Is it unusual that Samus should defer to a commanding officer on a mission under Galactic Federation jurisdiction?  Or that she should respect the orders of her former commanding officer?
 
Other M did nothing to kill Samus's character.  If anything, it only killed preconceived, ultimately incorrect notions of what people wanted her character to be.

't @Hailinel said:

" Is it unusual that Samus should defer to a commanding officer on a mission under Galactic Federation jurisdiction?  Or that she should respect the orders of her former commanding officer?  Other M did nothing to kill Samus's character.  If anything, it only killed preconceived, ultimately incorrect notions of what people wanted her character to be. "

" 't @Hailinel said:

" Is it unusual that Samus should defer to a commanding officer on a mission under Galactic Federation jurisdiction?  Or that she should respect the orders of her former commanding officer?  Other M did nothing to kill Samus's character.  If anything, it only killed preconceived, ultimately incorrect notions of what people wanted her character to be. "

the fans liked the preconceived notions more than this game's storyline. That is a major failing of Team Ninja, not of Metroid fans.  This game pretty much does to samus what the star wars prequels did to Darth vader. He's no longer cool because you know that under the armor he's a dork.  The same is true of samus if we pay attention to this game. So the answer is to simply ignore it like people do with the star wars prequel trilogy.  Don't buy the game, air your disgust publicly and the plot points and character development of Other M will likely be retconned or ignored in future games.  The OP is simply speaking with his wallet. If you want to happily and uncritically lap up anything that nintendo makes, that's fine but it's not an intellectually or morally superior position. "

"Is it unusual that Samus should defer to a commanding officer on a mission under Galactic Federation jurisdiction?  Or that she should respect the orders of her former commanding officer?  Other M did nothing to kill Samus's character.  If anything, it only killed preconceived, ultimately incorrect notions of what people wanted her character to be. "

" @Hailinel:   Saying that Team Ninja had nothing to do with the story is to say that their imprint on the work is entirely techical, which isn't possible or even logical  Other M is atrocious in terms of making sense of the fiction it sits in and Team Ninja are utterly and completely responsible for their selection of voice talent (lack thereof) and the way they told their part of the Metroid Story.  Technically it's a pretty apt Metroid experience, however, creatively it's a debacle. Stop defending bad work and get real.  Canon it may be, shit it definitely is.  Just like Jar Jar, then. "

" @Supermarius said:

" 't @Hailinel said:

" Is it unusual that Samus should defer to a commanding officer on a mission under Galactic Federation jurisdiction?  Or that she should respect the orders of her former commanding officer?  Other M did nothing to kill Samus's character.  If anything, it only killed preconceived, ultimately incorrect notions of what people wanted her character to be. "

the fans liked the preconceived notions more than this game's storyline. That is a major failing of Team Ninja, not of Metroid fans.  This game pretty much does to samus what the star wars prequels did to Darth vader. He's no longer cool because you know that under the armor he's a dork.  The same is true of samus if we pay attention to this game. So the answer is to simply ignore it like people do with the star wars prequel trilogy.  Don't buy the game, air your disgust publicly and the plot points and character development of Other M will likely be retconned or ignored in future games.  The OP is simply speaking with his wallet. If you want to happily and uncritically lap up anything that nintendo makes, that's fine but it's not an intellectually or morally superior position. "

For once and for all, Team Ninja had nothing to do with the story.  And to compare this situation to Star Wars is a poor argument, as it was also attempted by the G4 guys.  Do I like what the prequels did to the Star Wars universe?  No, I'm not a fan of some of the things that happened, but I'm not going to be one of those dunderheads that puts his fingers in his ears and tries to ignore it.  Yeah, Jar Jar exists, Anakin isn't a badass, and Padme's death felt contrived, but I'm never going to say that it never happened.  Like it or not, it's canon, just as it's canon that Samus isn't an emotionless destroyer of worlds.  If she were the merciless killer that some thought she was, she wouldn't have spared the baby Metroid at the end of the second game. "

" @Hailinel said:

"Is it unusual that Samus should defer to a commanding officer on a mission under Galactic Federation jurisdiction?  Or that she should respect the orders of her former commanding officer?  Other M did nothing to kill Samus's character.  If anything, it only killed preconceived, ultimately incorrect notions of what people wanted her character to be. "

Ya, but that stuff is only part of it.  What about when she freaked out when Ridley showed up despite her murdering him 4 times already by that point.  Why was she surprised in Metroid Fusion when she saw metroids? Why did the Galactic Federation try to emulate Mother Brain when it was just a stolen Aurora computer?  This game was inconsistent with the other ones even ignoring what they did to Samus. Think about it like this- at the end of the first Metroid, after single-handedly destroying the greatest threat to human civilization, Samus decides that metroids are too dangerous and decides to take care of them.  In Metroid 2, she goes to SR388 and kills EVERY SINGLE METROID IN THE UNIVERSE except one without having anybody else get involved.  When the Galactic Federation screws up and can't stop Ridley, she goes and murders him, the new Mother Brain, and what is believed to be every metroid in the universe by blowing the whole planet up.  In between this, she found time to murder Ridley twice and save 3 seperate planets from crazy stuff that nobody could handle.  However, when an old buddy doesn't want her to use her varia suit in a place filled with lava, she just lets herself be put in extra danger for the chumps she has been cleaning up after over and over?  Oh man, see what you made me do there?  Now I look like a loser for knowing all this stuff.  Nobody wins this one. "

