Chaos Control - The Philosophy of Shadow the Hedgehog

[Note: Obviously, this video contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen the film yet, why not go check it out?]

Hey there everyone! So I just watched Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - what, you expected me to be some pretentious snob who watches art films? Oh sure, sometimes I watch films like that, but sometimes I just want something fun and silly! Sonic the Hedgehog, especially the Adventure series, is a real treat for me - maybe it’s my autism, maybe it’s just how Sonic is such a far cry from the polished and uniform perfection of the Mario series, but this goofy cast of anthropomorphic animals interacting in the same world as the pyramids, presidents and military intelligence agencies is just a lot more fun to me, in spite of all of their imperfections.

Now I do want to take a moment to talk about this trend of Hollywood movies based on video games. Despite their positive reception from the public, I’m really not a huge fan of this new trend of Hollywood video game films, and mind you, I grew up in the era where almost every film based on a video game was absolutely terrible - the best live action video game movies of my time were probably the incredibly mid Tomb Raider movies from the early 2000s. However, I think the current trend of making what I call “Isekai Video Game” movies - referencing the Isekai genre of anime, where a character enters a fictional world - creates universes that are less focused on consistent internal worlds themselves and moreso on establishing worlds that stretch their subjectivities beyond the movies, by making constant references to previous media, memes and other viral phenomenon to make viewers point and laugh at the referential humor - humor that will ultimately date the film and bury all of the incredible potential in their source material in the dust. In particular, the Minecraft movie seems to be only notable for its constant stream of memes and the jarring difference between the “real” world and the “isekai” world of Minecraft, a world where literally anything could be constructed. Instead of the wide variety of possibilities seen in both amateur animations on YouTube and professional storytelling such as the Telltale Minecraft games, we are left with empty platitudes like “Chicken Jockey” and “the children yearn for the mines”. The Super Mario Brothers movie on the other hand, which I found to be nearly unwatchable, instead incorporates references to the chaotic nature of the property in the early 1990s to justify the presence of the Mario characters in the real world New York City entering the Mario World. The constant churning of these references and establishment of these properties in the real world ironically creates a world where nothing feels real at all. In my opinion, I think these movies would do much better to cut out the “real world” segments entirely and I think the reason why we keep seeing it is more due to the limitations of appreciating the source material, and it is disappointing how many fans of the films seem to not notice this problem.

The Sonic movies however, escape this issue of being an Isekai movie, by embracing the inherently intersectional world of the Sonic Adventure series as the films progress. The first Sonic movie was created just before this trend had taken off, and was the result of a completely chaotic production - like most of the history of the Sonic property. It had no idea how to ground its identity as a film, and was more a corporate response to Detective Pikachu after seeing how much bank that movie made - leading to a nearly disastrous production with a complete redesign of the character and resulting in a bizarre film about Sonic the Hedgehog in a buddy cop movie. Despite the fast pace of the character, the plot slogs along in these segments with Sonic and the cop. However, the fantastic performance of Jim Carrey as Dr. Ivo Robotnik redeems the film’s entertainment value, and the film performed well enough at the box office to produce two sequels, giving the series a chance to be more loyal to the source material and to distance themselves somewhat from the strange feel of the first film while retaining its continuity. This has caused the films to differ somewhat from the source material, but also incorporate it in a way that seems natural and realistic, and maintaining both the internal continuity of the films while maintaining its identity within a life action setting.

Film Review

Before I continue with analyzing the philosophical implications of the film, I want to offer my review of the film. Unlike the first film, the third film has a constant fast pace, matching the series appropriately well, although sometimes it feels it can be too fast. The pacing is chaotic and nonstop in comparison to the slow drag of the first film. Jim Carrey’s performance is fantastic and is the highlight of the film as usual, and the concept of having him play both Ivo and Gerald Robotnik in scenes with himself acting against himself is genuinely fantastic and a must-see for any fan of Carrey. While extremely different from the video game portrayal, Carrey’s Robotniks are highly enjoyable and fit the character perfectly. Most of the references to the source material are handled very well and naturally blend the live action aspects of the film with its source material. Unlike the first film’s confused identity, they either pay direct homage to the original games, or have clever interpretations that adapt for the setting - the Chao Garden scene in particular was clever, and it made me chuckle at the sight of it being represented as a novelty cafe in Tokyo, a unique spin I was not expecting. Overall, while not really a great film by any standard, it is a very fun film that I would recommend to fans of Sonic the Hedgehog and Jim Carrey.

