Shockfrost’s Glance REVIVED: Mirroring Shadows and Corruption

Shockfrost draws parallels between Warriors and the famous video game series, Metroid. 

I’m aware that I’ve been inactive for some time. That’s okay.

But now I’ve got a new article that I’ve got planned… Mirroring Shadows to Corruption.

Before you continue, I must warn you… it gets a little bit dark in this article. If you do not wish to see darkness, then I give you this chance to click off now.

Good? Good.

It’s already clear to you all that I’m a huge fan of the series Metroid. That’s not something I’ve tried to hide from you. But here, I’m taking a very direct approach and mirroring the abilities from the Three to the Prime Trilogy, and beyond, into the Dark Forest War mirroring the Phazon War. Just kinda… bear with me, it’s just kind of a thing I do with my hyper-analytic mind.

Bit of background here. If you recall Power of Three and Omen of the Stars, it was about the Dark Forest War that finally broke in The Last Hope. A little bit happened at first, Tigerstar getting pretty angry that Firestar lived where he shouldn’t have after the BloodClan battle.

I mirror the Metroid Prime Trilogy to this; after the events of Zero Mission (Samus kinda… blew up their station, tore their stuff down), the Space Pirates were kind of upset with her. The Phazon Wars (as they were later called… as in, quite recently) soon escalated to points where a certain substance (Phazon) was used to corrupt the minds of allies. I’m oversimplifying this, but as there are kids here, I’m just going to leave it at that.

I could just leave the mirror at that as well, but I’ve linked the Three’s powers with certain Power Suit aspects of each of the Metroid Prime games in my mind. Bear with me.

In Metroid Prime, there are multiple systems in the Power Suit’s Visor; the Combat Visor, the Scan Visor, the Thermal Visor, and the X-Ray Visor. The Combat Visor allows for traditional vision; that is, the way we see the world. Same as the Scan Visor. It’s just the visible light spectrum.
The Thermal Visor allows for vision in the thermal spectrum; Heat vision.
The X-Ray Visor allows for vision in the X-ray spectrum, allowing for visibility through certain objects, and to see invisible objects.

I link that with Dovewing. Why? This is the Visor system that best represents her capability of Hypersenses; she can see that which no other cat can see. She sees, hears, and smells from a very far distance. Granted, there are no Visor systems in any of the Trilogy that allow for that, but seeing into different spectra matches her abilities best, as opposed to transdimensional sight (Dark Visor) and echolocation (Echo Visor).

In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Samus goes back and forth between Light and Dark Aether in order to aid, to restore the Light of Aether to the correct dimension… Light. In addition, she’s got to deal with the “corruption” of Light world creatures. The inhabitants of the Dark world, Ing, take over the Light world creatures to make them into Darklings, strengthening them and forcing them to do their bidding.

And the Visor systems… most notable in my mirror, the Echo Visor, which I usually link for Jayfeather’s blindness.

I link the first portion with Jayfeather; he goes back and forth between StarClan and the Dark Forest in order to do his part to gather intel and solve the situation before it breaks. He goes between the two to figure out what’s happening. While blind. He does what he can to try to drive the “corruption/shadows” from some minds.

The second portion is more what’s actually happening in the Dark Forest War. The inhabitants of the Dark Forest go into the minds of the living to try to turn them into soldiers for the Dark, not the Light. And in most cases, it works.

Finally, in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus is infected with the substance, corrupted. Her body starts to generate that substance… and from there, a core gameplay mechanic is born.

Hypermode.

Activating Hypermode “injects” an Energy Tank (pretty much just her health in the games) into her suit, draining it in order to power it. What it is is essentially a /massive boost/ in firepower, and it renders her essentially invulnerable. After a point in the game, it causes her suit to go corrupt, which makes her stay in Hypermode longer. Too long in Hypermode, however, without careful management, and Samus will die to a Phazon overload. She gets 25 seconds in Hypermode at the longest, but even then… that 25 seconds is more than enough to dispatch most foes.

