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SONIC X SHADOW GENERATIONS - Dark Beginnings

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Crimson Neo, Sep 25, 2024.

  1. Bluebobo

    Bluebobo

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    Ultimately, Shadow, as much as his feelings towards Maria are real and painful, isn't a very reliable narrator.
    You really can't know a character through someone else's memories of them. Maria still is a blank slate of a character, we just have some idea what her character was like.
     
  2. Crimson Neo

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    This makes me interested how they are gonna to handle her in the movie that gonna release later this year.
     
  3. qwertysonic

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    Maybe Maria was actually a bossypants jerk and Shadow just remembers her through rose-tinted glasses.
     
  4. BlackHole

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    Well, this is beginning to permeate the lore now. Saw someone saying that G.U.N. funding Shadow was 'second nature to Shadow fans' without realising it was a bad retcon in these videos alone that makes no sense, but at least that part's consistent with Sonic Origins...

    This is going to swiftly become a Hyrule Historia issue.
     
  5. Rokkan

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    what do you mean, GUN funding Project Shadow? It's been a thing, that "The Truth of 50 Years Ago" text states that very plainly
     
  6. BlackHole

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    You mean this part where G.U.N. were unaware, and it was leaked to them, resulting in the raid? While it was the UF President 'thirteen presidents ago' whom set the project up?
     
  7. Starduster

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    Who funded Project Shadow is frankly the least of my issues with Shadow’s wonky backstory. Like okay maybe it doesn’t work with whatever other previous lore details we have but it feels so inconsequential to me in that none of those things really affect perception or direction of Shadow as a character. Maybe GUN was getting antsy about Shadow becoming too potent, maybe they felt involving the Black Arms crossed a line, maybe stabbing the scientists aboard the ARK in the back once they got their living weapon was always the plan. None of that really changes the relationship Shadow had with those important to him at that time or how his arc plays out. If others care more about it, that’s fine, I just really can’t comprehend why it’s a big deal.
     
  8. Blue Spikeball

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    I think it changes things a lot, as it completely recontextualizes GUN's motivations for the raid, and Shadow's reasons for hating humanity.

    If GUN massacred the ARK crew because they feared Project Shadow, then it's on them for being paranoid and going for the kill instead of further investigating the project's aim, explaining Shadow's misanthropy.

    If they did it out of greed, because they wanted to take Shadow as a weapon for themselves, then it's still on them, and gives Shadow even more fuel for his misanthropy. I'll concede that this one doesn't change a lot in relation with the previous.

    But if they did it because they found out Gerald struck a deal with the Black Arms in secret, then it's mainly on Gerald for basically selling humanity (even if he had prepared a countermeasure in the Eclipse Cannon), making Shadow's misanthropy feel rather random.
     
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2024
  9. Rokkan

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    I meant after Gerald was captured and forced to continue working for it under GUN. Whether Project Shadow started with GUN funding or not is a bit ambiguous (though the wording does imply they were unaware of it), it's possible they were funding the project but then took action when it was revealed to be what it was, in any case I don't think this is that important a detail as it is determining whether Gerald kept working on it under GUN in prison, which is why I thought *that* was the issue.
     
  10. BlackHole

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    It makes them look like absolute morons.

    "Oh, we got that guy to work on Project: Shadow. Let's pay an untold number to set him up in an orbiting laboratory... then kill everyone, including the one person he was doing this for, and force him to complete the project on Prison Island."

    If they had a problem with the potency, then whoever was reporting to them on the ARK dropped the ball when Gerald built a planet destroying energy cannon: clearly the hedgehog was a bigger threat.
    If this was always the plan, why not just hold him and Maria captive on Prison Island in the first place and save the untold number on their budget?
    If the Black Arms were crossing a line, why have him continue to work on the very thing the Black Arms were asking of him?

    Then they weren't funding Project: Shadow, were they? Tony Stark was hardly being paid by the hour in the cave.
     
  11. Blue Spikeball

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    Dark Beginnings states that GUN funded the research that created Shadow, while The Truth of 50 Years Ago says that GUN imprisoned Gerald (after he had created Shadow) and forced him to continue working on the research for them. That's quite the difference.
     
  12. Jaxer

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    Maybe it's just me, but I do not think that we should've ever taken flavor text from random supplementary material as certain and unwavering parts of the series' narrative just because it's Japanese.

    Unless we do the same for western stuff too, in which case Shadow loves Hot Pockets and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, and anything that implies otherwise is a retcon.
     
  13. Starduster

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    @Blue Spikeball But none of that changes anything for Shadow. Even in the case where one might argue GUN was justified due to the involvement of the Black Arms, Shadow’s motivation is still his hatred towards humanity for its needless and callous destruction of his first and most dear friend. Gerald still snapped and tampered with Shadow’s memories to make him more inclined towards animosity. Shadow likely wouldn’t know the reason for this stuff anyway.

