>>10434421I would argue that Samus could have been developed into a motherly character using the infant metroid, or any other non-human alien/monster/pet/mascot, if it were introduced in a game/narrative where you could watch her display a development of affection toward it over time.
Metroid II and Super weren’t those games; so if Other M was ever going to do anything like that, then yeah, they would have either needed to use a human child or “human child with alien face-paint” character to life-hack the audience’s instinctive attachment to cute shit, or make a game before it first where you got to see Samus bond with an alien gradually over time before subsequently watching it be tragically taken away from her.
Either way, tragedy is a category of writing where it’s absolutely to show, not tell the audience what a character had before they lost it, otherwise the viewer/player won’t have a sense of loss to make them sympathetic to the protagonist’s suffering. I would have also preferred to see “Primal but the human is a woman with space armor” than “Wat u mean bounty hunteru, arr women emotionar train wreck, now heru Adamu for extra daddy issuesu,” but that game had a lot more than weak writing working against it during development to prevent it from being made into something good, including hackneyed attempts “to promote creativity” among the devs by only ever using the wiimote without a nunchuck attachment, so the fact that Team Ninja put on a song and dance routine of their own issues with women by failing an attempted depiction of a woman with baby issues was just one ingredient in a whole-ass failed-execution sandwich.
