Sonic the Hedgehog Cinematic Universe Thread (& Knuckles)

Okay jokes aside that would actually hit really hard

 

See, that's literally what I always thought it was supposed to be in SA2. The room's not full of soldiers because she got shot at some point before going in, and presumably locking the door. In every adaptation of the scene, Maria sends Shadow off and then a dude barges in and aims right at her. In Sonic X you even meet the guy who did it, but I never liked that setup. It makes it very personalized to the individual, but Maria wasn't killed by one man alone, the ARK disaster was the consequence of a system. Any one of those soldiers could have done it. It always seemed far better to me that she was shot entering the room End-of-Evangelion-style and does the goodbye with Shadow while she's dying. It's why you hear the gunshot at the start of the radical highway flashback.

 

The one thing I pray to god, heaven, and hell that they don't do is undercut any of the drama with a joke, Marvel-style. I'm imagining after Gerald is executed via firing squad, there's this awkward silence before a character (likely Sonic) makes a "whoa that was heavy" quip to kill the tension. Oh god.

 

Not for nothing, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, objectively the most meta and Marvel-style of all of the MCU, didn't undercut any of its drama at all. And Jeff Fowler seems to understand that Shadow's entire backstory is supposed to be a tragedy played straight, so I think he understands the assignment.


This movie is going to be one hell of a mood whiplash compared to the first two though lol.

 

the stuff involving Longclaw in both movies was played 100% straight too. I got Feels when he brings up her hologram in the second movie.

 

I honestly wish we got to see more of her character, like maybe a flashback of her finding Sonic as a baby. She was the first parental figure he had, but had such little screen time and character development.

 

Yeah. Rocket's backstory was a real gut punch. Just wow...

 

It's the crazy shit I wish this movie could do but I know they just can't.

 

Ooh! What crazy shit, pray tell?

 

Us seeing Maria getting shot

WE WANT THAT BLOOD

 

People who aren't into Sonic somehow stumbling onto this thread would probably think we're all homicidal maniacs.

 

I would think for people outside of the Sonic-sphere our eagerness to see a young girl die violently would be unnerving, and apparently our bloodlust hasn't escaped the media's attention. https://kotaku.com/sonic-the-hedgehog-3-movie-shadow-maria-death-actor-1851227374

 

my "NOOOOOOOOO!" is going to sound a hell of a lot like a "YEAAAAAAAAAH!"

This feels kind of spoilery even though it's not scratching the surface of any real spoilers but it's just generally really nice and authentic soul-crushing and heartbreaking emotion with what would be a silly furry creature, which is normally disallowed because people think "I thought Sonic was a cartoon. like Mickey Mouse!" People just aren't receptive to it but James Gunn manages to make it work in the exact same way it should work with Sonic but it just never has.

 

Don't fret, I've seen Vol. 3, and I get precisely what you mean.

Nyeheheheh.

 

Well, we know that Longclaw was attacked/killed with a visible shadow, so I’m thinking the same thing with Maria. Parents taking their kids to see this should know better as to what this story is, but they won’t. I’m curious to see his this turns out. We are only a few months away now!

 

I feel like people are grossly over-remembering Maria's death scene in SA2. Here it is for context. There isn't even a gun in the scene, she's just confirmed to be a casualty after the Arc was shut down. Most of you might be misremembering the Shadow the Hedgehog scene where a gun is pulled on her. (Even then it fades to white when the trigger is pulled).


I guess there is also the Sonic X scenes.

 

I don't think people are "over-remembering", we're all on the same page that you don't physically see Maria hit by the bullet. But that does showcase what I was saying, you can hear a gunshot just before it cuts to Maria there, and she's clutching her chest. The way the scene plays out really does not feel like there's anyone else in the room besides her and Shadow.

 

For what it's worth, off-screen pre-release footage of Shadow the Hedgehog which was online in the lead-up to the game's release showed that at one point the intro actually included a slow-mo shot of Maria falling to the ground after the gunshot is heard - this was trimmed for the final release, presumably as part of an effort to get the game's rating lowered, as there were a few other small things toned down between this and the final release. It still wouldn't have shown the shot actually hitting her, but I think that's the closest there's been to actually showing the moment she's fatally wounded in any version of the scene.

(EDIT: Ah, wait - forgot that although the CG version of the slow-mo shot was excised, an in-game version still happens after Lost Impact. Weird that they cut it in one instance and not the other - presumably it would have taken more effort to go back and revise the in-game cutscene to excise it.)

In Sonic X we see the shot fired but we're looking at the GUN agent rather than Maria herself, and the flashback ends as soon as the shot is fired. We later see the aftermath where she's lying prone on the floor, though from memory this doesn't quite fit with what we see in the GUN agent's flashback - presumably to preserve the ambiguity they were going for around Sonic Adventure 2's release as to whether Shadow's memories of Maria were actually real, as this was written and produced prior to Shadow the Hedgehog's release.

Actually, it's interesting to see how the Shadow the Hedgehog version of the scene bears more resemblance to the version shown in Sonic X than the one originally shown in Sonic Adventure 2 - in both later depictions, Maria is shot and falls down and ends up lying prone on the floor next to the capsule while giving her final words, rather than supporting herself against the capsule's control panel as in the original. I wonder if the anime's depiction was closer to what was originally envisaged for the scene, or if the Shadow the Hedgehog team just decided it felt more dramatic than the original?

 

Sonic X season 2 and ShTH were pretty close in timeframe. 2004/2005 ish? So it makes sense that they'd both be similar. But what I'm saying is that SA2 had no guns, no soldiers, and no death on screen and we still knew what happened. They could easily do that in the movie and it would be perfectly suitable for kids. It's just simple story telling like we've seen in many G-rated Disney classics.