*click*
Dear Nintendo, hi!
*Bad Mario voice* Its a me,
Austin! Okay,
It's not as catchy when I say it and it's also irrelevant because I'm not writing to you today to talk about
Mario Jumpman Mario. I'm here to talk to you about a Metroid.
I've been thinking a lot about Metroid the past couple of weeks like way too much. It's been haunting my sleep
I'll be like having nice dreams about my two Overwatch Bae's Doomfist and Sombra, and all of a sudden
BLAM!
Friggin Metroid shows up to ruin everything
Since my intro last week went on long enough for two episodes worth of introductions
Let's just launch into this right away. When I say I've been thinking about Metroid what I actually mean is
Specifically I've been thinking about Metroids
You know the titular
jellyfish monsters of the series.
Not Samus who I thought was Metroid when I was a little kid just like how I thought that the pointy eared dude with a sword
trying to collect triangles was Zelda for like way too long. Anyway, what I've
specifically been interested in is the biology of the Metroids. Their role in the ecology of the universe and their creation
Astoundingly in the process of my research I not only
discovered amazing secrets about the Metroid's
But uncovered what may be one of the biggest secrets in all of the entirety of the metroid universe.
Okay, well maybe not. But still some stuff y'all didn't know and some stuff that will blow your frickin' mind
In my quest to understand the origin of the Metroids, I had to dig deep into
Metroid Lore of which there's a freaking butt ton!
Seriously, there's way more lore for the Metroid series than I could have possibly
imagined. Do you know there's a manga?
Well you probably did if you watch MatPat's video on Metroid anyway in the first Metroid you as
Samus blast your way through hordes of space pirates, kill the space pirate king and eventually
Lobotomize a giant artificial brain called Mother Brain the Metroid's interestingly are almost a footnote in the game
They're just like a biological weapon used by the space pirates basically their attack dogs that latch on to you and drain your energy away.
It's not until Metroid 2 for the Game Boy and the upcoming remake where we really go to town against the Metroids.
Turns out there's an entire planet of these things.
SR388
Even more terrifyingly while they were kind of annoying in the first Metroid game it turns out that a the Metroid's
In that game were just babies and they have a whole range of
Metamorphic phases they go through and be they're super super good at killing stuff
Which I guess is as good a point as any to hop into the manga
Which states that the Metroid's who have been on SR388 for only a handful of years had killed
80% of life on the planet.
Holy Crap
So fearing a galaxy-wide epidemic of jellyfish facehuggers the Galactic Federation
Launches Samus down to the planet to commit mass freaking genocide against the Metroid's which she does
Yay
Good job, Samus, but here's where things get kind of weird when I talk about the chozo yet. Let me check
Nope totally didn't yet
Okay, so the chozo are an ancient race of alien bird people and they're responsible for like
Everything in the metroid universe.
Mother brain, they created her.
Samus's power suit, created that too.
In fact, they also modified
Samus's DNA to be like their so she could survive on their home planet since her people were
massacred by space pirates when she was a child
Which hey bonus the chozo accidentally led to that colony. The chozo these old and wrinkly as balls
Aliens created Metroid's and Unleashed them onto
SR388, but why? That's like finding out Yoda created the aliens from alien and then drop them into a ship to massacre
Space Marines well if you watch MatPat's video on why you should definitely leave cute fluffy animals to die in a planet-wide
Explosion you already know the answer
Parasite X
Parasite X is a microbe capable of invading host bodies consuming and
Deconstructing them down to the very fabric of their DNA and rebuilding themselves with the skills
Memories and physical form of whatever they've latched on to
except, reprogrammed with one core purpose. Spread Parasite X further and get more
Power kind of like a horrifying version of the already quite terrifying, Ophiocordycepus Unilateralis.
