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I'd fly to you tomorrow, I'm not fighting in this war

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Cooro!

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Maria Robotnik's Plots and Schemes

This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and something I base a lot of my own portrayal of Maria on, but a lot of people I don't think really lean in to the "Robotnik" nature of her enough.

Prior to the release of Sonic 3 and especially in the Sonic X era, Western audiences really got no sense of Maria's personality. She was mainly just portrayed as "sick girl who is nice to Shadow and dies." She's very much the sacrificial lamb archetype - sweet innocent, do-no-wrong victim who dies early in the plot to help motivate the protagonist into action/revenge/etc. And by and large that's still what she still is in the games, but other media has given us glimpses into traits that help distinguish her from this flat character trope and flesh her out into a full person. And that full person is rich with potential.

First, of course, there is her plotting and scheming that we see in the movie:

Of course, we're watching this from Shadow's POV, so all we're thinking during this montage is "aww Shadow got a silly kind friend:)" But if you really think about it, Maria is probably an absolute menace to everyone else at the facility. She is Gerald Robotnik (notorious evil scary guy)'s granddaughter, basically allowed to do whatever she wants whenever she wants because Gerald said so. We actively see her sabotage research, vandalize equipment, and crash into an entire cart of Christmas cookies (some poor intern worked really hard on those!!). Yes, Shadow is also being used and mistreated by these people, so they kinda deserve it. However, when you look at this montage from the POV of just like, an average joe working there, she probably was really fucking annoying. And it's magnificent. Already we're departing from the "spotless angel" archetype and showing some who is real and has personality and flaws.

But it's really important to remember than even from her beginnings in Sonic Adventure 2, one of the biggest things we know about Maria is that she said fuck cops. In Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic X, and other media up until the movie, Maria dies by directly defying military orders in order to protect Shadow. She's still portrayed as a sacrificial lamb, yes, but a lamb who defied the supermilitary. So even back then, she was kind of hardcore.

And then there's all the moments of her being a beautiful little shit in the manga:

(here she is saying fuck cops again)

Look at her little glasses!!! Look at the little shadow on the cake!! Look how she nags him and how big in personality she is portrayed!!

Of course, she still fits back into that 'sacrificial lamb' trope in parts of the manga, because that is still ultimately what she is, but her portrayal is just so much less flat here than it was in the past. One thing that particularly stands out to me is her kindness to the little "Bug Eye" Black Doom created:

To these creatures that everyone else finds objectively evil and horrifying, Maria still extends the same kind of familiarity she has with everyone else. Maria loves breaking down barriers and expectations, and this is what draws her so much to Shadow in the first place. Maria sees a brick wall in front of her and goes "Well, that's okay. I brought a giant fucking drill." And she uses it.

What I'm saying is. I think only reason we only get Chaotic Good/Lawful Good/Do-No-Wrong Maria is because her life was cut short. I think, had Maria been given the chance to survive, the is a ton of potential for some of her more Robotnik qualities to be drawn out. All the plotting and scheming already present, the more abrasive and demanding parts of her personality - and her obvious potential for genius, as she was being raised as a silver spoon by Gerald and, if had been allowed to live, probably would have followed in his footsteps. Researching more about Shadow or the Black Arms perhaps, making her own robots, curing her own NIDS, even. In fact, we even have evidence for this in Shadow Generations, as it's revealed Maria is the one who designed his shoes.

Maria Robotnik was a budding genius with an enormous personality whose life was tragically cut short. Shadow and everyone around her deifies her memory because she died as a martyr, and as a result her portrayal gets sanitized and simplified, and it's what we, the audience, receive.

But I am holding your hand, I am taking you with me, and I am daring you to imagine a world where Maria Robotnik was allowed to grow up and live. To turn into the Chaotic Good (or Chaotic Neutral, or debatedly Chaotic Slightly Evil) genius she was always destined to become. Perhaps even one day surpassing Ivo or Gerald themselves.

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amy doodle today

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direct sequel to this post

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wonder amyyyy

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They're in denial

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Team Sonic likes to remind Shadow that he's the son of Space Satan.

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HE SITS (2023)

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this is easily my favorite sonic & friends tiktok. shadow looks like just saw through the matrix and realized they’re all trapped in kawaii hell and being made to do tiktok dances like sega’s work horses hedgehogs. how sonic tails and knuckles just proceed slowly toward the camera. flawless.

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i’m watching an art theft documentary and they’re interviewing this art history professor from new york who was asked to go with the fbi to authenticate a rubens that had been stolen but it was a sting operation so they had to pretend like they weren’t the fbi, that they were some private buyer about to pay $3.5 million for it, and the fbi was like “this is a VERY delicate operation because you never know how they will react to what you have to say so let the agent do all of the talking, don’t say a word to anyone just nod if it’s the rubens, the last operation we did the guy in your position got shot because things went wrong in a second” and then it cuts to the professor’s interview and he says “i wasn’t going to fly down to miami to be a part of an undercover fbi sting operation to handle what could be rubens’s aurora and just NOT say anything. i was gonna have to ad lib a little” and then he tells the interviewer that when he & the fbi agent got to the hotel while he was examining the painting he started lecturing the other people, first on how badly they had wrapped it, and then about like how it had been painted, the history of it, what the subject was and what she was doing, etc etc, and he was like “i hadn’t taught a class on rubens in 15 years, so for me it was like being back in the classroom except my students couldn’t leave” 

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commission for mayli_draws on twt ♥

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Super Shadow in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)

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🌌

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HE IS ALWAYS AURA-FARMING ON ANY MEDIA😭

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why did they make chao hell in sonic adventure 2. like yeah you got petted by shadow a bit too many times there buddy and now you go into the blood pit