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#ff14

also: #ffxiv, #Final Fantasy 14, #final fantasy xiv
stardustreverie
@stardustreverie

(if you’re seeing this in the ffxiv tag the relevant part is at the end. this was a draft and it doesn’t necessarily reflect my opinion on how shadow 05 should’ve been handled now, but since the end is nigh i might as well post this for posterity. the main point about GUN still stands)

in this episode of “emily thinks way too hard about sonic” i am A. annoyed that they barely used GUN in any games beyond SA2 and B. VERY MAD that whenever they did they basically got reworked to be either neutral or Government Good Guys(TM) with 0 nuance instead of aggressive military shitheads, especially when it comes to shadow’s game where it’s kind of presented as like “oh gerald brought this on himself and fucked over everything by making his faustian bargain” which makes the tragedy of the whole situation a lot less impactful when it wasn’t the trauma of the losses he experienced and the cruelty of humanity and stuff like that that made him into the monster he died as.

i guess you could make the case that that was the beginning of his downfall and the gov raid just cemented it, but in that case i think the whole thing with projecting that one recording he made for when the black comet returns makes even less sense than it already does, because that kinda presents gerald at that point in time as still sort of a good person, that he would care to actually do that (let alone the logistics of how it even got projected onto the black comet in the first place). imo the simplest and most sensical way that could’ve been handled is you go with the black arms deal being the start of a negative character arc and double down on it basically being “selling his soul” in a sense, with him definitively deciding to doom the entire planet to save his granddaughter in that moment.

this makes the stuff that happens with him in SA2 feel like a pretty natural continuation, and could also give him a reason to prep the whole shadow fake memories thing in advance (assuming that’s part of what happened and it’s not entirely shadow repressing shit due to his own grief), because maybe he started to get paranoid that GUN was going to raid the place as part of his spiral and wanted a contingency, instead of him definitively knowing that would happen in advance (???????) and recording-gerald being all like “shadow you have to save the planet from black doom! youre the only one that can do it!” and recording-maria being all like “you can do it shadow i believe in you!” (which i HATE MARIA BEING THERE AND KNOWING ABOUT ALL THIS IT MAKES NO SENSE GRR GROWL HISS).

besides that i think this version of the whole sordid ordeal gives shadow even more reason to decide to reject everything about his past and who he was by the end of it and finish becoming a completely new character from who he was in sa2. which honestly, i genuinely believe, besides the surface-level trend-chasing pandering shit, that the way shadow 05 approaches his character, with every route earnestly exploring and entertaining all the possible ways his character could be taken, and the canon ending rejecting all of them and definitively closing the book on sa2 shadow to let him rest, is genuinely the most respectful thing they could’ve done with him if they really were gonna bring him back after that game.

tangents aside, in shadow 05, the present GUN is a major player in the conflict and is basically just generic good american government, complete with a president and commander who are presented as basically good sympathetic people. neither they nor GUN writ large really answer meaningfully for anything the org did and SA2 is just kind of swept under the rug by the end (just like the real government). they REPRESENT THE GOOD SIDE OF THE MORALITY SYSTEM BY THE WAY (besides like sonic i guess, but the whole point of the thing with the black arms is that it’s an alien invasion and the government is the main bastion for humanity fighting against them).

this kind of shit reminds me of ffxiv when they backpedaled HARD on the thing with the capitalists running ul’dah being objectively evil and they made it more like “this one scheming fucking bastard let us get horribly fucked over along with a lot of people we care about, but we kind of have to work with him and oh look nothing bad really happens we can trust him as kind of a quirky ally now i guess” and then in the stormblood post-game it was like “these guys kind of have a point, y’know the shiny girl sultana whose entire narrative purpose is to be the country’s sole beacon of hope trying to keep the corporate oligarch bastards from being too evil (besides raubahn)? let’s have her ‘grow up’ and start to agree with some of the conservative horseshit they’re spewing”. in both of these cases it gives me the strong impression of “okay that was too spicy for corporate to be comfortable you better walk it back”