The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise does weird things with its own canon. While it’s not fair to describe every entry as a reboot, a lot of the games feel as if they choose to ignore the previous entries. Characters don’t often grow and change, events rarely follow other events in causality, and most callbacks exist more for fun than for continuity. Since the movies are attempting to build something a bit more consistent, they’ll often have to sort through some complex lore. No character is more weighed down by that narrative than Shadow the Hedgehog.
The Sonic movies are proud to be children’s entertainment. This isn’t one of those big franchises that desperately wants to be for everyone. These films seem to love catering to nine-year-olds and relying on straightforward quality to keep parents and older fans engaged. As a result, lore management isn’t the top priority. There’s a backstory about the world Sonic came from, but it stays firmly in the background. Adding characters like Shadow could pile a lot of new material on top of the existing canon.
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Shadow’s backstory is complicated
Much has been made about the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 3‘s inclusion of Shadow the Hedgehog. The Ultimate Life Form comes with certain baggage that many fans worried would hit the cutting room floor. His backstory, established in Sonic Adventure 2, involves the death of a small child. Hollywood rarely enjoys depicting young characters dying, but the trailers seem to suggest that they’ll deal with that issue as the games do. Shadow was the result of an advanced military science project to create the first immortal being. His creator, Gerald Robotnik, sought to use his advanced artificial biology to cure diseases, like the one afflicting his granddaughter, Maria.
The government later decided to kill and bury Project Shadow, gunning down Maria and moving Robotnik to an island prison. Robotnik became reasonably furious, taught Shadow to hate humanity, and planted a doomsday bioweapon in his former base. Robotnik is later executed, but Robotnik’s grandson, Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik, would later find Shadow in suspended animation, awakening him to serve as a weapon against the human race. This leads into Shadow’s role in Sonic Adventure 2, in which he acts as a villain until a sudden turn toward Maria’s more humanitarian philosophy and a noble self-sacrifice against Robotnik’s bioweapon. Though he appears to die, this is far from the end of Shadow’s story.
Shadow’s story after Sonic Adventure 2 is even weirder
Shadow returns to the franchise in Sonic Heroes, which reveals that Shadow has been safely held in stasis since his near-death experience in his debut. Rouge the Bat awakens Shadow and E-123 Omega, a dormant robot guarding him, while hunting treasure. The three team up to hunt down Eggman. For the first of several times, Shadow loses his memory between Adventure 2 and Heroes, leaving much of his story vague. During his quest in Heroes, he discovers several clones of himself, raising new questions. Throughout Heroes, characters wonder aloud whether Shadow is the real Ultimate Life Form or a copy. The game never answers that core question, leaving clones and robotic doppelgängers around without any answer as to who this Shadow is.
Shadow the Hedgehog then introduces a race of aliens called the Black Arms. They fly in on a comet with the intention of invading Earth and harvesting humanity as an energy source. Shadow is still without his memories, but the Black Arms’ leader, Black Doom, offers Shadow a new gig. It turns out, part of the mysterious processes Gerald Robotnik used to create Shadow involved borrowing DNA from Black Doom, making Shadow a hybrid hedgehog/alien. He later turns against Black Doom, wiping them out and leaving him the last survivor of the Black Arms. In Sonic (2006), he begins working for the government agency that ordered his creation, murdered his only friend, and executed his creator. The same game sees him hopping through time to defeat a different artificially created all-powerful hedgehog, only to see that threat escape, forcing Shadow to partner with Sonic and new character Silver to lock him away again. Sonic Forces sees him working with the resistance against Eggman’s world-conquering army and yet another all-powerful talking animal. Shadow’s story has a lot of conflict and very little resolution.
Can the Sonic film franchise follow Shadow’s story?
In the semi-consistent Sonic canon, Shadow is a half-alien lab experiment with the power to travel through time, teleport a planet, and survive literally anything, and he also might be a clone of himself. It’s very unlikely that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 will set up even a small percentage of that narrative depth. The games were full of a sort of radical experimental spirit. Not unlike old-fashioned Godzilla movies or superhero comics, the source material was a lot more free to throw things at the wall than the blockbuster adaptation. The film franchise will maintain a level of coherence that will be relatively new to Shadow the Hedgehog’s narrative. The games were free to throw aliens, alternate timelines, and an ever-growing list of superpowers into each new entry. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 will almost certainly maintain large chunks of Sonic Adventure 2, but the story beyond that will likely stay on the more terrestrial course plotted in previous films.
Fans of the Sonic film franchise are excited about the potential spinoffs. Knuckles didn’t exactly dominate the streaming market, but it was a fun treat for fans. A Shadow spin-off could follow that format, but it would have a much harder time following any existing source material. The aliens, robot clones, and consistent memory loss will probably have to hit the cutting room floor. Still, at least fans are going to see Shadow’s story begin as it usually does.
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