The third Sonic the Hedgehog film focuses around Shadow - perhaps the most interesting character in the series and my personal favorite. Shadow may seem like a joke character because of his over-the-top edginess and hilarious tendency to drop mild swears and carry firearms like a teenage boy messing with his father’s gun collection (“Where’s that damn FOURTH Chaos Emerald!”, but he is a fascinating character who has been analyzed extensively by other philosophy YouTubers because of his relationships to the State, the family, trauma, apparatuses of power, and the very concept of chaos itself. The film is clearly an homage to Sonic Adventure 2 (with some references to Sonic Heroes), carrying many of the same narrative beats as the original game, and even references significant events - such as Robotnik destroying the moon with a laser - but also expands on them in interesting ways. These transitions have important impacts on the themes of the film, allowing these elements to explore new territories. For example, moving the story of Maria from Space Colony Ark to a government research facility buried deep in a mountain has important consequences for the State’s relationship to imperial expansion - instead of Shadow representing the material limits of colonization through the collapse of a colonization project, he instead represents a chaotic potential weapons project that could not be controlled by G.U.N., the international neoliberal military force that maintains control over the world. G.U.N. restrains Shadow in a prison deep underground to contain his power after the cancellation of the military project. Both involve ending the research project into Shadow and the reckless murder of Maria resulting in 50 years of containment, with microscopic oppositional machines leading to the breakdown of the state power containing his cell, but the game and the film position their narrative structures differently, producing new relations in the film.

One major complaint I have however is the soundtrack. The Sonic Adventure games are notorious for its memorable, cheesy, ridiculously over-the-top early 2000’s rock soundtrack, with songs like “Live and Learn” being a cultural capstone of the entire series. While “Live and Learn” was featured throughout the film, this is as far as the soundtrack seems to go insofar as paying homage. It was jarring, for example, to not have the seemingly obvious “Waking Up” from the Shadow the Hedgehog soundtrack playing in the first few scenes of the film as Shadow emerges from his containment chamber - it seemed like a perfect fit. Seriously, if you don’t believe me, look at this [shows footage with music]. Or what about the scene where Sonic jumps out of a helicopter, where “Escape from the City” is noticeably absent? So many instances in the film are like this and its genuinely confounding how the director could pay homage to these famous scenes so well visually and narratively, and yet leave out the iconic music. Perhaps licensing was an issue, but I feel that if the license for Live and Learn was obtained, other songs, at least by Crush 40 and Jun Senoue could have been obtained, but this may be due partly because of legal disputes with Crush 40 vocalist Johnny Gioeli.

Regardless, unlike the out of touch choice of “No Sleep ‘Till Brooklyn” in the Super Mario Bros Movie, which feels like an insult to both The Beastie Boys and the video games the film is based on, where the scene is shoehorned in to the film to include the song, and was clearly part of the director’s music playlist, the songs from the Sonic games would have greatly contributed towards the tone of the film. The music is as much a part of the games’ identity as the characters themselves. Instead, the most we get are hints of the “Live and Learn” leitmotif being the only memorable parts of the soundtrack. Not even “What I’m Made Of” makes an appearance, which would have been very welcome considering the presence of Team Sonic.

Another annoyance is that the buddy cop character and his family from the first film is distracting, unwelcome and seems to serve the purpose of beating the importance of “family” into the audience’s head. While in the first film his presence makes sense to serve the plot, he feels shoehorned in the third film for no reason other than to reinforce Sonic’s love for his family. It is frustrating how he is written out of the film early on but sneaks back into its plot halfway through the film. Thankfully, his presence is short lived as he gets nearly yeeted out of existence over his cringe-inducing infiltration attempt of G.U.N. headquarters. Thanks, Shadow!

The Triangulation of the Family in the Sonic the Hedgehog Movies

The new era of Sonic films, more than perhaps any of its video game contemporaries, are hyperfixated on the relationship between the family and a police military state. Sonic serves as an apparatus of state power by using his super speed abilities as an extension of the police state that dominates the world through G.U.N., local police forces and other state military organizations. However, Sonic didn’t start this way in the first film - rather, he is an alien from a distant planet, where his incredible power is guarded by Longclaw the Giant Owl as he matures. Longclaw is the last survivor of a race of owls who has been in a long-running war against a race of mysterious echidnas, who are attempting to capture Sonic’s power for themselves so they can gain control of the Master Emerald - an object in the Sonic series that has the power to control the chaos produced by the Chaos Emeralds. In a last ditch effort to protect him, Longclaw uses teleporting rings to transport Sonic halfway across the universe, and gives him these rings to have teleporting powers at will later in the films. At this point, Sonic has no conception of the father, mother and child, and also has no conception of the state. To him, power is constructed purely through material relations through his body’s capacities and the earth - a reality reaffirmed by Longclaw’s education.

