#this is mostly about sonic 3

[browless-donnie]

I’m so happy these past few years have made me proud to be a sonic fan again

[hyrules-warrior]

Imagine if after the end credit scene of Shadow retrieving his inhibitors, he is found by GUN.

He has just dragged himself out of the second crater, snapping his ring on his wrist when he hears the helicopters.

GUN has found him

He briefly contemplates teleporting away, hiding in the surrounding forest or a fight...... but just as quickly he abandons those thoughts.

He is tired. He honestly had not planned for there to be an "after" . He has lost everything, and anything he knows is 50 years out of date.

He almost destroyed the world. GUN is right. He is dangerous, he is a monster. And dangerous things should be locked away and kept under control.

So he submits himself to GUN. He submits himself to testing and stasis when he is not needed. They test many things, his strength, his healing ability, his speed. They run him to exhaustion, they pit him against the weapons they build to see how effective they are, they bleed him dry taking samples.

He grows weaker by the day. They take without giving him time to recover and just put him in stasis. This is penance he thinks. His punishment for his crimes. He almost destroyed the world, and now they will study him to death to better defend it from monsters like him in the future.

It goes on for months, weeks in stasis broken up by short bursts of testing. His quills become brittle, his fur dull and greasy, and his bright red eyes fade to a pale grey. He wonders if one day they will take too much and he will finally fade completely. His soul free to join Maria where ever she is. He starts to hope for that day.

Sonic and everyone else think he is dead until someone (aka rouge the bat) leaks GUN info to the Wachowski's. They are all horrified at what is happening to Shadow and Maddie specifically goes on a warpath to free him into their care. "look at the state of him, you don't need to be a vet to see that whatever you are doing is killing him!"

GUN resists and it takes longer than anyone wants to get him free. It even includes Sonic and their mysterious leaker threatening to go public about some of GUN's less than good past plans/intentions but eventually Shadow is released into their care.

Shadow just thinks he is being given to new researchers, especially when he learns Maddie is a vet. Medical research this time, maybe it will be a break from fighting things and running all the time? Maybe less stasis too since they will need to observe him more? He hates stasis, the fluid stinks and always leaves his skin so itchy and mats his fur. Perhaps these researchers will be a bit better. More like Gerald and the scientists. Plus Sonic and the others he was with are kept here too. Maybe he will be allowed to interact with them, it could be nice to be with others that look like him for once.

It takes time for him realize the testing is over. He at first thinks they are waiting for him to regain his strength before starting but even after he has recovered no testing happens. He just keeps waiting, remaining quiet and compliant. It takes even longer for him to learn that they don't "own him", he is just joining their family. He is free to do as he wishes in ways he has never really known. Free to be "Shadow" without the word "Project" attached. Shadow has no concept of family, he has only ever been owned and he struggles to figure out how it is different. Maria loved and cared for him and he for her but she was a child. Any adult in his life has been an owner more than a parent or true caregiver. Luckily the Wachowski family has plenty of patience and love to spare to help him find out what family is and who he is.

[sonknuxadow]

wouldnt it be so awesome and cool if the sonic franchise was normal about fat people . imagine

[risingsunresistance]

closest to a selfie i'll post nowadays but i love the fit for today <3 sonic gloves, dr pepper shirt, hand me down leather jacket that i got from a friend yesterday, and my checkered mask that i finally found after it went missing for two years

[ryetherat]

i love team dark but omegas so difficult to draw im sorry

SURPRISE IM PROMOTING MY SHIT

hi i've been making a shadow fic set after sonic 3, my own version of what a shadow spin-off story could be :)

its called what i am because i'm bad at titles

i'm three chapters in i've been trying to be plot-focused but it's making me miss out on epic character building so of course i'm making a 2.0 where it's more character driven.

[astronomical-bagel]

just watched sonic 3. im gonna explode

HBWUF. WAH. My dudeeee what did you think of the end card??? Also robotnik’s death scene is my own Nov.5 superhell moment and I’m still not over it.

[beevean]

It intrigues me that some of the most interestingly baffling takes I see about characterisations are on Gerald of all people. There seem quite a few takes here that he was irrevocably evil, rotten to the core, cackling manically as he hurt and damaged the being he'd brought into the world with no regard for Shadow's wellbeing, and so on and so forth. And that is barely putting it as graphically as the statements about all the "torture" "Shadow" "faced" on the ARK I have read before.

But to me, Gerald seems so incredibly heavily driven by love instead? He originally did not even want to create the Ultimate Lifeform, as he deemed it something humanity should not muddle with, but his love for Maria and desperation to save her life made him accept this burden. He very explicitly calls Shadow his son, tells him he's made a mistake with accepting Black Doom's help, and worked to ensure humanity had a defence against the Black Arms. He gave Emerl and Shadow a soul like Maria's, so that these weapons of mass destruction would never fight and only use their powers selflessly. In Battle, Rouge could not spell out more to the nose that he was researching ways to bring hope and happiness to people (similarly discussed by Shadow and Maria in SA2), but forced by those in power to use his creations for war instead. When Gerald goes insane, he himself talks about the fright it gave him, that he can only think about revenge. With the added complete lack of indication Shadow was ever mistreated in any way on the ARK, the idea of Gerald as some conniving bastard gleefully causing Shadow suffering (or even just somberly causing him suffering In The Name Of Science) holds no more water at all to me. He is not at all a flawless person, but until the point he learned he lost Maria, all his concerns were centered around the happiness of the world instead. And personally, I find the idea of a person driven by love to go insane because that love caused him to lose his most important person, which only then makes him hurt his other creation he earlier regarded as a son, a lot more interesting than someone who simply always was evil and disdainful of said creation and just regarded him as a tool to help someone else. Shadow was more to Gerald that just that, of that I am certain.

