The Sonic the Hedgehog Continuity Thread of Love and Timelines

Abe's rank in Shadow Gens is given as commander. That means according to rank he is second in command of the Metal Harbor base below the captain. Which means he wouldn't have been anywhere near the place where Shadow was released nor in a position to step in and stop everything. The duty of the rank of commander is to execute the will of the captain, not make military decisions.

 

He's not just a commander, he's the Supreme Commander of GUN in his JP bio. There's usually no one above that rank depending on where you are minus a civilian leader.

The game seems to treat him this way since he's the one leading the GUN counterattack against the Black Arms.

 

He literally cannot be supreme commander, because that's another word for "commander-in-chief" and Sonic's world has a president, which is exactly that.

A Commander will lead troops in a grouping larger than a single ship but is not in charge of the entire offensive. I.e. what you see him doing in the attack against Black Arms is exactly what a commander would do.

 

You can say this but that's the title Sonic Team gave him, you can check the JP manual that's in the Retro wiki.

And no, that's not the only definition supreme commander has. For example, General Douglas MacArthur was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. But he wasn't president was he?

Either way, in his few appearances he basically gets treated as the De facto leader, or at least someone with a big pull that puts him in a position to identify that it was Shadow and not Sonic causing trouble in Prison Island.

 

There’s no reason the military-political structures of Sonic’s world have to follow our own in a way that takes precedence over what the story is suggesting (i.e., that Tower is leading G.U.N. in Shadow the Hedgehog). Further, the President tapped Rouge as his spy to dig up dirt on Shadow in SA2, so clearly the administration doesn’t have the best relationship with or total authority over G.U.N.

 

Or, and hear this headcanon out: Abraham Tower was not the G.U.N. Supreme Commander at the time.

After the events of Sonic Adventure 2, where the President of the United Federation was investigating them via Rouge and their dirty laundry was aired by Gerald's video and attempt to ram the ARK into Earth, they were forced into a massive reshuffling that saw the complicit Supreme Commander that was guarding Shadow ousted, as well as various other old wardogs, and Abraham Tower was installed as one of the few actually clean commanders in the organisation.

 

I mean that’s also an option. Either way, it’s not a difficult thing to explain. Tower didn’t clarify the truth about Sonic and Shadow in SA2 because he didn’t exist yet and the plot needed to happen. Anything else is perfunctory.

 

Honestly, the entire thing with G.U.N. is weird. They know Shadow was sealed for 50 years, but go after the world renowned hero hedgehog everyone knows has been active and involved with the Little Planet and Angel Island?

I can't even justify it as the news confusing the two and G.U.N. taking advantage of that since that was a breaking news bulletin at night "just a few moments ago..." when Shadow stole the Chaos Emerald, while Sonic was captured during the day, long before that point.

This is why I subscribe to the theory G.U.N. were trying to get Sonic in Shadow's way so he'd stop them without G.U.N. having to explain themselves...

 

I like the idea that GUN was purposefully trying to pit Sonic and Shadow against each other.

Maybe, since GUN had access to Geralds old notes, they wanted to kidnap sonic to use his DNA to make their own Shadow after the original got stolen?

 

IMO and TLDR, its easier govt optics to blame all your problems revolving around nefarious hedgehog sightings by pinning the blame on the only hedgehog people actually know about.

Given Sonic's 'drifter' nature at this point in the overarching story, people only have baseless vague knowledge (based on the existence of Barry) of a hog going out causing chaos for some random doctor, saving animals and far away islands, and maybe having something to do with some large water serpent attacking that one city a bit ago. He's not so well known to be considered a celebrity, but not too terribly unknown since he's a fairly active activist - said peoples who have been saved by Sonic, who aren't numerous to begin with, would have a harder time getting their voice heard. Now imagine being an average citizen, generally conscious of this one hedgehog's escapades just to hear some bubbly new story that he's in hot water~ It only makes it easier to keep yourself as a military org quiet when you focus most of the news' resources on maintaining the idea that this one anthro we have footage of is the same anthro not a lot of people see anyways. I think it's ingenious!

