Sans titre

Since Sonic 1 Sonic would seek out Eggman in order to deal with him. Sonic's been going out of his way to look for Eggman to fight him since the Classic games, which is why he tracked him down to Angel Island. Even the 3D games hold true, in Sonic Heroes he decided to seek out Eggman to stop him. Yet game purists criticized adaptations like the 2nd live action movie because Sonic went to look for villains to fight.

If he wasn't the type to seek out a villain and only fought him to defend himself, he would've let Eggman take over the world instead of going on a single adventure. People shouldn't need to explain to people that Sonic would look for villains for the sake of saving people from them because he's a good person, not the kind of monster who would just focus on himself while knowing that bad guys could be doing who knows what kind of evil to people. Most of the time he wouldn't happen to run over to a place where villains were doing things just from running around the world.

The fact that the game purists say blatant falsehoods about the games to demonize adaptations is all the more proof game purists don't really believe the arguments they use, they'll just complain about anything they could possibly complain about in stuff not written by Sonic Team because they hate anyone outside of Sonic Team who writes for Sonic.

There's simply no way they could be so ignorant of Sonic's character that they would actually believe he wouldn't seek out Eggman himself, like he does in the games, the whole reason Lost World happened, and Frontiers, and Colors! He went to another planet to seek out Eggman! Like he did in Sonic CD! He decided to seek out Eggman in 06 and followed him to Soleanna, in Unleashed he followed him to a space station. What are all these mythical games where he just spent the whole plot running in a straight line because Eggman chose to kidnap animals instead of fight him? He'd have to keep tabs on him to even know he started doing that, which requires seeking him out.

No one's media literacy could be so poor. There's no way they could've cared so little about the franchise as to not think about that position on Sonic enough to realize that the world would've been taken over if Sonic acted like Eggman didn't exist whenever he wasn't attacking him with his Eggmobile, not sparing a single worried thought to the idea of him tormenting people because he didn't track him down, as if he was too evil to care about them, and didn't find fighting Eggman fun, so of course he'd seek out villains to fight them for fun, and they even admit that he finds it fun to fight Eggman and would find new adventures without Eggman around, so they've admitted this is bullshit.

To think that any Sonic wouldn't seek out new villains to fight, which is clearly what new ADVENTURES meant as they're the source of adventure for him, would be to confuse Sonic with Scourge in these adaptations. And even then it's debateable that Scourge wouldn't go fight bad people for the fun of it out of boredom.

1: Sonic the Story: Sonic’s relatable when he tells Tails to get on with it and start telling the story, since I was also bored.

2: Tails apologizes and complies.

3: It makes Sonic believable to explain that Sonic had lots of childhood friends who taught him many special skills. It’s more relatable and realistic. Most kids have had school photos, and most go to school so they could get a job, so why wouldn’t Sonic have?

4: It was useful of those friends to teach Sonic special skills, as was also explained in the book Stay Sonic, that the rabbit taught him how to jump high and someone else taught him to swim.

5: Sonic’s friends were the animals from Sonic 1. It's of course respectful of the source material and has more charm than if it were to make them look original.

6: Sonic met Eggman because he tunneled through a mountain with his spindash while playing hide and seek. This is the most believable way he ever met Dr. Kintobor.

7: It’s competent of Sonic to be able to spindash through a hill. This is respectful to Sonic’s character.

8: Eggman’s got a backstory. Once again, he wanted to absorb all the world’s evil into the Chaos Emeralds and it all got absorbed into him, so it makes sense that he’s so evil.

9: It’s relatable that Sonic shows boredom while Tails is telling the story and wants him to get a move on. Sonic is supposed to be impatient.

10: At least Eggman making a mistake because of his overconfidence and optimism is in-character, unlike him being clumsy. So this is the most believable way he screwed up and got himself turned evil from an explosion near him. You’d expect a genius to pay closer attention unless he’s either easily distracted or confident.

11: Sonic’s good enough to warn everyone that Eggman turned evil.

12: Seeing this is new.

13: It seems new that Eggman tried to kill Sonic by hitting a tree with an axe. It’s interesting because he’s fighting him without the Eggmobile. It makes Eggman proactive, as he’s meant to be.

14: The narration says Sonic’s smarter than the average hedgehog, which is respectful of someone who’s supposed to be admirable.

15: The narration says Sonic likes eating chili, (which makes sense for a daredevil to like)

16: as well as cheeseburgers and fries. It’s relatable of him to love those.

17: Sonic swims in Labyrinth Zone instead of there being no creativity there. It’s competent of Sonic that he wasn’t too scared to decide to learn how to swim. It’s more respectful of Sonic that way instead of contradicting his coolness.

18: Eggman was smart enough to put Crabmeats in the first zone. You would expect crab robots to be near water, and you see water there as Sonic kicks a Chomper.

19: Sonic jumps on Eggman’s head.

20: It’s more believable that Sonic could continuously run away from the Eggmobile while it was dropping fire in Marble Zone instead.

21: Sonic jumps on Eggman’s head again.

22: He has to use the palm tree to jump on Eggman.

23: It’s also new that Sonic goes to take a photo of the exploding Eggmobile. It’s in-character and a little entertaining.

24: Sonic calls Eggman “ eggy features. “ The “ egg “ references despite him being called Robotnik reference his nickname in Japan, respecting the source material.

25: It’s creative that after beating the Marble Zone boss there, Sonic frees animals in Green Hill for the first time.

26: Sonic does a victory circle around his freed friends which shows just how happy he really is about the fact that they got saved from Eggman, showing how much he cares about people. It’s not like he just kept walking afterwards, as if he didn’t care.

27: It’s nice of Sonic to tell Tails he told that tale in a mega-awesome way

28: and pet him.

29: Tails says “ I was honored to tell it, Sonic! “

30: “ Sorry if I was telling it too slowly. “ 30.

31: Sonic the Hedgehog: The Invisible Robotnik: Eggman has a brilliant invention that can turn himself invisible. That’s very respectful of the main villain.

32: Even the narration is complimentary to him. It says he “ perfected a plan “ and calls the machine amazing.

33: Eggman going invisible to try to hurt Sonic is something that only happened here.

34: It shows the people of Hill Top Zone are afraid of Eggman. When they see the Eggmobile fly over them without anyone in it, even that scares them into running away. This is respectful of Eggman, revealing that for anyone but Sonic he’s still a huge threat.

35: At first the animals wanted to be brave because Sonic would be, because he’s supposed to be an inspiration.

36: The narration says Sonic raced at supersonic speed. It’s respectful enough to overestimate how fast he used to be in the Classics.

37: It says the Rings supply Sonic with energy.

38: The copious amount of Rings shown throughout the levels in this story is not only accurate but mean that it’s easier to figure out that the reason Eggman isn’t as hurt as he should be is that Rings healed his foot.

39: It’s creative that it shows Hill Top Zone as being mostly a normal-looking hill with brown mountains in the background that has the blue loops from the game.

40: It is a little satisfying to see Eggman fall off the loop looking scared.

41: Eggman lands on a bunch of badniks breaking them apart one after another. I never saw Eggman do the badnik bounce before,

42: and he looks like he’s in pain during it.

43: A rabbit jumps on Eggman’s head.

44: It’s creative that the rabbit that’s probably Johnny is brown and white.

45: Hill Top is actually used in the story properly which justifies the recycling of a setting; the tram from Hill Top is used as a story element, because

46: Sonic relatably got bored from waiting on the tram so he immediately jumped off it causing Eggman to fall after him.

47: Eggman falls into the water and hates it complaining.

48: Eggman was smart enough to have learned how to swim. It’s especially respectful of him because back then, the games didn’t establish that he could swim yet. This has the writer independently figure out that a genius would take swimming lessons.

49: Eggman at least tries to be entertaining because he relishes in scaring people away. He’s a card-carrying laughably evil ham, like in SA1, when I liked him the most in the games.

50: It’s relatable that Eggman’s startled by just how high the red spring launched him.

51: The badniks attack Eggman.

52: Eggman finally wisens up and gives up on being invisible.

53: Sonic knocks Eggman off his feet as he runs past him.

54: “ I hate that hedgehog! “ Even a UK picture book referenced AoStH in a context that made sense. 24.

55: Sonic the Hedgehog Robotnik’s Oil: It’s creative that Eggman started oil drilling in Aquatic Ruin.

56: It's a bit cathartic that Sonic runs around Eggman to make him dizzy and groan until he’s intimidated into telling him his plan.

57: It’s better that Sonic has to work to earn learning about Eggman’s plan. It’d be stupid of Eggman to tell him his plan otherwise.

58: Eggman chases Sonic in an Eggmobile that’s wielding a giant brown hammer. I think this is new, especially with how it looks.

59: The Eggmobile crashes into the pillar from Aquatic Ruin,

60: which takes advantage of the level as well as making him suffer.

61: It’s a bit interesting that Sonic jumps causing some robots to fly into each other.

62: Sonic uses his super speed and a wrench to sabotage the oil drilling machines so that instead they

63: spray a bunch of water at Eggman and cause him to leave it. It’s more interesting to see Sonic be cool enough to use a wrench to his advantage. He’s supposed to be cool and he’s the main character of the series and it’d be lazy and uninspired to have Tails sabotage the oil rig like you’d expect, so it feels right.

After this I'm going to start posting my lists of everything good about stuff like the other continuities of Sonic and then Sabrina. This all adds up to there being well over 20 fallacies, 25 just for how they argue with people alone and over 13 for canon purism itself. The new examples of fallacies game purists use are from teachthought.com's Master List of fallacies.

12: The A Priori Argument " Also: Rationalization; Dogmatism. A corrupt argument from logos, starting with a given, pre-set belief, dogma, doctrine, scripture verse, ‘fact’ or conclusion and then searching for any reasonable or reasonable-sounding argument to rationalize, defend or justify it. "

They always start with the conclusion that nothing can be better than the source material and anything that contradicts it must be bad writing. So when they find out people are pointing out good changes, they rush to disagree, even if it means ignoring the truth or even insulting a part of the games continuity itself by denying what is good about the changes.

