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.
