I know that this scene is about Shadow grappling with the fact he has alien DNA, but I feel like his thoughts in this scene are relatable to people with conditions like autism, BPD and NPD (not an exhaustive list) who struggle with feeling and being treated like an outcast or monster at times. For some, it’s because we struggle to operate in a world not designed for us. For others, it’s fighting against all the negative perceptions society has of us.
Shadow sees himself as a monster. But Maria assures him that just because he expresses himself differently, that doesn’t make him evil. I feel like especially for people who struggle with empathy, this really hits home. People often assume that people who struggle with empathy, whether cognitive or emotional, are heartless. And for those with personality disorders, they’re often treated as if they are abusive or manipulative just because of the disorder they have, even though people with said disorders are victims of trauma and abuse themselves.
I hope you all have a Maria in your lives. And if not, please remember that it’s your actions that define you, not your neurotype or disorder. If you struggle with socialising, or emotional regulation, or empathy, you’re not a monster. You’re strong for living in a world that so often seems to outcast and insult you. You’re strong for choosing to be as kind as you can be, even though so many people refuse to show that common courtesy in return. Even when you can’t be strong, you are not a monster.
I read scans of Gerald’s Journal and I have to talk about it. Not the lore or anything like that, but the disability rep. I didn’t expect to cry reading this.
Please don’t look at this post if you don’t want to be spoiled about what’s in this journal. If you do want to read it, you can find scans here. Credit to this Twitter/X thread for the images I’ll use.
I don’t have much to say about this image, but it is nice to see Maria using a mobility aid. It’s not often we get representation for an ambulatory wheelchair user.
I do wonder about Maria’s relationship with her parents. They weren’t happy with Gerald’s wish to bring her to the ARK so that he could research a cure for her, but they let her go anyways? Maybe Gerald got some sort of order to get her to go or Maria decided she wanted to go with him, but it seems a little odd to me. I’ll expand on this a little later.
Quote from right page: “[Maria] is growing into a lovely young woman. It breaks my heart that someone as bright and energetic as her is diminished by disease. There are no visible effects, and I’ve caught my fellow researchers muttering to each other, doubting her illness. It is infuriating. I find all my reason and restraint vanished when she’s slighted.”
Oh my days, I’ve never felt so seen by a piece of media and it just so happens to be my special interest video game. I am tearing up again thinking about this. Maybe that’s silly but to have a character express his frustrations about people doubting the invisible disability of his grandchild is so touching. I wish people in my life were more like Gerald. People with invisible illnesses get doubted so much because we “look fine”, but it’s so invalidating to have your struggles questioned just because the symptoms aren’t as visibly obvious.
Quote from left page: “[Maria] doesn’t know the full scope of what [Shadow] has been designed for, but she understands he will be under tremendous strain. She’s helped me conceptualize a number of accessories that will help focus his power and aid in his mobility.”
So we now have confirmation that Shadow’s air shoes and inhibitor rings are akin to mobility aids. I headcanoned this but I didn’t know they’d flat out confirm it like that. My favourite character is canonically disabled physically (and I’d argue mentally given his PTSD). I don’t have much to say about this besides being happy that my favourite character is now even more relatable.
It also makes a lot of sense for Maria to help create them because she has experience with her own disability and can offer a perspective that an able bodied person couldn’t. That and it makes Shadow’s connection so much stronger. His mobility aids were designed by Maria. He didn’t just help her with her disability - she helped with his. He wouldn’t be able to function without what she and Gerald created for him.
Quote from the right: “Back on Earth [Maria’s?] parents have been blessed with another little girl. They’re already run tech(?) and she has none of the genetic markers like to [Maria’s] condition. While this was welcomed news, the unspoken commentary was received loud and clear.”
(I am assuming they’re talking about Maria’s sister, but I guess they could also be talking about her cousin.)