A rationale for why it's good to have Sonic kiss a girl is Sonic was meant to be cool. They disagree even when that means denying that he's 100% cool, because they would rather he be relatable to them than the cool kids who put nerds in lockers. People also like SatAM Eggman because he looks competent because he took over the world and roboticized people and has scary eyes. The purists demonize this even though that means insulting the competence of a major character in the games. They see a major character to the source material being portrayed in what he'd see as a flattering manner and somehow see it as insulting.

They also always start from the conclusion that anyone who disagrees with them is evil and wrong and hates the games, so they block anyone who disagrees without listening to them, even when one of those people agree with them on other things. Do that and see how many followers you lose.

13: The Affective Fallacy: "that one’s emotions, urges or ‘feelings’ are innate and in every case self-validating, autonomous, and above any human intent or act of will (one’s own or others’), and are thus immune to challenge or criticism. " That's game purism. I also saw it quite literally at times, like the worst game purist on tumblr saying " it feels like " the Mario movie is made by people who love the games because it has references, even though it could just as easily be that those people had to do research as part of their jobs, and he doesn't say the same when seeing Flynn reference the games identically.

What is the difference between just having Mario have the cat power-up for no reason, and a Flynn reference for equally no reason? If you wanna say Mario was actually using the cat power-up (even though my point is the story would be the same if he had a different one), the purists didn't appreciate a Riders tournament arc in IDW even though that is using the reference to Riders as entire plots. In both situations where a writer doesn't care and is just pandering and does care, the results look the same.

Not listing it as one because they haven't admitted it but there's Outcome Bias and Stay the Course here too because if game purists let themselves realize they were wrong, the outcome would be regret over all of the times they were wrong and harassed adaptation fans. So they would rather block people and think in alternative facts than accept the canonical intended interpretation of Sally as a good person for example.

14: Where there’s Smoke, there’s Fire: " The dangerous fallacy of ignorantly drawing a snap conclusion and/or taking action without sufficient evidence. " That's canon purism; always assuming an adaptation will be bad, because it's not 100% like the source material, or because it's even an alternate continuity at all.

15: Playing on Emotion: I don't like that they use the word adaptation in the first place instead of alternate continuity because it tries to manipulates you into expecting that it should be just like the source material by implying it was " adapting " it. They say adaptation in this manner even while ignoring the fact that Archie was an adaptation of SatAM, not the games, which they know about. Adaptation fans are more likely to use the words alternate continuity instead.

Their whole ideology is sort of trying to appeal to fear as if they're intimidated by the very idea of the source material being portrayed differently and want you to be too. They talk as if it's something to be afraid of.

Game Purist Arguing Methods:

" The accident fallacy refers to applying a generalization to a group where there are obvious exceptions. " They do that to adaptation fans. " The ‘Hero Busting’ fallacy has also been selectively employed at the service of the Identity Fallacy (see below) to falsely ‘prove’ that ‘you cannot trust anyone’ but a member of ‘our’ identity-group since everyone else, even the so-called ‘heroes’ or ‘allies’ of other groups, are all racist... or hate ‘us.’  " Game purists literally accuse non-game purists of being Japanophobic just because of that. This identity fallacy combo is a favorite of conspiracy theory makers to get recruits.

Identity Fallacy (as well as Othering): "In this fallacy, valid opposing evidence and arguments are brushed aside or ‘othered’ without comment or consideration, as simply not worth arguing about solely because of the lack of proper background or ethos of the person making the argument, or because the one arguing does not self-identify as a member of the ‘in-group.'... "

Game purists won't listen to anyone but game purists, and I bet even if a game purist did argue with another, he'd just call him a fake game purist, causing some of their allies to take offense at being treated like idiots for not being as extreme as one of them is because they like the movies.

" An Identity Fallacy may lead to scorn or rejection of potentially useful allies, real or prospective, because they are not of one’s own identity. " They certainly aren't open-minded enough to listen to Archie fans. Therefore they scorn and reject even the ones who hate IDW Sonic. In fact, one of them called them " retards. "

This same fallacy is found in refusing to listen to accurate criticisms of Flynn's writing of late Archie Sonic simply because it comes from a member of the Anti-Archie Sonic group on deviantart, even despite not being able to disprove the truth of those criticisms.

Moral Licensing: " The contemporary ethical fallacy that one’s consistently moral life, good behavior or recent extreme suffering or sacrifice earns him/her the right to commit an immoral act without repercussions, consequences or punishment. " Their justification for having strictly negative posts about an adaptation be in the tumblr tags for the adaptation, even though they're unable to handle seeing negativity in any of the posts for the tags for the works of fiction they like, the games in this case. It's an excuse for sinking to their level.

If they really believed that Sonic fans were doing something wrong, why are they doing the same thing because they can't go a week without seeing people do that? The same can be said about the fallacy Tu Quoque also called Two Wrongs Make a Right.

Just for fun because this is the only fun I have with the smug AoStH Sonic, here’s everything he has in common with Robotnik, and then all the times that he tried to kill someone.

  In the servitude chip episode, Sonic loved having Scratch and Grounder work for him and bow down to him, taking full advantage of how Grounder would offer him a hot bath and whipped cream. He also didn’t bother to try to save them from an avalanche, without saying that he knew they would be fine anyways. He also insulted them about as harshly as Robotnik did at one point for not being useful enough.

One time when a national park is being destroyed, Sonic takes a long time to actually bother trying to do something about it and Tails asks him why he’s not helping, reminding me of how Scourge would react, who ALSO is a Casanova around the ladies like this Sonic while Tails sits there on the beach bored.

  Another time, Sonic wanted to put off stopping Robotnik until after his nap and ignored Tails’ efforts to wake him up. After Grounder fell in a hole, Sonic called him scumbot, a shockingly harsh insult. He makes sand sculptures of himself in a pyramid twice, which is the same thing Robotnik did. Sonic loves images of himself, and it showed when he had some miners wear Sonic hats and Sonic-like shoes.

While Robotnik gave Scratch and Grounder some Asian accents just because they absorbed the brainpower of a ninja, Sonic imitated that ninja’s accent while putting his straw hat on his head, and before that he imitated a Scottish accent and before that he imitated a German accent while dressed up like a soldier pretending to be evil. So they’re both kind of similar in that regard, though Sonic does treat everyone equally including alien lifeforms, he’s just really cavalier and carefree about this and somehow gets away with it.

Speaking of that, he was creeped out by the tentacle arm of a squid girl he found attractive before when he should be used to squid people in his world by now like every other species of anthropomorphic people out there. And he said Breezie being a robot makes him queasy despite his feelings for her, right to her face to no consequences.

  He says that he’ll miss someone “ because she made Robotnik so miserable! “ and Tails shows how he’s badly influenced by him because he says happily that Sonic can make him even more miserable, showing how sadistic they can be.

One time after asking to help him with shotput, Tails is really weighed down by the shotput and falls to the ground, but instead of asking him if he’s okay and helping him up, Sonic just says, “ Not now, Tails! “ and never lets him help in the sports coliseum, not to mention that when he first met Tails, he yelled at him threateningly for falling on his head from a tree as if it was his fault. Even Fleetway Sonic had a way nicer first meeting with Tails than him!

  Sonic has no qualms whatsoever about taking over the minds of a roboticized whale and then Scratch and Grounder, and brainwashing bikers into helping him, complete with them saying in monotone that they’ll all help him and he’s smiling the whole time.

Someone with a stronger conscience like Sally would’ve nagged him about brainwashing and worried about the ethical implications of doing so, but Sonic didn’t even hesitate, even though the whole pollen episode was about Robotnik using pollen to brainwash people and he did it too. Also, one time, Sonic got clones of himself, and he did nothing while he ordered the clones around. He could’ve taken over the world like that, but he just doesn’t feel like it.

  And there’s four times where after Scratch and Grounder rescue Sonic, he gets them hurt without caring. They free him from a special cage and get damaged (well he had to do that to them to escape with his chains and all), they free him from a cell during the music-ban episode and they end up in a cage themselves, they rescue him from a dangerous lake under the false impression that he’ll rescue them in return, and there’s another time that he does something like that later. A stark contrast to Fleetway where the heroes save the lives of minor villains all the time.     He caused tons of collateral damage to a town in the Wild West episode, and not only did he suffer no consequences while the town would probably be stuck with a hefty repairs bill for that destroyed water tower and barn, but all Sonic reacted to it with was a sheepish expression for a split second. He never even said sorry.

I’m not sure whether or not he actually remembered spindashing apart a police car when he was brainwashed into being a biker, considering he never talks about that afterwards, and yes, he gets away with that too, when that was the same episode where he was put on a chain gang with a hefty fine for running like he always does.

  He’s probably only keeping the bad guys around to keep having fun with them, and doesn’t actually want to set Mobius free; there was a time when Robotnik and his robots were trapped in ice cubes with switched bodies and he just left them like that, they were also trapped in quick-drying concrete once, and he never took them to prison or anything. Now for his times where he’s way too harsh with his enemies:

1: He tricks Da Bears like Mad Mike into sitting on train tracks with a train bearing down on them. In the next episode they appear in, they’re kind of badass heroes against the bad guys, and that slapstick was never mentioned again after it magically didn’t injure them.

2: He left Robotnik in a frozen pond for like a week or two. How did he survive that, how’d he KNOW he’d survive that?

3: He sends a purple monster to Robotnik. How’d he know he’d survive that? He was talking as if he was bringing the monster to him to give the monster some food. It was also irresponsible of him because if he failed to eat Robotnik, he logically should’ve been captured and used as a weapon by Robotnik afterwards.

4: He wrecked Robotnik’s parachute to let him fall.

5: How could Sonic have known that the Spider bandit that he made shoot his own head off was a robot? He looked pretty non-robotic to me!

6: Every time in the Emeralds Arc that Sonic sent Robotnik away on his time machine, he sent him to what he had every reason to believe would be a certain death trap for him. That’s 3 times, like he sent him to a flying plane and to a Roman coliseum with tigers and to a shark-infested sea on a boat if I remember correctly. That adds up to 8.