It is not until he reaches Earth that he suddenly finds himself captured into the apparatuses of power constructed around the family - known formally as “Oedipus”, which references the Oedipus Complex. This complex originates in Freudian psychoanalysis as a way to explain how humans develop psychologically, such as how their traumas, neuroses and sexual preferences are arranged, and is based on analyzing how a person grows up with relationships to their mother and father. You may have heard about its fixation on “loving the mother”, “killing the father” and “castration” - which may sound extreme, but it is really just part of the modelization of this development with your relationship to your parents, according to Freud. To Freudian psychoanalysis and fields influenced by it, the Oedipus Complex is an essential aspect of human development that can be found in every human, and psychological differences and problems are explained by how someone’s upbringing is compared to it. However, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were critical of the idea that the Oedipus Complex is essential to human development, and instead was a product manufactured by capitalist society. In this film, we can see directly how the Oedipus Complex is a learned pattern of the society that Sonic finds himself a part of.

This is highly evident in Sonic’s development in the first film. Sonic is eventually discovered by Tom Wachowski, a local California sheriff, after hearing rumors of his existence. Through Wachowski, Sonic is given a new home, protected by the structure of the family from Ivo Robotnik, a super villain who wants to capture Sonic’s power for himself. Not only is Sonic embedded into the structures of the family by being accepted as a sort of adoptive son by the Wachowskis, but he also is integrated into the apparatuses of power dominating the police state. His traumas and experiences are immediately transcribed into Oedipus, and thus producing a subjectivity, or internal experience, that connects Sonic’s previously disorganized power into one that serves the continued repetition of the family, state and police powers - all to serve the proliferation of capital within the film’s universe. Isn’t it strange how a superpowered alien can be convinced in a single movie to care so much about the affairs of the military state that he runs up to defend it, when he could probably destroy them if he really wanted to? In other words, Sonic loves the state because he has been taught to love his family, his cop family, which models the relationship between not only himself and the figure of the father and mother, but his relationship to the state itself, and other power structures such as those relating to labor and production. Thanks to this encoding, Sonic is able to use his incredible powers to reinforce and protect the power of the state from Robotnik, through a cinematic struggle where both sides, despite their opposition, work together to reinforce to the audience the importance of trusting and obeying the structures of family and ultimately the state through a theatre of power. This oedipalization is so complete that by the third movie, Sonic treats Longclaw’s memory as a memory of his mother, despite Longclaw not being his actual mother, but rather a guardian serving a political purpose.

Even though the internal social structures that construct Sonic, and later Tails and Knuckles, are alien to humans, they are readily recaptured into the needs of the state by aligning their desires with that of the protection of Oedipus. For example, in the third film, Robotnik’s assistant, Agent Stone, seems confused about the labor relations between Tails and Sonic, since they do not have features that a human would expect at their job - such as salaries, benefits, paid time off, or worker’s rights. Tails explains to him that “Oh, I’m not Sonic’s assistant - we’re team mates! He’s the leader, Knuckles is the muscle and I’m the gadgets guy” - indicating a different internal arrangement of power. However, the unit still functions as a unit of capitalist productivity, similar to co-op groups within capitalism who merely produce different labor relations to adapt to unique social situations, because the group’s exterior relations still serves the same function as that of a family unit, as opposed to actually challenging the relations the group may have to capital. These differences largely exist because of different histories between the two kinds of labor organization that have lead to different kinds of structures of hierarchical power between them, and so both groups are organized in a way to produce heterogeneous, serializable subject-groups. In this sense, the complex, polyphonic flows of both Team Sonic and Robotnik’s operations are reduced to binary relations to capital, to contain them within its structures.

Shadow the Hedgehog, on the other hand, has completely different relations to capital. He, like Sonic, was an alien that crash landed on Earth (although 50 years in the past), but unlike Sonic, instead of being directly incorporated into a family unit, his power was studied like a science experiment. Shadow, being objectified as a weapon of power, is treated as a perpetual outsider by most humans.

