forever on speed

I felt bad for only giving the cropped out version of the finished slide. For context, I was tasked with coming up with a new element to add to the world, and my chosen context was Sonic CD. Here's the full slide.

[TEXT: The Emissary of Kairos

In the past version of the stage, Wacky Workbench, there situates a secret room that houses an angel statue. The figure never gets further backstory, but the statue's pillar resembles that of ancient Greek architecture.

In the bad future, Eggman finds this seemingly sacred space, and replaces the angel statue with a statue of himself that explodes if you destroy it.

The Emissary can appear in the past version of every stage, when the player is a short distance away from a robot generator. Whenever a player is a short distance away from a generator, the Emissary will appear before the player and lead them to it. However, the catch is that the Emissary phases through walls and ceilings, and will only be present for 20 seconds before it disappears.

The Emissary teaches players how to analyse their environment and effectively slow down to avoid the long term punishment of losing momentum in their playthroughs.

I've chosen to reinterpret the angel statue as the Sonic world equivalent of Kairos, the Greek God of Opportune time. My new character is thus the Emissary of Kairos whose goal is to guide Sonic to save the planet. To grant the wishes of this planet's unseen populace whose future is in jeopardy, and requires a savior.]

it was in a jp exclusive manual (according to people online, i don't speak japanese and cannot verify this information) right after sa2 released but was not mentioned in that game, it was included in sonic x (according to the wiki it went completely unmentioned in the english dub and in the japanese dub was not mentioned by name. but fansubs were Extremely common at the time of the sonic x japanese dub). the reason i bring up sonic x is because i'm POSITIVE that's the only reason most english fans grew up knowing about it (now it's common knowledge) because otherwise it was only in a prima strategy guide in english and i would say that unless it's in the actual game/media, fans should not be expected to know about it. also prima strategy guides aren't always canon compliant.

i actually dont think it was ever mentioned in an english game until shadow generations (in gerald's journal it's mentioned by name). sonic battle (japanese version specifically) is the ONLY game where they ever mentioned NIDs prior to shadow generations, but i have no clue if they ever clarified that she was terminally ill, because it just looks like they said she has a disease and moved on, and this was never put in the english text of sonic battle, they don't even mention that she's sick in the english version they just mention that gerald wants to apply his knowledge to save his granddaughter's life, which unfortunately could mean a number of things, such as gun holding his granddaughter's life hostage or whatever.

the archie comics was the only media out of the games and tv shows that mentioned her terminal illness consistently.

like people hand-wring over her illness being central to the games when criticizing the movies and while it is EXTREMELY important to explain why she is on the ark, the first time they ever established the symptoms, the name, or even the fact she was ill, in an english game until shadow generations (it was mentioned in an encyclopedia in the 2020s but i am specifically mentioning the games and how they portray and depict her as representation of someone who is terminally ill). and i MUST STRESS, by the time the english game text had confirmed that maria was intended to be terminally ill and was also chronically ill in addition to that, the movie was recorded and finished.

it would've been cool if they had taken a similar route to sonic x (although i don't remember if they called the illness terminal or described her being chronically ill), but given all this, it's actually fully possible they didn't know she was sick because the games haven't cared enough to mention it until 2024 (outside of sonic battle and while the game is great, the text is easily missed ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY DIDN'T LOCALIZE IT TO ENGLISH).

basically: for all people claim that maria's disability is important, she technically hasn't been confirmed disabled in english until recently (and even more recent if you didn't have the encyclopedia which is the first english mention of her illness), and her illness was only vaguely implied in sonic battle, and it didn't even confirm if it was incurable or just difficult to treat or anything related to it.

i love maria, and i'm glad they decided to lean in to her being disabled and having symptoms of chronic illness, but i feel like when criticizing the movies it's extremely important to mention that it's very possible that even people at sega might've been unaware of it, especially before shadow generations marketing and release, where they focused and expanded on it. in the games prior to that its ONLY purpose was to justify maria being in space so shadow could have a friend. if the ark wasn't in space in the game i dont think maria would've been given NIDs, unfortunately.

as for the second part of your ask:

the intended read of shadow's memories of maria in sa2 is that they are almost completely accurate and true, gerald just changed her final wish to be the destruction of the earth, and when amy unlocks his memories, that's an actual memory he has. in subsequent games they re-confirm that all of his memories (including the one where they spoke about earth while looking at it) were accurate but at the very least his memories of maria ejecting him from the ark were completely accurate up until her final wish. i guess you could hypothesize that their window chat was completely falsified but the ejection scene is real shadow and maria knew each other in sa2.

and i'm trying to be polite here but this is... incredibly obvious if you pay attention. maria sacrificed herself to save shadow.

which i guess she could've done that for fun or w/e but i feel like it implies the other memories are real because why would she do that for someone she doesn't care about. maria's wish being "save everyone" is a real memory that he had, according to the text of sa2, so he knew her for certain.

