This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: The Samus: From YKTTW
Lale: Okay, I'm lost. The name comes from where?
Tanto: Metroid. In the first game, for the NES, the main character wears a full-body suit of armor that hides her gender, leading many players to assume she was male. At the end of the game, she takes it off if you've fulfilled certain conditions.
BT The P: OK, so the hotshot fighter/test pilot that pulls off astounding moves, lands, pulls off her helmet, shakes out her not-military-style hair, and saunters over to the flight line. Here, or separate.
Lale: Here, if that is The Reveal.
Egak: Has anyone noticed that I worked all the proposed titles from the YKTTW discussion into the body of the entry?
lala: Did this happen in Hot Shots or was I dreaming it?
Ununnilium: IMHO, Ranma himself doesn't count. He's not a woman in any of the ways that count for this trope.
Since Google and Yahoo don't have the YKTTW cached, a partial transcript (from the Yahoo search):
The Samus. added: 2007-11-06 21:42:04 by Egak An attractive woman in armor bulky enough that the audience (and the viewpoint character, usually) can't tell her sex until she takes her helmet off.
StruckingFuggle: Is Naruto's Haku an example of this, a reverse, subversion, or something entirely different?
MrInitialMan: Shouldn't the Lord of the Rings example be under Literature, as the novels came before the movies? Trust me. The Eowyn Reveal is in there.
Zeke: Oho, there's that gorgeous Samus pic again. I've been trying for a while to find out who the artist is. Anyone know?
BigT: Well, thegamer uploaded it... Incidentally, I'm thinking it may need to be a bit smaller. I'll see what I can do. Do you like this
◊ or this
◊ better? (If I reduced the quality too much, I can fix that.
Caswin: Am I the only one who thinks an official picture would fit the page better? Surely there are a few good canonical "Samus Is a Girl" pictures out there.
Arrow: Not really; most Metroid titles don't actually show her face until after the suit's entirely dissolved. The ones that do are first three 2D games, and still images of (admittedly largely delailed) sprites don't convey nearly the amount of visual oomph that a fan-drawn image specifically showing her manually exiting her suit does.
Caswin: For what it's worth, I may have found a nominee. Less playing up of the overt "sexiness" — I'm of the camp that that's a bit closer to her character — although on a second look, all non-Samus entities in the picture do kind of drag it down.
Big T: Took this out because it's too nattery.
- This video. Carve out 40 minutes of your time to watch it.
- That's 41 minutes. That I'll never get back. And this trope is about 4 irrelevant seconds in it. You're warned.
Blork: Removed this one since it seems incredibly unlikely:
- Word from the developers themselves have said Lara's introduction at the beginning of the original Tomb Raider was intended to be this trope (of course, her popularity now makes it hard to imagine), with her being wrapped in a cloak that covers her features, and revealed to be her when she throws it off a little later. As an extension, for Anniversary, the developers intentionally avoided pulling off the same scene due to how omnipresent knowledge of Lara is now (therefore making it redundant).
- I guess nobody told the marketing department, since Lara was wearing her usual hot-pants-and-tank-top combo on the cover of the game.
The marketing department clearly must have screwed up to an unbelievable degree since not only is Lara's gender clear from the picture on the front cover, but also the screenshots on the back, the manual, the adverts, her name and pretty much every article ever written about the game, in fact it was a big deal at the time since having a female protagonist was very rare. And even if we assume that the marketing guys just didn't know what they were doing, the developers obviously didn't either since the intro movie (shown before the one referred to here) clearly shows Lara to be female and makes it obvious that she's the protagonist.
DokEnkephalin: Removed because the Word of God finally spoke up on the matter:
- Fawkes in Fallout 3 is a Super Mutant, thus appearing to be masculine. However, she was a woman before she became a Super Mutant, which is hinted at in some in-game writing found before you meet her.
- In-game writing more clearly states that a female in Fawkes' room had died, but the public statement by Fawkes' voice actor is that Fawkes was a woman, and Bethesda has made no official contact with the fan controversy.
DokEnkephalin: The word came second-hand from Emil Pagliarulo through a Bethesda board community manager, who so far has been the only one in position to get that Word who's actually gotten it.
How would Salerno from "The Sting" fit in here? It's not made obvious who she is (and that she's a she) until she dies.
Daibhid C: I'm not at all sure about the claim that Monstrous Regiment is more Sweet Polly Oliver than Samus Is a Girl. It would seem that the troper who added that isn't sure about it either, since Sweet Polly Oliver is spoilered, and the difference between the two tropes is that Samus Is a Girl is a spoiler! Polly/Oliver is a Sweet Polly Oliver, obviously, but there's then a series od Samus Is a Girl moments as she finds out about the others.
Falcon Pain: This may be inconsistent with the examples people have added, but doesn't Sweet Polly Oliver also largely imply that the female character has to dress up as a guy to do what she's doing? (In the Trope Namer and Monstrous Regiment cases, because women can't join the military.) Samus isn't trying to avoid being recognized as female; it's just hard to tell until The Reveal.