9: Sonic once tried to cut up the Mummy Robotnik with his spindash, expressed disappointment that he FAILED to slice him to pieces (he literally said something like that), and he actually did kill him in Prehistoric Sonic, leaving him nothing but bandages. He had no qualms about that whatsoever. So he must be only keeping the main bad guys alive to have fun toying with them and dodging their traps, because otherwise he would’ve dealt with them already, he had tons of opportunities to take them to prison. Also he killed Blackbot, but he had no way of knowing that used to be a Blackbeard human before being roboticized. It still counts though; ultimately AoStH Sonic is guilty of 2 cases of murder and 9 cases of attempted murder. No big deal, it’s never brought up again! I don’t know how Sonic assumed Robotnik would survive all the over-the-top slapstick he was put through in the show, either, like being blown up a lot.

Ultimately, all of this is just fun flavor to make AoStH Sonic more of an interesting anti-hero in retrospect, as the reason I hate him is instead because he wins way too easily and is always a slimy trickster to his enemies, which even Scourge wasn’t, and not because of all these interesting tidbits.

Him being a major anti-hero is never pointed out by people other than the bad guys, who merely insult him and don’t call him an anti-hero outright. This is why the show needed a rival for Sonic like Knuckles who still was a good guy, so that we’d have the show acknowledging Sonic is supposed to have the flaws he has in-universe through a character you’re not supposed to always disagree with. That’s the good thing about good characters having rivals.

When you think about it from Scratch and Grounder’s perspectives, AoSTH is actually kind of dark. Major characters with speaking roles get blown to pieces and reduced to a head on a regular basis. Sonic even graphically melts them onscreen for several seconds one time when he doesn’t even have to. Not even Flynn’s Other M comic did that. He holds them above a cliff in a net, sadistically taunts them like a supervillain and then drops them to watch them fall to their doom. If this were any other show, the person doing that would be the Card-Carrying Villain, this would look really bad in any other context.

There’s defending yourself, but he enjoys it a little too much for robots forced to do Eggman’s bidding, who are honestly the worst of Eggman’s victims of all because they have to LIVE with him and put up with his abuse. And they compete with each other over who Robotnik loves best, so they clearly see each him as their father with each other in a Sibling Rivalry, and Robotnik is not exactly a good dad.

Sonic in this show is all about being a sadistic, lying, Smug Snake Manipulative Bastard, the show is constantly teaching the lesson that Scratch and Grounder should never trust Sonic as he lies to them both in and out of disguises. It makes him look slimy and eventually made me feel sorry for the robots who at first I hated for their stupid voices and incompetence. I love Fleetway Sonic as a character, but he’s not really that smug and arrogant, just very snarky.

This Sonic is a flat-out sadistic trickster, bullying them and tricking them with disguises when technically all he has to do is escape the traps, hit them with a spindash or make them dizzy with a tornado, and run away in seconds. And as a Fleetway fan, I know I can appreciate an anti-hero, Sonic is SUPPOSED to be one after all, but this show goes too far. If it weren’t for his heroic deeds and lack of outright crime, he’d be no better than a villain himself with the way he treats them.

And even then, I’m not so sure about the crime part, because with the disguises and equipment he runs offscreen to get, there’s no way he’s not stealing them from people to get them. Sometimes he gets stuff like military uniforms and doctor’s outfits, uniforms that you obviously couldn’t legitimately buy at a store for yourself. Plus he only has a concrete home to put stuff in for one episode. So either Sonic’s a wizard who magically zaps up clothes and stuff in a Deus ex Machina over 60 times, or every time he gets stuff like a construction crane or soldier’s outfit, there’s someone out there he had to take it from.

It’s actually a kinda meanspirited show, with well over 7 minutes total of the villains getting ridiculously hurt, and Sonic gets his victories handed to him on a silver platter with his stupid disguises being only one example, to the point where it feels unfair and you feel sorry for the villains.

And from Coconuts’ perspective, it’s really depressing! At some point the writing got really meanspirited getting him demoted to sewer patrol and sent away on traps for the most unfair of reasons and I just wanted Tails to give him a hug already. Was that supposed to be a joke? That’s Comedic Sociopathy, then, the same genre of humor seen in shows like Family Guy and later Spongebob episodes! Robotnik has to take something from his eye at one point and I wish I never saw that.

His life is so miserable that Coconuts even tries to run away saying Robotnik doesn’t love him, and Sonic just tells him to stay so he can keep reducing him to a head. Coconuts isn’t a horrible person, he’s just misguided, a robot who’s trying to get a promotion from his pointless job of sewer patrol. Why does he get the worst of the abuse when he’s slightly more respectable than Scratch and Grounder? Why does he get singled out so badly? Even I felt sorry for him, and I tend to instinctively wish that characters that seriously irritate me would get killed off in times where they easily could’ve been, and I still wanted to give Coconuts a hug after a while.

Unlike Robotnik, these guys are just robots who don’t have that much of a choice in what they’re doing. Robotnik has shown that from pulling a lever and pressing a button, he can make Scratch and Grounder explode, in the episode where they were in space. So even if they chose to be good and betray him, he’d just blow them up. He can pull a lever to make one of them have a laser explode something whether Grounder likes it or not and strand them both in space.

Of course Scratch and Grounder are evil and enjoy doing what they’re doing, like looting and intimidating, but that’s just how they were programmed. Technically, they all have free will and thus could leave Eggman at any time. Servitude chips certainly make them act differently and it’s creepy when it happens.

Scratch and Grounder betray Eggman on multiple occasions, once siding with Momma Robotnik and later lying about letting Sonic escape a cell accidentally, and Coconuts has taken action of his own free will more than any of them, that’s kind of his gimmick in fact, or WAS anyways until the writers started having really bad days. Coconuts tried to leave Robotnik because he doesn’t love him – regularly attacking his robots and insulting them – so at least there was some hope for him.

And how did the show end? Did we see the robots get one over Robotnik, stand up to him, leave him for a better boss as he’s trapped in another dimension? NO. The show ends on the status quo.

I often said that Robotnik was way too much of an incompetent clown in this show. But the frustrating thing is, he very easily COULD’VE been a threat. He mentions that he built thousands of miner robots. Why couldn’t he have equipped them with weapons if he wanted a robot army so badly? He mentions that he wants a robot army in the Not-Altlantis episode and space episode, but the excuse is that he can’t power them all, but then he made miner robots offscreen just fine.

He shows that with stuff like servitude chips that can be put on a wristwatch, he can brainwash people, and he can brainwash a kangaroo Freedom Fighter with a cone on his head and electricity, with the brainwashing kicking in again every time the kangaroo sees a picture of Robotnik. The guy also brainwashes a giant gorilla with a headband!

WHY doesn’t he just do that to everyone, using those very miner robots to kidnap people? Keep Sonic distracted with Scratch and Grounder and just do that and you’ll get your Robotropolis populated no problem! Oh but he can’t roboticize-WAIT, he roboticizes a pirate in the Emeralds arc. With a portable roboticizer, at that, which was a very overpowered invention in Archie. And yet he only uses that invention ONCE. Oh wait, twice, doesn’t he roboticize a whale one time? And Sonic goes inside it and takes over its brain.

This is why it’s so stupid that Robotnik is on such a low status in this show, because he clearly demonstrates that he’s capable of being a much greater threat thanks to his inventions, while in the games, Eggman only ever uses his inventions for trying to fight Sonic, that’s IT. And it’s so pathetic by comparison to the other continuities that I lost all respect for him and can’t bear to even see him anymore. It’s a shame because I loved his hammy acting in SA1.

There’s plenty of plans he has in this show where I thought they should’ve been allowed to succeed to make Robotnik have more of a negative impact on the world and be more of a threat to root for Sonic fighting against him. There was the time that he planned to trap people in a Robo-Lagoon to be his slaves. I wished that he would’ve succeeded so the show could have its own Robotropolis. It’s not like it would’ve changed the formulaic plots that much, right? Scratch and Grounder would still be trying to use traps against Sonic.

We’d just get to see how Robotnik would be as a ruler, even against one city of people, and that alone could make Sonic’s victories more satisfying. The end of that episode where all the defective robots come together doing their own things to help save the day would’ve been so much more satisfying if it was the finale, and happened long after Robotnik had succeeded.

There’s also a very threatening plan where Robotnik has three different robots put bombs in three different, very key locations on Mobius, one of them being a place where all the trains go through or something, and Sonic is running around the world exhausted trying to stop all of the bombs. So there’s genuine tension because even Sonic is tired, and he eventually sinks in the water and needs Tails to save him. If Robotnik tried a plan that exhausting to Sonic every day, he would’ve won.

So it’s insulting that he hasn’t when he’s shown himself to be that capable. And that doesn’t mean I want him to be like in Sonic Boom either where he’s simply treated like a particularly smelly coworker at the office. I’d rather him be unlucky but with tons of potential to be competent and a threat, than to not even have THAT.

But with AoStH Robotnik having so much potential to be just as much of a threat to the world and suppressor of freedom as SatAM Robotnik is, it just makes it clear that the only reason he ISN’T in that position is because of the show’s forced lightheartedness. It’s the same reason there’s so much slapstick in the show, to try to force comedy which I never really laughed at, I only laughed at the few really funny lines from someone like Grounder.

Robotnik’s position as the Butt Monkey that Sonic’s literally made cry a couple times was always forced to me because he has the design of Robotnik, not the silly Classic Eggman who would’ve actually suited his character and status in the position. You do not have a character with black and red eyes start bawling like a baby because Sonic pulled his mustache or fall asleep sucking his thumb next to Sonic. That is just completely tone-deaf design.

What a dumb 90s Sega mandate, he should’ve just looked like Classic Eggman and been honest about it, but instead I notice how weird it is that he’s not a threat at all right away, and I notice how the show has the potential to take itself seriously and make me invested and have tension because Robotnik has the potential to be super threatening. But he just isn’t, because Sonic had to have a comedy kid’s cartoon, so wacky visual humor.

Disguises (Sonic changing outfits out of nowhere and/or they work as disguises for some reason): 86 times!