Add on the fact that a lot of the activities are from a dark hedgehog going faster-than-light during a time of day when it's really dark, which makes proper sightings vague puts even more favour into G.U.N.'s court. I literally couldn't do it any better, the optics are staggeringly great.

 

Except they already had Sonic arrested before Shadow was even known publicly, claiming he was a deserter from a military facility. Shadow, meanwhile, attacked that night, after Sonic had been arrested. Not to mention if news got out of Sonic's capture, which it did via Satellite TV according to Tails' summary, and Shadow attacks somewhere else, it looks even worse for G.U.N. optics-wise.

Plus, they just so happen to capture Sonic, and put him on the same island where they're collecting Chaos Emeralds? An island that Robotnik has already blown his way to the deepest level of?

And Tails immediately sets off to Prison Island, suggesting they announced where they were holding Sonic. In Gerald's prison cell, despite numerous other cells to hold him in without sensitive data. I wonder if that one was to try and draw Tails' attention to it, but Amy mucked that up for them, but that one's just speculating.

Regardless, G.U.N. would be arresting a well known hero for something he literally could not have done just after he helped save Station Square and the world from Perfect Chaos, then put him in a prison cell no one's otherwise touched in 50 years where there's immensely sensitive data, while letting the actual threat run around uninhibited otherwise, because why would the military continue hunting for 'Sonic' if they already caught him and announced thus?

But if we operate under the assumption that it was a trap, they had Tails inbound to help Sonic escape due to announcing where he was, plus potentially decoding Gerald's ramblings, three Chaos Emeralds to draw in Shadow and Robotnik, and an island for Sonic, Tails, Shadow and Robotnik to all fight on. They just didn't expect Amy and Rouge.

Still, if we continue this, perhaps to the Headcanon thread, since we're discussing plotholes and speculating on how to fill them.

 

To me this still makes sense. The chase starts at 1:27pm, around 10:22pm there was the news report that Shadow had arrived to the city, stolen the emerald and authorities had him in sight.

After this Sonic seems to be alone until BIG FOOT catches up to him.

I thought that the game was showing that during a brief moment GUN had lost sight of Sonic and this is when Shadow appears so they start chasing him leading them to where Sonic is.

At the same time during this chase the pilot of BIG FOOT reports that he found Sonic.

And at the end of all GUN forces arrive to the location and Sonic gets framed even further.

And I think this is what makes GUN role in the game so interesting because despite being antagonists we don't really have a clear view of their intentions/reasoning.

The only reason why I brought up Abraham is because he retroactively makes the situation more confusing. He personally hated Shadow so what exactly was he doing during the events of the game?

I think every theory so far in this thread makes sense in its own way, though I guess we just need to find out what the team thought when they were creating the story for the game.

In the movie thread I said that there was two sides within GUN after playing the game. One that did not know about Shadow so they thought it was really Sonic, and one small group that knew about Shadow but in their effort to keep things secret they framed Sonic and went after both.

Sonic X does play with the idea that there's a hidden group within GUN keeping Project Shadow a secret.

But was that an idea from Sonic Team or was it from TMS?

It's funny how no one has asked this to one of the people involved in the game when getting the opportunity.

I guess I gotta hold on to it if Maekawa ever does another fan Q&A.

 

The problem there is that is contingent on the idea G.U.N. were expecting Sonic to escape: if he didn't, they'd have had Sonic in custody at a G.U.N. base when Shadow's attack kicks off, plus likely announced his capture since that's what they did in the game.

The news report says Shadow has the Chaos Emerald at 20:31, and as you noted Sonic's cutscene starts at 13:27: Sonic's been escaping from the city for seven hours (and four minutes) by then, arrested for longer since they had to get him handcuffed and such first. The next cutscene where Shadow's stood atop the bridge on Radical Highway says 21:09, adding another half an hour to that at least, since we don't know how long from that it took for Sonic and Shadow to run into one another after that. No wonder the poor guy's exhausted by the time he took down Big Foot.