His only understanding and contact with family was indirectly through Maria - the granddaughter of Gerald Robotnik, the lead scientist researching the Shadow project. This means that to Shadow, family is always something exterior to him. Shadow clearly seems much more attached to Maria than he does to Gerald, learning most about what human society and life on Earth is like through her - as opposed to Gerald, who treats him more like an experiment to extract value out of. He does not construct the same social structures as those that emerges from the father and mother, and so develops completely different relations to human socialization through Maria and Maria alone. However, tragically, as in the games, Maria is killed when the Shadow project is abandoned when the military attempts to destroy the evidence. Shadow is too powerful to be destroyed however, and instead, they contain him in a state of suspended animation, deep in a hidden military base. It is not until 50 years later when his trauma of Maria’s death manages to assemble the power needed for him to escape his prison, with the help of Gerald Robotnik hacking into their systems. Commander Walters notes:

“Shadow’s story began a lot like yours, Sonic. But where you found family and friends on this planet, Shadow found only pain and loss.”

This line really reinforces the idea within the film’s universe that family relations are essential to proper socialization within the Sonic film universe, and that the goal of the third film is to capture Shadow’s chaotic energies back into the structures of the family to contain him.

Understanding Shadow’s Powers through Guattari

Before we get too deep into analyzing the problem of how the state tries to absorb the chaotic power of Shadow the Hedgehog back into its own apparatuses, we should first discuss a few theoretical ideas proposed by Félix Guattari to help explain the scaffolding of this analysis.

For some background, Félix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst and philosopher. He was particularly interested in how something called “subjectivity” is formed. We can think of subjectivity as the inner world of the subject - for example, consciousness is a form of subjectivity, but subjectivity doesn’t need to be conscious or self referential with a subject like an “I” or “Me”. A lot of us think that our consciousness is produced by something like our neurology, our trauma or our relationship to society. But to Guattari, subjectivity is not only formed by all three of those things intersecting together, but the relations to many, many more processes, that he calls “abstract machines”. Everything ranging from the organization of your native language, to where you live, to the economy, all works together to construct subjectivity. Subjectivity is connected to all of these things, and essentially is the “junction” that forms at a particular place and time that intersects all of these machines - an idea that he calls “transversality”. You can then think of subjects as being located in different places in space, with different connections depending on their relative distance to other machines. In this sense, subjectivity is like a user interface where all the inputs and outputs of this assemblage of machines can meet in one place, and be analyzed through an internal logic that can then be translated into changes to the machines that are constantly producing - this is how you can formulate your own decisions can then go to impact reality. Instead of trying to analyze the arrangement of Oedipal structures, you build your own constructs that are a product of the abstract machines meeting at your subjectivity - and this is why he believed the Oedipus Complex is not essential to human social development. In this way, you can see instead why the Oedipus Complex really seems to be so common - because the abstract machines that are prevalent in society keep reconstructing it!

What is interesting about Guattari’s conceptualization of subjectivity is that there is no way to not only predict the structure of internal subjectivity, but any attempt to do so, such as in psychoanalysis, leaves out important information local to the subject. Have you ever read a dream dictionary and thought - wait, this isn’t quite right, I think that this symbol represents something different in my life based on my own experiences? That’s because no model of subjectivity can really capture what’s going on inside of there, because its the transversal intersection of all those complicated machines. Archetypes, just like the Oedipus Complex, are imposed by the analyst. Because of this, there is always chaos involved with the production of subjectivity.

What does he mean by “chaos” here? Well, Guattari really means that we cannot predict the direct possibilities of any interaction - it could go any which way, like when you drop a pen and have no idea where it will go. Instead, each development produces a set of possibilities where one can be potentially be materialized. Each time this happens, the state of the entire universe “refreshes”, updating like how a computer updates its state of internal memory every clock cycle. To do this, just like a computer, there is a cycle between “on” and “off” states. In a computer, the “on” state has clearly defined territories in memory, which constructs all of the virtual locations in memory - like where the “bytes” are to represent structures in the computer. This is physically done by shooting a small electrical charge in the board. But what produces the “off” state? For computers, this is caused by letting up the electrical current, and clearing the state of all the byte territories. To Guattari, the “off” state “deterritorializes” the virtual state of the computer, while the “on” state “reterritorializes” it. Each time the state deterritorializes and reterritorializes, it has a wide set of possibilities it can assume, increasing entropy in the system over time, and leading to the system growing more and more deterritorialized over time. In Anti-Oedipus, Guattari refers to the “deterritorialization” as “schizophrenization” - referring to how schizophrenia - you know, the mental illness - “breaks up” structures - and the “reterritorialization” as “paranoia” - referring to how paranoia reconstructs and assigns values to vague feelings and experiences. This means that over time, systems become increasingly schizophrenic, having their internal codes more and more “deterritorialized” from their “original” form. Everything is always in a process of entropy and transformation, and evolving away from its base state due to the number of possibilities!

