And so ends the best Metroid fic I've ever read. Not for a lack of searching, either.
I'll have to give some thought to most of your questions, but I can say that I absolutely adored the space pirate grunt interludes, and that the god painter introduction was really great.
I love my pirate grunts, who in my head are often dubbed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and are remarkable here for Not being dead.
The whole thing was brilliant. Each faction had its own unique voice and feel.
I would buy this game in a heartbeat.
Do you have any plans for a sequel? You've already set up the star eaters or whatnot.
Thank you. All my stories tend to sprout at least four distinct factions.
And I do not currently plan to write a sequel, although things can always change. I wanted to leave hooks for something more both in case I change my mind, in case someone else wants to run with what I wrote, or just to light a tiny fire in the minds of those who read this, like I always felt getting to the end of a good science fiction or fantasy story. The brush of light illuminating a new wide world.
You give the epic, overwrought scene all the purple prose it deserves (I didn't even know there could be good purple prose before!)
I always have a soft spot for florid or baroque description in literature. It's really no surprise I write that way. The temptation is especially strong when adapting a mostly visual property.
I do wish we had more Samus/human interaction towards the end, in particular with her parole officer Yin, but like you said Samus is bad at goodbyes, so I'm not sure what that would be. The Last seemed a bit underdeveloped for ostensibly the main antagonist maybe? I'm not exactly sure why, we get quite a lot on her background and how she thinks and why she's doing what she's doing. Maybe it's just because I never really understood in an empathetic way what she was after other than "I'm getting out of here", and why that made Samus her enemy? The Star Eaters as an explanation for the Chozo leaving seems a bit perfunctory, like a studio note to add a sequel hook.
But ignore all that, overall this was a really satisfying complete story, congratulations! Now I'm excited to see what you do next!
You are right, I did sort of lose track of the humans for about half this story. I tried to correct that trend towards the end but you noticed the loose threads on this last minute stitching.
The Last's presence in this story is tricky, in a large part because how close behind Samus' eyes the viewpoint lies for most of this narrative. Samus annalyzes, understands, and empathizes, but she does not actually
care about the motivations of her enemies. When it comes right down to it my Samus views the world in black and white, which is both her virtue and her strength. It makes her an implacable hero, but it also means she can't connect much with her adversaries. Like I said, it's tricky, and I could probably have still handled the Last a bit better.
And about the studio adding a sequel hook? That is essentially what actually happened, but the studio and the writer were both me. Towards the end I decided I wanted to open things up at the end so I just elaborated on the background ideas I had already had about why the chozo left, even if it was not really relevant.
I dislike this bit, both because it dispels some of the mystery of her past without actually answering anything but it also leaves me with a bunch of irrelevant questions when what I as the reader should be focused on is that ending and that plothook but now I'm wondering what made her do all those wild and uncharacteristic things mentioned. Why pull me away from the story just as it's ending?
I get why you might not be crazy about this last flashback being placed at the very end of the story. I was trying to make a thematic parallel to the chozo's perpetual view of time, but it is very irregular from a structural standpoint. However, as for those things being uncharacteristic, I suppose we just have different ideas of who Samus is as a character. At that point Samus was young, undersocialized, powerful, released from a strict monastic upbringing, and a soldier. All of those are very volatile components, especially for someone who would have an imperfect understanding of human moors and very little reason to care about them if she did understand.
Spectacular. Exactly as much closure as is required. I love it and have thrown it at as many people as I could think of.
I disagree with your interpretation of this as uncharacteristic. Samus was, at some point, a stupid twenty something with too many hormones and not enough wisdom. More particularly, she was a warrior and a soldier, and if you ever want to really party, hang out with a soldier on leave. Additionally, as culture expands, it necessarily becomes less rigid, so her experiences don't sound, to me, outside any sort of norm. That breadth of experience sounds pretty normal, to me, for a spacefaring culture anyway, and without any details, I don't feel like it ruins any of her mystique.
Then again, I'm just a random human on the internet sharing their opinion, so, y'know.
Thank you for recommending me to other people!
Dunno why, but I think this was my favorite line of the chapter.
Now I must mourn the end of the fic, and that there will not be more amazing chapters coming.
Oh right, and the Pirate grunt scenes were always entertaining.
It is always fun to have one character who is just completely exasperated about the grand elements of a fantasy story, and right there Aurora played the roll. I am glad you liked it.
It was an awesome story, and I really enjoyed it. I really liked just about everything to do with Samus's powerups, plus the fight with the First Metroid (particularly the 'Learning phase of the fight') and the fight where she could see the future.
I will say that Yin felt underused. She had an impact on the plot - but it was kind of disjointed? By which I mean we saw the mutiny but between their arrival in-system and her being confined to her quarters without being confined to her quarters all she did was "What? Ms. Aran!?" and get cut off by the Commander. And then she takes over the ship.
I am very glad you liked those fight scenes. The story really "clicked" there.
Yes, I admitted further up in this post that I kind of lost track of Yin and the humans for a bit, and if this was to be worked over into a more finished state I would certainly try to rectify that.