Tails gets kidnapped: 18

Now for the ultimate proof that the comics where Sticks watches TV with Game Tails are not set in the universe of the games. Because game purists think they ARE in spite of the games' lack of references to them as past events in their world, it's about time this list get made. Continuity errors in bold and italics are the contradictions that aren't just Out of Character Moments, so read those first if you think it's never an out of character moment if Sonic Team is responsible for it.

1: Rouge thinks of Charmy as just “ that kid “ even though they met each other twice in Generations and Heroes.

2: When a chao puts a flower necklace over Omega, Omega thinks there’s a logical error in his thinking, instead of being in-character and getting mad right away and taking it off, like anyone would expect. " Well that's a load off my back! " -Omega in Heroes when his teammates fall to their dooms. This is the same kind of " softboying " that was done with him in that one Archie panel where he didn’t want to make Cream because she’s cute.

I never outright hated that because it hadn't occurred to me that being likable could be bad but if comic Silver can get that criticism for being likable then logically the same would apply to Omega.

3: And somehow Rouge is dumb enough to make fun of Omega when he’s in an embarrassing position. I can’t imagine the Rouge from Heroes doing that. She immediately had the level head to get Omega and Shadow to team up and figured out Shadow had amnesia on her own. Before that she tried to make Shadow think even his memories weren't real with a newspaper picture of the Biolizard.

4: Big’s extremely stupid, when he was never stupid in SA1. There he said, “ I don’t know who would bother to save us both “ and could fly a biplane well enough to not immediately do a nosedive straight towards the ground. Here Big’s wondering where Froggy is, even though he’d feel the weight of him on his head and he’d immediately want to find out what it’s about.

He sees his reflection in the water and somehow thinks he can find him by jumping into the lake. You could say this is going with a fandom misconception about Big the Cat, since he’s only said something stupid in Sonic Chronicles games-wise and has not done anything stupid, but just has a stupid voice, simple lifestyle and only cares about simple things.

5: Since when does Cream hang out with multiple normal-looking baby chao? Yes I can see why it’d be written based on game lore, but game purists don’t think like that with other continuities, they just think “ that never happened in the games so it couldn’t possibly happen in them ever, “ so I’m counting it. Cream was only ever shown hanging out with a chao other than Cheese once.

She has never been depicted as doing this, so on the most nitpicky level this is currently inconsistent, in the same way that depicting Sonic eating Brussel Sprouts would count as contradicting the games.

6: Since when is a chao able to damage a doll by accident? Chao are weak and you would have to actively try to damage a doll, and these aren’t Dark Chao. Dolls are made of fabric.

7: Vector asks his friends who ate his pudding instead of just assuming Charmy did it.

8: And then the story ends with Vector getting beaten up by his so-called friends! They shouldn’t blame him for doubting Charmy. This is worse than how any other writers portrayed them!

9: Tails the genius pilot decided to fly THAT LOW risking flying into a pole for no reason.

10: Charmy reveals he’s a prankster to his friends out of nowhere. Just because he occasionally talks annoyingly doesn’t mean this makes sense. He doesn’t ACT annoyingly let alone evilly. Charmy has never been this OOC before.

11: A meteorite starts falling from the sky and Silver stops it, and then he reaches his limit, even though that’s not how it is in the games. He can hold something above him for as long as he wants, if he was like this in 06 he would've never been able to beat Iblis in the future by catching flying rocks and then sending them back at it because he would've reached his limit.

12: Blaze refuses to light wood on fire for Marine because she’s completely selfish apparently. I would expect her to gladly agree to it because she’s a hero. Instead she needs to be talked into doing something helpful, like she’s badly written Shadow.

13: She’s flattered on her looks when she uses fire and somehow it makes her annoyed when she wouldn’t be used to being complimented on her powers, when they’re why she was always alone.

14: Amy blushes while talking about Blaze. We see Amy saying she wants to see Blaze being cute while she’s blushing and in the same pose as she’d be if she was thinking about Sonic. It’s not about being literally cute because Blaze was just called a beauty. So Amy's attracted to Blaze canonically, if these are canon. This doesn’t contradict the games since bisexuals exist.

And Amy never got to talk to Blaze enough in the games to show how she feels about her, but game purists aren’t this lenient, based on how they judge other continuities they should’ve looked at this and said “ That’s not in the games so it sucks. “ So I’m counting it.

15: How are the heroes in the Sol Dimension with Blaze and Marine just for a casual visit? The game purists will remind you when it comes to IDW that Rush Adventure made such a big deal out of needing both sets of Emeralds to escape the Sol Dimension, ignoring Generations’ Blaze appearance that proves that’s not a rule anymore because that would get in the way of insulting an alternate continuity. So I’m counting this just because of them. From their perspective they should be calling out how easy it was of these guys to visit Blaze.

16: Eggman Nega goes up to Eggman but simply scribbles on his face instead of attacking him in an effort to kill him, despite claiming to have a lifelong hatred of him in Rivals 2. I don’t think this is a continuity error because a guy petty enough to wanna turn the world into a card just because his plan failed would do something petty.

And at no point in the games did he say that he wouldn’t do something as minor as a prank, but his character in the games has always been known for being a huge threat any time he wanted to do something evil, so the same logic for hating Eggman’s Villain Decay applies here.

And the way game purists look at other continuities they wouldn’t be giving this any slack if it was in Archie. They would say that because Eggman Nega never got the chance to try to scribble on Eggman’s face in a game yet or do anything minorly evil, this is adaptational decay. So I’m counting it.

17: Orbot looks up data about the robots before him, because somehow he thinks he has to to avoid being reconstructed, when they already serve their purpose fine.

18: The next story’s about Sticks when she’s supposed to be a Sonic Boom character. It turns out she’s in Tails’ house and he’s not wearing goggles. The game purists still talk like Sticks being namedropped in Frontiers means nothing but they praise the Sonic Channel comics and say they’re canon. Did they not read this story? If Sticks was in IDW they’d freak out. I accept this, but why do they?

19: Why would Game Tails be friends with someone as out of touch with reality as Sticks who hasn’t proven her usefulness? If they aren’t friends why is she in his house?

20: Jet starts splitting the treasure equally with his gang saying half even though there’s 3 people here. I didn’t get the impression from the games that he was this stupid, I’d expect Storm to say half instead of third!

I guess SoJ purists would make the excuse that they never say he is good at math and he has no apparent reason to be, even though they wouldn't be making an excuse for this if it happened in anything else, because that would be saying disrespectful portrayal of Jet is fine because the games didn't say it was inaccurate, which usually is the territory of the non-purists. So I'm counting this.

21: Jet acts completely Out of Character by giving Wave his share of the money, even though one of his most defining moments is daydreaming about being rich.

22: Wave’s Out of Character by saying she can’t accept his share of the treasure, despite being completely selfish and remorseless in the games as Tails can attest.

23: Why is a restaurant run by Omochao? Not only is he not a restaurant owner in the games, there was never any indication that he was a canon character and not just there for the sake of the people playing the games.

While every hub world with civilians in the games clearly depicted that restaurants are not run by Omochao, I don’t think that this is necessarily incompatible with the games, as his stint in the games could just be his hobby or what he did before this, and it was never said in the games that Omochao are forbidden from running restaurants if they do the work to get the permits.

But game purists aren’t that lenient, they would see this in Archie and say that this didn’t happen in the games yet so it should never happen here as if the games never do things they didn't do before. So I'll count this.

24: In the games Omochao didn’t give you more advice, he just gave you advice and then left you alone until you found another one. In this story Omochao relentlessly follows Sonic giving him advice like it’s a Sonic Short. Oh is it Rule of Funny? So what, if this was any other continuity this wouldn't be excused. I bet that was the excuse for a lot of these.

25: Somehow a Dark Chao feels bad about sending a chao flying with his punch. But Dark Chao are evil. That’s the point of Dark Chao. In fact the Dark Chao in this is nice enough to share food with another chao. Then why make him a Dark Chao?

26: If Tikal can be out and about like Chaos in Sonic Battle to play hide and seek, why does she never show up again? Why didn’t she go to Sonic’s birthday by following Knuckles there? Why is this only a thing in the Sonic Channel Comics and the Archie reboot?

27: And this doesn’t seem like a way the canon Tikal would act. I’d picture her reading a book. It’s lucky that she became easily amused enough to play a kid’s game when she was portrayed as mature enough to be against greed and war earlier.

28: Metal Sonic’s using his V Maximum Overdrive so how is Cubot outrunning him? Cubot and Orbot weren’t built to chase Sonic so why would Eggman go through the extra effort of making them faster than Metal Sonic? If a game purist will call Belle out on being faster than Sonic from just dodging his attacks from a standstill, I get to count this. The same excuse can be applied to both that Eggman can make any robot faster than Sonic and why wouldn’t he do that for the sake of it? But game purists aren’t that lenient so I won’t be either.

There were 8 continuity errors that contradicted the very rules of the universe of the games and their past events directly.

The rest were OOC moments, showing that the characters are actually written the most off they've ever been in these comics, but the same people who stan for Pontac and Graff must be incapable of noticing OOC moments in anything produced by Sega of Japan since they think Cream cowering from Egg Pawns is in-character in the same game she fought a boss.

Stuff like the fact that Rouge doesn't recognize Charmy and Sticks is in this and Silver's power only temporarily holds things definitely proves that the Sonic Channel comics could never have happened in the same universe as the games.

Bonus: Literally the very first comic has Sonic say to Cream that say he's afraid of water. Which makes sense because it explains why he didn't get swimming lessons after Labyrinth Zone! I only bother to mention this because game purists think he's not like that in the games because they don't care enough about the games universe to actually think about it, because for them to figure out this Fridge Brilliance they'd have to be able to question the games in any way.

Then they would've asked why Sonic didn't find out how to swim, and since the only other alternative is that he's stupid and that's bad faith, it has to be that he's scared of drowning and his friends like him too much to strongarm wrestle him into learning how to swim for his own good.

There are 19 fallacies they use here: Ad Hoc, Ad Hominem, Anecdotal Fallacy, Affirming the Consequent, Denying the Antecedent, Anecdotal Fallacy, Appeal to Ridicule, Association Fallacy, Bulverism, Proof by Examples, Stolen Concept, The Strawman Fallacy, Toupee Fallacy, The False Dichotomy, The Broken Record, Converse Error, No True Scotsman, Red Herring, With Us or Against Us.

