It's probably been said a couple times before in this thread, but seriously, Samus kills Ridley in every fucking game. Without the slightest sort of emotional reaction.
Corollary: when was the last time you cared about Ridley showing up in a Metroid game?
Never, because Samus never broke down and cried?
Ok, let me tell you a story:
I like zombie movies. A lot. I've seen pretty much every big, highly acclaimed zombie movie, and I've tried to get my wife interested in zombie movies because we share so many other interests. So we watch the -Of the Dead series together, and 28 days/weeks later, and a few other movies, and I finally manage to get ahold of a copy of a movie I've been trying to watch
forever, Zombie, the italian cash-in on the Of the Dead franchise.
So we watch the movie, and almost every female character dies a grisly death, frozen up and crying every time a zombie comes anywhere near them. My wife was PISSED. This is just a cultural difference in our film and their film - in our film, the strong female is a common character. By our standards, a strong woman might not even be a strong woman - but at least she's not standing there,
waiting for a man to save her.That's why Samus is pissing everyone off so much. The very idea that a character who has represented strong women in gaming (however unintentionally) for the last 20 years needs men to tell her what to do and men to save her from enemies she has bested, alone and utterly without support, a half a dozen times is the height of absurdity.
I hate to bust out the Japan is a nation of misogynists card, but we should have known when a japanese man said he wanted to explore Samus as a woman, that something like this would happen.