You, Me, & this Lonely Feeling

Sonic CD drawing for a presentation I did months ago. He's too pretty to be forgotten~

I felt bad for only giving the cropped out version of the finished slide. For context, I was tasked with coming up with a new element to add to the world, and my chosen context was Sonic CD. Here's the full slide.

[TEXT: The Emissary of Kairos

In the past version of the stage, Wacky Workbench, there situates a secret room that houses an angel statue. The figure never gets further backstory, but the statue's pillar resembles that of ancient Greek architecture.

In the bad future, Eggman finds this seemingly sacred space, and replaces the angel statue with a statue of himself that explodes if you destroy it.

The Emissary can appear in the past version of every stage, when the player is a short distance away from a robot generator. Whenever a player is a short distance away from a generator, the Emissary will appear before the player and lead them to it. However, the catch is that the Emissary phases through walls and ceilings, and will only be present for 20 seconds before it disappears.

The Emissary teaches players how to analyse their environment and effectively slow down to avoid the long term punishment of losing momentum in their playthroughs.

I've chosen to reinterpret the angel statue as the Sonic world equivalent of Kairos, the Greek God of Opportune time. My new character is thus the Emissary of Kairos whose goal is to guide Sonic to save the planet. To grant the wishes of this planet's unseen populace whose future is in jeopardy, and requires a savior.]

like people hand-wring over her illness being central to the games when criticizing the movies and while it is EXTREMELY important to explain why she is on the ark, the first time they ever established the symptoms, the name, or even the fact she was ill, I'm going to try and thread the needle here. The reason the removal of Maria's illness is detrimental to the film isn't just the loss of representation, though that is important. It's because her illness was a load-bearing narrative pillar. Its absence causes the plot to lose thematic resonance and not make sense.

She essentially becomes a teddy bear that Gerald lugs around physically and Shadow lugs around emotionally. Not to mention the various plot holes it raises. Why isn't she in school? Why doesn't the government send her home after she makes a mess in the hallway, specifically after she ignored Commander Walters' suggestion to "ditch the skates"? The film treats Movie!Gerald's despair with the same gravitas as if GUN had personally betrayed him like in the games rather than caused an unfortunate accident, and it leads to a feeling of dehumanization of Maria. Without that element of bitter betrayal and loss which leads to Games!Gerald desiring vengeance on all of mankind, it gives off the implication Gerald worshiped the idea of Maria more than anything else. We can see this in the line of dialogue he has where he shuts down Shadow's scruples about the Eclipse Cannon plan with, basically, the thought that whatever Maria might have wanted them to do instead of this doesn't matter because she's dead.

Gerald wasn't working for a cure only to get stabbed in the back at the eleventh hour of his career. He, like Maria, had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which is its own special kind of pain, to be sure, but is that enough to spark a genocidal descent into madness? Now here's the part where I become a bit pedantic and add a "yes, and" to that. Does Maria need an explicit reason to be on the ARK? Why can't it be part and parcel of the premise? Furthermore, why is her condition not to be taken seriously unless it comes attached with a list of symptoms?

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basically: for all people claim that maria's disability is important, she technically hasn't been confirmed disabled in english until recently (and even more recent if you didn't have the encyclopedia which is the first english mention of her illness)

I'm kind of side-eyeing the underlying assumption that something isn't canon until it's confirmed in English. SA2's Japanese paratext, Rouge's The Truth About 50 Years Ago... report, described NIDS as difficult to treat in the present day and incurable 50 years ago.

That doesn't mean it didn't exist. If NIDS really was a secret locked behind a Japanese linguistic paywall, so to speak, then fandom wouldn't have known about it for the past however many years.

The fact is we do know and have known about it, so clearly it's not that insurmountable of a lore gap, or particularly esoteric knowledge. Otherwise, Flynn wouldn't have given Buns NIDS in the Archie comics roughly 18 years ago. This issue, 193, came out in 2008:

Something not existing in an English-speaking milieu doesn't mean it doesn't exist, period. It just means it's not accessible. Inaccessible =/= nonexistent.