I'm just talking about the toxic purists here. These are really just about being a stan, which is an overly emotional immature egotist who can’t take people saying even one true criticism of what he likes and resorts to demonization and blocking – but how is it possible to be someone who thinks “ different = bad “ and rages about EVERY difference, and not be a stan for what you prefer which only results from being that level of emotional? They also fall under 45 of the tropes for self-righteous people, and that's later in this.

1: Ad Hoc: “ An explanation of why a particular thing may be the case is substituted for an argument as to why it IS, “ which can be detected by “ uses of the words “ might “ “ maybe “ “ probably “ “ possibly “ and “ could “ “ but an arrogant arguer will not even use those. Them assuming that everyone who makes adaptations must hate or at least not respect the source material falls under this, and them assuming any adaptation fan does.

Not to say any argument that falls under this can’t be right, that’d be Fallacy Fallacy, rather it is less likely to be right and the fallacy is insisting that it definitely is. Game purists do this in defense of the games because they’ll defend anything about them. “ Tails wasn’t egotistical in Lost World! He was only pretending to be when he was bragging about himself! “ At least I assume that’s why he said no he wasn’t, otherwise he has no argument. This was never proven true in the story.

It was never referred back to and this same argument could be applied to Sonic himself. They do this because the reason they hate other continuities so much is because they’re stans of the games, and that sensitivity causes them to perceive any adaptational difference as intentional criticism.

2: Ad Hominems: Game purists always deal in this when going out of their way to insult people who talk about other continuities positively online. “ You prefer an adaptational difference? You just hate the games! “ “ Anyone who likes Surge is obviously a simp for her because he’s a stan of the comic! “

  They’ll see anyone compliment IDW and say to them, “Thanks for telling me you hate the games. “ which is always responded with, ” No I don’t, “ or best of all, “ Did anyone tell you that you can like different things for different reasons? “ Yeah like different franchises. The fallacy is the insult doesn’t refute the point they wanted to refute, the point the other person made about the difference or adaptation being good. It just conveniently avoids thinking about how perhaps it may be good.

  Someone can hate the source material and still be right that an adaptation or its difference is good. So it’s an Irrelevant Thesis. Similarly, them just attacking the other continuities of a series saying they’re bad or garbage doesn’t prove their point. It doesn’t prove their point about being a Canon Fascist being the way to go either.

  There are SO many fallacies associated with this, “ you must hate the games! “ “ any fan of any adaptation is no true fan “ or “ anyone who insults the games once isn’t a fan “ that I’m gonna have to put them all under this one category right here and count them all because it’d be repetitive otherwise.

  Any fallacy listed after this that has nothing after its name is here because of one of those things they say: Ad Hoc, Ad Hominem, Anecdotal Fallacy, Bulverism, Proof by Examples, The Strawman Fallacy, Toupee Fallacy, The False Dichotomy, The Broken Record, Converse Error, Everything Except Most Things, the Undistributed Middle fallacy, No True Scotsman, Red Herring.

 Anecdotal Fallacy: “ X happened to me/someone else so the statistics are wrong, it happens all the time. “ “ Bulverism is a logical fallacy in which one party simply assumes that the other party is wrong, and explains the other party’s reasons for wanting to believe it rather than addressing the argument itself. It combines Begging the Question with the Genetic Fallacy. Wikipedia expresses Bulverism as: You claim that A is true. Because of B you personally desire that A should be true.  Therefore A is false. “

  Proof by Examples: “ Also called an inappropriate or hasty generalization, this fallacy happens when someone takes one or more non-exhaustive examples from a group that have a property, and making a generalization that everything in that group has that property. “

  “ The Strawman Fallacy happens when a debater constructs a more easily defeated version of their opponent’s position to attack. “ “ The Toupee Fallacy is when a debater claims that all examples of a subject conform to a specific quality because they’ve never seen one that hadn’t, ignoring that any examples they did see that didn’t have that quality they didn’t recognize as examples. “

  The Broken Record: “ If you repeat the same point over and over again, you win — because obviously, the other side didn’t address it if you won’t shut up about it. Extra effective if you keep repeating a catchy soundbite or buzzword. “

  Converse Error: “ (part of “Correlation does not imply causation.”) Concluding that a certain set of results can only come from one set of circumstances. “If A, then B. B, therefore A.” So if adaptation fan, then game hater. Now see how it comes off when you pretend they’re saying an Unacceptable Target in place of adaptation fan.

  When told by someone who says twice that he loves SA2 that the Sonic 3 movie shouldn’t have been identical to SA2 because showing the characters going through all of the levels identically would’ve dragged on forever and been boring, a game purist didn’t address that point. Instead he accused him of saying that he thinks SA2 is bad and garbage, despite him saying he loved it twice in that post.

  The point he actually made wasn’t refuted, because it can’t be. It’s so much easier to make up a blatant lie out of thin air to refute. They repeat this delusion Ad Nauseum hoping it’ll get convincing if they say it enough. On a side note you can always tell someone's childish by whether they wrongly think that they’re being strawmanned by people pointing out literally what they’ve said and what the accurate implications of that are.

  “ However, it’s more often used to get the audience on one’s side than it is to confuse the opponent, especially when it’s coupled with an Ad Hominem implying that the opponent is immoral for ” holding” the strawmanned position. “

  At one point the most extreme game purist DID admit that he doesn’t think every fan of adaptations hates the games, but still says most of them do. Saying most of a group is a certain way when that certain way isn’t mandatory and intrinsic to the very nature of being a part of that group is still bigoted. If you said that about any oppressed minority group it’d be seen as the bigotry it is. And yet he claims to want bigotry to end. Yet in other posts he said he hates anyone who likes the adaptations.

  Also that’s only one game purist, it’d be the Anecdotal Fallacy to apply that to them all. Most of them might still hold this fallacy, but at least I said might. I could name another game purist who said that he doesn’t hate fans of the adaptations per se, he just hates that they say when they’re better than the games. And that logic itself is bad because when an adaptation does do better, who’s to say people should have their freedom of speech restricted when it comes to pointing that out or else lose face to you?

  They should get to because it makes them happy and isn’t hurting anything. So what if a tiny amount can’t handle that? That even applies to if they’re wrong about a difference being good, but when they’re wrong it’s okay to be annoyed at that.

Red Herring: “ In logic, a fallacy of distraction where an irrelevant side-argument is introduced in an attempt to draw the opponent away from their main one. “

3: Affirming the Consequent: “ If A, then B. B is true. Therefore, A. “ If my car was a Ferrari it could travel at over 100 mph. It can do that. Therefore, it must be a Ferrari! “ The fallacy is that it’s never proven that A is the only possible cause of B being true. “ If Trip was the last of her kind she’d be like Knuckles. She’s like Knuckles by being the only guardian of a magical gem, therefore she must be the last of her kind. Never mind her official character bio not confirming that.

   Never mind the manuals and wikis never confirming that, never mind the fact that it’s never the case that Classic Sonic levels show NPCs in them either way. By the same evidence you should assume Rouge’s the last of her kind, you could look at Amy and say that there’d never be any more hedgehogs after her and Sonic because these two used to be the only hedgehogs shown.

The assumption was also from Appeal to Ignorance; the games didn’t show other Sungazers, this must mean they don’t exist. The games don’t show Sonic going to the toilet. This must mean he doesn’t have to go.

Sega didn’t allow other echidnas to be in IDW but it allowed other sungazers. They know this would be told to them but keep believing this. By the same logic that Sega not allowing something in IDW means nothing, Chaos Shadow the original plan for how Shadow would fight the zombots by removing his bracelets is canon to the games because Sega didn’t allow it.

4: It’s also a result of Denying the Antecedent. “ If a person is wearing a hat they have a head. I am not wearing a hat. Therefore I do not have a head. “ If there’s other sungazers in the games Trip isn’t the last of her kind. There are not, Trip is the last of her kind. You can say the same thing about Vector. He has just as much evidence of it.

  There could still be a possibility that Trip’s the last of her kind and Sega just doesn’t give a shit what IDW does with her probably because they never plan to use her again. But it’s extremely unlikely with all of the evidence and fallacies against it. Both this and Denying the Antecedent are Non Sequitur Fallacies. Saying a character's the last of her kind is an unlikely claim so the burden of proof is on them and they have none, nothing but the absence of proof that she's the other way around.

5: Anecdotal Fallacy

6: Appeal to Ridicule: “ It suggests the argument is false by presenting it in a way where it appears silly or trivial. This fallacy is a strawman or appeal to ignorance. “ According to quantum theory an electron can be in two places at once! Have you ever heard anything so stupid? “ “ Game purists type out, “ thE gaMEs hAvE alWayS bEen inconSiSTenT “ to mock people. How does that debunk it?

  The games have gone from a world with Casino Night Zone where you just walk down to pinball flippers to get to a slot machine to a more realistic world where in Casinopolis that doesn’t happen. It went back for Heroes and back to the real world for Shadow and back again in Lost World. As usual the fallacy is when that’s the whole argument they’re using against that sentence.

  “ This fallacy differs from reductio ad absurdum, where it’s demonstrated that an absurd conclusion naturally follows from the underlying logic of an opponent’s argument. “ I’ve used this before but any victims of this would erroneously claim they’re being strawmanned. “ A variation is argumentum ad lapidem, in which a statement’s dismissed as absurd but with no proof it’s absurd. “ See any game purist’s response to every argument I’m making here. They do this any time they’re proven wrong and respond to it.

  “ There’s many fallacies that fall under Irrelevant Thesis where the arguer only thinks he refuted somebody’s opposing position; all Appeals to Consequences, all Appeals to Emotion, all Strawmen and Red Herrings, Ad Baculum, Ad Nauseum, and all Ad Hominems. “ Guess why I put some of them in bold.

7: Association Fallacy “Claiming “X is a Y. X is also a Z. Therefore, Y is a Z.” Incorporates Guilt / Honor by Association, where it is asserted that relation to a good or bad thing means the associated thing is also good or bad. “ They’ve thought, Trip the Sungazer is a guardian of a magical gem on an island. Knuckles is that too. Therefore, Trip is the last of her kind too.

