#that project's script was a fucking nightmare if you thought abt it enough and like. the fact that you would try to

[antirepurp]

ok. microwaving my brain to organize thoughts abt the dark beginnings animations mostly in how they portray shadow and maria on the ark. rouge and omega were cool too but not a priority here

i don't think im a fan of how... post-sa2 shadow is acting in these, in scenes that supposedly took place 50 years ago. from what i can tell though what we see of it is supposed to be through the perspective of shadow, as reminiscence or nightmares colored by the retrospect, which is a huge fucking relief unless they fuck that up later somehow. as long as the veil of retrospect surrounds those flashbacks everything is more or less fine; shadow can know about him being made out of black arms, he can have some violent angst about his purpose, act less unsure in general, because the shadow in those scenes would effectively be shadow from the present day, not the shadow that actually lived in those moments

that said if we take everything here at face-value it slots pretty terribly in with sa2 i'd say, which is pretty bad since that game is the Basis for shadow as a character. like the shadow in the flashbacks of sa2 was far less. aggressive even? prone to lashing out? he explicitly did not know his own purpose for a while, which in turn leads me to believe he probably was not involved in research the way dark beginnings implies he was. also that would give us Objective Depictions of Maria which sucks to me specifically but you know

there's also the matter of shadow's amnesia in heroes and shadow 05. i actually think that if all we see in the memories is subjective things work out in a really cool manner; everything here is painted from things shadow learned in retrospect about his early life and ARK. everything we see is things he has slotted in to a narrative scraped together from what remains, whether those remains are other people's subjective memories, documentation of the ARK and project shadow, or the state of the ARK in the present day. shadow could not remember what he was like 50 years ago - he slots in the version of himself he does know. he doesn't remember what maria was like - he replaces her with what other people have said she was like. he learns he's made of aliens - now there's aliens on the ARK. the original script is lost to time and he's forced to write a new one from what remains, which leads to inconsistencies, an obsessive knowledge of how much time must pass between each event, the birth of moments he wishes would have happened and that he can make real if he just believes in them hard enough.

if sega isn't a coward they will leave things ambiguous. we can have the cake and eat it too. they will succeed in creating something remarkably cool with shadow and the so-far questionable state of how much he remembers anymore. i am however terrified that im going to discover that the cake im having is filled with shit because no one at sega has realized the narrative potential in this character and his fucked up history

[shonaegi]