She essentially becomes a teddy bear that Gerald lugs around physically and Shadow lugs around emotionally. Not to mention the various plot holes it raises. Why isn't she in school? Why doesn't the government send her home after she makes a mess in the hallway, specifically after she ignored Commander Walters' suggestion to "ditch the skates"? The film treats Movie!Gerald's despair with the same gravitas as if GUN had personally betrayed him like in the games rather than caused an unfortunate accident, and it leads to a feeling of dehumanization of Maria. Without that element of bitter betrayal and loss which leads to Games!Gerald desiring vengeance on all of mankind, it gives off the implication Gerald worshiped the idea of Maria more than anything else. We can see this in the line of dialogue he has where he shuts down Shadow's scruples about the Eclipse Cannon plan with, basically, the thought that whatever Maria might have wanted them to do instead of this doesn't matter because she's dead.

Gerald wasn't working for a cure only to get stabbed in the back at the eleventh hour of his career. He, like Maria, had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which is its own special kind of pain, to be sure, but is that enough to spark a genocidal descent into madness? Now here's the part where I become a bit pedantic and add a "yes, and" to that. Does Maria need an explicit reason to be on the ARK? Why can't it be part and parcel of the premise? Furthermore, why is her condition not to be taken seriously unless it comes attached with a list of symptoms?

---

basically: for all people claim that maria's disability is important, she technically hasn't been confirmed disabled in english until recently (and even more recent if you didn't have the encyclopedia which is the first english mention of her illness)

I'm kind of side-eyeing the underlying assumption that something isn't canon until it's confirmed in English. SA2's Japanese paratext, Rouge's The Truth About 50 Years Ago... report, described NIDS as difficult to treat in the present day and incurable 50 years ago.

That doesn't mean it didn't exist. If NIDS really was a secret locked behind a Japanese linguistic paywall, so to speak, then fandom wouldn't have known about it for the past however many years.

The fact is we do know and have known about it, so clearly it's not that insurmountable of a lore gap, or particularly esoteric knowledge. Otherwise, Flynn wouldn't have given Buns NIDS in the Archie comics roughly 18 years ago. This issue, 193, came out in 2008:

Something not existing in an English-speaking milieu doesn't mean it doesn't exist, period. It just means it's not accessible. Inaccessible =/= nonexistent.

(And really, do you want new fans who don't want to take up the shovel and dig?)

---

and her illness was only vaguely implied in sonic battle, and it didn't even confirm if it was incurable or just difficult to treat or anything related to it.

I feel like you're moving back the goalposts a little. First you conceded that Sonic Battle did imply she was terminally ill, but because it didn't expand on the nature of her illness, it doesn't count.

To use an example from a contemporanous game: we don't really need to know what disease Mary had in Silent Hill 2 because the symptoms of her illness came second to the horror of her experience of coming to grips with her impending mortality. "Was it melanoma?" misses the forest for the trees when Mary is screaming at James to leave because she feels disgusting and useless.

Likewise, narratively, all we needed to know to understand Gerald's desperation was that Maria was ill. Battle didn't really owe it to us to expand on that.

---

in the games prior to that its ONLY purpose was to justify maria being in space so shadow could have a friend. if the ark wasn't in space in the game i dont think maria would've been given NIDs, unfortunately.

Yes, but the fact that SA2 was created with the setting of space in mind - Maekawa got the rest of ST onboard in order to celebrate the new millennium - means this will forever be a hypothetical, thus rendering the thought moot.

According to this logic, Abraham also needs an overt reason to be on the colony as a kid, which SxS Gens doesn't provide in the game proper.

It's a bit ironic that, in the game obsessed with tying up every loose end surrounding the ARK, we're supposed to accept that he's Shadow and Maria's classmate Because Reasons. Is he also ill? Is he not allowed to live on Earth? Is he an orphan? Who knows? SxS Gens' paratext doesn't answer the question beyond "his parents were researchers who had a surprise baby aboard the colony," which is pretty much the same lack of explanation the movie gave for Maria's presence in the film: "Gerald takes her wherever he goes."

It's circular reasoning. Abraham is here because the game said he's here. Maria has NIDS because she's on the ARK. She's on the ARK because she has NIDS.

