Shadow the Trumphog

A few days ago I made this post on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@DuthOlec/100050331585689503

“Currently pondering what path Donald Trump would take through Shadow the Hedgehog.”

So let’s do it! Let’s see if we can’t figure out what path he’d take! The obvious one would be “he’s a bad bad man so he’d do everything dark and be bad and end on the path where he destroys everything” but I think we can be more nuanced than that.

Level 1: Aliens are invading a city, and you can choose to defeat all the aliens, defeat all the human soldiers, or ignore them all. What would Donald Trump do? I think he would view the aliens as immigrants and therefore attack all of them. Yes, I’m starting by saying he would go the hero route. However, in level 2 he would see they have a big, beautiful ship, and he wouldn’t want to destroy it, so he’d ignore it. That’s the dark path, so he gets thrown into some military jungle base. In level 3 the aliens want him to destroy all the military robots, but he wants a robust military. At the same time, some bee wants him to find these data disks, but that sounds complicated and boring, so he just ignores it all. Neutral route. That sends him into the sky in level 4 where the aliens are fighting some scientist guy. He still doesn’t want to destroy what really are quite fantastic ships, but he also doesn’t want to blow up the aliens’ power source because that sounds hard. Neutral route. He ends up back in a jungle for level 5 where Eggman is retreating and the military is attacking him, and, really, as much as Trump wants a strong military, Dr. Eggman is clearly a small business owner that the government is treating unfairly, so he blows up the robots attacking Eggman. That leads to level 6 where the aliens send him to their base because the military’s attacking them.

Okay so at this point I could go the obvious route and say “turmp hhelps the aliens, and becomes their tool, because it turns out, the aliens were rusisa!” But I think what really happens is Trump considers these robots too much work to destroy and just ignores him. This leads to the ending where Shadow declares himself master of his own life. Maybe not a big revelation to consider that Trump just does what he wants, though.

Gender Swap

I’m sure you’ve heard: The Doctor is now a woman! Neat! I’m not here to talk about that, because I saw this tweet in response:

https://twitter.com/GhisPerrier/status/886609854307192834

SO I DID.

Animaniacs, Pinky & the Brain, Freakazoid

Yakko and Wakko as girls and Dot as a boy? It totally works! You really don’t even have to change anything. No, technically, you don’t have to change their reactions to attractive people.

Pinky & the Brain also super works too and the show kinda needed more female characters so yeeeah. I even once wrote a story in the past with a character who was basically a female version of The Brain so I can confirm it still works.

Freakazoid was the only one I had a bit of trouble with at first but then I got over it. Actually would female Freakazoid be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl with no guy to be a supporting character to? (I know Steff was his girlfriend later but he’s still the main character?) I guess he (she) wouldn’t really be pixie. I guess Freakazoid is more of a Cloudcuckoolander. Look I don’t organize tropes I just write them and then people tell me what tropes I’ve used, or at least they would if they’d put me on TV Tropes. Someone go do that.

Sheep in the Big City

I’ll wait a moment for you to look that up.

Anyway just reverse the entire Secret Military Organization. Which really just means they’re all female now, except maybe the Plot Device, who is still a robot but with a male voice. It still works, except it again took me a bit on General Specific, but I think I got it conceptualized. Also, Ben Plotz. Have a female narrator!

Actually I recently realized I missed a great opportunity to give Wally in the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos a gender-neutral name. There’s no reason they should be male, and in fact good reason for them to be neither, so Wally is officially a gender-neutral name and Wally is referred to with a they pronoun. Anyway! With those two shows considered I started thinking of other forms of media!

Discworld

Why haven’t we had a female grim reaper?

I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if something has had a female personification of Death but I don’t know of one.

Also I don’t know if The Luggage counts as male but if it does there wouldn’t be much of a difference as female.

Despite what Granny Weatherwax might say, I could not only see the wizards and witches be swapped, I’m not sure there’d be a difference!

And there’s no reason the Night Watch couldn’t be swapped. Sam Vimes, Sergeant Colon, and yes, even Nobby.

Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos

wait these are mine. and top is neuter. Okay actually if the CCC is ever adapted into a media with sound Top should definitely be voiced by a female voice actor.

