we know for sure. She’s a powerful agent of retribution for the galaxies worst criminals (samus is a cop) at the beck and call of the largest force of lawmen in the universe. Where they can’t go, she cleans up their messes (SAMUS IS A COP)

Samus has left a string of exploded planets in her wake. Once, she genocided a species and caused an imbalance in the natural ecosystem of the entire galaxy that if she hadn’t gotten involved again and cleaned up the mess she caused working for the fucking space federation, this might be one of those science-fiction stories that ends in the entire idea of sapience being replaced by orange goo and yawning muscle tissue sleeking along some forgotten mud ball of a world.

Actually, it’s badass when the walking tank has to hide from shit. It’s so good we should make every Metroid game about hiding from shit, now. Samus is me. I am Samus. Samus is a 6’4″ Warrior (or a 5’4″ supermodel) wearing the skin of a dead civilization that increasingly looks like may have doomed itself.

The warrior child of a race proud and noble, so proficient at churning out weapons that they’d turn a child into one. A strong and proud woman who does what she wants with agency, with cunning, with violence. She’s just always doing It on the side of the law, on the side of the people who’ve already got all of the power in the universe.

Her armor puts a different barrier between herself and the rest of us. It represents something older, wiser, and more powerful. The Galactic Federation can try and fail to replicate her as much as it wants. They’ll never come close. So they know she wants to fight in every way she can, and she’s the patsy and rube they can always count on to bail their asses out.

What makes the Space Pirates the badguys anyway? They’ve killed Samus’ family and her adopted one as well; but we know that there’s more going on here. That chosen family took a little girl and rebuilt her as a weapon, and that weapon went to work for the people wanting to put a collar around the entire galaxy. How many times has Samus bailed the Space federation’s endeavors to explore, chart, define and obtain the assets of entire cultures and species?

If you were being pursued across all of space by a silent, unstoppable warrior who leaves a trail of destroyed spaceships and uninhabitable planets in her wake, you’d be coveting the most dangerous weapons in the galaxy too.

Samus is the fantasy to be beautiful, quietly feminine, and most importantly: not a loser.
It’s clear through her journey’s that she’s sided with The Law. Raised by a race of bird-people known for conducting biological experiments and being technologically advanced, she sides with the spread of anonymous human faces through the galaxy.

We scream that we want to get rid our bodies because the ways we’ve been hurt. I stumble and fall into identities based on unstoppable death and decay. Skeletons, terminators, fantasies where I am standing arm in arm and invulnerable and unstoppable: I always look to my left and right and see that I am alone. I may be stalking through this world, but at least the solitude guarantees I can never be hurt again. She’s the girlboss I want to be.

She even marks her enemies in her own upbringing: we know from Metroid Prime that the Space Pirates are a race and not a class of people; they just happen to also be a race of bird-people known for conducting biological experiments and being technologically advanced. They even refer to her in the same way the Chozo’s logs of their terrible future did; The Hunter, The Bringer of Death.

Like many queer icons we’ve been force to imprint ourselves into from childhood into adulthood; our messy roads of self-discovery leaving us hurt and broken and shielded in armor of our own. Samus is not the fantasy of losers: those fantasies are ones of disabling power structures, these are ones of seeing ourselves and people we think look like us recognized in them. Samus may be a cop, but she is never a victim, except all of the times her victim hood is central to her character.

Metroid: Dread opens with the plot hook that the Federation has lost contact with yet another string of powerful weapons that strikingly emulate some of her most dangerous abilities.
Metroid: Fusion closes on the idea that the Federation wants her to be disposable, that the only reason they bailed her out in the first place was to get their hands on some more Metroid DNA so they can clone them, and maybe her power suit so they can clone her too.

Fusion ends on the note that if someone could put a collar on her, they would. It ends finally on a hopeful note: Samus can finally make her own decisions as the most powerful thing in the galaxy. The Chozo warrior embodied, the perfect weapon. Dread picks up and shows us that if we want to be the most powerful we can be, the only thing that makes sense is to go to work for the people pointing guns at everyone else.

I am so happy Nintendo made sure there was a character out there for all us girls.