Irrheia’s event really felt like a breath of fresh air to me cause for the past like year we’ve been having plot relevant events and it was nice to just unwind for a bit and have a fun and chill one
x. i'm on my RE kick rn because new game soon BUT TRUST and BELIEVE 2026 is gonna be artie's year. see all the canon stuff on his carrd ?? we're expanding that, we're blowing it up, we're writing the npcs into threads, we're diving head-first into anti-gov rhetoric and systematic abuse themes. we're documenting his survival journey. we're giving him a cool and sick revenge plot. we're gaining allies and creating enemies out the wazoo. artie's canon will be revived and prioritized because i have abandoned his main verses way too long and his story deserves respect, damnit !!
It's baffling to me that a certain subset of the SW fandom is willing to accept some of TCW’s most ridiculous story arcs and blatantly OOC characterisations as literal canon, but then pretend that they 'can't believe' that Padme could possibly fall for Anakin in the actual Prequels films.
Really? You can believe that space-godzilla goes on a rampage and destroys a sector of Coruscant, that several of the main characters are kept as slaves by an evil cat-queen, that Obi-Wan fakes his own death (complete with a pretend funeral) and callously traumatises everyone who cares about him in the process, and that Maul somehow survives TPM and is at one point a ROBOTIC SPIDER ...
... but you can't believe that two child prodigies who formed a bond while mutually aiding one another can meet again years later under intensely emotional circumstances during the outbreak of a galactic war and legitimately fall in love with each other and get married?
i've been promising it for ages, so here are finally some notes on the two iterations of black arms/doom i write for. in this house we ignore the "black doom is an evil space tyrant for the sake of being an evil space tyrant" thing and have fun exploring his motives from different angles
(it's because i had no idea that was even a thing until like a week ago. i've always thought the motivator was Just Food, and i like that significantly more.)
i like to think of eclipse's paternal qualities as something telling to black doom/the species as a whole, at least outside of canon instances. so that's an intentional trend across both.
it's also intentionally implied the alt arms are more or less what aruna's hive could/would have turned out like if he were less traditionally stubborn and foolhardy.
as for their plans and how things ended up:
alt doom started out as generally interested in how humanity might progress. once in contact with gerald, his plan was to trade his DNA for the chaos emeralds as a source of energy for the black comet, as its at-the-time power would have been mostly depleted by the time it circled back around in 50 years. this agreement was doomed to fail; both he and gerald almost immediately realized how badly it could backfire, got paranoid, and mutually planned to destroy each other. the fact humans are good sustenance for the black arms was just a convenient bonus at that point.
given shadow didn't make it past SA2 on this timeline, it left sonic to defeat the black arms. and in sonic fashion, this meant putting them in their place and sending them packing without properly destroying them.
alt doom is not so much one to accept he's been beaten, and more one to re-approach something from a different angle once he realizes his methods were flawed. this leads to him picking up and just going Somewhere Else. he's a scientist too, on some level. he can figure it out. and he does. rather than being all traditional and stubborn, he learns to work with other species, which in turn leads to securing better/more diverse materials, more ethical/convenient food sources, etc. the arms' population booms and advances at breakneck pace from then on. they diversify and spread out. without having to fight for survival, things are chill. it's considered the good end.
aruna's is the bad end. shadow is present on this timeline, and summarily wrecks his entire shit (for good reason).
the trouble with aruna's hive is it was in a constant state of nutritional deficit. they were the multiverse's scavengers, tending to pick planets clean whose populations were already critically low. not for any moral or ethical reason, just that the hive itself was so comparatively small in numbers, they didn't much have a choice.
this led to desperation. he got Tired of it. his last ditch effort to secure some means of easier travel/means to acquire food was to obtain the chaos emeralds. so he struck a deal with gerald, as these things always go.
he comes back 50 years later, finds his son has sided with the humans, and just snaps. just goes absolutely nuclear. if the deal isn't going to be upheld, and shadow sees the black arms as The Enemy, then he's just going to take the emeralds (and by extension the whole planet itself) by force. he's done playing nice. he and his people are starving. have been starving for enough years he's lost count.
this ends with the entire comet being blown up, and that's the last thing he sees as he's falling back to earth.
what all goes on after that point is between nobody but him, the multiverse's worst and, somehow, eventually, a familiar fallen god. (it's going in another aruna-centric post, some day, maybe, i hope.)
there's even still more i could say about how their respective hives operated and how they interacted with them personally, but that also needs to go in another post because this one's already long enough. but oh man is there more to say.
(and a shoutout/direct link to @motobug as always for the mobian design)