    @BlackHole In the reverse scenario, either GUN looks stupid regardless for not being aware of the orbiting space station (if it was commissioned by the president along with Shadow), or else Shadow the Hedgehog specifically was outside the scope of what they commissioned the ARK for (if they commissioned it).

    I think this kind of scratches at a lot of my issues with the minutiae of Shadow’s backstory - it’s so poorly defined within the games proper that it becomes hard for me to care about or even follow stuff like who funded the project or Shadow’s journey from the ARK to being “completed” (whatever the fuck that means, there seems to be no difference between Shadow 50 years ago and Shadow in SA2, physically speaking) and then being sealed away. At this point I’d like to see a webcomic on the socials that properly fills in all those blanks in a way that feels properly digestible and that’ll be stuck to - whether that’s taking the old telling as its basis or just running with what’s established in Dark Beginnings isn’t a particular point of contention for me.
     
  14. Beamer the Meep

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    While I'm drawing a lot from Star Trek here, I think most franchises consider "supplemental material" such as comics, books, ect non-canon. The Star Trek Countdown comic comes to mind as it was considered canon in 2009 and for a long time after until Star Trek Picard went their own way with the events mentioned in Countdown and the 2009 movie.

    While Sonic tries to maintain canon cohesion between various supplemental material now, this was not always the case, especially in 2001.
     
  15. The Deleter

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    TTo50YA isn't the equivalent of a silly magazine promo with dated pop culture laughs, it's the equivalent to Chaos being described as a mutant chao in the strategy guides and later on the Sonic Channel website.

    A president from 50 years ago commissioning Project Shadow as a hope for immortality, Gerald seeking to cure his granddaughter's illness, the event on the ARK being an outright massacre, someone in the ark who betrayed the rest of the team working on Project Shadow, "the rest of the ark" being evacuated, (giving the Commander an actual excuse to make sense) the reason they chose a lizard to begin with, the specifics of Shadow's fate afterwards - this was all either established or supported by this supplementary material. And considering how small the team who worked on SA2 was, there's not a lot of room for other writers to come in and write as many details as these that actually line up with the game, while being as divorced from the main text as is being implied here.
     
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2024
  16. BlackHole

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    The US manual notes Gerald designed the ARK, so if I were to include that, it would be the former, which would make sense in the context of Sonic Adventure 2 since space was shuttle travel, not random G.U.N. space fleet that causes more confusion, but let's not get into that can of worms yet (incidentally, at this point I'm assuming the Death Egg shot them down in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive)), but otherwise means G.U.N. would hardly have a presence in space to monitor it.

    BUT, as I'm sure is known from similar discussions I don't use the US stuff, and from what I can see of the equivalent portion of the Japanese manual, it only describes Gerald as a genius who went missing 50 years ago so it seems that was just added in by the localisers. I used Google Lens, so I don't know if it missed a detail, but until I confirm that detail is somewhere in the Japanese manual, then I have no idea who built the ARK.
     
  17. The Deleter

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    TTo50YA already states that, before learning about Project Shadow, GUN were hostile to the ARK institute to begin with. They already knew about the ARK, they were simply not taking action against it until Project Shadow ended up leaking - and with the way they captured the means to make Project Shadow itself, it might as well have been a power grab, in turn.
     
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  18. Blue Spikeball

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    Even if we take the easy "Shadow's memories were altered anyway, so he doesn't have to have an understandable reason to hate humanity" path, I find that taking the blame away from GUN with the Black Arms thing is far less interesting.

    I find Gerald's story much more compelling if he was (by contrast with Eggman) a completely well-meaning scientist who wanted to help Maria and humanity, and was wronged by a corrupt military organization. Shifting the blame to him lessens the tragic aspect of it all.

    Yes it was. Stuff from The Chaos Emerald Legend was referenced by Sonic Channel (as mentioned just above), while Maria's disease from The Truth of 50 Years Ago was referenced in later material, even the SA2 adaptation in Sonic X.

    The lore expansions from those strategy guides were always intended to be canon. If anything, it's only now that contradictions are starting to pop up.
     
    Last edited: Oct 20, 2024
  19. Jaxer

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    Even if somebody involved with SA2's development wrote it, who knows if the rest of the team knew - or cared? I have a hard time believing that this minor thing written for a guidebook was hanged on the wall at Sonic Team as some sort of sacred text that must never be defaced.

    And as for stuff introduced in it turning up in later Sonic media, who's to say that they didn't just pick the parts they liked? Might I remind you where Amy Rose and Charmy Bee made their first appearances?
     
  20. Blue Spikeball

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    Poor comparison. Amy and Charmy were introduced in a manga that was always a separate canon from the games, so of course the games didn't follow its lore when it adapted the characters.

    The texts in question from those strategy guides were specifically attributed to the games the guides were about, and elaborated on the lore presented by the games. They were written and presented as part of the game universe.

    Saying that they were meaningless/non-canon when they were perfectly in line with the games in question and some of what came later feels like being contrarian for the sake of it to me.
     
    Last edited: Oct 20, 2024