8: Bulverism

9: Proof by Examples: " Another version of this fallacy is assuming that since having a little of something is good, having more must be better. " Game purists think that since having an Adaptation contain the core elements of its source material IS good, having it be almost nothing but stuff from the source material with nothing different must be better.

Therefore they publicly shame anyone who points out that nothing but Sonic vs Eggman would get stale, because that’s insulting the games, despite the common knowledge that eating enough of even your favorite food would get tiresome.

  This wasn't in the game purism article since purism's actually about hatred of adaptations and the exclusion of anything that makes them special, not just about saying the more of something there is the better, but the less of something alien in it the better. Purists aren't about love for the source because they don't care if the source changes and downgrades, they're about trying to prove stuff OTHER than the source sucks.

This fallacy is used when it comes to arguing with people that stuff like SatAM should have no differences even though that includes good ones. There are so many more novels based on SatAM than UK novels based on only the games and it was popular enough to have picture books made of it too. And clearly Sega keeps Sonic around to make money, so it’s in its best interests to make as many fans happy as possible, which would also be the ideal thing because more people would be made happy which is going to look good to anyone with compassion for the average person.

10: Stolen Concept“ A fallacy in which one or more of the concepts (or premises) on which an argument depends are (usually implicitly) denied by the argument itself, thus meaning the arguer is taking two or more opposed positions at the same time. “ “ I personally think it’s completely fair to compare an adaptation to the source material-how dare he say this is better than the source material?! “ Game purists do this with their inherently unfair preferential treatment to source material, which makes them look like hypocrites for contradicting what they’ve SAID.

  It’s really that they use double standards. I’ve made two articles on all of the different ways they tend to use this fallacy where they don’t care about the source material having problems the adaptations do but go ballistic at the adaptations for them without acknowledging that it’s not unique to them, or being deluded that it doesn’t apply to the source material at all.

  And they mock fans of adaptations because they can’t take criticism but any time someone says an accurate criticism of what they like, they throw a hissy fit and block them, even if the ones they blocked agreed with most of what they had to say.

The truth is that they actually believed that anyone except themselves who can’t take criticism is pathetic. The root of most of the world’s evil is people acting like the rules of morality don’t apply to them. Hypocrisy is defined as claiming to have beliefs and values you don’t. TV Tropes calls it not practicing what you preach.

  They would be hypocrites if they believed the exact words they said to justify purism. But it’s just making up excuses to sound persuasive. A better term is double standards or dishonesty because their beliefs are a lot more specific and far fewer in quantity than that. All of their beliefs boil down to, “ My opinions are the only ones that should be catered to and respected and anyone in conflict with that is dumb or evil or both. “

  There’s many ways they reflect this in one of their actual beliefs, like their actual belief, “ Only the franchises I want to be just like the source material have to be to be good. “  They don’t just say that because that’s not persuasive. What do you say to justify that? Because I Said So. This is the same belief that encompasses both of the first two beliefs I already covered.

  Then there’s their second actual belief, “ The source material of the specific franchises I like are the only ones that deserve praise, so only something I like can have new ideas that are good. Anything new in an adaptation is bad because it’s in one and I think it’s bad, like The Freedom Fighters. Anything unique is born out of spite or apathy for the source material, because I think it is. And even when an adaptation is using an idea from the source it’s bad, because I don’t like the adaptation. “ Like, “ Sonic shouldn’t smirk (like he does in Sonic 3) outside of the games! He'd never do that! “

  Their argument sounds a lot less persuasive when you see it for what it really is. It’s no wonder they phrase things different than that because all they could do to justify their real belief is circular logic, another fallacy. It’s not an objective truth that only the source material should be praised and deserves open-mindedness.

They just think this because they think the world should revolve around them. When their argument rests on a subjective premise, “ because it’s good, “ you should know the argument is probably false. All they want to do is make reactionary outrage bait for fellow purists about adaptations when it comes to adaptations and so it's rare for them to admit anything's good about them even when they notice it. Isn't there pride in acknowledging both good and bad to fully expose the truth? Then the audience will know what the extremely bad stories are by when there suddenly is a near lack of compliments.

  They look like hypocrites for implying that it’s unacceptable for someone to not do research by saying it’s unacceptable for someone making the story for an adaptation to not have every detail about the source material memorized. But, since they think it’s fine for THEM to make uneducated misinterpretations from a lack of knowledge, about stuff they don’t like, it’s clear what they believe is specifically,

  “ The people making an adaptation should do research to have every detail on the source material memorized until they’re a walking human encyclopedia, and if they forget even one detail their work will become garbage, they’ll prove they suck and were doing it on purpose and their work will be dead to me. But it’s worth the effort of getting the source material memorized. “

  Either this is from them not thinking it through enough to realize nobody has a good enough memory to be 100% accurate to the good material since the human memory’s infamously bad, which would mean not even anyone at Sega itself could, and even if they made mandates for this nobody would be able to remember all those mandates required, or they know this and don’t care. It’s impossible to not know that not everyone has a perfect memory.

11: The Strawman Fallacy

12: Toupee Fallacy

  Chewbacca Defense is really a whole class of fallacies which is why it wasn’t in that whole paragraph’s worth of them. “ Chewbacca Defense is using non-sequitur arguments to “prove” a point, relying on distracting and confusing the opposition. “Winning” a debate through methods other than logic and reasoned argument. “ That’s them when they jump to the conclusion that someone hates the games just because he likes an adaptation.

“ As such, the Chewbacca Defense commonly relies on Logical Fallacies and insane rhetorical techniques, like The False Dichotomy, The Ad Hominem, The Broken Record. “

13: The False Dichotomy: “ Claiming that only two (often conflicting) options exist. If the other side is wrong about anything, no matter how irrelevant, they’re wrong about everything — and you’re right about everything. “ Often their point when pointing out the problems with IDW is that because IDW stans are wrong about it being a perfect comic that’s well-written overall, and wrong about Flynn being perfect, that proves all adaptations are bad and no one should like them. “ It’s also called the black/white fallacy. “

  And I’ve noticed that they think in black and white. You’re not supposed to do that as an adult. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackAndWhiteInsanity Despite the fact that they’d defend any time the games’ Sonic was harsh and don't hold anything Amy did against her, they don’t do the same for the characters that happen to not be by Sonic Team, just because of their country of origin.

  They’ve called evil a canonically heroic Canon Foreigner in a position of power who doesn’t think a game character is perfect and infallible (like the non-game purists don’t) for being in a tough situation where both decisions have harsh outcomes, even though that’s inevitable for someone in a position of power and by that logic every single one would be evil.

  They would call the character evil no matter which decision or judgement was made, even when her judgement is for preventing the destruction of the entire world, because that’s not agreeing with Sonic who was risking it. They see Sally as Non-Game Purists and view her every disagreement with a game character as her being uppity when they think she should know her place. But they think Amy can disagree with and hit Sonic with a hammer all she wants because of her country of origin.

  Yet these same people call Flynn a racist for having Mazuri have a food shortage, not just saying he wasn’t creative, they went to the next level without having enough information. They insist that because Mazuri had jars and bridges it couldn’t possibly have its situation change with time even though time tends to do that. Even Ireland had a food shortage!

And in the same post they’ll ask why Spagonia couldn’t have had the food shortage when their same defense for why Mazuri couldn’t have had one applies there. It looks like nothing’s wrong in both places, but they take place before IDW.

  I don’t know if they’re right or wrong but it’s easy for bigots to look innocent of that if they accuse someone else of it. Ben Shapiro accuses people of antisemiticness easily but is in most scenarios the opposite of someone regularly cries wolf of bigotry.

  And these purists love to talk about Sonic online to demonize people outside of their group, calling them right-wing slang “ tourists “ for not knowing everything about the lore of the games. But they were surprised to hear from Sage that Tails knew Sonic most of his life. 8-4=4, and Classic SONIC is 4 years younger, and Classic Tails is just as much younger.

  I figured this out before I saw any adaptations, but they’d insist this was just the writer making it like Archie, because Flynn wrote it and they haven’t thought enough about the games they claim to like but liking games for just the gameplay isn’t liking them as a whole, games consist of story and music too.

14: The Broken Record: One even admitted that he thinks all his problems with IDW boil down to, it’s not exactly like the games. Which isn’t even a true assessment of his complaining as a lot of their problems with it don’t just have to do with inaccuracy such as slow pacing. Or are they arguing that none of the stories in the games ever had any slow pacing?

15: Converse Error

16: No True Scotsman: Aside from the obvious way they use it, I’ve seen the most extreme one of them say “ the actual Sonic franchise “ to mean just the games, even though that ignores what franchise means; franchise 3: “ a series of related works (such as novels or films) each of which includes the same characters or different characters. “ By Cambridge dictionary: " a series of films that have the same or similar titles and are about the same characters. "

  Sure not every character’s identical to how they are in the source material but the dictionary doesn’t say there’s an exception because of that and that it means they’re different characters. If the dictionary’s not enough for you, try profiting off a Sonic fan comic or fanfiction!

The fact that the fans trying to make Season 3 of SatAM had to go through the proper legal channels should make it irrefutable that it’d be illegal to profit off any alternate Sonic continuity which would not be the case if Sega didn’t see it as part of the franchise.

  And Sega wants to make as much money as possible and thinks people thinking stuff is canon is good for business, and encouraged or at least let Aaron Webber tweet that “ Everything is canon. “ Copyright Sega and “ characters owned by Sega “ are always in these adaptations in the credits. It goes without saying it’s not just the games. Sonic is a multi-media franchise, and only 6% of it so far is just the games.

  At that point it’s only a video game franchise because the games are the oldest and current continuity and make the most money so they probably won’t be cancelled. But to claim something’s only accurate because it’s old or new is both Appeal to Tradition and Appeal to Novelty. They need to resort to this fallacy to claim they’re still fans at all for keeping any chance of people listening to them.

