Fire Embly

so here is the plot

This begins 50 years before the main plot. There’s a Military called GUN. (It’s supposed to be multi-national but is very coded US Military; the filmverse seems to be making it exclusively USA.)

They contract Gerald Robotnik (Eggman’s grandfather) and ask him to make them an immortal lifeform, most likely to use as a living weapon. Gerald isn’t too sure but his family has some serious health issues so he agrees in order to find a way to cure his family.

They end up in a Space Colony, which we find out in other games was an actual colony. It wasn’t just scientists up there, there were families and children. Keep this in mind.

Gerald is working very hard on this Ultimate Lifeform because his granddaughter/Eggman’s cousin, Maria, was born with an incurable disease that is literally just AIDS. They call it NIDS but it’s very clearly supposed to be AIDS. She is too sick to leave the space colony and has to be under constant supervision and he wants to cure her so she doesn’t, you know, die young.

It’s not super important to the point of this post how he makes the Ultimate Lifeform but long story short there were demon aliens involved

So they make the Ultimate Lifeform– Shadow the Hedgehog. He seems to be practically immortal and has a deep connection to the all-powerful chaos emeralds.

Shadow says explicitly in later games that he was “born and raised” on the ARK, and that he was raised alongside Maria. Gerald refers to Shadow as his son in a later game and Maria is clearly his big sister figure. The two of them just really wanna go see Earth bc they’ve been stuck in space forever.

Shadow starts having depression bc everyone tells him he’s supposed to be the Ultimate Lifeform and he was created to cure Maria but… he hasn’t cured her. She’s still sick. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.

And then. well.

We’re not sure exactly what happened? But it seems pretty clear that GUN found out about Shadow, that Gerald wasn’t planning on using him as a living weapon, and they got scared he might use Shadow against them. So they. well

GUN stormed the ARK and started murdering everyone

And yes, we know that it was everyone, not just the scientists. In Shadow’s spinoff game, we meet a survivor of the massacre who says explicitly that his entire family was killed during that incident

Gerald ends up captured, probably bc the government still wants him to make them stuff

MARIA IS NOT SO LUCKY

MARIA IS LITERALLY SHOT

THEY LITERALLY MURDER MARIA

If you’re wondering how old she is: the games give her no age but she is constantly referred to as a child and her model seems vaguely teenage. The anime, Sonic X, put her at twelve years old

Maria survives just long enough to send Shadow off in an escape pod but she is LITERALLY MURDERED by the MILITARY

Gerald manages to nab Shadow’s escape pod, which put him into a cryosleep. He finds out Maria is dead, absolutely fucking cracks, and decides to fuck with Shadow’s memory so that Shadow will want to destroy the planet

He gives Shadow false memories of Maria wanting him to avenge her and then sets him on a path to blow up the planet and everyone on it

GERALD IS THEN EXECUTED BY FIRING SQUAD

The military can’t figure out how to wake Shadow up so they keep him on ice for fifty years.

Eggman then breaks in and releases Shadow. Once Shadow is out and starts committing crimes, GUN doesn’t want people to figure out their fucked up secrets so they frame it all on Sonic, the only other nearby hedgehog, and try to imprison him

If you follow the theory that Eggman does what he does bc he has Orphan Issues, this implies that everything shitty that happened in Sonic Universe happened because the military decided to murder civilians

So that’s all canon, and think about this in the filmverse:

They set up GUN

They set up that Robotnik/Eggman is an orphan with government connections

They set up that the government can make people disappear if they’re a bad look 

They set up that the military is incompetent, violent, and totally down to maim/injure/capture non-hostile aliens because they don’t understand them and/or want their power

In the post-credits scene, they established Shadow is 50 years old, that he was in Project Shadow, and that the government is covering him up while keeping him in cryo

You remember a few bullet points ago I mentioned a survivor of the ARK massacre in Shadow’s spinoff? You know the Olive Garden Military guy? They are very clearly supposed to be the same guy. Aside from the game!character having heterochromia, they look exactly the same, and he recognizes “Project Shadow” when he’s told about it

And most importantly:

The director of the SCU, Jeff Fowler, got one of his first jobs working on the cutscenes for Shadow’s spinoff game, where this backstory is restated and focused on HEAVILY