I'm very glad I did not encounter a single instance of what you saw :) but I don't doubt that some fans really headcanon Gerald as being cruel. After all, apparently some are going around painting Sonic & co. as monsters for not playing therapist for Neo Metal Sonic...

It makes sense. If a fan really wants to imagine that Shadow suffered like hell on the ARK, it goes without saying that in this interpretation Gerald was a bastard who didn't care about his creation.

Anyway, it is inconceivable to me to play SA2 or ShTH (not even including Battle as at this point I think only 5% of the current fandom even remembers it) and come away with the conclusion that Gerald didn't adore Maria and Shadow. But, well. I may have answered my own question :P

@skaruresonic did you see anything resembling this?

[tollsoftheclockwerkbelle]

shadow being portrayed in the past as hating friendship was a result of his first only and last friend being traumatically murdered in front of him and ever since it happened he wouldn't allow himself to make any future connections in order to cope but his new angle of having confidence with oneself is a reflection of his progress in overcoming his internal struggle and grief allowing himself to finally move past what happened and embrace making new friends send post

[niyana-the-ambiguous-mobian]

Idk why, but I can’t get the thought outta my head thinking that one of the first foods that Movie!Shadow would taste after his creation would be chocolate 🍫.

I mean, he probably doesn't need to eat much anyway, but I can imagine Maria giving him a small piece of the bar she had, tastes it, and goes absolutely ga-ga for it and kinda becomes his main comfort food.

It gets to the point where he'll ask for it at least once a day to where Gerald tells him that the station doesn't have anymore in stock cause it was genuinely getting annoying.

Of course, Maria sneaks him a piece every once in a while cause that's cruel to keep someone away from sweets for that long.

Even when he wakes up 50 years later, the first thing on his mind is, "I need some chocolate."

[movie-robotnik-positivity]

The way I see it, I feel like Shadow's redemption in the movie will be less like how it is SA2 and more comparable to Sage's arc in Frontiers

Thank you for your question!

I'd argue Knuckles' redemption in Sonic 2 was a little like Sage's arc too. This misguided character questioning their beliefs as they realize the person they were raised to hate isn't what they expected.

There are many ways to handle Shadow's realization. It could also be an internal conflicts that grows as he's faced by Sonic's unwavering belief in the good humanity. It could be a result of him slowly discovering more details of his past, and what Maria actually wanted. All I know is that I'm sure it will be great!

[zosonils]

oh my god I respect it so much. I love Jules hedgehog. one of my top three favorite sonic characters from any canon. I like to imagine his voice is naturally bitcrushed. (also please for the love of god drop that q&a)

YOUUUU YOU UNDERSTAND ME YOU GET IT bitcrushed-voice robots are so good. man sounds like the vocal samples from the sonic 3 & knuckles soundtrack

here's the qna! it's all really fun but jules' responses are in blue if you want to skim for those. i'm sure this one isn't the only one ian's done, but these old forum posts are very poorly archived/catalogued [hence why the link is to a wayback machine snapshot, the original page is long gone] so i'm yet to successfully dig up anything else

[drakonovisny]

thought to maybe go to a cinema today but i checked which movies are scheduled and almost all of them are a fucking sequel that i didn't even hear about until now???

[sonknuxadow]

they werent lying that knuckles series barely has knuckles in it

[mbat]

and of course only now after i gave up on the idea of going to the movies and just watched wicked by myself, my dad is like 'we might finally go to the movies tomorrow btw. you wanted to see wicked right?' 😑 i only spent a whole month asking but ok sure

i dont even wanna rewatch it bro. it was good, but holy fuck it was long and i didnt love it enough to wanna rewatch it only 4 days later but whatever

[takealookintheback]

just saw Sonic 3 and... i need to lay down for a while

and without going into spoiler: Agent Stone and Shadow are besties in my new HC

[thestrangestwatermelonofall]

i will never forget the time I was hanging out with two other people who were new friends and they were like "let's do a sonic fandub" and one of them started looking up sonic game footage on youtube for us to dub while we discussed who would speak for who and we decided I'd voice tails. But also I knew nothing about sonic at the time, i'd only seen the snapcube fandubs because I'd heard they were good and funny, I didn't know the plot or characters very well. I couldn't remember what they sounded like so while the other two started to say silly things in sonic and amy's voices I asked "what does tails sound like again?" And I was laughing because I was embarrassed and also shocked by how quickly they had started commiting to the bit of trying to do some voice acting and my friend just said "he sounds like a twink" and I could not stop laughing and I could not take the idea seriously and I just told them that I couldn't do the voice oops. And so we moved onto a different topic pretty quickly and just enjoyed the pizza we had while we waited for our other three friends to get back from the store

anyways all of this is to say that Tails is NOT a twink, he is an 8 year old little boy and my friend was misguided.