(And really, do you want new fans who don't want to take up the shovel and dig?)

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and her illness was only vaguely implied in sonic battle, and it didn't even confirm if it was incurable or just difficult to treat or anything related to it.

I feel like you're moving back the goalposts a little. First you conceded that Sonic Battle did imply she was terminally ill, but because it didn't expand on the nature of her illness, it doesn't count.

To use an example from a contemporanous game: we don't really need to know what disease Mary had in Silent Hill 2 because the symptoms of her illness came second to the horror of her experience of coming to grips with her impending mortality. "Was it melanoma?" misses the forest for the trees when Mary is screaming at James to leave because she feels disgusting and useless.

Likewise, narratively, all we needed to know to understand Gerald's desperation was that Maria was ill. Battle didn't really owe it to us to expand on that.

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in the games prior to that its ONLY purpose was to justify maria being in space so shadow could have a friend. if the ark wasn't in space in the game i dont think maria would've been given NIDs, unfortunately.

Yes, but the fact that SA2 was created with the setting of space in mind - Maekawa got the rest of ST onboard in order to celebrate the new millennium - means this will forever be a hypothetical, thus rendering the thought moot.

According to this logic, Abraham also needs an overt reason to be on the colony as a kid, which SxS Gens doesn't provide in the game proper.

It's a bit ironic that, in the game obsessed with tying up every loose end surrounding the ARK, we're supposed to accept that he's Shadow and Maria's classmate Because Reasons. Is he also ill? Is he not allowed to live on Earth? Is he an orphan? Who knows? SxS Gens' paratext doesn't answer the question beyond "his parents were researchers who had a surprise baby aboard the colony," which is pretty much the same lack of explanation the movie gave for Maria's presence in the film: "Gerald takes her wherever he goes."

It's circular reasoning. Abraham is here because the game said he's here. Maria has NIDS because she's on the ARK. She's on the ARK because she has NIDS.

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Overall, I think this is an issue of SxS Gens making explicit something that used to be implied. It would sort of be like if a new game came out tomorrow where Tails straight-up looked at Sonic and said, "Gee, Sonic, you sure are a homeless bum. When are you gonna pay your taxes?" And Sega was like, "This is so that new players know that Sonic is a nomad. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge."

It'd be odd, a little jarring, and a regression from previous games where more was shown than told. We were able to gather from context clues that Sonic is a vagrant who probably couch-surfs at his friends' houses. You didn't need to spell it out like that.

We can see in The Doom and Lost Impact's round clear screens that she stops to catch her breath, something no other character does:

We could also argue, faintly, that Maria's belief that the Heal Unit is her grandfather's greatest invention suggests an interest in the ARK's medical research.

A light touch, you know what I mean? Trust in the players to draw their own conclusions.

You also have to remember the cultural zeitgeist in which SA2 and Battle released. The AIDS epidemic was a fresh scar in the cultural consciousness of the early 2000s - of course the game is not going to come right out and say Maria is suffering from a fictional version of AIDS. Imagine the public outcry if a new Sonic game came out and had a character suffering from "KOVID."

They probably didn't include explicit mention of NIDS because they didn't want to be skirting that line with the ratings board. (Which is why I found it so crass when Woolie and Pat described her illness as "space AIDS" and immediately made homophobic jokes. Can You Not).

On a more subjective note, I kind of don't know how to feel about SxS Gens' framing of her illness, because in some places it almost feels like it's using her illness not to reveal a material fact about the character, but as a twist of the knife for Gerald and Shadow's manpain... Which ironically is the whole reason SA2 gets criticized, for reducing Maria to her effect on Shadow and Gerald.

I'm not opposed to the idea of Maria acknowledging her illness, but the game seems to frame it as "Isn't it so sad that Maria is terminally ill (subtext: isn't it so sad Shadow couldn't save her)?" rather than "Maria is a girl who so happens to be terminally ill," like in previous games. While I understand they were trying to lean toward the latter in her flavor text, it almost suffers from the same problem the film does of thinking quirks = fleshing out the character.