When you think about it, it sounds a lot like Chaos Control, doesn’t it? For those not in the know, Chaos Control is Shadow’s super power. He can pause time temporarily (deterritorialization), and rearranges himself relative to it (reterritorialization). Chaos Control is actually a great way to remember the schizophrenic-paranoid process for this reason - the world is constantly “updating” through a process of Chaos Control! If you had control over these processes, that would make you incredibly powerful. This is the core of what makes Shadow so powerful.

Because Shadow is not taught to force his process within the structures of the family and the state, he has no reason to follow the rules. He is under no obligation to follow the Oedipus Complex, despite being involved with human affairs - because he was never part of the process that reproduces the Oedipus Complex in his head. He never constructed the voice of a mother or a father. He constructs the structures of the world totally differently, which means that he can “walk through the walls” of the structures of human society. This is why the state is so fearful of his power, in comparison to Sonic, despite having similarly absurd superpowers - unlike Sonic, Shadow does not structure his behavior around Oedipus. In a way, Commander Walters’ comment on Shadow reflects not just pity for not participating in the oedipal relations, but also that his status as a villain is that he does not cooperate with the structures of capital.

Gerald Robotnik’s Deployment of Oedipus

Interestingly, Shadow is not the only character who is met with this attempt to be recaptured into Oedipal trauma. Ivo Robotnik, the main villain for the series, finds himself in a unique bind. After losing his sense of identity between the second and third films, loafing around aimlessly with seemingly no motivation or willpower to chase his previous pursuits of world dominating power, he finds himself in the peculiar situation of working with Sonic. It turns out that a mysterious impostor has taken the image of Robotnik’s face and has started using it to exploit weaknesses in G.U.N.’s defenses to release Shadow the Hedgehog upon the world from his prison.

It is revealed later that the real culprit is actually Gerald Robotnik, Ivo Robotnik’s grandfather. Not only is Gerald his grandfather, but he was the lead scientist behind Project Shadow back in the 1970s. He, like Shadow, was traumatized by the State trying to suppress the power of Shadow, and witnessed the direct death of Maria caused by the violent shut down of the project by G.U.N. authorities. As a result, he has incredible animosity towards the state and wishes to destroy everything it represents - including the planet itself. In this way, Gerald repeats this pattern of the Oedipus Complex - he wants to destroy the “father”, or the state, because of how it took away his access from the “mother” figure - Maria. And like a father asserting his authority, the state sentences Gerald to life imprisonment, reconstructing the events of the accident to frame him as the perpetrator.

The figure of the Father, I mean the state, however, makes an offer that Gerald cannot refuse. In exchange for his freedom, Gerald is assigned to use his incredible engineering prowess to design the Eclipse Cannon - a military super weapon with the ability to consolidate the fluxes of chaos power into the structures of both the physical machine itself and the abstract machines of state power into a super powerful laser with the ability to destroy planets. This weapon, stored deep under the Thames River, gave G.U.N. incredible power to assert its dominance and authority across not just the world, but possible extraterrestrial threats in the foreseeable future. This weapon seems at face value like it consolidates incredible amounts of power into G.U.N.’s authority, but Gerald has other plans - he managed to smuggle one of Shadow’s quills, brimming with chaos energy, to extend his own life and release his own chaotic potentials in the future. In this way, Gerald is able to capture some of Shadow’s ability to “walk through walls”.

Gerald uses the Oedipus Complex as a way to contain both Ivo Robotnik and Shadow and extract their respective talents as value towards the execution of his plan. Ivo, upon meeting Gerald when Sonic and Ivo’s teams are lured into the military base, finds himself suddenly overwhelmed with emotion after meeting his grandfather. He initially is frustrated by his grandfather’s absence, but he soon finds a new kinship through their similarities in both appearance and ways of thinking. To make up for lost time, and to encode these oedipal relations into his grandson, he constructs a virtual reality with VR headsets to simulate these relations in an accelerated timeline. In a way, the virtual reality produced by the headsets don’t just produce simulated environments, but also simulated familial relations between Ivo and Gerald as constructed by the Oedipus Complex, attempting to install into Ivo his own relations to the figure of the father through a cinema of virtual reality. Shadow, on the other hand, has his trauma reinforced into the Oedipus Complex by transforming his relationship to Maria into one where the family of Gerald was destroyed, and Shadow was part of it. Despite Gerald not really being a prominent member of Shadow’s interactions during the initial experiment, Gerald reinforces his projection of Shadow being a child to him as a psychological tool to encourage his allegiance with Shadow and recapturing the chaos power that he was exploiting 50 years ago.

