I think the 80s-90s will actually translate really well with Maria and Shadow’s backstory given the historical precedent of the real world epidemic that was going on at the time
hoooo boy, THAT is a complicated can of worms to open.
Namely, the debate about whether NIDS is a reference to AIDS at all.
Of which I did a solid six hours of research to find my answer. Buckle up, this post got long!
SA2 is a very American-themed game through the lens of Japanese anxieties, I think. There's a niche article on Medium that attempts to contextualize SA2's story in the political climate of Japan in the late 1990s that I'll quote here:
"At this point in world history, the dot com bubble is beginning to burst. Japan has been in a deep, painful recession, America’s own economy is starting to boom, and it feels like Japan is about to become America’s little brother protectorate once again. Always notable in Japanese pop culture around this period is the Aum Shinrikyo sarin nerve gas attacks of 1995, which colored a lot of the zeitgeist of the country for a while after the fact. The Iran-Contra scandal, even though it occurred more than 10 years ago at this point, has colored foreign views of American military operations. The Y2K bug is on a lot of people’s minds, producing fears about a technologically induced apocalypse, our wonderful scientific advancements coming back to haunt us."
Another thing coloring the zeitgeist was that at this time, 50 years ago would have been shortly after the end of World War 2. The 1990s were really the first time that Japan publicly acknowledged its brutal colonization and treatment of its neighbors- a fact illustrated perfectly by the sheer number of apologies issued in the 1990s compared to the preceding decades. So not only was Japan watching U.S. become the sole world power after the Cold War, it was also reckoning with its own imperialism and the actions of 50 years ago. You'll note that 50 years ago is the number chosen for Shadow's backstory and the raid aboard the ARK. I don't think this is a coincidence. Keep that in mind.
Continuing on, SA2 is an extremely American themed game. Sonic in particular has always had a rebellious "American" edge to him fitting with other shonen protagonists, but SA2 specifically had American cities and American rollerblading and skateboard culture- this was a game fully intended for the American audience and as a serious representation of the country to Japan. The Medium article puts it well:
"It’s discussed in interviews and obvious in some of the game’s architecture and city design that the main cityscape is based off San Francisco — City Escape has its valley-like, absurd downhill slopes, Radical Highway is based off the Golden Gate Bridge. The United Federation (unnamed as they are in this game) is run by a President who looks to be visibly Caucasian and an omnipresent high-tech military force looms over the setting. Route 280 and 101 are named after two interstates that run through San Francisco. Sonic Adventure 2 is super American. Keep that in mind."
And AIDS was an American problem. From the Japanese perspective, AIDS was a "foreigners disease". It was associated almost exclusively with gay men, hemophiliacs, and those who immigrated to the country. It is extremely difficult to get a pulse on how Japan felt about AIDS at the time due to a lack of social science research into the topic and suspected chronic underreporting of the disease. This article is the best source I could find, and it links to several others that are probably worth a read if you're interested in this topic further. I'll smack a quick quote down of the most relevant section to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:
"The English-language and Japanese literatures on HIV in Japan are dominated by clinical and epidemiologic studies using almost exclusively quantitative and biomedical data. A focus of the comparatively smaller body of social science research, including both qualitative and quantitative investigations, has been the experiences of a very specific population: the victims and families affected by the “Yakugai AIDS Scandal,” [in 1995] in which hemophilia patients were infected through blood products imported mainly from the U.S. . . Though [these and a few other] studies have provided insight into a few disparate aspects of HIV in Japan, more social science and qualitative research – particularly that which contextualizes a broad view of the country's epidemic – is needed to fill sizeable gaps in understanding."
AIDS in Japan, even well into the late 1990s, was not something that was talked about. Quotes from interviews in the study indicate that Japan still struggles with open conversation of the disease due to its associations with sex.
The name for Maria's disease in Japanese is ＮＩＤＳ：先天性免疫不全症候群 Senten-sei Men'eki Fuzen Shōkōgun, and it was written out first in the Sonic Adventure 2 Perfect Guidebook released accompanying the game in Japan. This guidebook was officially endorsed by SEGA. The reference to NIDS is on page 214, styled in an epilogue written by Rouge. Of note with this translation is that the word "Neuro" is not used in Japanese, which results in the name sounding like some other immunodeficiency disorders rather than it's own distinct thing.
HOWEVER! Every English script of the game, every English game manual, and every English guidebook makes no mention of NIDS. Zip. Zero. Trust me, I have searched the scripts of both SA2 and even Shadow the Hedgehog 2005. Neither game mentions it. There's no mention of NIDS is in the adaption of SA2 in Sonic X (which aired in 2003) either. In fact, it's hard to find any explicit references in the script that she's sick- it's mostly just implied. The first explicit mention of NIDS in an official English format that I can find is Issue #171 of Archie Sonic, released in 2007. It was written by Ian Flynn- which makes sense. Allow me a tangent first though:
Several of the earliest english fics that star Shadow and Maria posted after SA2's release date on fanfiction.net support all of this. In a lot of fanfictions from between 2001-2006, there are no mention of Maria's illness. Some fics even have Maria aboard the ARK as just a visitor, while others have her return to Earth without a problem. A certain fic, though, titled "Shadow of a Girl" seems to get most of the backstory details right though, sans actually mentioning the disease by name all the way back in 2003. I can only wonder if this was speculation on the author's part or a very keen eye for detail and lore-searching support from Sonic fan message boards. (If I knew how the wayback machine worked better, I'd be tempted to give it a quick search for this!) Otherwise, the first fic to mention the disease by name was called "Fractured History", published in 2004, though this one is an exception that proves the norm.
