Who is our Ridley?

Summary:

We need more Space Dragons is what I'm saying.

Who is our Ridley?

Zesc 07 Feb 2025 20:37

There are many fictional organizations the CI took inspiration from, but I consider Metroid's Space Pirates to be basically our reference implementation. Think about it: we have an hostile organization branded as mere outlaws or brigands ("Pirates" and "Insurgents", respectively) by an hegemonic adversary (the "Federation" and "Coalition", respectively) where their facilities clearly show a higher level of sophistication. They unite various strange lifeforms with the common goal of doing evil under an engimatic, unclear leadership. They are strictly dogmatic, dangerously efficient, and can't say no to dipping their toes into ancient, uncontrollable super weapons and mad science.

But the Space Pirates have Ridley. In case you don't know whom I'm refering to, it's this space dragon. Now Ridley is not just a cunning, high-ranking general of the Space Pirates with a long history (and "rivalry", of sorts) with the protagonist, he also is an immediatley re-occuring boss throughout the games. Samus defeats him normally, and the Space Pirates just bring him back, better and stronger than before. There are plenty of different Ridleys: Meta Ridley, Mecha-Ridley, Omega Ridley, Neo-Ridley/Ridley-X and Proteus Ridley, to name the instances that are boss fights.

So whom does the Insurgency have to throw into a fight over and over again, each time geared up with some other unspeakable anomalies from the bottom of our "Hold my beer"-drawers? Ideally somebody with already some rep even outside the wiki (early SCP-lore, before the whole "Engineer"-fiasco)? If we had such a character, we could have something in the way the Foundation has SCP-001, where everybody gets to write an own, parallel version and stuff.

Can anybody think of somebody who would fit this role? I'd recommend making one otherwise, but given how great plans tend to pan out around here, I feel that would only have exactly two authors making versions of it.

+ Spoilers

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Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.

Re: Who is our Ridley?

Crayon man 07 Feb 2025 21:53

Brunnen Brunnen Brunnen

Containment

As the self-proclaimed resident Metroid Lore enthusiast, I have to say that you the space pirates are a superb inspiration to draw from. Also, their leaders are usually an ancient super AI/brain in a jar or a shadowy council, but I would argue that the underlying principles of their culture could produce a self-propagating Space Pirate (Nation?) even without an Elite. Ridleys titles, namely being referred to as the Pirate King and “The cunning God of Death” don’t seem to mean anything concrete. Though he undoubtably has a high degree of Authority. (except in maybe prime 1 and when under X control) While Im on the topic, they have less of a rivalry and more of a kill on sight policy when it comes to one another. With one party known to engage in absurd amounts of friendly fire just in an attempt to hurt the other while the other saw (probably) endangering civilians and being court-marshalled as an acceptable price just to get one more attempt at brutalizing the other. Also how dare you make an Other M reference.

But putting that tangent aside, lets answer the actual question. I cannot think of a character that would fit this description. So im pro raising a new one. We generally have a character problem here. Or non-obscure storytelling not disguised as worldbuilding. In my backlog I have a character that is just militarism to its extreme. That could be a good start
Further suggested characteristics include:

• This character, if they have hands, must be left-handed. I should not have to explain this.
• They have some ties to the red right hand.

Re: Who is our Ridley?

LasNeonach 08 Feb 2025 21:35

Much like crayons said. It can be some Guy. Or two guys. Since Im working on a "Tale" With those 2 guys from here
http://ci-wiki.wikidot.com/trouble-in-a-spoil-of-war
But they were envisioned as a Lower Class guys. You know. Drug dealing and child trafficking and other evils of our world with a pinch of paranormal thrown in there. Well they are essentially henchmen.
I could try making a character I actually have one candidate in my backlog.

Re: Who is our Ridley?

Zesc 09 Feb 2025 21:00

+ Karma Ka-ka-ka-Karmanation!

- Karma Ka-ka-ka-Karmanation!

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You're preaching to the choir here. Though the Space Pirates have existed long before they found Mother Brain (ever wondered why the Federation has no issues running Aurora Units, i.e. MB clones on their own?) and do just fine without her throughout the entire Prime sub-series as well as ASMR, err, AM2R, err, Metroid II. They just have a tendency to make people capable of sufficient ass-kicking their leaders, i.e. Draygon, Kraid, Phantoon and Ridley who are Space Pirates.

Though I agree in generally considering Other M a terrible Fusion fan fic. The only three things I consider canon are:

1. Phantoon being a full on eldritch horror
2. Fwuffy boi Widley
3. The Gravity Suit being just a purple-ish aura. I know many hated that, but think about how many games end with Samus in her Gravity Suit, and have the sequel begin in her Varia Suit even before she loses her upgrades. And with stuff like the Gravity Boost from Echoes I fully endorse this probably unintentional canon fixer.

