This was never my reading of this situation. I read it as her suit broke during crash landing, and she found a backup in a Chozo temple. Anything to support your interpretation? I mean, you might be right, but I'd just like to see some proof.
Actually, come to think of it, it's been like that since Super Metroid. When Samus dies in that game her power suit goes away. But to answer your question:
http://www.metroid-database.com/features/faq.php
Q: Why does her suit come off when Samus is escaping inside her spaceship?
Sakamoto: For Samus's suit to appear, considerable powers of concentration are necessary. In short, it was too constraining. It's the same as a salary man loosening his necktie when returning from a business trip on the bullet train.
Q: Isn't Samus's powered suit integrated with her whole body? After you destroy Mother Brain, and on the way back pursued by space pirates, Zebes is falling apart. Why does she lose her suit when it should be integrated with her. That's my first question. Thank you very much!
Sakamoto: For Samus to remain connected with the Power Suit requires mental energy unfathomable to an ordinary person. In situations like this when she is under pressure, indeed, even Samus is unable to concentrate her mental energy. However, when Samus completes the trial of the spirit of the mural (God of War), she regains her strong force of will and can successfully integrate with the Legendary Power Suit.
She is oddly preoccupied with the death of a non-human, non sentient creature, and refers to it as 'the baby' continually, and her thoughts often touch on its fate. This is weird. Obsessed? Alright, wrong word. But she sees things with a distinctly maternal viewpoint or outlook to a very strange extent. This isn't surprising, since (as you point out) motherhood is the key theme of the game and all female characters are caught up in that theme in some way. The hint is in the title, twice. (Because god forbid they do anything subtle in this game.)
She only talks about it during the intro. That creature saved her life and she is grateful about it. It's also poignant in that it was a creature that she dedicated her life to eradicating but ended up saving her. But she doesn't act like it was a child. Like I said, considering what it did for her, her reaction to its sacrifice was pretty low-key. And why do you think it wasn't sentient? It didn't seem mindless. And why is it being non-human an issue? People care about animals; sometimes more than they care about humans. Samus though? She's pretty matter-of-fact about it.
...her reaction to his words does not. He doesn't 'disown' her. She IS an outsider, and everyone is there on that ship in a professional capacity, so they speak in a professional manner. There's a bunch of soldiers and a bounty hunter. She's the outsider. Taking it in any way personally marks her as being over-emotional and unprofessional. It's as if she doesn't understand the social / professional reality of the situation she's in. Again, I think this is because the writer's intrinsic sexism caused him to write a poor character.
The words have double meaning. It conveys Adam's current feelings about Samus. She's not a close friend and ally anymore. She's an outsider to both the mission and to him. These feelings are not intrinsic to sex. Men and women feel bad when people they used to be close to treat them distantly.
PTSD isn't a woman thing, but I don't believe that's what this scene was about. If the game wanted to show us Samus having PTSD, it could have spent even one brief moment setting the stage for that, by focusing even a bit some of her history that might explain it - things like her prior encounters with Ridley, her parents getting killed, the 'baby' being stolen, any of that stuff. We don't get to see that. Instead we get to see stuff regarding the baby and Adam, stuff that emphasises Samus' basic femininity both maternally and socially. All we get about Ridley is 'he's my longstanding nemesis' or some such. That's it.
And no, a guy wouldn't react the same way as Samus here because it makes no sense for any human to react that way to their 'longstanding nemesis' after facing them so often and winning. But to a sexist writer desperate to show how womanly his hero is at every turn, perhaps another chance to show her emotions get the better of her was too good to turn down.
You're entitled to your opinion, and I'll say that you're making your points patiently and fairly, but I'll never buy what you're selling here. We're worlds apart in our reading of what was on screen.
If they wanted to show Samus as a weak and scared woman they could have easily done that. If that's what they were trying to convey they did a terrible job. Why only that scene? Why only for 1 minute? Why tie it into her past? It makes no sense as anything else. It's not like I'm pulling this from my ass. Sakamoto wants her to have PTSD.
And again, this being later in her career does not mean she can't have a relapse PTSD episode. I think people have a hard time understanding that it's not normal fear. It's not rational fear. It doesn't matter that Samus has fought him several times and won. PTSD causes you to relive the traumatic event in a flashback. Think of it as she was having a nightmare while standing up. It was out of her control until she "woke up". I think that having the person that caused you to have PTSD come back to life from the odds he overcame in Other M would set most people off.
But that doesn't explain why she couldn't have a PTSD in the beginning of Super Metroid . And you didn't touch on my argument that the scene in the science lab was more gruesome and reminiscent of her previous encounter with Ridley (both slaughtering a group of people, Samus powerless to help them etc).
But regardless of the theories around PTSD, I think making a point of her having PTSD because of a dead entity coming back to live, goes against the logic that the previous Metroid games established. It felt like interjecting "realism" in a series where Ridley was just a arch nemesis that kept coming back to life because he was her nemesis (as stated above). Also felt like interjecting character traits in an already established character. Trying to explain away things that are video gamisms or trying to give them meaning really stands out like a sore thumb (and is probably why many people hate Other M).
If they tried to reboot the series or made a prequel/remake of Metroid where Samus first encounters Ridley and breaks down (because she also is lacking in experience and it's her first time seeing him again), that would make a little more sense and actually have significance to the story. Then she could overcome this and become the great bounty hunter we know today. Instead it happens in Other M when she is an established bounty hunter and really makes her look like a helpless girl in amateur hour. Especially when little mishaps like that could get her killed etc, and there's no prior history of this occurring (and you could see several situations where it could have occurred thus making it feel inconsistent that she may have PTSD). In addition the particular scene felt one-offed and had not real significance in the overall plot (because oh hey its Ridley again didn't see that coming). Only really showed that Samus is a vulnerable girl that needs to be saved.
But we don't know because Super Metroid doesn't show Samus' emotions. I touched on it that the emotion of the player seeing Ridley there would most likely be fear, and the fact that she is supposed to lose in that encounter.
Like I said above, it doesn't matter that the game isn't her first encounter because PTSD can relapse. And I think that the game made it clear that Samus thought he was dead for good (which he actually was) and she was very surprised that he was alive again.
The scene had no impact on the plot because her reaction wasn't part of her normal personality. It only served to illustrate just how big a nemesis Ridley is to her. He's not just the leader of the biggest criminal organization in the galaxy; her relationship to him is very personal. It's just a shame that Samus didn't get to finish him off. That's the bad part.
You give waaay too much credit to metroid's writers, they took some inspiration here and there, but the games in no way really give you an actual "Alien" feeling or character, Samus is nothing like Ellen Ripley, specially Other M's Samus. Other M's Samus wouldn't had survived any Alien movie, not even the bottom of the barrel like Alien vs Predator.
How am I giving them too much credit by pointing out that they blatantly copied a bunch of ideas from another series?
How would Other M Samus not have survived an Alien movie? She had a 1 minute freakout, but she has a badass powersuit that makes her an unstoppable force of destruction. It's not like she spent the whole game like that. She spent the whole game being a badass killing machine. After her episode she beat the shit out of Ridley, who looks far stronger, quicker, and durable than any xenomorph.