So what am I trying to say?
The term "NIDS" would not have been known to Americans outside of niche message boards and fan culture until 2007. This is six years removed from the actual game, and brought into the American Sonic Fan's consciousness in 2007. By this point, Flynn was likely just trying to reference the niche bit of trivia rather than making a deliberate creative decision to reference AIDS.
Not even the original writer of SA2, Shiro Maekawa, may have intended for this association. Nowhere in his script or any of his later works does he make reference to it. The guidebook was written in collaboration with SEGA, though, Shiro Maekawa may very well have collaborated in writing this portion of the guidebook due to its story-driven nature, but we can't definitely prove it.
Rather, it was the writers at Enterbrain who wrote a spin-off guide, Yutaka Noguchi and Mitsuharu Orihara, who may have made the decision to invent the fictional disease of NIDS and stylize its letters in a way that was reminiscent of a disease that was hardly talked about in Japan at all. These two writers are ghosts to the internet at least, so I'm out of leads. We cannot definitely prove their intention.
Sonic Adventure 2 is a very American-themed game. The AIDS crisis was no longer a hushed topic by the time the game was being developed in 1999 or released alongside the guidebook in 2001. Sonic Team did a lot of research on America and American culture to make this game, so I would not be surprised if information about AIDS came up came up during said research.
This may be a leap, but for me, the evidence that proves the reference was intentional by these writers comes down to how the letters "NIDS" would be pronounced in Japanese.
The Japanese word for "AIDS" is a loanword, spelled エイズ , and pronounced "eizu". The phonetic pronunciation for the similarly spelled, made-up English acronym of "NIDS" would be. . . ンエイズ. Pronounced "neizu".
Just one Kana (roughly equivalent to a letter) off. Sounding almost identical, even more so than how the typical english pronunciation would be. (It's not a rhyme, as rhyming is not really a thing in Japanese from what I can tell of my research. But-) No matter how you look it, it's so damn close in association.
. . .
It is just. . . insane to me that writers associated with SEGA made the decision to actually use a portion of the "AIDS" acronym as a shorthand for Maria's disease in the time shortly after Sonic Adventure 2 released. The fact that an openly innocent and heroic character written in Japan had a syndrome with a shorthand for disease like AIDS is such an incredible thing for me.
Remember, 2001 is maybe ten years removed from AIDS victims in the U.S. being excluded from society, not being touched without gloves, not being allowed to live their lives and people assuming they'd done something horribly wrong in order to get the disease in the first place. Well within the living and cultural memory of American audiences. And in Japan- they were still in that phase in the late 1990s! HIV was associated only with "bad" people and "bad" foreigners. It was not talked about. But it was known. And it was an anxiety felt by people on both sides of the Pacific.
Sonic Adventure 2 addresses a lot of Japanese anxieties through an American lens. Most of it isn't even just in the subtext- you explicitly have unpredictable governments capturing our heroes and suppressing their freedom, horrific government acts and executions kept secret for 50 years and only now coming back to haunt everybody, looming terrorist attacks threatening the end of the world as everyone knows it. All of which were things that were on the forefront of the political climate of Japan at the moment.
And a disease that is incurable, where catching it or being born with it isolates you from the world entirely. Watching your planet go on without you from afar.
Ian Flynn would go on to bring the term NIDS to the American audience as an obscure reference and homage in 2007. From there, he would once again reference it in his 2021 Sonic the Hedgehog Encyclo-speed-ia, then he would finally immortalize it in a mainstream game in 2024's Sonic X Shadow Generations.
But before then, the Japanese audience and the dedicated American fans would have known about the particular acronym, and perhaps because of this they may have had more sympathy for the victims of the pandemic raging around them.
And that, my friends, is the history of NIDS as it appears in the Sonic franchise. Thanks for reading.
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Sources:
(apologies I am NOT properly citation formatting any of the ones that don't already have the citation provided. Maybe some other day I can but for right now it's almost 1am and it's a work night and holy shit I should be in bed.)
https://info.sonicretro.org/File:SonicAdventure2PerfectGuide_Book_JP.pdf (Page 214 for the NIDS reference - but be sure to have the ability to translate Japanese from a picture! My phone has a basic translation capability built into the camera, yours may not. However, you can spot the english letters "NIDS" in the second paragraph.)
The hivemind has dropped off a dozen termagaunts into the imperial palace. No reason, no threat. Theyre more like baby puppies. Custodes has hurt itself in its confusion
