Autistic Rants About Fictional Characters That Don't Exist, #1

Alright, well in this essay I'm going to have to talk about both because of hose deeply intertwined the real world and IRL history is with the ARK conspiracy. If the English teacher flags my paper as AI, I swear to God I will bribe Shadow into Chaos Controlling and knocking her into next week.

Anyway, TL;DR it depends on how hard the general public pushes back, how much of the true nature of the conspiracy they uncover, and how hard the government bullies the peasantry through propaganda and the like.

This is gonna take a while and so I'll break it down into several comments, point by point.

TW we're going to delve into some pretty heavy shit here, so if you're of weak constitution, leave the conversation now

.

.

.

The first and probably the most important thing we can do is to dispel the dumbass, apologist notion that because a terrible event happened 50 years ago means that it does not matter, or that justice regarding it should not be pursued, or that it's immoral or unjust to hold people responsible for atrocities committed that long ago.

In the real world we hold people accountable for heinous crimes no matter how long ago they are committed because we don't believe justice should have an expiration date. Murder has no statute of limitations in the United States. The #MeToo movement strongly opposed statutes of limitations against rape and sexual assault charges with great effect — actually the main reason Sean Combs is in jail is because of a singer who sued him over sexual assaults he committed since 2005. As in 20 years ago. (source: https://www.vox.com/culture/24006759/puffy-diddy-sean-combs-video-cassie-rape-lawsuit)

People still pay respects and do tributes to the Bloody Sunday massacre that occurred 50 years ago. (source: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/thousands-pay-respects-50-years-after-bloody-sunday-massacre/2489492)

Even stuff like the Tulsa race massacre, which occurred in 1921, was investigated by the Justice Department over 100 years later, long after everyone involved died. (source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/us/tulsa-massacre-justice-emmett-till.html)

Like as moral and social progress continues, the more we as a people abandon the silly notion that the past does not matter. If anything we've all been learning the hard way WHY it matters, at least in the real world. We know the kind of injustices and atrocities we allowed to go unabated by believing stupid self-serving lies about how the past doesn't matter and have, at long last, started to reject them.

In the Sonic movieverse, which is basically just the real world with hedgehogs running around, there's no real basis to argue their reaction would be any different. 50 years was not that long ago; most Boomers alive today were around back then. Commander Walters was in his late 70's, early 80's during the movie for example. So a lot of people who were responsible for the ARK massacre would still be alive long enough to be directly held accountable for murdering an innocent 12 year old girl among the other atrocities and horrors they enabled if not directly committed in that base.

The real question is whether the public would care enough to go do something about it. I'll talk about that next comment.

As to the question, would the public care enough to do something about it? If history is anything to go by, well, maybe.

Especially if whoever investigates the conspiracy can get some juice evidence that pulls the public's heartstrings. Really it's influencing the public's heart that matters here, not their minds.

Oh, and TW again, skip this crap if you're sensitive

.

.

.

Por ejemplo, the Mississippi Burning shooting. (source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississippi-burning-murders-resonate-50-years-later/) TL;DR in 1964, three civil rights activists who were running voter registration drives were murdered for their trouble. The reason the dude who was actually responsible for those murders was caught was because the news reporter who investigated and found him saw the movie Mississippi Burning, which came out in 1988, and the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen who organized the murder didn't happen until 2005, respectively.

That movie, Mississippi Burning, was the primary reason justice was done.

Let's take a much more recent example into account: the George Floyd murder. I actually don't know if I can link to a source on this because the full video of his murder is online for you to watch in its full horror (source: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007159353/george-floyd-arrest-death-video.html)

Half of the country was burnt to the ground because of that video. If that video was not put on blast all over social media, the protests would never have happened, Derek Chauvin would never have been held accountable at all, and George Floyd would have been forgotten.

Also I don't know about y'all, but I went to the 2020 protests that happened in response to that and... I saw some shit lol

Now consider all that, and then consider these facts:

Why is it that we don't see mass protests on the streets for these issues, but we tend to see them for issues involving one or a few singular people getting murdered or being forced to suffer in some horrible way?

So, what the fuck does that have to do with a bunch of cartoon hedgehogs? Well, consider: we're talking about an incident that happened 50 years ago, where innocent people including a 12 year old girl was murdered by the U.S. government, to cover up nefarious evildoing on the part of our military.

Given the way we've demonstrated people think and what they'll protest over, I think it's fair to say that if word got out about what happened to Maria, regardless of whether the public actually knows about Shadow or not, there would be outrage and possibly even protests.

And that leads us to more questions and, more importantly, more juicy plot possibilities. Whether Shadow's existence is known or not is irrelevant, so you say, starmen999? Well, yes and no. The truth is that Maria's death alone would be enough to spark a public reaction, but knowledge of Shadow's existence would probably complicate things — and knowledge of his involvement would either spark a revolution against our the U.S. government, or it would be exploited by our government to turn humanity against all of the aliens in the franchise, including Team Sonic.