also known as the zombie fungus because it hijacks the nervous system of ants in order to spread itself
We're gonna mostly skim over how Parasite X works, but here's the basics the chozo discovered parasite acts on
SR388 by observing it devour a space frog and assume its form fearing the power of this parasite
Especially if it were to say the invade a sentient species and learn how to fly spaceships
They created the Metroid's with the help of Mother Brain to act as a predator
against
Parasite X and it's here that I finally stop Lore dumping like an eight week old puppy on your favorite rug and get to the
Science. Because the science of these things is
Unbelievably cool
Metroid's have a number of interesting properties the most useful and dangerous of which is their ability to absorb energy from
Well just about everything plants, animals, form-fitting power suits if it has free available energy
Metroid's can take it willingly or not. This also touches on something that kind of annoys me about fiction in general where writers act like
Energy is some sort of thing.
Cyclopses energy blasts are a great example, but there's examples everywhere. Energy isn't a thing so much as it is a
Concept in its simplest form it's the ability to do stuff to move to generate this can take a lot of forms
Photons carry massless energy, heat energy is a microscopic form of kinetic energy, and then there's biological energy
We tend to think of it in calories since that's how we interact with biological energy from day to day
But it's actually much simpler than that. The ability to do stuff for almost everything alive is
Adenosine triphosphate, which I'm sure I'll get a lot of flack in the comments section for mispronouncing
So we're just gonna call it
ATP for now on. Ten carbon atoms, sixteen hydrogen atoms, five nitrogen atoms, thirteen oxygen atoms and three
phosphorus atoms created from a combination of eating and breathing
That's what we use to do everything and this here is the first key to
Understanding how Metroid's work and more
Specifically how they drain energy from other life. The first thing that Metroid's do is bogart their hosts ATP. Thisk
Horrifically is something that actual diseases can do like the bacteria Chlamydia trachomatis
Or just Chlamydia.
but it doesn't stop there. Metroid's are capable of leaching electricity and
weirdly eating beta radiation
seriously
The manga tells us that Metroid's multiply in the presence of beta radiation. Beta radiation is highly
Ionizing and isn't the same as mushrooms that are able to
photosynthesize gamma radiation. Gamma rays are just high-energy photons
You know light, beta radiation though is an actual free electron zooming through the air at high speed
That being said this is a
Surprisingly consistent characteristic of Metroid's when you consider that electricity is also electrons and ATP
ATP just facilitates the transfer of electrons throughout our bodies. Metroid's are just big old
Electron vacuums and that that is a real thing that exiskkts on our planet
bacteria of the genuses - Geo bacter and Shewanella have both been observed straight-up living off of electrons
Seriously, you stick an electrode shooting out electrons in the ground and these bacteria will be all over it multiplying and doing bacteria sh*t
eating nothing but pure unadulterated
Electricity which is like the most metal thing on the frickin planet. So Metroid's are surprisingly plausible cool
But that's not why you're here
You're here to know the why of it.
Why are they the chosen weapon against Parasite X, and why are they so dangerous?
And why at the end of the day was creating them the worst
fricking choice the chozo could have possibly made aside from creating a big giant AI
monster out of a huge brain with an eyeball stapled to it? Well in order to understand that we're gonna have to move away from
biochemistry and take a look at
Ecology specifically the food web
The food web is a colloquial way of describing the inter woven food chains of an ecological
System like the plant gets hit by the Sun uses that to create more plants which is eaten by I don't know what do you?
What eats plants?