So did Maria’s parents see their new daughter as a replacement? If I’m reading that correctly, it’s so sad. Do you think Gerald told Maria about her sister/cousin? If she did know about it, I bet she was excited to meet her. But I get the feeling that her parents back home didn’t really care about her anymore given what Gerald says in his journal. It hurts that much more when you consider how much Maria wanted to go home, perhaps even return to her family.
I feel like all of this makes Maria’s death more tragic for both Gerald and Shadow. For Gerald, he did so much reason and sacrificed so much in order to try and find a cure for Maria. He supported her when no one else did.
And from his perspective, despite her illness and the judgement of others, including potentially her own family, she was still positive. And yet she was killed, and he only found out about her death because of a report that had her name on it (I think anyways?).
From Shadow’s perspective, she is the person who gave his name meaning. Despite most being distant and weary of her, she was immediately friendly to him and helped teach him about the world. She helped created the devices used to reduce his pain and control his powers. He quite literally carries part of him with her. She was his sole reason for existing for a long time. And despite being this super supportive, kind, loving person, she was killed. I can imagine him being mad at Gerald for messing with his memories, but I figure there’s a degree of understanding, even if he doesn’t fully agree with what Gerald did. The difference between them both is Shadow’s purpose shifted beyond Maria while Gerald’s did not. Anyways, I digress - this post is about disability rep, not Shadow lore.
I love this and Dark Beginnings for their direct and indirect disability rep. My love for Shadow and Maria has only grown and I have a deeper appreciation for Gerald. I wish more people were as understanding as he is towards people with invisible disabilities.
I don’t really have a conclusion. I just really wanted to yap about the journal entries.
This’ll be kinda long cuz I want to cover as many characters as possible and I want to include both mental and physical disorders. Spoilers but I made everyone neurodivergent.
Sonic — adhd, Tourettes; chondromalacia patella, chronic migraines (post Frontiers), narcolepsy type 2
I saw a post about Movie!Maria and Game!Maria about how the tragedy of Maria in the game is that she would have died to her disease if she wasn't shot, and how the tragedy of Maria in the movie is that she could have lived a full life and didn't get the chance to.
Perhaps that's the reason for the erasure? Either that or they simply couldn't figure out how to portray it.
Okay, am finally getting around to writing this. Hopefully you dont mind me using this ask as a springboard to address some thoughts I’ve seen on the matter? It’s something I’d like to explore and I figured this would be a good opportunity for it. /lh
I will preface this by saying that although Maria’s illness being removed in the film was a bit disappointing to me, I’m not deeply offended by the choice either. I also don’t think it ruins the films by any means and I still really enjoyed it. I just want to share my thoughts as someone who is disabled and finds Maria to be a refreshing source of representation.
Spoilers for Sonic 3 (ofc)
I’ll start with the point you mentioned in your ask. (I haven’t seen the post you referred to, but hopefully I’ve understood what the perspective is.)
“Movie!Maria’s death is more tragic because she isn’t terminally ill and so had her whole life ahead of her”
I can definitely see this perspective, though I’d argue it’s not entirely true. Dark Beginnings gave a bit more information on Maria’s condition. For one, her symptoms were in remission because of the low gravity on the ARK. That means, to my understanding, that she had more time to live, even if a cure wasn’t found. The other thing is that Gerald was still working on a cure, so she still had the hope of being cured one day. Whether a cure would’ve been found we don’t know because her life was tragically cut short and the research stopped. The tragedy in her death was that she had hope of a cure to finally go to earth, but her death wasn’t even caused by her illness in the end.
Movie!Maria arguably had a better chance of a more fulfilling life given she was able bodied and lived on earth. But as far as I can remember, we don’t really know why she was living at the GUN research facility. I guess it was to be with Gerald? I suppose you could argue that she never had the chance to figure out who she wanted to be, but her backstory isn’t super developed in the films. I understand given they had the rest of the story to tell, but ultimately we don’t really know much about how her life would’ve been.
