"You can only be a wise man on the other side of the screen."
— Kasumi Ayase, Dies Irae
"People get really hung up on how Shadow could be mistaken for Sonic, but they're always thinking about it at a surface level completely divorced from the context. To you and I, it's easy to tell them apart, but to everyone else, they see a hedgehog-like creature with a similar silhouette to Sonic, moving at blitzing speeds with a Chaos Emerald at night. Why wouldn't they suspect Sonic?
"And that's not even the half of it; try to divorce yourself from what you know about SA2 and how it's shown to you, and just picture Sonic. You know him. You're familiar with him as a popular character. Then you see this. You have never seen him before and don't know who he is. Wouldn't your first assumption to be that he's some kind of dark form of Sonic? Hell, you show anyone who is only vaguely familiar with the series, and they'll just straight-up say, 'Oh, it's Sonic!' Even the former CEO of SEGA of America mistook Shadow for Sonic.
"Once again, to you and I who are Sonic fans and who are experiencing what's happening from Sonic's perspective, no shit it's easy to tell that they're not the same person! But how is anyone else supposed to know that? That they look superficially different? Need I remind you, Sonic has been witnessed by probably hundreds of people before, transforming into another form with the Chaos Emeralds, whose spines are shaped exactly like Shadow's, might I add. I will go as far to say it wouldn't make sense for people not to mistake them. I'll go into more detail with this later, but suffice to say, context is everything."