  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fan “ fan noun (2) 1: an enthusiastic devotee (as of a sport or a performing art) usually as a spectator 2: an ardent admirer or enthusiast (as of a celebrity or a pursuit) “ That’s the opposite of someone who only likes a franchise for one aspect like the gameplay or hates 93% of a franchise and usually only talks about it to trash most of it and tends to compliment it just to use that as an excuse to trash other parts of it.

  True the same applies to people who have almost nothing but complaints for the games’ main cast and worldbuilding and the way it handles stories to the point of being bitter about them overall, but you’re hardly gonna find any adult not like that due to their egregious problems so demonizing them isn’t fair when they didn’t make the games how they are and they can be admirers of other parts of the franchise in enough quantities to make up for that in Sega’s eyes for sure.

Sega loves everyone who regularly gives them money, anyone who truly cares for and understands Sega would know that. And liking an adaptation and discussing it online means either way I get to hear someone discuss Sonic! So there’s a reason they apply this fallacy to both the franchise and fans, because they can only be right that bitter fans are haters if everything not the games is outside of the franchise. But if Sonic is mostly not the games, then they're the haters, they're the anti-fans of Sonic.

17: Red Herring

18: With Us or Against Us: " A form of false dilemma. Assuming that not openly supporting one side means you oppose them (or vice-versa). " But does it count as opposing them if I don’t oppose them when it comes to the current bad continuities? They're almost the only people I ever find complain about them and how are they supposed to improve without anyone criticizing them?

They only piss me off with the well-written ones but those are usually dead or entirely dead. But it’s not even enough for them if you criticize an adaptation like IDW and put Likes/hearts on tons of their posts or videos that criticize the adaptations that are by normal people. You can’t prove game purists wrong without one blocking you.

  Game purism is their religion, no that’s being generous. It’s just a conspiracy theory now after the debunking I did. How can you say a philosophy is correct if it’s got nothing but fallacies to support it? You have to be a game purist for game purists to see you as someone worth keeping around even as someone to give them likes, and then they wonder why they have less than 10 Notes on posts and have barely anyone following them.

And they wonder why none of them will ever become actually popular on Youtube and they see every SonicTuber in general as always wrong because they disagree with them and use their brains. Youtubers are artists too, to be a good creative you have to not be fascist or you’d like the status quo too much to do anything new, so naturally most creatives aren’t fascists. So there was no chance of most SonicTubers being canon fascists.

You can’t even compliment one of IDW’s best characters without one of them saying you’re a “ cultist “ and stan of it, KotyTang got called that and he reviewed most of the comic negatively. With THIS fallacy they’re the ones exhibiting cult-like behavior, as psyco-the-frog put it.

  For someone who doesn’t like most of the modern adaptations starting with the 2000s era, it’s a little cathartic to see people who agree. Their problem is that they heavily overreact to game inaccuracy so even when you agree it starts being too grating to be worth it. A show should not be dead to you because of one minor detail that’s hardly even used in it. And they can’t keep their demonization of Archie out of their IDW posts sometimes.

  Even when they aren’t mentioning anything specific about Archie. The two comics have completely different appeals and their fanbases mistreat each other. They have different characters and settings and history so it’s not hard to understand. But these people are dim enough to say the comics are the same. Because Sonic alone is similar that means “ I can’t see the difference. “

But the key difference in their appeal is Archie is creative and IDW isn’t usually. But with people who literally think creativity is bad, I should’ve expected them to be blind to what’s good about Archie.

  Here’s every trope about self-righteousness they fall under. There’s 45! While a few of these applying to someone isn’t the end of the world, as it’s impossible to not count as any of these try reading that list, the point is the sheer amount they qualify as! 45 of them, including Fan Hater. This is at the end of this article because by this point I thoroughly proved why all of this applies to them. And here’s what a game purist would be thinking to try to justify all this, “ But it’s okay when I do it “ -said every criminal and bigot, and that falls under 2 of the tropes below.

  Fan Dumb ((” Fan Dumb: We adore some work or genre of fiction (or some person or whatever else can be adored) to the exclusion of all else, and anyone who doesn’t do likewise is wrong! “ A group of fans who are unhealthily obsessed, entitled, intolerant, and make fandom difficult for everybody else. “)) The Fundamentalist (“ Our beliefs, whether they are religious, ideological, or academic, are top priority. “),

  The Gadfly (“ If we’re the hedonistic variant, we just want self-enjoyment from provoking people’s reactions. “), Hate Dumb ((“We abhor some work or genre of fiction (or some person or whatever else can be abhorred) to the exclusion of all else, and (when we’re also Fan Haters) anyone who doesn’t do likewise is wrong! “)), Obsessively Normal (“Anything even the slightest bit unique is evil! “), Principles Zealot (“ A character who cares too much about their principles, often at the expense of caring about the results of their actions, “)

  Single-Issue Wonk (“ We obsess over one issue. Even others that intersect don’t matter. “), He Who Fights Monsters (“ How dare you accuse us of being as fanatical and evil as those evil fanatics we’re fighting to destroy?! – A character becomes more and more like the evil that they pursue. “), Internet Jerk (“ We’re free to be assholes online thanks to the anonymity of the Internet! “ An online Jerkass that takes advantage of anonymity to harass people), Black-and-White Insanity (every adaptational difference and everything unique about an adaptation is treated the same minor or major),

  Moral Guardians (“ Viewers that morally object to certain types of work and wish to see it banned or censored. “ See my entry on Appeal to Pity if you’re wondering why I include it despite the word morally), Necessarily Evil (“ We didn’t want to be evil, but the circumstances require us to be! “), Then Let Me Be Evil (“ You treat us like we’re evil? Fine, we’ll be evil, then “), Tautological Templar/ Moral Myopia (“ Evil acts aren’t evil when we do them, silly. We’re the good guys! “), Vocal Minority,

  Aggressive Categorism, Because I Said So (“ We don’t need to explain to you ignoramuses why it’s right or wrong! If we say it’s right or wrong, then it is, without question, right or wrong, so accept it! “), Blatant Lies (two of them lied that the punishment Sonic was facing for treason in issue 40 was not banishment from Knothole but execution, when normally they can be so observant they find nitpicks that EVEN I didn't notice), Brutal Honesty, Can’t Take Criticism (“ How dare you call us “fanatics”? We are the purest, truest expression of what we believe and you are in no place to criticize us! “),

  Circular Reasoning, The Complainer Is Always Wrong (“ How dare you think differently from us! “), Die for our Ship (against Sally, yes the same people who campaign against Sonic loving anybody admitted they’re SonAmy fans and like its Sonic X fanservice, which leads right to the next two), Double Standard, Double Think,

Enemies Equals Greatness (“ What defines us as the only righteous people is the antagonism from the many lowly pathetic people who know we’re better than them and can’t stand it! “), Everything is Racist/ Opinion Override (“ People who aren’t a part of group X react to an offensive comment or portrayal of that group. Members of group X don’t care. “),

  False Dichotomy, Feeling Oppressed by their Existence, Hypocrite (“ One who doesn’t practice what he preaches. “ They lecture Flynn on writing like a cynic but act cynical of most of Sonic its fans and writers and Sega of America being the most bitter people talking about Sonic, while adaptation fans only complain about 6% of Sonic minimum and are usually just positive about adaptations),

Jerk Justifications, Logical Fallacies, No True Scotsman, Offended by an Inferior’s Success, Once Done Never Forgotten, Opinion Myopia (“ How can anyone feel differently about this than we do?! “),

Playing the Victim Card, The Power of Hate, “The Reason You Suck” Speech (“ A character delivers a harsh tirade to a second character that is designed to dissect that second character’s flaws, weaknesses or failures “) against adaptation fans,

Serious Business (“ Treating something more seriously than necessary. “), Twisting the Words, With Us or Against Us, You Are What You Hate, Obnoxious Entitled Housewife (for the female game purists; “ Despite the title, she may not be married, “ “ likes rules, structures, and hierarchies, and will frequently invoke their authority… This entitlement may even manifest as bigotry… “),

  There’s some fallacies I could’ve stretched to include, like Soapbox Sadie, Undying Loyalty, Demonization, Propaganda Machine/Piece, Unsportsmanlike Gloating, Lawful Stupid (they defend mandates with Appeal to Authority so that can easily be mocked with hypothetical extremely bad mandates), but since it doesn’t fit the literal definition I won’t bother pointing them all out, there’s a lot.

  Inaccuracyspotting is an easy shallow form of criticism that can be used to make any adaptation look bad through appealing to emotion alone. It’s like making a video just about criticizing any time a bald character is a villain across various works of fiction and nitpicking apart the heroic bald characters, and saying those works are bad for it.

  The reason they had gotten on my nerves is that they do have good critical thinking skills but choose to only apply them negatively towards what they hate because they don’t wanna risk agreeing with a group they discriminate against, but defend those same problems to the death with the games proving that they don’t actually care about their quality, while I can’t turn my brain off with media so I notice when the writing is forced even when I’m casually watching a TV show for once.

  What’s unsatisfying about criticism from a game purist is that their pointing out the bad writing is just an excuse that makes their game purism sound like a persuasive grift. The adaptations could be written like Citizen Kane and they’d still hate them.

They could be good in every major writing component thus being objectively good and they’d still call them garbage if they weren’t 99.9% like the games. The only reason I don’t say 100% is they still like Sonic 2 movie and a few of its differences, or at least the most extreme one I've seen does, anyways.

  And the cognitive dissonance on that was so real that instead of realizing that hating differences on principle is stupid they had to say it was because the adaptational differences introduced were respectful while they only hate stories with ones that aren’t. But there are other changes that qualify, how do you define respectful if I’m sure they hate that Archie Sonic’s faster than Game Sonic?

Peach saying Mario’s not important isn’t a dealbreaker to them since they like the Mario movie, meaning they might find her being different in that movie respectful because she seems more competent and cooler than in the main games.

  And by that logic The Wizard of Oz would be bad because it’s got one good witch instead of two like the book. That’s racist against witches so that’s disrespectful to what the source material and its writer wanted! I don’t know how any of them can like any changes because they usually never notice or accept any changes as good. So why would any game purist not hate that there was a recent war between echidnas and owls or the Emerald and Chaos Emeralds had been fused together?

