checked my canvas info and i spent about 14 ½ hours on these ✌️ but yeah i sat down and was like “what if pokémon” so that’s what i did. took my 14 ½ hours but i did do it. won’t be able to do it again for a while but knowing me ill probably do this again. i mean let me know if yalld care. click for better quality and whatnot
Hear me out: Bee and Puppycat but it’s Maria and Shadow.
Bee and Puppycat is one of the most underrated animated shows ever. If you haven’t watched it yet – give it a try. It’s a very special show, pretty mature and it’s cute style is but a facade. It has angst, character development and interesting twists.
BONUS: Shadow is mad because she didn’t let him buy an edgy outfit.
Hear me out: Bee and Puppycat but it’s Maria and Shadow.
Bee and Puppycat is one of the most underrated animated shows ever. If you haven’t watched it yet – give it a try. It’s a very special show, pretty mature and its cute style is but a facade. It has angst, character development and interesting twists.
BONUS: Shadow is mad because she didn’t let him buy an edgy outfit.
big fan of the idea that shadow was born as, like, a real baby rather than being spat out of a test tube as the fifteen year old he is now. there’s so much room to play in the space with baby shadow. they have to baby proof the space station because he tried to chew on wires. maria dresses him up like a little doll. everyone carries him around when he’s in a Mood because it calms him down. he has to hold maria’s hand whenever they walk anywhere. they have to teach him english but he copies someone swearing once & maria has a full on giggle fit. the possibilities are endless
thesonic the hedgehog filmverse writers waltzing into the studio after finishing their script adaptation of sonic adventure 2 to tell the higher-ups that they just made absolutely sure that they will never get any military funding
ok but. do my non-sonic followers know that the plot of the second-most popular sonic character shadow the hedgehog’s introductory game (which shapes his entire character) is like explicitlyanti-military and also that the sonic cinematic universe meticulously set up everything for his backstory to be exactly the same as it was in the games
no. tell me more please
ok so im going to tell you the plot of sonic adventure 2, one of the most beloved sonic games and, as i said, the introduction to the character of shadow the hedgehog. i want you to know that everything i say here is NOT a joke WHATSOEVER. it is not fake. you can look up playthroughs, wiki summaries, etc. to see for yourself.
so here is the plot
This begins 50 years before the main plot. There’s a Military called GUN. (It’s supposed to be multi-national but is very coded US Military; the filmverse seems to be making it exclusively USA.)
They contract Gerald Robotnik (Eggman’s grandfather) and ask him to make them an immortal lifeform, most likely to use as a living weapon. Gerald isn’t too sure but his family has some serious health issues so he agrees in order to find a way to cure his family.
They end up in a Space Colony, which we find out in other games was an actual colony. It wasn’t just scientists up there, there were families and children. Keep this in mind.
Gerald is working very hard on this Ultimate Lifeform because his granddaughter/Eggman’s cousin, Maria, was born with an incurable disease that is literally just AIDS. They call it NIDS but it’s very clearly supposed to be AIDS. She is too sick to leave the space colony and has to be under constant supervision and he wants to cure her so she doesn’t, you know, die young.
It’s not super important to the point of this post how he makes the Ultimate Lifeform but long story short there were demon aliens involved
So they make the Ultimate Lifeform– Shadow the Hedgehog. He seems to be practically immortal and has a deep connection to the all-powerful chaos emeralds.
Shadow says explicitly in later games that he was “born and raised” on the ARK, and that he was raised alongside Maria. Gerald refers to Shadow as his son in a later game and Maria is clearly his big sister figure. The two of them just reallywanna go see Earth bc they’ve been stuck in space forever.
Shadow starts having depression bc everyone tells him he’s supposed to be the Ultimate Lifeform and he was created to cure Maria but… he hasn’t cured her. She’s still sick. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.
And then. well.
