All Too Shadow

There’s no solace in understanding one’s self. Don’t get me wrong, there might be, but don’t be fooled: no guarantees, just ifs and buts.

"He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer - though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist."

Friedrich Nietzsche

When you encounter one of those eureka moments - “so, that’s why this has happened throughout my life” - you can ride that high, try and get some answers, and plan around the future, but it doesn’t mean that others will follow your self-knowledge. You can try to give them tools to treat you better or to help you manage yourself under pressing circumstances, but at the end of the day, the Other will always be the Other. You can symbiotically integrate their patterns and characteristics within yourself, but they’ll stick from you, dangle and metastasise and eat and hurt and itch and caress with no consent. They’re all parts of others. You won’t control them, which is fine. Great, even.

Shadow Generations hangs as Sonic Generation’s appendix. It’s there, on the title screen - not integrated into the main game, but trying to eat its real estate. It covers Sonic Generations’ menu when you select it. 

Although Sonic Generations was and still is a celebratory game, very light-hearted, fun, and hopeful, Shadow Generations is not like that. Sonic’s character is, at the end of the day, Just A Guy Who Loves Adventure, but Shadow has no taglines. Some of the stages selected for his part of the game are from titles he wasn't even a part of. He's an outsider, even in his own franchise.

In Sonic Generations, Sonic is always smiling and jumping around in a self-congratulatory way, enjoying his own missteps, and his own powers. He doesn't need to explore - even the hub is completely Sonic: a horizontal, 2D line. Shadow's hub, clearly based on Sonic Frontiers, is big and confusing and shows you places you can't even get to yet. You can see that he's in pain whenever he gets a new power. He must relive his trauma, not his adventures, by going through old stages and meeting old people on his world map.

The thing with Shadow, though, is how weirdly deterministic he is.

It's almost like he's a video game character.

His story determines his self, his creation is what tells him that he's a weapon or too powerful or created for destruction. After many games that people don't like, he understands that, indeed, he is all of those things, but his will is what shapes his power.

"But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness. To be sure, such a man will have bad nights, when he is tired and finds closed the gates to the city that should offer him rest; perhaps in addition, as in the Orient, the desert reaches up to the gate; predatory animals howl now near, now far; a strong wind stirs; robbers lead off his pack-animals."

Friedrich Nietzsche

There are a lot of scenes solely dedicated to Shadow affirming the violence-coded trash-talking that villains give him, just to twist them into a "yeah, and I'll do all of those things to you." Taking his entire arc into consideration, it's the expected thing: denying himself by trying to change would just take him further away from who he is, and knowing who he is still makes things problematic, weird and edgy, but it's at least knowledge. His peace won't come from knowing if he's The Ultimate Life Form or The Ultimate Weapon or A Clone or A Robot or whatever. Those are just titles. It will come from how he presents himself to others, how he reacts to their lack of understanding or their unconditional understanding.

He is a weapon, and a powerful life form, and a clone, and a robot, and an alien, and an experiment, and someone who was left behind, and a survivor, and he will never be comfortable with any of those things but will be anyway.

In his own 2005 game, the whole point is to meet 10 different versions of himself through the branching paths to get to a "true ending" where you see that there's just one. You need to go through all of them, though. In Sonic 2006 he accepts that this is how things will be forever, having visions from the future where he is still suffering, but never giving up on seeing that future himself.

I argued (in another article about Sonic with a Nietzsche-based title) that Sonic 06 is not a game that can metaphysically hold Sonic within itself, and therefore its strength lies with its actual characters: Silver and Shadow. They needed to have Sonic there, however. It's the name of the game. The name of the franchise. The face of Sega. I believe it's the same with Sonic x Shadow Generations - Shadow will need to go through his arc again, go through a nostalgia-based trip again, feel pain again, and he will need to do all of that to justify the existence of a remaster for a game that celebrated Sonic more than ten years ago. It's fruitless - he won't change, he cannot change, because he already changed. It's just torture. It's a PTSD fever dream. It's amazing, the best setpieces of the franchise. I felt like seeing the orca in Sonic Adventure for the first time. It encapsulates an eternal struggle. And the movie isn't even out yet!

It could've been just a Shadow game. It won't be. Sonic is more important. But that's okay.

"Then for him the frightful night sinks over the desert like a second desert, and his heart becomes tired of wandering. If the morning sun then rises, glowing like a divinity of wrath, and the city opens up, he sees in the faces of its inhabitants perhaps more of desert, dirt, deception, uncertainty, than outside the gates - and the day is almost worse than the night. So it may happen sometimes to the wanderer; but then, as recompense, come the ecstatic mornings of other regions and days. Then nearby in the dawning light he already sees the bands of muses dancing past him in the mist of the mountains. Afterwards, he strolls quietly in the equilibrium of his forenoon soul, under trees from whose tops and leafy corners only good and bright things are thrown down to him, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood, and solitude, and who are, like him, in their sometimes merry, sometimes contemplative way, wanderers and philosophers."

Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human, Aphorism #638

As someone who was tardily diagnosed with the kind of mental disorder that people usually associate with overthinking Sonic the Hedgehog, it's hard to temper your expectations regarding the treatment of others. The euphoria of understanding yourself may make you think that things are solved, that it all makes sense now, but still, no one owes you anything. People will keep misunderstanding you and not see your silent struggles. They will keep asking you to do things that hurt you because that's what you led them to believe you can handle. They'll think that some things that eat you from the inside are Actually Cool. That your personality is strong. That you're petty. That you're using your diagnosis to be an asshole. That they also have their own disorders and are not as bad as you. That you can be better. That you're strong and so brave. That it's just a label, that you are more than that.

They'll also try their best. You just need to know that you are.