Tag: dr eggman

benignmilitancy:

Despite what he tells Tails in SA2 about having looked up to his grandfather as a child, I don’t think Eggman knew Gerald as a kid. Not in the flesh, anyway. I feel like there are multiple hints to suggest he didn’t really know Gerald at all, but rather, idolized a man who might have already been dead by the time he was growing up.

• One of Eggman’s idle animation quotes in Lost Colony is, “Could this be the place my grandfather wrote of?” suggesting he did not know about the ARK’s existence, let alone the incident that shut it down.
• If he didn’t know about the ARK, how could he have known about the execution? In the Iron Gate recap, he says he “stumbled upon” Gerald’s diary “by accident.“ His knowledge of Gerald’s exploits in relation to the events of SA2 seems to be fairly recent.
• Building on my previous point, this renders the "he’s avenging Gerald’s death” headcanon moot. If he was retaliating against GUN (which implies he’d known about the execution for some time, rather than “just read about it yesterday”), the game probably would have made that clearer, instead of having him jump at the chance to use Grandpa’s uber-cool death ray weapon for his own aims.
• Probably some of the most telling pieces of evidence are his silences on Maria. In SA2, Eggman adopted a very possessive tone over his grandfather’s achievements. He didn’t recognize the password “Maria,” though, and said nothing about how her death impacted Gerald. Surely the single most catastrophic event in his grandfather’s life would have garnered more of a reaction from him, but no. What he doesn’t say in this case actually says quite a bit: either he didn’t know Maria, didn’t know how important she was in his grandfather’s life, or it (“it” being her illness/her death being the cause of Gerald’s insanity) causes him enough cognitive dissonance with what he once thought true that he’d rather not dwell on matters concerning her at all. Possibly all three of these things are true.
• The ShTH line, “He betrayed his people for research?” reveals Eggman’s ignorance, imo. Having idolized the man, he couldn’t conceive of treachery in dear old Granddad. And it’s supremely ironic, considering he stabs people in the back all the time and that loyalty doesn’t exactly run a two-way street for him, either. But he expected Gerald to be above that sort of thing. To be honorable, just like a hero would.
• Between that and the weird “That mad scientist!” comment following Gerald’s execution speech, it seems Eggman was rather quick to project. And that type of projection suggests he just didn’t KNOW Gerald, who he was, or what it was he stood for, especially in comparison to Shadow, who at least knew the professor wanted to make people happy through the power of science. He saw HIMSELF in his grandfather, not the other way around. So part of that broken pedestal may have very well been him realizing that not only was Gerald capable of destroying everything in a fit of madness, he just wasn’t who he thought he was. Imagine idolizing someone your entire life, only to find out you knew nothing about them.
• The last and arguably weakest piece of evidence is Gerald himself. This one is YMMV because his insanity might have overridden his sensibilities toward the end of his life; he still tampered with Shadow’s mind, after all, and he considered Shadow a son. But I don’t believe, given his family-oriented character, that he’d have gone through with the colony drop program if Eggman had been a child at that time—or was even born yet, for that matter. Some part of me thinks that he would have lost the nerve if he’d known he’d had another grandchild down on Earth. But as it was, at the time, as far as he knew, he’d lost everything with Maria.