That’s pretty obviously Lionblaze, with his power. His is simple; he’s invincible as long as he wants to be, and he’s incredibly powerful. He’s able to tear anything he sees to shreds if he wishes, and if he sees it as an enemy. It’s up to him to make the most powerful fighting warrior the forest had ever seen. And it’s all up to him and the Three to fix the problem.

It WAS, anyway.

Regardless, the mirror goes beyond just The Three.

I’ll go into the regions first. The Dark Forest itself was a core enemy region, toxic, unfamiliar to the Warriors of the living. It’s the hub of the most evil of the warriors, where they’re supposed to wander alone, forever. The environment itself is evil.

There are two parallels I draw here; Dark Aether from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and Phaaze from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. I’ll explain both in turn.

Dark Aether is evil. Toxic. The terrain is unfamiliar. Even the air harms Samus just by being there; with Varia, by 5 Energy per second, with the Dark Suit, by about 1 to 2 Energy per second, and not at all with the Light Suit. The water there is poisonous, damaging her without the Light Suit active, stacking onto the poisoned air. It looks like a twisted version of the Light world.

The Dark Forest matches that type of description, of course. Slimy water. Dead trees, unfamiliar terrain. It’s a twisted mockery of StarClan’s territory; in The Last Hope, it’s shown that as the Great Battle to end the Dark Forest War advanced, the terrain grew more corrupt, more slimy and dark, like a “dark” version of the lake territories that we see in the series.

Phaaze is a sentient planet, and the source of all Phazon. Because there are kids here, I’ve been skirting the topic, but I can’t really avoid it now that I’m discussing Phaaze; Phazon is a semi-sentient, highly toxic substance. It actively attempts to corrupt everything possible it touches, powering it up before killing it rapidly… It’s a toxin beyond any toxin that any of us know.

Phaaze is the source of it all, a planet made up of nothing but Phazon. Mirroring it is to the Dark Forest. Both are the hub of everything that’s going on. But Phaaze is also to be treated as Tigerstar himself as well; as it is a sentient planet, it, like Tigerstar, is trying to serve its own purpose to corrupt the universe/Clans. Phaaze uses Leviathans to send Phazon into planets elsewhere… and Tigerstar plants “seeds” of corrupted thoughts, builds on faint feelings of negativity, hatred, and greed in order to slowly build an army to destroy the Clans.

Tigerstar is the main villain of the entire series… he does his best to destroy the Clans because he finds it amusing, because he felt it… wrong that he had to die where Firestar did not. He’s trying to make the Dark Forest the primary power of the land, and without the Three’s intervention, he would have succeeded. He even tried to turn Lionblaze into a warrior of his own… training him to be an even more powerful fighter than he already was, trying to make him into his pawn.

Mirroring this is Dark Samus. After stealing the Phazon Suit upgrade from Samus in Metroid Prime to restabilize itself after its defeat, it vowed revenge against her, fighting her three times in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, before trying to kill her right at the start of Corruption. What wound up happening instead was Samus’ corruption with Phazon, which only wound up making her more powerful. Dark Samus’ goal in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was to spread Phazon Corruption across the galaxy, turning it into her own galaxy that she controlled. If Samus had ever given into her own Corruption, she would have been made into a hyper-powerful pawn of Dark Samus.

Sound familiar?

Samus went into Phaaze the same way that the Three fought against the Dark Forest, to end things. To finish the war that was brewing. Without Samus, the Phazon War would have been lost. Similarly, without the Three (Lionblaze, Jayfeather, and Dovewing), the Dark Forest War would have been lost, in much the same way.

That’s mostly what my thoughts are, mirroring the two wars. I saw similarities upon my replays of the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and I wanted to share them.

I do apologize for anything that might have scared you as the reader. It is not my intention to scare you.

And I’ve spent a good amount of time on this article; final word count is 1,615 words; longer than most things I’ve ever written. I hope to see you all next time on the updated series, Shockfrost’s Glance. It will not be as dark as this one, I promise you that.

Now, I suggest that you go and look up some cheery music.