I haven't played Dread yet btw, so that might change a lot of my takes.

And really, if your policy isn't to kill on sight, you're not rivals. You're just both too haughty to admit your crush.

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Honestly, what logically follows from both the demand to have a counter part to the Red Right Hand and NeoNach's recommendation of two guys would be to have an entire squad instead of a single person. That also gets rid of the "detail" problem: we would have to pick an origin story, personality, gender, etc. for that character. With some elite squad you could just rotate members and have them die "for real". More importantly, you could also have plenty of fun with uniform design for each experimental iteration.

I'm not sure if I ever already mentioned them in any published work, but I have Praetorians in the Vault canon. Besides wearing face masks in the style of roman cavalry, continuously chattering in the style of Combine Overwatch soldiers and having cloaks made from Lifecloth (basically tanned angel hide) which makes anti-tank weaponry merely knock them over, there's not much to them yet though. As the name implies, they're the bodyguards, enforcers, spies and whatnot of the people in charge. Is that something worth considering?

Although I think some collaborative effort wouldn't be half bad. Perhaps we can work something out with ASSAULT, or the french MORTs?

Besides that, if I were to pitch a single character, it'd definitely be Overseer-AQUARII.

+ Spoilers

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AQUARII is a parasite in the vein of Cymothoa exigua, the tongue-eating louse, except that her hosts are gods, not fish. Although in the Marvel jargon, she might rather pass as a "symbiont". Anyhow, after finding that the Tetragrammaton committed suicide in order to avoid a long death of starvation after nobody showed up in heaven after the rapture, we scratched off her dessicated remains and did what we do best: mushing ancient and priceless artefacts together in an attempt to create a monster. Frankly, nobody expected the process to actually work out, including such wonderful things like Katrahaski DNA (which helices spiral orthogonal to the normal 3 spatial dimension) and the preserved remains of Jean d'Arc and William Howard Taft (making them technically her biological parents), but in the end we somehow ended up with some shape-shifting gore golem. (Visually, she is inspired both by Despian Quaeritis and my the skinless corpse of my neighbour in my shed¹, as she is unable to grow body parts except sinews, teeth and eyes.)

Just like the Minions from the blockbuster Despicable Me franchise the Space Pirates, AQUARII just tends to follow whoever she considers the strongest one around. As she lacks brain cells both literally and figuratively, she basically immediately fell for Insu propaganda and started fangirling over Haos which makes keeping her under control rather easy. As she's a metaphysical creature, her physical body is more like an avatar, and she can be easily cloned when she dies, which happens a lot. I wasn't joking when I claimed she's 2 years old on Discord. So the "is defeated, and comes back again in a new form" thing could fit really well if she attached to different anomalies or stuff.

At the other hand, she is probably too powerful to become a commonly occurring character. Given that her powers include shape-shifting, calling forth the apocalypse, speaking with every human being in any language no matter the distance (she's illiterate though), operating Gate-AQUARII and surviving brief immersion in Vault-ARIES (by far the most impressive feat on this list) she's not the sort character I trust people to write, nor which many may want to write.

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Footnotes

1. With which I mean the skinless corpse owned by my neighbour, which I borrowed recently and haven't had the chance to return yet. I obviously did not skin my neighbour — what do you take me for, a psycho?

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Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.

Last edited on 09 Feb 2025 21:10 by Zesc Show more

Re: Who is our Ridley?

Crayon man 17 Feb 2025 21:05

Congrats I think those are some brand new sentences.
I think we should add to the list of qualities that the character must preferably work in as many scales as possible. No concrete plan on how this would be achieved. Maybe we do not think stupid enough, maybe the solution is a Space Dragon.

Re: Who is our Ridley?

Meta Wonderrat 22 Feb 2025 12:01

I wish to point out that there is a lack of CI characters in general (see posts here). After the failure of the Jerry series the only new recurring character that comes to mind that are actually main-side are from the "Perfect Edge" series. Maybe before we check what could fit the Ridley mold we take stock of what we actually have on hand (outside of the sandboxes).

I was working on a version of Haos that functions similarly to how old Dr. Bright functioned. The difference was that it would always be the same saved image + what ever the host was. It was designed so that there is always: Haos + Something = Haos Instance. Old Dr. Bright had a "I overwrite everything, but keep remembering all that came before" stick. My Haos is more like a costume anyone can put on and start acting the roll but being unable to abandon the performance.

I am not actually familiar enough with the Metroid series to actually profile Ridley. He seems more like a recurring aesthetic. Does Ridley even remember anything, considering that he needs to have been dead at least three times by my count?

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Fighting Monsters and Language since 2016.