Why Are Shadow And Mewtwo’s Origin Stories So Similar?

There was something in the water in the late ’90s and early ’00s, some chemical that made fictional scientists want to create the ultimate lifeform. That lifeform, crucially, also needed to resemble existing characters from their universe. And, of course, the creatures would need to turn against them and/or what they stood for, and leave the laboratory behind. It’s a tale as old as Frankenstein (at least), but the familiar story was reimagined with an anthropomorphic edge at the turn of the millennium.

DNA Stranded

For Mewtwo, the basis was Mew. For Shadow, the basis was not, actually, Sonic — at least not in universe. The legendary Pokémon and the moody ‘edgehog are both synthetic beings, made in labs by scientists who formed them from the DNA of other creatures. Mewtwo’s genetic material came from the legendary Pokemon Mew. For Shadow, the DNA came from Black Doom, the leader of the Black Arms, an alien army that is featured heavily in Shadow the Hedgehog and the recently released Shadow Generations.

Shadow and Mewtwo have similarly traumatic backstories, both escaping from the labs where they were created to seek domination over or revenge on humanity. In Pokemon: The First Movie – Mewtwo Strikes Back, the psychic ‘mon has a chip on his shoulder about his origins, troubled by questions surrounding the purpose of his creation. He takes that insecurity out on organic Pokemon, seeking to prove that clones are better by pitting his lab-grown creations against the tamed Pokemon raised by Ash, Misty, Brock, and other trainers invited to New Island.

Shadow was similarly a synthetic being who argued he was better than the organic hedgehog we’d followed in the Sonic series until that point. When he first speaks with Sonic, prior to a boss battle in the Green Forest level of Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow calls the Blue Blur a “faker” and then, after getting defeated, “an impostor.” Unlike Mewtwo, though, Shadow is motivated by lies. After the death of Maria, the human girl he was raised with, Shadow aimed to protect humanity. When the younger Robotnik finds him in stasis and recruits him, he corrupts her words, encouraging Shadow to get revenge on mankind. That sets him on a collision course with our heroic hog.

The Redemption Of Shadow And Mewtwo

But both Mewtwo and Shadow come around in the end. Mewtwo is convinced that the human-Pokémon bond is worthwhile when Ash is turned to stone and Pikachu (soon joined by the other Pokémon) cries, and their tears magically transform Ash back to flesh and blood.

Shadow similarly regains his memory and becomes an ally to Sonic and the gang as the games progress, transforming from a villain to an antihero in Shadow the Hedgehog. In recent games, he’s just another friend and member of Sonic’s crew. Knuckles took a similar path after being introduced as an antagonist in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (a path which the recent film adaptations have dramatized — Knuckles even got his own spin-off series, just like he got a spin-off game in the ‘90s).

This is the redemption arc that the villains in many children’s stories eventually receive because usually, if you’re a villain in a children’s story, you probably haven’t done anything awful. At least, not concretely. You might want to take over the world, but that’s a little less tangible than, like, murder. Shadow and Mewtwo were bad, but they weren’t that bad. Both, like Frankenstein, got given a raw deal by their makers, but rose above the circumstances of their birth. In Mewtwo’s immortal words, “It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.” And Shadow and Mewtwo have used the gift of life to be extremely cool.

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