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Life & Arts

Women are nothing but trouble for Nintendo

My 8 Bits

Jason Poland

After Samus Aran blasts Mother Brain into a seizure and escapes from planet Zebes moments before its self-destruction, Nintendo players the world over make a discovery that has forever changed the playing field for our 8-bit counterparts. Samus Aran is a woman.

She removes her space helmet revealing her true identity when Metroid is completed in under three hours. Many chubby-cheeked chauvinists refused to believe that a woman outside of a pink princess dress could be featured as the lead in a Nintendo game. Princesses may need to be rescued, but women like Samus Aran can save themselves.

How many Nintendo games can you think of where the main objective is to rescue some hapless dame? Even before Princess Toadstool, Mario was rescuing Daisy from Donkey Kong's hairy meat hooks. Bonus points were even rewarded if Mario managed to find her lost hat, umbrella and purse. I'm not saying Mario should leave Daisy stranded at the top of a building with a giant gorilla, but he isn't helping anyone's situation by leaping around on I-beams twenty stories up recovering lost fashion accessories.

While Samus was wasting space pirates and saving the universe from alien parasites, Princess Zelda was painting her nails waiting for Link to unlock her dungeon cell. The premises as well as the language of Nintendo games are innately sexist. Extra lives are often referred to as "extra men," and the Nintendo game library reads like the guest list at a sausage party. What's a girl to do in this male-dominated video world? Boldly go where no man has gone before, that's what.

In Samus' galactic realm, there's a minimum of Y-chromosomes causing a ruckus. The stage is set for a matriarchal throw down. Her arch-rival is Mother Brain, another female superpower, and planet Zebes is free from the pink feminine signifiers that litter other female-first games like Mattel's Barbie. As if it's any surprise, half of this game is spent at the mall buying a new outfit for Ken's party. Some of Samus' own "outfits" include reinforced body armor, high jump boots and missile launchers. Her freeze beam is a testament that's she's not frigid, she's just got a job to do.

A history of Nintendo games have taught gamers that a woman's place is in the clutches of evil waiting for a heroic rescue. This misconception isn't healthy for the emotionally stunted children who have been shut in their rooms with a Nintendo Entertainment System since birth. It may be romantic when Link finally kisses Zelda after adventuring through perilous dungeons, but it's also unrealistically ideal. It's the same kind of deluded mentality that people who marry their high school sweethearts have. In Metroid, Samus proves that women don't have to wear pink dresses and wait around in towers for their lives to start. An intergalactic amazon like Samus can't hope for anyone to save her from the Metroid parasite but herself, because in space, no one can hear you scream, but everyone can hear you roar.
 

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