In ShTH, although her thoughts were sparse, I still got the sense that they came from her rather than some cuteness quota the writers had to fill. She had opinions on things. She thought Gerald's greatest invention was the Heal Unit. She thought the Artificial Chaos were "kind of cute" when they split apart and that their eyes looked "sad." She told Shadow she gets lost in the ARK sometimes because it was so "huge." She would apologize if Shadow attacked the soldiers (though tbf every partner character reprimands you if you kill mission-critical NPCs) and wondered if they should leave control of the emergency to them.

Her thoughts varied. They had a little bit of texture. It wasn't just the equivalent of "Do you like stars, Shadow?" over and over.

Granted, it wasn't much, but it wasn't nothing, either. People would have you believe there was nothing to her other than dying like a sacrificial lamb.

Maria is a selfless character, so naturally she's going to speak more about other characters than herself. Even then, it still kind of feels a bit like she lacks interiority in her SxS Gens flavor text.

For instance, she says she enjoys Spagonia's food and would like to try it again with her family on Earth. That sounds nice and wholesome until you realize it leans again into the "Aww it's sad she's gonna die and never do Normal People Stuff(tm) again" type stuff... Which is like. Not an implication that sits right with me when we see her doing her version of Normal People Stuff aboard the ARK in ShTH, like racing Shadow down slopes.

Notice how often Maria is talking about what she misses. She misses her family. She misses her teacher. She misses Spagonia's cuisine. She talks about what she lacks. It all adds up to imply the ARK isn't a home for her, just a placeholder until her "real" life can start. Which, again, is supposed to twist the knife.

Like, the fact that she has to be the one to comfort Shadow about his status as her savior sibling in the Dark Beginnings short also doesn't sit right with me because it's still subtly dehumanizing him, reducing him to his function. I get what the scene is trying to accomplish, but it feels a bit unnecessary to point signs at it.

Compare that to the SA2 flashback where Shadow says he "just doesn't know anything anymore." Yes, Shadow was still talking about his existential woes in that heavy-handed way of his, but his hangups weren't "omg I'm a freak of nature" so much as a general existential malaise. If he was asking "Who am I?" in the SA2 flashback, he had shifted to asking "What am I good for?" in the Dark Beginnings short.

Plus, he had soliloquoyed in response to Maria asking him a simple question about what he thought it was like on Earth. Had nothing to do with her disease or his function.

I’m proud of you partner

today I saw someone pushing the idea that Maria in the movie adaptation is better because she's not terminally ill so she's like a "normal girl" which makes her death more "tragic" and this was on reddit and it got 12k upvotes without a single mention of how ableist that is

and i'd call this a "common reddit L" if not for the fact that I've also seen this idea pushed on Tumblr too. And it makes me wanna KILL SOMEONE! TELLING ON YOURSELF, TRULY, ABOUT WHO YOU DO AND DON'T VALUE IN THE WORLD! that movie and its fans make me foam at the fucking mouth, man.

Not an exaggeration btw

beautifully terrible intersection of

just having fun

I SHOULDNT BE LAUGHING THIS HARD HELPP

run and rest

Eating onigiri

I'm so sorry you had to deal with this persistent badgering from this person.

I think there's a lot to be meaningfully discussed about Silver's characterisation. Above all, I think you should be recognised for your efforts to improve at your craft and openly wanting to do so. You don't deserve to be constantly bothered with the creative humility you show and strive for

I was inspired to write an essay about Silver's characterisation in light of the complexities of the Sonic franchise as an IP managed by SEGA. Whether or not I published this link in a separate post, it doesn't change that it was inspired by reading this ask (and that it's also about 4500 words! Whoops)

I hope this offers food for thought for people who decide to read. All good if it inspires disagreement, too! At this point, I think there should be actual, real engagement with characterisation with sensitivity and consideration as opposed to the kind that the asker has done above

hello?

Ok Amy….

wow! your understanding of this character is so. . . Unique! just wondering by the way but when was the last time you directly interacted with the source media

spinning rouge