We’re not sure exactly what happened? But it seems pretty clear that GUN found out about Shadow, that Gerald wasn’t planning on using him as a living weapon, and they got scared he might use Shadow against them. So they. well
GUN stormed the ARK and started murdering everyone
And yes, we know that it was everyone,not just the scientists. In Shadow’s spinoff game, we meet a survivor of the massacre who says explicitly that his entire family was killed during that incident
Gerald ends up captured, probably bc the government still wants him to make them stuff
MARIA IS NOT SO LUCKY
MARIA IS LITERALLY SHOT
THEY LITERALLY MURDER MARIA
If you’re wondering how old she is: the games give her no age but she is constantly referred to as a child and her model seems vaguely teenage. The anime, Sonic X, put her at twelve years old
Maria survives just long enough to send Shadow off in an escape pod but she is LITERALLY MURDERED by the MILITARY
Gerald manages to nab Shadow’s escape pod, which put him into a cryosleep. He finds out Maria is dead, absolutely fucking cracks, and decides to fuck with Shadow’s memory so that Shadow will want to destroy the planet
He gives Shadow false memories of Maria wanting him to avenge her and then sets him on a path to blow up the planet and everyone on it
GERALD IS THEN EXECUTED BY FIRING SQUAD
The military can’t figure out how to wake Shadow up so they keep him on ice for fifty years.
Eggman then breaks in and releases Shadow. Once Shadow is out and starts committing crimes, GUN doesn’t want people to figure out their fucked up secrets so they frame it all on Sonic, the only other nearby hedgehog, and try to imprison him
If you follow the theory that Eggman does what he does bc he has Orphan Issues, this implies that everything shitty that happened in Sonic Universe happened because the military decided to murder civilians
So that’s all canon, and think about this in the filmverse:
They set up GUN
They set up that Robotnik/Eggman is an orphan with government connections
They set up that the government can make people disappear if they’re a bad look
They set up that the military is incompetent, violent, and totally down to maim/injure/capture non-hostile aliens because they don’t understand them and/or want their power
In the post-credits scene, they established Shadow is 50 years old, that he was in Project Shadow, and that the government is covering him up while keeping him in cryo
You remember a few bullet points ago I mentioned a survivor of the ARK massacre in Shadow’s spinoff? You know the Olive Garden Military guy? They are very clearly supposed to be the same guy. Aside from the game!character having heterochromia, they look exactly the same, and he recognizes “Project Shadow” when he’s told about it
And most importantly:
The director of the SCU, Jeff Fowler, got one of his first jobs working on the cutscenes for Shadow’s spinoff game, where this backstory is restated and focused on HEAVILY
we are ABSOLUTELY going into the sonic the hedgehog “fuck the military” arc of cinema
the sonic movie 3 team making the most anti-military movie of the decade
Random Headcanon (really middle of the night though):
Chaos turns your thoughts into power, right? Shadow uses chaos control to teleport.
His use of chaos energy is blue—just like Maria and Sonic. In fact, it’s the same hue of blue as the two of them. I say this because any time he uses chaos control he leaves a blue light behind…
Could this mean that he thinks of them constantly and their “auras” rub off of him? Like, the thought of them is what allows him to do some techniques of chaos control?
Like I’ve said, it was just a random thought that I had in the middle of the night.
[begin ID: fanart of maria robotnik and shadow the hedgehog in maria’s bedroom. the room is dark save for soft yellow light coming from a lamp on a white table beside maria’s bed and from under the door. beside the table lamp is a bottle of water and an alarm clock reading 2:33am. on a white dresser against the wall is a bit of jasmines, a handful of medicine bottles, and a golden decorative menorah. on the wall above the dresser is a round mirror and four cloud wall decals. maria is wearing round glasses and pink and purple pajamas, and is sitting in bed with one hand gripping a blue blanket. a frightened shadow is underneath a rocking chair opposite from maria, hiding in the shadows with his eyes glowing. end ID.]
i’ve wanted to draw this scene from CotA since i wrote i so i finally did!! it’s not exactly how i pictured it but i’m pretty content :) there’s a lit version under the cut just for funsies too
Alright well this is an idea I’ve been slinging back and forth with @jeroesworld for a week or two, and at this point I’ve produced enough content that I might as well share it because holy hell am I getting carried away.
