I’ve gotten so tired of the “Shadow the hedgehog is 50 years old 🤪” jokes because people use it as an excuse to draw porn of him, so I’m swinging violently in the opposite direction and saying there’s more evidence pointing to him being the youngest member of the cast then there is evidence that he’s an adult.
1: to get this out of the way, he was in STASIS for 50 years, so he did not age physically or mentally in that time.
2: in his Sonic Generations dlc we see that when shadow met Maria they both appear to be the same age, this implies that when shadow was “born” he had both his current mental age and his “teenager” type body.
3: Maria does not (at least visually) age between her first meeting with Shadow and when she dies on the Arc.
So with this information in mind Shadows actual age is based solely on how many years he had with Maria, which all things considered could be less than 1. There is a real tangible chance that the reason that he’s so unstable in SA2 isn’t just because he’s still mourning the loss of his best friend/sister but because she’s all he ever knew, he know her since the day he was born fully conscious, then she’s just gone. On top of that his entire world changed, if I lived in an environment with a complete lack of ambient noise and basically nothing but sterile empty halls and was suddenly on a planet with constant noise and bugs and weird smells I’d consider destroying everything, and that’s without the factor of still being in mourning.
Shadow may have the physique and mental fortitude of a 15-16 year old but clearly would not have any experience up to that point. This also explains why in the Shadow the Hedgehog game he’s so easily manipulated and influenced after losing his memory, he’s been set back to square one, he’s basically an infant.
Now this may have spawned as a “fuck you” to people sexualizing a fictional child but this explains so many quirks about him that I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more people talk about this or play into it in fan works, Shadow is basically a toddler in the body of a 9th grader given the power of a god, sure he’s smart enough to make decisions for himself but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s huge gaps in his knowledge still even after living on earth for as long as he has.
In conclusion, let Shadow be a kid and stop making excuses to be creepy about him.
