Shard: The Redemption of Metal Sonic

Shard is such a tragic character for only reasons outside of his own fault. Both real world and in universe reasons too

I love the theory that Shard was reincarnated in the Reboot universe as Gemerl, due to their similar colors and backstories.

One other cool thing to note too is that Post Reboot Gemeral is given a lot of Shards personality, so I like to think that the Ian and the crew wanted to explore more concepts with him as a stand in for Shard.

I really hate the fact that he essentially dies the moment he's about to tell nicole how he feels. He shuts down & then immediately gets erased from existence. Shard X Nicole would've been the cutest couple ever 😢

Its interesting how both Metal Sonic and Shadow differ as foils to Sonic. I think whats really cool is how Shard works as a foil to Metal Sonic, considering how the metal doppelganger has only ever been someone else's foil. Its a shame that Shard likely wont ever come back. He became such a well written character by the end.

Love the irony that despite Shard looking less like Sonic (being a clear homage to Metal Sonic v3.0 from Rivals), he ends up resembling him more personality wise.

Why are all the most compelling and well-written Sonic characters robots? Gamma, Emerl, and Shard all are so cool to me. Omega's also a consistently awesome character.

Shard was the Metal Sonic I wanted so badly to happen as a child, A Metal Sonic who breaks the traditional mold and sees the light, Shard was taken before his time, and is gravely missed.

Cant lie I teared up a little bit at the end there. Shard meant a lot to me as a kid and his search for connections but feeling unable to was something that resonated with me so much. I mourn never being able to see him again but I hope that videos like this show people how wonderful he became by the end.

Man, that's the saddest story I've heard since Shadow's Origin Story. Would've loved to see Shard adapted to the anime, or even a game. Could've been a fan favorite

Funny enough I was just looking back into Shard about a month ago and realized that at a certain point he was one of the few badniks built by the original Robotnik still running around. They had that weird plotline where Robotnik had died just to be replaced by a self-roboticized Robotnik from a reality where he managed to defeat the freedom fighters and then tried to invade the prime reality because he literally had nothing better to do. The first time around he showed up as a one-time villain where he sent out a bunch of his SWATbots to attack Sonic's world but it was actually the original Robotnik who sent out his own SWATbots to fend off the attack. This showed us that for whatever reason despite not being able to defeat his version of Sonic, Prime Robotnik was capable of building robots that were superior to ones built by a Robotnik who won. That's why I thought it was pretty interesting when you consider the fact that the current Eggman wasn't even dealing with his own robot when it came to Shard but rather his predecessor's, even when he sent his own Metal Sonic to deal with him Shard still had the upper hand forcing the newer model to self-destruct as a last resort. Now I 100% doubt it was intentional but I still thought it was a pretty neat reference.

This is literally my all-time favorite character from the Archie books. Thankyou so much for covering this guy!

Shard's redesign looks so squishable and more carismatic, he looks out of murder drones and i love it

and here I was thinking that Shard got rejected from Mecha March Madness. You just saved him for a 40 min. video on him. Great work as always :) (I'm still waiting for the 1 hour long Metal Sonic analysis )

I do think that Shard did continue into the reboot, Gemerl speaks like him in archie and even does a lot of taunts with double meaning to Metal Sonic. Intentional or not, Archie gemerl was effectively the reboots version of shard.

Everytime I get to issue 50, I alway get sad, because it's a great story, but it was done to deal with characters sega didn't want anymore. I'll always miss you, shard...

Metal sonic is an amazingly written character, especially in IDW, especially when he tries to infect himself with the metal virus. Shard was strange to me at first, but i ended up really enjoying his character as his time in the Archie series developed.

Shard is my favorite Archie character. His growth as a his own person is amazing. Something random into something we never expected and love. It hit hard when Shard tried to voice Sonic's own advice for Metal in his final issue, "There's more to life." And while it's never stated, a lot of fans, myself included, feel like Shard could have been reborn in the reboot as Gemerl. Not only having the same color schemes, but also Gemerl's personality is similar. My favorite headcanon, if they existed in the same universe, is Shard and Belle becoming siblings. Even Evan Stanley had mentioned this idea once. That made me so happy.

One thing I love about shard from seeing this video was how expressive he is, how his eyes and mouth weren't just static plates of metal, it makes him more of the artificial life form he is (also, I can't help but think of anime metabee when I see shard, despite being aware of the latter far longer than the former)

I remember when they functionally replaced him with Gemerl in the rebooted universe, and thought "I love Gemerl being a mainstay...but it's just not the same."