vegans. That vegan will eat the plant to create more vegan until that vegan is either eaten by a tiger or
Dies as a result of the inescapable creep toward eternal darkness. We all face every day
Cancer or the heart attack
probably cancer in the process of a vegans life
They shed skin cells, poop places, sneeze, etc all sorts of things eat
This waste and things will eat the dead body of the vegan. The tiger, worms
Bacteria and on and on it goes. Oh and the tiger will be eaten by stuff too, more bacteria, jackals, jack loafs
stuff like that. Anyway all of these things
Interconnected with one another is the food web. In a closed system these different elements mostly balance out only so much stuff can keep so
Much other stuff alive there's give and take but on a long enough timeline
Barring meteors or the interference of civilizations things remain mostly cool
And it's this last part where things start to go off
the rails
The Metroid's were created by the chozo, but we don't really know what that means we're led to believe that
There are a holy synthetic organism created from the ground up
But I'm not so sure and we can use a combination of the food web
And the chozo's known practices to figure this out when the Metroid's are discovered by the non chozo on
SR388
80% of the local population has been wiped out. We know since we read the manga that the Metroid's were unleashed to eliminate
Parasite X by I guess robbing them of the much-needed ATP, they need to undergo cell growth or perhaps
Just killing all their food
so they have nothing to multiply from but you know what's interesting? When Parasite X was discovered by the chozo, the ecosystem of
SR388 was completely in balance. Sure, they see a Parasite X blob kill and mutate into a copy of some weird frog thing but
So what? There's TONS of life on SR388 plants, frog things to kill. You know what that means?
Parasite X has a natural predator
and that predator was probably the Metroids. You see, the chozo display a
remarkable aptitude for gene therapy and genetic modification, but we never see them straight up create life from scratch
They modify Samus's DNA, they modify their own to prolong their lives
It's only reasonable to presume that in their panic upon discovering a space version of the zombie ant fungus
They single out their local predators and juice them into something else
modern-day genetic modification is done with a combination of viruses used to implant changes. CRISPR, literal guns that shoot DNA into cells and
Sometimes good old selective breeding. The chozo are like, I don't know space monsanto
I mean That's what we do in Metroid right just append to space everything? Anyway remember that ant zombie fungus?
As horrifying as it is and as capable as it is of completely wiping out entire ant colonies
It has a limiting factor. A currently
undiscovered predator, a parasite parasite that parasites the parasites so you can parasite while you
Parasite nobody knows what it's called or even what it looks like
But there's some natural parasite of this parasite called a Hyper
Parasite. This limits it's ability to spread by a whole bunch
Seriously because of this hyper parasite, this fungus only has about six to seven percent viability
That's like the Krogan genophage, but for horrifying zombie funguses. This is important because like in our flashbacks of SR388
What we see is a completely balanced ecosystem
Everything working more or less in harmony with one another sure there's a terrifying Parasite X
But there's a hyper parasite in the form of well
Probably bacterial Metroid's let's let's call them proto
Metroid's and in their panic the chozo tried to eliminate this parasite by goosing up the Metroid's into some sort of super hyper
parasite which freakin nuked the local ecosystem created an accidental
biological weapon, attracted the attention of the Galactic government who then landed on the planet to commit genocide
Against the GMOs like I don't know some sort of militant faction of Whole Foods which in turn left Parasite X without a freakin predator
Natural or unnatural and put the entire galaxy in danger
Just because the chozo decided to play space god. The points given all the evidence
Is that the chozo if they just let nature take its course and left the planet alone?
Maybe some sort of space nature preserve everything would have been fine
Some space frogs would have died sure but damn at least the entire galaxy
Wouldn't be at risk because they made some sort of mono cropping panic move. The lesson here is that
Ecosystems are complicated and often have factors that we can't even begin to imagine
Working together and even if space bird Yoda's think they can control for every factor
They can't so screw the chozo and their accidental creation of literally every single problem in the metroid universe
Stupid birds. Is that racist? Eh, who cares?
They're not real.
Sincerely Austin
PS
Also, space pirates these dudes have an army of biological weapons and have conquered entire space systems
I'm not sure the term "pirates" really applies here. It's like if we called the Mongols "Horse Pirates". Get it together, Nintendo
Thank you everyone for watching my video on Metroid. Well boy nothing like
Cross-disciplinary videos to cause me all kinds of headaches
Thank you for watching it. Subscribe to the Game Theorists
If you haven't watch MatPat's video on Metroid, watch my other stuff
And I'm gonna go take a nap because I am so tired and I'm going on vacation now.
Weeeeee Vacation Weeeeee