Basically it’s a Clone!Maria story with the idea being that Gerald Robotnik toyed with the idea of making a clone of Maria and supporting its health with altered, powerful DNA (Basically a Shadow!Maria) but could not bring himself to replace her and left the clone forever in stasis. Ivo Robotnik finds the clone, lets it out, and uses the clone to do his usual take over the world shtick because she’s very powerful. Since she’s a naive kid, he convinces her that her work for the Eggman Empire is to ‘help the world’.
She has most of Maria’s memories up until the very end, where little bits are spotty–she can kinda remember Shadow, but not fully. Cue existential drama for Cloneria and Shadow’s Trademarked DramaAngst.
Henri’s just an extra loser I designed. tl;dr human being who humans ostracize because Eggman building robots has made robotics very unpopular, but likes building robots so he fucked off to build robots in the jungle. He pretty much just exists to reprogram Mikky and Lenny, the watchbots that follow Maria everywhere. His design here isn’t entirely accurate, since Jeroes suggested I make him kinda gangly tall. So disregard the height thing in the corner.
It’s not fully fleshed out yet. There’s some gaps I need to fill in here and there. But whatever, here you go.
This may be the first Sonic idea I have ever fully thought through that was 100% detached from Archie Sonic.
wait i just saw an edgy post about shadow the hedgehog and they mentioned something about his back story?? what is this man’s backstory?? /gen
shadow’s backstory is bonkers and largely in subtext/supplemental material to a 20 year old game but it’s SO important to him as a character
50 years before the events of the main games, eggman’s grandfather, gerald, was tasked with creating the ultimate lifeform. the president at the time commissioned the project as a way to achieve immortality, something gerald thought was an overstep of science, but his granddaughter, maria, was born with an incurable terminal condition (the fictional NIDS, obviously meant to invoke AIDS) so he agreed to the project to help save her life.
the project was developed on an orbital space colony, which allowed a perfectly controlled environment for maria to live in, and the distance from the government meant they didn’t have extremely strict oversight of what was going on.
so project shadow goes ahead, and a number of things are created as a result - namely, a prototype ultimate lifeform, a volatile and powerful lizard which has grown uncontrollable, and the true ultimate lifeform, shadow. the lizard is so dangerous that it gets locked away in the depths of the colony, but shadow is a polite little guy and gerald ends up raising him alongside maria. (according to shadow’s own game, his genes were stabilized by the blood of an alien literally called black doom, but this really isn’t as important as you would think)
eventually word leaks down to the government on earth about the prototype, being interpreted as the ultimate lifeform itself being an uncontrollable danger, and the military launches an attack on the colony to forcibly shut down the project. they arrive under the guise of responding to an emergency, and in order to keep the silence about the government being involved with something like project shadow, completely evacuate the civilian personnel of the colony to shut it down, then murder everyone involved in project shadow. during the massacre, shadow and maria attempt to run to an escape pod together, but maria gets shot by a soldier (!!!) and forces shadow into the escape pod alone. her last act is to ask him to be kind to the people on earth and send him away, while he watches helplessly and knows she’s dying.
so shadow makes it to earth, but the military captures him anyway, and lock him up on an island military base while they decide what to do with him. gerald is there as well, kept alive because he knows everything about shadow and can make him useful to them. gerald is completely broken over what happened on the colony and to maria specifically, though, and vows revenge on all of humanity. he reprograms shadow to carry out this revenge by implanting false memories about maria’s last wish for him, and when the government realizes what he did, orders his execution by firing squad (!!!!!) and locks shadow in stasis to keep him from destroying the world.
50 years later, eggman gets wind of his grandfather’s ultimate weapon and its whereabouts. he breaks into the base, releases shadow, and plans to use him to take over the world. shadow plays along, but is really just aiming to fulfill his last promise to maria, which he thinks is to wipe out humanity.
and then the events of sa2 actually happen and idk if you want a summary of that too but tldr he realizes what maria’s true wish was very late into the story and then sacrifices himself to stop his creator’s plan and protect the people of earth for her and it’s very
the black doom alien is an eldritch demigod being with an army btw. no explanation is ever given as to why shadow’s a hedgehog
it’s clearly established that gerald studied the technology and culture of the ancient echidnas, who had a prophetic mural about super sonic. they’ve never stated it outright but it’s pretty heavily implied that he’s a little hedgehog in-universe purely because sonic is also a little hedgehog
