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Commentary
for August 16, 2022:
Now here is a
character who could have easily stayed away for a while. In fact, he
did. Shadow the Hedgehog last appeared in Chapter 17 at the end of
season 1; he didn’t appear at all in season 2. That was a deliberate
choice on my part, for Shadow to be absent all of season 2, but it
was also faithful to the story as originally told in Eon’s Comic.
Now, as you may recall from the commentaries to Chapter 17, Shadow
actually died in the version of that story told in Eon’s Comic
back in 2003 and I originally had no intention of ever bringing him
back. As I’ve said previously, I did not like Shadow back then and I
had been very disappointed by his sudden heel-face-turn at the
eleventh hour in Sonic Adventure 2. That’s why, for his
original arc in Eon’s Comic, Shadow was an unapologetic
villain from start to finish; I was basically trying to fix what I
saw as a mistake in SA2 and, once Shadow’s story was done, that
would be it for him.
But then a game called Sonic Battle came out for the Gameboy
Advance and it had some really nice Shadow sprites in it that I
wished I’d been able to use. So I brought him back. Yes, it was
entirely because there were now some cool official Shadow sprites,
whereas before there had only been fanmade ones. (Ironic, isn’t it?
As a 17-year-old, I craved official sprites; but at 36, pretty much
all my character sprites are now fanmade.)
So at this point in the original story, Shadow returned as a result
of Knuckles accidentally striking the Master Emerald with Thunder
Arrow while fighting Rouge. There was never any real explanation for
it, beyond very hand-wavy Master Emerald magic, but Shadow was back
and this time I like to think I did a much better job of writing
him than I’d done before. Certainly, he was no longer the
unrepentant villain he had been in his first arc, but more of an
antihero like he is in official fiction. In fact, if I recall
correctly, I think I retconned it so that the villainous Shadow
who’d appeared previously had been some kind of corrupt temporal
duplicate, whereas this Shadow was the genuine article.
Well, this time, it’s nothing so confusing. Here, Shadow never died
and this guy is the same one we last saw in Chapter 17, where he and
Sonic parted amicably in what I still feel is one of the best
chapters of Eon’s World to date. I’m very proud of what I
wrote back in 2019. |