Anyway, point is if Sonic didn't escape, they'd have had Sonic in custody for around seven hours when Shadow pulls his heist. What then?

 

If there's one thing I’ve learned during my time in journalism, it’s that people who want to keep secrets rarely think ahead. G.U.N. just got lucky Sonic managed to escape.

This also raises the question: was Shadow only noticed because the military and law enforcement were chasing Sonic through the city?

Would things have been different if Sonic had been in custody on Prison Island?

Perhaps Shadow could have escaped unnoticed until the investigation eventually pointed to him, making it easier for the government and the military to keep the situation quiet and throwing the media out of the loop.

But again, not saying it's perfect. I just went through some SA2 material and it's interesting how there's not a lot of info on GUN.

I can see why the short SA2 Archie adaptation put the bank heist a day before to frame Sonic.

 

Unlikely, since it was the police who were responding to Shadow on the bridge, with no G.U.N. unit in sight until the level begins: it probably would've been the same situation, except Sonic locked in the prison at the time so Shadow wouldn't be able to pose atop the downed Big Foot unit.

Truly the worst timeline they have.

 

The description of Sonic as “deserter” is strange in that it doesn’t quite correctly convey what he (or rather Shadow) has done, the term usually being applied to soldiers who abandon their duty as opposed to an escaped prisoner.

Of course, GUN is presumably a widespread organization that shares sensitive information like the details of the Prison Island break-in on a need to know basis. What the arresting soldiers believe about Sonic may be different from the understanding of the soldiers monitoring the initial Prison Island invasion.

Here’s an assortment of other questions this discussion has prompted in my mind:

Did the soldier piloting HOT SHOT survive his encounter with Shadow? If so, was he able to convey an accurate description of Shadow’s appearance? If there were no cameras in Shadow’s vault, it’s conceivable that certain soldiers would have no idea what he actually looked like. Indeed, HOT SHOT only refers to Shadow as “the enemy” (in English, not sure about Japanese); is he even aware that Shadow was just released from the capsule and is in fact GUN property?

How does Shadow get off Prison Island? Does he use the grey chaos emerald to chaos control out? From what I recall we don’t actually see what happened to that emerald until it’s already placed in the Eclipse Cannon. And once he’s fully free, how did he spend the next day? Where did he go, and how was he able track the green Chaos Emerald’s location?

I do like to think of GUN’s seemingly inscrutable actions in SA2 as the result of the acting Commander’s cover up attempt, though to what end and a lot of the details are fuzzy. That said, the intro to Gerald’s diary describes Tower’s predecessor as having covered up much of what happened 50 years ago, so there is some canonical evidence for that theory - though to be fair it’s not clear what time period the predecessor was in power.

 

The Hot Shot pilot opens with:
"Awakening of Rogue Element in Classified Area confirmed."
The pilot is otherwise in constant contact with an operator, and while never does describe Shadow to her, the use of awakening suggests they are well aware Shadow was asleep before that point: see aforementioned point about Sonic being a world renowned hero.

6:27

 

Yes but the city was already on high alert and the police were also on Sonic's trail. Just because we just see cop cars it doesn't mean GUN wasn't part of it.

It is not unlikely that they reacted faster because again there was a city wide emergency.

If there's no emergency then Shadow has a bigger window of opportunity to get away faster.

It's not like GUN knew he was after the emeralds or Gerald's plan to put more security for the bank.

Yeah, I also pointed out that deserter part and found it weird as well. Especially because that's the reason they told Sonic he was being arrested for.

There could be a story reason for it or Sonic Team just thought that sounded cool.

 

I mean, it's a Chaos Emerald. They're not exactly unknown by this point, and they've been used to wipe out at least one city so far, so I would suspect the bank had it deep in their vault when Shadow went for it, even if Shadow wasn't a factor for the simple reason Robotnik very much is.

Cultural differences might be in play as well, I'll need to check that out at some point.

 

It could be, I honestly did not think about there being cultural differences.

If you find something let us know.