I think either way her death was tragic. Neither one to me feels more or less tragic than the other.
“They didn't have time to write her as being sick”
That assumes that they had to make a big deal of her being sick. There are a few easy tweaks that could’ve been made to hint at her being disabled without making it a huge spectacle. Maybe when she first shows up, they comment how she is there because Gerald wants to monitor her condition. Maybe there’s a scene where she is using a mobility aid. Maybe in the scene where Shadow is having tests done on him, Maria is too. It would also be a way to show that being disabled isn’t her entire identity, it’s just a part of her life.
Shadow’s backstory also wouldn’t really need to be changed in my opinion. Maybe his presence has nothing to do with providing a cure for Maria. Or maybe in the midst of testing his DNA, they find there may be a way to cure her. His backstory of being from a comet wouldn’t need to change at all.
“It’s too sad for a kid’s movie”
I don’t really get this one if I’m being entirely honest. Maybe they didn’t want to show a disabled girl being killed, but they still ultimately killed a child on screen which is tragic in itself. They also killed multiple other characters throughout the films, so they’re not shy to it at least. I don’t know that her being disabled makes killing a child more tragic? As I said in my previous point, they didn't even have to heavily depict her disability. I don’t have much to say about this point and I’m not sure how to properly articulate my thinking on it, but I don’t think a disabled character dying would be much sadder than her being able bodied and dying. She is still a young girl being killed.
One argument I saw was that they might have removed her sickness because of the COVID still being a fairly recent event. But I really hope that wasn’t the thinking. I get that it was - and still is - something that causes distress, but erasing a character’s sickness because of it feels a bit silly to me. Also a love of people, including teenagers, were disabled by COVID. It would almost be like saying “hey so we don’t want to think about that, so we are gonna just make this more palatable for the people watching.” I highly doubt this was the thinking, but tiptoeing around the idea of disability because of COVID kinda feels like the opposite of what should be happening.
“Killing a disabled character is cheap”
Eh, I’d argue erasing a character’s disability is worse. At the end of the day, they’re still killing a child, which in itself could be argued as being ‘cheap.’
“The writers didn’t know about her in-game lore/the information from Gerald’s Journal wasn’t available at the time of writing”
This one I can kinda understand. I can’t verify it, but I did hear that the whole NIDS thing was apparently only mentioned in guide books or something released a while after the games were? I can’t remember the specifics of what I was told. If that is the case, the writers not knowing about her being sick makes enough sense to me. I’d argue that if they were about to implement references from Sonic 06 and even include Sanic that they could read the wiki page on Maria and quickly see she was at the very least chronically ill, but I don’t know their process.
I feel like I had other points I wanted to discuss, but I can’t think of them right now. Hopefully this at least expresses my viewpoint on things. Again, I am not deeply enraged or offended that they changed her backstory. There are a lot of things I actually like about her depiction in the films. I do really like the playful and friendly dynamic they have in the movie. They’re friendly in the games, but we only ever really see Maria as being an emotional support to Shadow. In the movie, that comes after we see the silly interactions they share.
I think I’m more disappointed than anything. I was really happy at the disability representation in Dark Beginning’s and Generations/Gerald’s Journal, especially with regards to invisible and dynamic disabilities. I suppose at the end of the day, the movies are a separate canon from the games, so if they can change the backstories for other characters like Sonic and Shadow, they can change Maria’s. I suppose I was just looking forward to seeing a chronically ill character on the big screen.
Thanks for the ask! I’m glad to have hopefully been able to explain my thoughts on the matter, even if you don’t agree with them.
(I really do hope this makes sense. It’s pretty late as I’m writing this and I haven’t really proofread it.)
I thought of diabetic Surge as a passing thought but now she lives rent free in my mind. Imagine Kit helps her remember to check her blood glucose level throughout the day. Imagine Surge uses it as an excuse to get Amy to bake sweets for her to have when her blood sugar is low. Imagine-
