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)
82 notes
·
View notes
i think it’s less that ppl are legit expecting a white christmas in boston every year and more that the probability for one used to be 20 to 30% and it’s now been almost 15 years without one and probability has dropped to 10% and will continue to drop. for someplace like worcester in massachusetts it’s even worse — probability was 67% ish for the boomers and now it’s a little over 30%. only 27 white christmases in boston since 1892 sounds small but when u consider most bostonians had 3 white christmases by their mid-teens on top of all the christmases where there was snow even if it wasn’t one inch and now there are teenagers who haven’t seen even one white christmas… it makes sense why ppl freak out every year it still hasn’t happened.
And that absolutely makes sense, yeah! I have immense climate anxiety too, like I said!
What I was responding to was more the people saying "it's 60 and raining in Boston and it feels like the apocalypse" or "this isn't how it's supposed to be ever; this never used to happen."
I don't know if you saw my longer post, but I went and looked at Boston weather records going back to 1893. Most Decembers from 1893-1903 had multiple days in the upper 50s, with many years getting into the 60s at least once. I didn't track every single year from 1893 to the present, but it seems reasonable to assume that that 10-year period wasn't just a weird fluke. December 1895 actually had more days in the 60s (5) than December 2022 (1).
That's not the full story, of course- December 1895 also had a couple of days in the 20s before that upswing, some with small amounts of snow. You also have things like overnight lows going haywire, and other reminders that climate change is real and it is happening now. I would never, ever attempt to deny that. It's the single biggest problem facing humanity at the moment.
However. There are multiple things to hold in our minds at the same time when thinking about its day-to-day effect on our lives, and one of them is "the effects are seldom as simple as It's Warmer Every Day Now Than It Ever Has Been, And That Will Continue Unilaterally For The Rest Of Our Lives." I'm not trying to deny or negate anything. I'm just trying to make people feel a little less despondent.
(I also just discovered that the metric for a white Christmas here in Boson states that it has to fall before 7 AM, which seems arbitrary and weird. We actually had a white Christmas here in 2017- we got 2.9" of snow -it just fell later in the day. So...it doesn't count for some reason? That's really strange to me. Anyway, the article where I learned this estimates our average yearly "one inch of snow on the ground at 7 AM on Christmas morning" chances nowadays at 19% as of three days ago.)
(I also think this demonstrates what I'm calling Reverse Environmental Amnesia- where, rather than thinking that the effects of climate change have always been normal, you tend to remember past weather in a way that fits the absolute direst interpretation of circumstances. Anyone who was in Boston on Christmas 2017 SHOULD remember the snowstorm...but I've seen multiple locals who don't travel for the holidays agreeing that we've had no Christmas snow at all since 2009.)
39 notes
·
View notes