#to be clear this post isn't saying that gerald didn't love or care about shadow. personally i think he really truly did

[zosonils]

an aspect of shadow's trauma that i've been thinking about a lot since the sa2 replay is how fucked his perspective of gerald must be after everything, especially assuming he was family to shadow just as much as maria was [which i do every day]. the man who raised you, created you from nothing but tissue samples and energy and hope, the man who could have easily decided you were a simple thing to be used and yet welcomed you into his family as easily as his own granddaughter, who treated you as a person when so many others treated you as a lab rat or a weapon or another soon-to-be-failed prototype, in a moment of unfathomable despair, decided you were to be a tool that would carry out his final plan. perhaps treating you this way was another symptom of his mental breakdown, perhaps deep down he's always seen you as nothing more than a thing to reach his goals with. you will never know, because he is dead. every comforting memory you have of him, every time he encouraged your curiosity or stayed with you during a test he could have observed from afar or told you how proud of you he was, forever tainted by the thought that it could have all been a lie. a variable in an experiment, a means to an end. how would you ever trust anyone ever again man i'm in shreds

#and sure in shth he gets to know what he was made for and that he was never meant to be a weapon but it's hardly closure #because that recording was from before gerald's breakdown. it could've been the illusion of caring as much as anything else #to be clear this post isn't saying that gerald didn't love or care about shadow. personally i think he really truly did #but he said and did some awful things while he was grieving too much to think straight and didn't have his family to ground him anymore #and he was killed before being given the chance to process his grief and what he was doing or to reunite with shadow #so that's the last version of his creator that shadow will ever know. and it'll probably eat at him for the rest of his life #sorry for 1am shadow sadstuck i promise i have a funny post queued up for next time #just fucking whatever #shadow the hedgehog