This allows Gerald to install the social programming necessary to convince Ivo and Shadow later in the movie to act as an extension of Gerald’s desires - capturing him in his dream of world destruction. To do this, they need to infiltrate the G.U.N. headquarters in London and release the Eclipse Cannon from the Thames River by grabbing a top secret activation key located deep in its lair. Gerald and his team is able to use Team Sonic’s infiltration of the G.U.N. headquarters as a mechanism to inch his way towards obtaining the second key card for himself, allowing him to gain full access to the super weapon and set its cross-hairs on the planet. Gerald uses this as a way to direct his anger towards the destruction of his own family at the figure of the father embedded in the state. Gerald does not care that he is not only aiming his super weapon at this father figure, but at the whole world itself - a whole assemblage of whirring physical, biological, geological and sociopolitical machines that are reduced into a flat surface through the Oedipus Complex.

Recapture into the State

Shadow and Ivo Robotnik are now positioned actively within the drama between Gerald Robotnik and the state. This assembles the power necessary for Gerald to power the Eclipse Cannon. Sonic, meanwhile, recognizing the grave threat to not just the state but to the whole world, urges Knuckles to grant him access to the Master Emerald so that he can transform into Super Sonic and fight in space. Knuckles puts up an opposition, reminding him that “the Emerald must never be yielded for vengance! Not ever!”, but he relents upon recognizing the seriousness of the situation. As Sonic charges towards the cannon in space, Gerald reveals to both Shadow and Ivo that his plan all along was to exact his own revenge against the state for the death of Maria. Shadow is confused - “is this really what Maria would have wanted?”, he asks. Gerald reminds him that this revenge is to “take back” what family was taken away from him 50 years ago - remember that Shadow wasn’t even really part of this family outside of his relations to Maria, but Gerald forces him under that umbrella anyways. On the other hand, Ivo is frustrated - he saw the cannon as an opportunity to shift the flows of power towards himself and his grandfather, allowing for world domination, and believes that the destruction of the entire planet is a useless and reckless endeavor. Upon refusing to cooperate with his plans, Gerald disowns Ivo, resulting in a fight between the two, distracting Gerald from executing his full plans.

Shadow, still adherent to his newly installed father figure, not only powers the cannon so that it can charge, but pursues Sonic in an attempt to suppress the state’s only chance to maintain control of the situation. Shadow and Sonic fight over the meaning of family, with Shadow fully convinced of Gerald’s deranged narrative. He reminds Sonic that he violated the trust in his own family and abandoned them to pursue this reckless fight, which enrages Sonic and leads to the two fighting in a brutally violent fight - but Sonic does not have the heart to kill Shadow. This is reinforced by Sonic’s own surrogate father reminding him in a flashback to not commit murder. Sonic’s mercy gives Shadow a moment to contemplate the events occurring up to this point, and clears his head - ultimately, Shadow really does love Maria at his heart, and realizes that Maria would never have wanted Gerald to destroy the world in revenge. It is through this that Shadow switches sides and finds himself integrated into Sonic’s cause, reincorporating his family values to assign themselves with the state. With this new alignment, Sonic and Shadow manage to assemble enough power to redirect the cannon’s blast away from the Earth, hitting the moon instead. This misfiring of the cannon causes the cannon to start overloading, which would result in worldwide devastation and extinction, thus forcing both Ivo and Shadow to work together in a suicide mission to sacrifice their very lives for the future of the Earth.

Now, after all of this chaos is released, after all of the structures of the world could be rearranged in any which way, with nearly the world coming to an end, what ultimately happens? Only a mere shift in the structures of power occurs, almost undetectable. G.U.N. is still an incredibly powerful military force that effectively has world domination, who employs the alien superpowers of the space critters, who gleefully play like children in the forest until they are summoned again for a new mission. But some shifts of power are observable, hinting towards a fourth movie - the sudden appearance of an army of Metal Sonic clones in the forest who are dispatched by a new alien hedgehog - Amy Rose. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Sonic and his friends, Shadow survived the destruction, grabbing one of his limiter rings in the final scene, and thus his chaotic production can continue, with a completely unknown, unpredictable future, now unbound from his temporary familial ties - and lies.

posted on 06:44:05 AM, 05/14/25 filed under: game theory [top] [newer] | [older]