Here we go with the 30 year old shit again.
As if Super Metroid would no longer be canon. As if Metroid Prime would be wiped off from history or memory. Like the history of Samus Aran, the deep lore in which she's entrenched, would be irreparably harmed and distorted and the sense of wonder you felt when you first stepped into Phendrana Drifts would disappear. All because Samus is portrayed as a Black woman.
This is an eye-opener.
I mean yeah, those experiences are experiences we've had with those characters. I mean the level design and sheer joy that Mario Galaxy brought when I first played it would be the same even if the game starred Sonic, but the experience wouldn't be the same. Also, unless you want to go the "space magic" route, changing Samus's race would actually make the experience of Super Metroid, that we experienced, none canon.
You can't have a character be canonically white and then suddenly just be black because potatoes.
You don't actually need a "character study" for the exercise to have broad merit. Representation of minorities in roles of all sorts of criminally low, far below even the percentage they make up within society itself. Just as they deserve representations which do go in depth into the black existence within society, they also deserve characters for which being black just is justification enough, where they get to act as a hero for children and teenagers in minority groups and let their imagination run wild with nothing more than the fact that the space hero looks like them.
Again there is no actual impact of any serious consequence for those who are just mad 'cause they grew up with the character, versus the very real positive impact integrating such characters into the social fabric of pop culture icons can potentially have - as long as the creator of the vision are themselves OK with it, as they obviously would be in this case.
Let me explain something here. I actually have pretty, or rather severely, bad anxiety that manifests itself consistently over fears and rapid paranoid thoughts in regards to fictional characters that I like. Paranoid thoughts so strong that they can and have in the past prevented sleep, and recently forced me to scour DeviantART to reassure myself that there was no "bad" (not gonna say how because I've been harmed for opening up like this before on the internet) fan art anywhere. What typically calms me down is the rationality that Nintendo would never significantly alter any of their characters and as such I never have to canonically fear any of my most "precious" or "cherished" fictional characters from said company being portrayed as such. Now imagine how said anxiety and paranoid thoughts would react if suddenly out of the blue, Nintendo announced that a character of theirs that's never been changed significantly, was suddenly changed just for the sake of it.
Similarly, in one of my most drawn out "anxiety cycles" I was in constant and unrelenting fear of a cartoon I like somehow making a fan fiction canon. I feared this because the fandom and creators were much closer then is usual and said fan fiction, as terrible as it is, was a meme among the fanbase. Amidst this "anxiety cycle" my mother passed away unexpectedly, which took my already unrelenting and annoying anxiety and paranoia and added a large large large dose of depression to it. You want to know what dragged me out of said anxiety and depression? Well, it was the stoic unchangingness of Nintendo characters. In the middle of me losing it over cartoon characters I like potentially being tied canonically to a horrible fan fiction and the general feeling of great upset/grief of how easily my life could change on a whim and the feelings of great loss, Skyward Sword and Mario 3D Land released, and the sudden realization that,
"Hey, here's a bunch worlds and characters that never change randomly or suffer from the sheer chaoticness of life."
Was a little hard to ignore. Now imagine how I must of felt, when three years later I was being called sexist by members of Neogaf because I didn't want my favorite character, Link, a character that helped me through anxiety, grief, and depression, changed to a woman. Needless to say it kicked off an even worst "anxiety cycle" that lasted almost three years, as I lived in fear of news of BOTW confirming a "female Link" not only because I didn't want a character that meant so much to me changed, but also because I didn't want the members on this site who treated me like dogshit to get their way.
You and many others keep acting like it's impossible to have any meaningful connection with a fictional character while simultaneously hyping up a change like this because of the importance of such a change and how people could suddenly create meaningful connections if the characters were changed...which is just asinine.