"I don't think the argument from Metroid fans is that she was a merciless killer, but that she was a no-nonsense bounty hunter. Bounty hunters tend to be pretty serious about their jobs, and since any time we've seen Samus she's been on the job, people assumed she was like your traditional bounty hunter. The Samus that appears in Other M - you don't get that feeling. You don't get the idea that Samus is a hardened warrior, but instead a pretty ditzy girl who doesn't know how to think for herself and must rely on others for guidance (I won't bring up the whole sexism debate, that doesn't really matter in this discussion). If that wasn't the intention of Team Ninja and Nintendo, then they failed spectacularly in their characterisation.  Also the point about saving the baby Metroid - that I thought was an interesting development. It doesn't contradict the fan conception of Samus being a serious bounty hunter, but instead reinforces that bounty hunting and what not is just a job, and one she is very good at. It showed her humanity in her inability to harm an infant creature that, for all intents and purposes, couldn't really defend itself. That was interesting. What Team Ninja and Nintendo did with Samus in Other M was not interesting, it was akin to Miyamoto revealing in the next Zelda game that Link secretly wears women's panties and frequents Beefcake bars. You could make the argument that it was definitely canon, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a retarded development in the character's evolution - based both on fan perception as well as established mythology. And that, I think, is the crux of the issue. Samus for years has been a silent protagonist, one that you had to build a character for as a player. Her scripted actions in the games gave some insight, but not much. If you're going to have a practically blank slate as your protagonist, you need to keep it that way. That is unless you want to spurn your customers when you do create a personality for the character and it doesn't match the popular view. A great example of a silent protagonist still being intriguing as a character would be Gordon Freeman. Then again, Valve knows what they're doing. When it comes to Metroid, it seems as though Nintendo and Team Ninja do not. "

Wowww. Just watched the last scene from Other M. That was horrrrriible. In every way imaginable. Here's the link. 
 
Anyone that tries to defend that shit is either batshit insane or has some serious asperger's goin' on.

@KingWilly: 
I never considered the manga to be 100% canon, but more like the core concepts introduced were canon.  The character of Adam Malkovich, how Samus got to Zebes, the relationship with Ridley, etc.  If you look at the manga and Other M side by side, they contradict each other quite a lot when you look at the details (For one, Samus never served under Adam directly).  

I've said this many times about this game, but people think it's just bad writing (well, there is some of that), but it's actually a bad localization.  Nintendo of America didn't do their job when it came to localizing this game.  It's very literal to what is said in Japanese, and if you've played the Japanese version (and understood it) you'd realize where the disconnect is.  But alas, no one besides me and a handful of others are making this point when it's THE BIG ISSUE here.  With long-winded lines, you get voices who become uninterested in their roles and its' harder to direct them.
 
The characterization of Samus matches up really well with Fusion actually.  However I doubt many people played Fusion, nor do I think they wish to play it.  Sure, there isn't a voice for her in Fusion, but you can see those threads in her that make her what she is.

 

@FunExplosions

"Wowww. Just watched the last scene from Other M. That was horrrrriible. In every way imaginable. Here's the link.  Anyone that tries to defend that shit is either batshit insane or has some serious asperger's goin' on. "

I think the problem here is people thinking they knew what kind of character Samus was, and then feel sour that they were completely wrong. It's easy to say she is ditsy and whiny and weak and it goes against 'everything she was in the previous games,' instead of empathising for her incredibly tragic life that lead to her various, and spoken for, complexes. 
 
She is still strong and able and intelligent and can get the job done, since she has spent all her life intrinsically devoted to duty and war: growing up from a very young age with the Chozo who raised her specifically as a prophesised saviour, and then reintroduced to her own species as a soldier, and then becoming an independant bounty hunter who takes orders from whoever is paying. All she's ever known is duty and war, so it's not a stretch that her charisma would take a bit of a hit, or for her to have a heavy amount of respect for her seniors, or to develop a feeling of alienation within her own species. You could say her becoming a bounty hunter was an attempt to break free of her dependancy on duty and carve her own destiny, but clearly that complex is far too imbedded in her psyche to shake easily, as is shown in Other M. Her irrational fear of Ridley was a bit weird when I first saw it, but when you consider young humans can develop irrational fears of ducks that do much less than massacring your entire colony in front of you, and keep coming back to haunt her over and over again, it's not beyond the scope.
 
There's also the point that everyone around Samus that she loves tends to die. Her family died, her adoptive alien-chicken family all died out, her commerade bounty hunters all die (by her own hand, mind you) and in Other M her surrogate family, including the man she respected and loved like a father, start to die one by one around her. It's kinda hard for me not to empathise for her, and I think people are too hung up on their fantasy of her being some hard-arse emotionless chick more than her character and Other M's take on her complexities being outright 'bad'.

I got the impression she was whiny from Fusion, or at the very least fussy.  Ditsy...I dunno about that.  Again going back to Fusion, she doesn't really think everything through.  At the end of Fusion, she needs a bit of a guiding light to prevent herself from dying and getting the correct result (X-parasites/Metroids = dead).  She knows what to do, but is unsure how to do it.  In Super, you just sorta see her rush off to Zebes to presumably get the baby Metroid back.  Maybe it's to clear her name, because she's technically a criminal now (transporting Metroids) and an accessory to the deaths of many, many people.  She doesn't know how she's going to save the Metroid/clear her name, but she's going to do it.