---

Overall, I think this is an issue of SxS Gens making explicit something that used to be implied. It would sort of be like if a new game came out tomorrow where Tails straight-up looked at Sonic and said, "Gee, Sonic, you sure are a homeless bum. When are you gonna pay your taxes?" And Sega was like, "This is so that new players know that Sonic is a nomad. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge."

It'd be odd, a little jarring, and a regression from previous games where more was shown than told. We were able to gather from context clues that Sonic is a vagrant who probably couch-surfs at his friends' houses. You didn't need to spell it out like that.

We can see in The Doom and Lost Impact's round clear screens that she stops to catch her breath, something no other character does:

We could also argue, faintly, that Maria's belief that the Heal Unit is her grandfather's greatest invention suggests an interest in the ARK's medical research.

A light touch, you know what I mean? Trust in the players to draw their own conclusions.

You also have to remember the cultural zeitgeist in which SA2 and Battle released. The AIDS epidemic was a fresh scar in the cultural consciousness of the early 2000s - of course the game is not going to come right out and say Maria is suffering from a fictional version of AIDS. Imagine the public outcry if a new Sonic game came out and had a character suffering from "KOVID."

They probably didn't include explicit mention of NIDS because they didn't want to be skirting that line with the ratings board. (Which is why I found it so crass when Woolie and Pat described her illness as "space AIDS" and immediately made homophobic jokes. Can You Not).

On a more subjective note, I kind of don't know how to feel about SxS Gens' framing of her illness, because in some places it almost feels like it's using her illness not to reveal a material fact about the character, but as a twist of the knife for Gerald and Shadow's manpain... Which ironically is the whole reason SA2 gets criticized, for reducing Maria to her effect on Shadow and Gerald.

I'm not opposed to the idea of Maria acknowledging her illness, but the game seems to frame it as "Isn't it so sad that Maria is terminally ill (subtext: isn't it so sad Shadow couldn't save her)?" rather than "Maria is a girl who so happens to be terminally ill," like in previous games. While I understand they were trying to lean toward the latter in her flavor text, it almost suffers from the same problem the film does of thinking quirks = fleshing out the character.

In ShTH, although her thoughts were sparse, I still got the sense that they came from her rather than some cuteness quota the writers had to fill. She had opinions on things. She thought Gerald's greatest invention was the Heal Unit. She thought the Artificial Chaos were "kind of cute" when they split apart and that their eyes looked "sad." She told Shadow she gets lost in the ARK sometimes because it was so "huge." She would apologize if Shadow attacked the soldiers (though tbf every partner character reprimands you if you kill mission-critical NPCs) and wondered if they should leave control of the emergency to them.

Her thoughts varied. They had a little bit of texture. It wasn't just the equivalent of "Do you like stars, Shadow?" over and over.

Granted, it wasn't much, but it wasn't nothing, either. People would have you believe there was nothing to her other than dying like a sacrificial lamb.

Maria is a selfless character, so naturally she's going to speak more about other characters than herself. Even then, it still kind of feels a bit like she lacks interiority in her SxS Gens flavor text.

For instance, she says she enjoys Spagonia's food and would like to try it again with her family on Earth. That sounds nice and wholesome until you realize it leans again into the "Aww it's sad she's gonna die and never do Normal People Stuff(tm) again" type stuff... Which is like. Not an implication that sits right with me when we see her doing her version of Normal People Stuff aboard the ARK in ShTH, like racing Shadow down slopes.

Notice how often Maria is talking about what she misses. She misses her family. She misses her teacher. She misses Spagonia's cuisine. She talks about what she lacks. It all adds up to imply the ARK isn't a home for her, just a placeholder until her "real" life can start. Which, again, is supposed to twist the knife.

Like, the fact that she has to be the one to comfort Shadow about his status as her savior sibling in the Dark Beginnings short also doesn't sit right with me because it's still subtly dehumanizing him, reducing him to his function. I get what the scene is trying to accomplish, but it feels a bit unnecessary to point signs at it.

Compare that to the SA2 flashback where Shadow says he "just doesn't know anything anymore." Yes, Shadow was still talking about his existential woes in that heavy-handed way of his, but his hangups weren't "omg I'm a freak of nature" so much as a general existential malaise. If he was asking "Who am I?" in the SA2 flashback, he had shifted to asking "What am I good for?" in the Dark Beginnings short.

not thinking of those who struggle to live to the fullest as being as human as themselves, who apparently "deserve" to do so, rather than considering how "tragic" it must feel to know you likely never will as everyone looks down on you (some real high-grade nazi shit)

Game sonic being functionally perfect works because his character arc, if you could call it that, is applying his skills to be the kind of person the rest of his cast and the plot need. Frontiers was the closest we've gotten to an "arc" from him in some time, and that was again being the person his friends need as *they* grow and change, to become "game sonics" on their own. IDK, I just think it's neat. Sorry this is a bit disorganised I just really liked your post.

Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts! I appreciate that you liked my post enough to think more deeply about it and consider it in the context of the writing and handling of movie Sonic, because how these characters compare and contrast is an interesting discussion, albeit one that is hard for me to have specifically due to the wide celebration of the Sonic movies being seen as amazing video game adaptations by the general populace.

At this point in time, I don't agree with the notion that movie Sonic is becoming game Sonic. Honestly, it stopped being Sonic the second he was given a dead owl mom and a traumatic backstory to encourage the viewer to feel bad for him, so whatever they do now is for naught unless they just completely ignore that backstory they already established and make it ineffectual to all of his motivations and decisions, which would just create a new problem of being, generally, pretty bad writing. If it is a goal to get new fans to play the games, then it is rather questionable to present a completely different Sonic as encouragement when there's no guarantee they will even enjoy game Sonic if they enjoy movie Sonic.

Even if this was what they were going for, the concept of forcing myself to suffer through years of sequels to see the main character be like what they were in the source material is a practice in "cinematic universes" that shouldn't be normalized as much as it is. If I end up enjoying the sixth movie because they finally made Sonic act like Sonic that still leaves five movies over the span of >10 wasted years that I dislike (because, among other reasons I do not enjoy these movies, Sonic's character is perhaps the biggest.) Quite frankly, they already made their message loud and clear by throwing out game Sonic right away and just doing what they want in accordance with current consumer trends, so for my own sanity, I'm going to assume that they are never going to make movie Sonic faithful for the sake of capital returns instead of convincing myself of the false hope that it might happen someday in the next decade.

I feel I must emphasize, with the point you brought up about how movie Sonic is different because of a younger audience: Sonic was always for a younger audience. Sonic games are already for children. He didn't need to become Sonic, he just was already Sonic. I see what you're saying with Frontiers and how it can mirror movie Sonic growing into his own like Amy/Knuckles/Tails grow into their own. The thing is, characters besides Sonic serve a different role than Sonic himself, which is why they even exist in the first place. Switching the roles here is missing the point, because these are not interchangeable aspects of the characters. They achieve opposite effects. The reason Sonic doesn't tend to have a full-on narratively-focused arc where he changes fundamentally is not because Sonic has no weaknesses, or because he's literally perfect. It's because none of his weaknesses are treated, by the narrative, as things to be fixed. When this is flipped on its head, he is being presented as the antithesis of this concept, which therefore removes the feeling that this character is Sonic the Hedgehog.

This idea that movies about preexisting franchises need to ease in slowly into things by writing the characters as different characters in a banal real life world to appeal to the new generation/people new to the franchise may be a popular trend these days, but it's ultimately not true. Movies can be anything, and with the right execution, can communicate anything. They can be faithful and appeal to new audiences, these are not mutually exclusive at all like so many people argue them to be. The key difference between games and movies is that games have additional gameplay elements that add to the storytelling that movies do not, so movie writers should consider how to supplement this. It's actually an interesting topic that is outside of the scope of this ask right now.

Hey. You have sent this exact message and messages very similar to it several times. I have already acknowledged the shortcomings in Silver's characterization in the comics before and my intent to do better. I'd like to remind you: -Ghosts of the Future Silver exists in a radically divergent AU, with a different backstory and character arc. That was the point of the story; to take him from a timid, insecure boy to the bold hero we all know. That's why he can't fly, and generally has a weaker grasp on his powers. I have never written official depictions of Silver like him, ever.

-Silver's lighthearted side is a canon aspect of his character, and comes forward when he is in lower-stakes situations. By design, the comics are usually (but not always) depicting lower-stakes moments in the characters' lives.

-All IDW content is checked at multiple levels of SEGA of America and SEGA of Japan, including by Iizuka-san. Their notes can be very specific, and are always applied.

I think there's a lot to be meaningfully discussed about Silver's characterisation. Above all, I think you should be recognised for your efforts to improve at your craft and openly wanting to do so. You don't deserve to be constantly bothered with the creative humility you show and strive for

I was inspired to write an essay about Silver's characterisation in light of the complexities of the Sonic franchise as an IP managed by SEGA. Whether or not I published this link in a separate post, it doesn't change that it was inspired by reading this ask (and that it's also about 4500 words! Whoops)

I hope this offers food for thought for people who decide to read. All good if it inspires disagreement, too! At this point, I think there should be actual, real engagement with characterisation with sensitivity and consideration as opposed to the kind that the asker has done above