Stay tuned for the next episode of one of starmen999's long obnoxious TED talks about fictional characters and stuff that doesn't really matter

Okay, so let's get to the real meat and potatoes of this shit. We already established Shadow's existence isn't really necessary to compel the public to demand justice for GUN murdering Maria. But what about Shadow?

I shall make the claim that knowledge of his existence complicates things, and it would bring about great change for humanity — whether it be for better or for worse is actually up to the U.S. government and whether it would be willing to allow the truth to come out or to allow itself to be held accountable at all.

The games present us with a very real conundrum that actual real world scientists and government officials have had to grapple with over the years: how would humanity react to positive confirmation that aliens exist? That they have contacted humanity before? That some of them are living on the Earth right now?

What if those aliens were hostile? What if we were hostile to them?

And for a real-world look at how humanity would react to something like that, we need only look at a gentleman named David Grusch.

First off, if you don't know about this guy or didn't watch the Congressional hearings he was in last year, go look him up. Look up the hearings on Youtube and give them a watch. Go read the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grusch_UFO_whistleblower_claims

Like this guy, just last year, sat his ass in front of Congress and told them to their faces that the U.S. government has been ripping off crash debris and alien bodies from all over the world since the 1930's, that they found alien bodies, and have hurt and killed innocent people to cover it up. And he did all of that, and managed to convince a lot of the American public that his claims were plausible simply because of his credentials, with no physical evidence what-so-fucking-ever. The caucasity of that motherfucker knows no bounds.

And let's meditate upon that for a second. People from all walks of life have been making claims about UFOs visiting the Earth for decades now, and they've all been discredited in one way or another — what little physical evidence they could bring to the table was put under a microscope, scrutinized and dismissed; they themselves were discredited as either grifters or mentally ill; and all and I mean ALL claims that UFOs exist or aliens exist are widely dismissed and laughed at.

Even after the David Grusch hearings, nobody gave a fuck. A lot of Americans don't even deny his claims and yet nothing is done. There haven't been any protests, any widespread outrage, people don't even really talk about it at all anymore and it was only a year ago that he came forward.

That matters a LOT for a future Sonic story involving the ARK conspiracy, because without some really compelling evidence of Shadow's existence — like video footage of him being experiemented on or doing tests or him just living his best life with Maria at the base before the massacre for example — absolutely no one is going to believe that shit. People don't even really take the existence of Team Sonic seriously in the movies or the Knuckles show at all. Knuckles the Echidna himself was broadcast on live national fucking TV during a BOWLING TOURNAMENT and not one single fuck was given about the fact that an ALIEN was there. HELPING ONE OF THE PLAYERS BECOME CHAMPION. I'm not wholly convinced it's even registered with the people of Green Hills that Sonic and company are, in fact, aliens.

Actually we see Team Sonic running around freaking everywhere in Sonic 3 and no one seems to care.

This tells us many things, but not many that would be very good for Shadow:

On the plus side, the public isn't likely to react to seeing him out and about in public, even after the Eclipse Cannon incident. They didn't react to him when he was stuck out in the rain alone in the middle of Tokyo; the people only reacted when GUN rolled up in force.

As for the negatives... there are a lot. For one, it's highly unlikely anyone will take seriously his claims that he's an alien, even if he used his powers in front of them. I don't really even think anybody would believe him if he came forward about the ARK massacre. If any human he told came forward, even if they had video of Shadow himself talking to them and put that shit on blast on social media, nobody would believe it, because of how the culture has conditioned itself to think about aliens.

Actually Shadow coming forward with his existence or even talking about what happened might potentially screw up a case involving Maria's murder because simply by being associated with him, GUN could discredit everything involving the ARK massacre.

Imagine, for a second, that tomorrow you open up whatever news site you go to and you see article after article after article about how the U.S. government has been imprisoning and experimenting on aliens, and how it raided one of its own bases and killed almost everyone inside to cover it up including the 12 year old granddaughter of the lead scientist, who has been arrested over it.

Would YOU take seriously that claim?

Even if there was evidence?

How would you know it wasn't a hoax, or AI or something?

We in the real world side with Shadow because we have the benefit of omnipresence the movie grants us. We saw for ourselves Shadow's life with Maria, his sweet and cuddly and soft and tender personality before the massacre, and we saw for ourselves Maria Robotnik's murder at the hands of GUN. We saw Commander Walters try to save them and fail. We saw his evil ass put Shadow on ice anyway even though he was the true victim in all of this.

In the actual Sonic movieverse, people don't have that benefit and they don't even have the ability to objectively analyze a situation like that because of how American culture works.

I'm certain once people met Shadow and got to know him that they'd TRY to get the truth out for his sake, but I highly doubt anything would be done about it or taken seriously, because to put it simply, Shadow is not a 12 year old white girl. He's an alien, a hostile alien at that, and so people simply wouldn't care about his suffering as much if they acknowledged the importance of his existence at all.

So if the mountains of bullshit I have inundated the thread with hold any water, it's that people would believe and care about the ARK massacre — so long as Shadow was never brought up.

That actually makes me really sad now that I think about it.