Super Mario

Female Fawful? Works for me! Male Cackletta? That’s just Antasma. Female Waluigi? wa. (That’s Waluigi for “yes”) Female Count Bleck, female Dimentio? YES

Banjo-Kazooie

Why is it so hard to imagine a male Gruntilda? Maybe it’s because she’s such a figgin awesome female villain and those are always precious. Anyway, as soon as I imagined her not as a witch but as a wizard or warlock or something IT STILL TOTALLY WORKS

Sonic the Hedgehog

okay i draw the line at eggman losing his mustache

JUST KIDDING FEMALE EGGMAN WOULD BE COOL TOO

I’d also be super down with female Tails and Team Chaotix.

Nedroid

Female Reginald and female Beartato would also be cool and I want to see Anthony Clark do that actually.

Homestuck

Let’s be honest, there’s probably enough fan-fiction out there that every character is gender-swapped at some point, and I’m okay with this. Female Spades Slick!

Anyway I hope none of this is offensive, or maybe I hope all of this is offensive. It’s hard to tell!

Shadow the Hedgehog Summary Dialogues

For those who don’t know, the video game Shadow the Hedgehog (spin-off of the Sonic the Hedgehog series starring the rival antihero character Shadow the Hedgehog, big surprise there) featured a branching storypath. You could do evil or heroic missions, usually helping the main villain Black Doom or assisting a friendly Sonic character from the series, or sometimes you can just ignore both paths, and the story and level you go to change depending on the mission you go to. This means you could do some evil stuff but then change to hero and end up in a level you’d have been to if you did mostly hero stuff.

This also means the story is usually disjointed and doesn’t follow very well.

Sega also gave a name to every storyline you can do, 326 in all. Because of the weirdness of some of these paths, I wrote a summary in dialogue form. Here’s storyline #157, Diabolical Power:

Black Doom: SHADOW KILL THOSE SOLDIERS
Shadow: lol nope
Black Doom: WHAT, FINE, THEN GO ACTIVATE OUR RUINS
Shadow: lol nope
Black Doom: RGHA;R FINE GO DESTROY THESE OTHER SOLDIERS
Shadow: lol nope
Black Doom: OH YEAH WELL GUESS WHAT WE DON’T NEED YOU ANYWAY WE GOT OUR RUINS FLOATING, SO GO BLOW UP THAT DOCTOR GUY
Shadow: Oh okay actually I will go blow him up, he’s annoying.
Black Doom: YESSS, GOOD, NOW DESTROY THE PRESIDENT’S PLANE
Shadow: lol nope
Black Doom: THAT’S IT YOU’RE COMING HOME AND DESTROYING THESE SOLDIERBOTS IN OUR BLACK COMET
Shadow: oh. okay. that’s fair.
Sonic: I can’t let you do this, Shadow!
Shadow: nope i work for black doom now
Black Doom: YES BUT YOU’RE A TERRIBLE EMPLOYEE SO YOU’RE DEMOTED TO JANITOR

And here is Shadow the Hedgehog storyline #73, An Eternal Rival…

Black Doom: SHADOW, KILL THESE SOLDIERS
Shadow: kay
Black Doom: NOW SHADOW, DESTROY THESE INTERNETS
Rouge: Hi Shadow
Shadow: actually i’m gonna help the hot girl
Black Doom: WHAT. WELL AT LEAST DESTROY MORE SOLDIERS.
Shadow: nah i’m turning over a new leaf.
Charmy: Hey Shadow!! Wanna help me!!
Shadow: no you’re not a hot girl
Dr. Eggman: What about me?
Shadow: you’re cool so okay
Black Doom: YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING FOR ME.
Sonic: Hey Shadow!
Shadow: oh my god go away sonic, black doom if i blow up some defense systems for you will you make sonic go away
Black Doom: YES. WHATEVER. DO AS I SAY.
Shadow: okay but after this i’m going to ignore you entirely and deal with my angst by killing dr. eggman
Dr. Eggman: What was that?
Shadow: i mean activating his volcano defenses
Dr. Eggman: Oh, splendid!
Shadow: haha jk i’ma kill you *karate chop*
Dr. Eggman: nooo

Anyway. I kind of want to do a whole series of this. Maybe not for all 326 though.