  By their logic that you can’t like a change without hating the source material or at least a part of it, that means either they don’t like the games or they hate that the echidnas were wiped out millennia ago, and that the two types of Emeralds aren’t fused.

Or, that logic is full of shit since it can’t only be true for some people, and being interested in alternate what-if scenarios doesn’t mean you hate the original. By that logic anyone who likes the What If… show for superhero fiction would hate the source material too.

  I’ve found plenty of changes that had objectively nothing wrong with them that they still hate for being changes even if they have to make up excuses. Right, because being new alone is bad, nobody wants any artistic expression of creativity in art. Let’s look at the dictionary definition of write. “ to have the job of creating books, stories, or articles, to express an idea… “ This is from the cambridge dictionary. If you aren’t creating, because you’re just using others’ ideas, like if you just wrote exactly like the games, you’re not writing.

  So being 1 to 1 is not writing very much. That’s why it should only be like the games in the major ways and the references that I outright love. References are forgivable though if they aren’t used in place of a new setting or better idea or aren't the characters quoting lines from earlier with no acknowledgement of it. Merely pointless imagery is neat but looks cynical if the story itself is bad.

  Let’s see the dictionary’s definitions of a hack! From cambridge: “ hack: a journalist (= writer for newspapers or magazines) whose work is low in quality or does not have much imagination. “ How is it imagination to be 1 to 1 with the source material? They want writers to be hacks.

Ironically they keep calling the modern writers hacks, but only because they define it without that last part, and either are solely aware of or selectively only use the other dictionaries’ outdated ill-thought-out definitions which only involve bad writing and writing purely for a paycheck.

Of course outdated applies to the above definition insisting on specifying magazines and newspapers for no reason when we all know it's not specific to writers of those. But that nitpick doesn't change the rest of the definition's accuracy as it matches what the other definitions have to say.

  Bad writing’s too vague to look objective enough for a definition. And a writer only writing for money is a hard assumption to prove to everyone that requires irrefutable evidence.

I'm tired of these people using the word Western entirely when they're about to demonize Westerners as being unable to write and localize. How can I not start to wonder if they have a bias against them after a while? What else can you say about the belief that no Westerner can write well or adapt well, and assuming the makers of SatAM were racists with no evidence? Even then it’s a False Dichotomy to say THAT would invalidate all of their original ideas.

  So they’ve been grasping at straws for years. It would’ve helped if they didn’t dismiss out of hand every adaptation that IS like the games. They baselessly insist “ every fan of American Sonic “ is “ Japanophobic “ and will preemptively mock the idea of being told otherwise and compare them to the Confederates. The only one who brings up race is you, purist. Only the purists dismiss characters out of hand based on their country of origin, instead of going on a case by case basis with them.

  How is it punching down to call out SoJ when the people working at Sega of Japan aren’t Japanese-Americans so they’re people at the same equivalent position as people like Flynn are where he lives? I never saw them complain about that popular OVA or the manga. It must be that the most extreme only complained about Sonic X because the Americans in 4Kids were involved.

  The weird thing is, even the most extreme purist doesn’t have a huge amount of complaining about AoStH or Sonic Boom. It must be because game stans can’t stand adaptations taking Sonic seriously, but are fine with when the games do, including Shadow the Hedgehog. It calls into question whether they truly like when Sonic is dark or not because their amount of bias means they would never think back to any times adaptations did dark material tactfully and purposefully or wouldn’t bring it up if they did.

  I’ve read two game purists saying that as long as you like the games and don’t put them down they don’t have a problem with you liking adaptations. It doesn’t make it okay to say you only like a member of a harmless group if they’re “ one of the good ones “ if you assume they’re rare. It still doesn't make adaptation fans feel safe to even talk to you.

If a lie gets repeated to someone enough it becomes harder to not believe it. Game purists are like Flat Earthers. Nothing convinces them they’re wrong not even this article because they’re so arrogant and emotional that they won’t engage with the facts against their views even when they prove they’re fallacious. There is literally nothing actually supporting game purism because its entire foundation is fallacies and opinions.

  And yet they accuse Archie and SatAM fans of being like Flat Earthers because they don’t respect American companies and either haven’t learned that Sega of America’s why this series didn’t stay a tech demo and made it the most money or are one of the nutjobs that dismiss all of the info on what it did for Sonic as fake news because it doesn’t suit their agenda.

So someone ought to add to that entry on Sonic’s Misaimed Fandom page because it was by someone who despite saying Sonic was a joint venture only sees SoJ as valid, arguing that people should only care about what they think.

It’s rare that an adaptation won’t contain anything that people like about the games. If one were to hate all these things you would hate the games, and if one truly liked them they would also be happy seeing them in adaptations.

If you absolutely love these game elements one would expect just seeing them in anything to be enough to make you like stories that aren’t badly written in most of the components of writing, or even then, people who get giddy about something will like a bad plot just because it’s there. STC has Emerald Hill Zone and Metropolis as its main settings and Emerald Hill looks exactly like the games. It had a story about an extra life monitor!

  But the game purists are still complaining about Flynn making references to the games while claiming to be the only ones who really like the games and treating the Pontaff games as above criticism.

They saw a few people give an impression of hatred and generalize due to confirmation bias. Even saying only most people are a certain way is still bigoted against that group. Imagine someone saying he doesn’t hate women because he only thinks MOST of them are annoying sorts of feminists that think that real women don’t wear dresses.

  These people say a lot that Sonic lives by his own feelings by just doing what he wants and they love that and say that it’s just because Sonic’s implied to be like that in the games but since all their opinions are feelings-based entirely and they just do whatever they want with no regard for the feelings of the people they offend, they identify with Sonic there. You know who also only lives by his own feelings and just does what he wants with no interest in upholding moral principles?

  Eggman. Eggman’s a fascist. Maybe Sonic’s philosophy isn’t good and only works out because he happens to be a good person. They even admit that it’s only through luck that Sonic happens to like being good instead. But whenever they see Sonic be too mean in adaptations specifically they have a lot of feelings about that. But he’s living by his own feelings and not caring about principles! I thought they liked that about him! They don’t. It’s just about having any excuse to demonize what they don’t like.

  If you liked a game element you’d like seeing it everywhere. Next you’re gonna tell me they claimed the whole concept of Sonic fighting Eggman with a group of friends is bad and isn’t meant to be in Sonic. Oh wait they did say that about the Freedom Fighters even though Tails and him were a group since Sonic 2 and Sonic Heroes exists. So they should hate the whole concept of Tails going with him on adventures and Knuckles being in the game then.

  Yet they defend Knuckles being in the game with no explanation because they’ll say anything to defend the games. But he has NO reason for being with Sonic, how is that better than the FFs? So that’s just an excuse for the real reason they don’t like them, Sonic Team didn’t make them.

  Of course the fact that the game characters share similar roles or the same ones doesn’t mean they should never be reintroduced in the games which is proven by Heroes having multiple teams to play as with characters with the same abilities as other ones in the same game. As long as the characters are kept away from the ones they’re too similar to when they’re doing stuff that matters, it’s fine. So that’s not the point of this.

  While the characters as you see them in SatAM aren’t in the games as people, though they’re in Sonic Spinball but don’t talk, later on in the games other characters went on to fill most of their roles. Nicole’s role is sort of filled by the Miles Electric, and as for a talking AI loved one, Sage is the closest we’ve got. Tails could invent Nicole in the games’ universe.

  The closest we’ve got to Sonic’s uncle is Tails because he’s got such a good bond with him that they’re like family, because Sonic’s the closest he’d had to a parent. Tails is also nice and a gadgeteer and wants to hug Sonic. Other than him not inventing the roboticizer, I can’t think of any difference in personality.

  The closest we’ve gotten to Rotor in the games is Wave, another gadgeteer who isn’t Tails or Eggman. She’s not part of Team Sonic but at least she proves that it’s still possible in the universe of the games for someone to be a brilliant inventor who’s not Tails or Eggman.

  And who’s to say the future of the games’ continuity that we’ll never get to see couldn’t have Wave interacting with Sonic just as frequently as Knuckles and Amy? She could start spiting Eggman as a hobby, especially if she gets fed up with Jet and Storm who she’s only shown being annoyed by, or if they die or get hospitalized. Marine’s a more likely candidate since she likes the heroes and made a watercraft at the end of her game.

   A Dark Gaia Titan made Tails cower and call for help instead of trying to fight it like he’d canonically do (he fought the Eggmobile in the Classics!). He didn’t think Sonic would be able to beat the final boss of Colors and cowered to Chaos 0. He’s even scared that he’s a burden to Sonic in Frontiers. It’s clear that he now fits the role of “ The coward of The Sonic Heroes, “ though only loosely because those moments are rare instead of a frequent part of every time he talks in each story like with Antoine.

  He’s not entirely Antoine because Antoine’s also a braggart most of the time – but Tails bragged in SA1 briefly and then Lost World. He hasn’t done that since, but it happened. Now Knuckles is the real, braggart who’s not Sonic of Team Sonic because he does it a lot in every story he’s in recently. But Modern Tails has shown all of the major personality traits of Antoine. All he’s got missing is being French – as if there would never be a French character in the games’ universe – and in love with someone like Sally. Give it time, maybe in a future we’ll never see he’ll end up falling for Blaze.

  Snively’s role as Eggman’s assistant who doesn’t like him ended up taken by Orbot. He’s Snively if he made sense, because he’s a robot. Bunnie’s the only main SatAM character I can’t think of as having her role even mostly filled because there’s no cyborg hero in the games or anyone with her accent. But there are plenty of heroic characters with super strength like Knuckles and Vector and Big, and even Shadow can move a whole car.

  The werehog’s got extendible arms, but I’m talking about the SatAM Bunnie who never extends her robot arm in the show, whose use of extendible legs benefited her in a way that the werehog’s arms never did. Since Lost World had the threat of roboticization, people should know better than to think that Bunnie couldn’t possibly still have the same explanation for being half robot in the games.

  The closest the games got to King Acorn was just the Duke of Soleanna. The king may not be dead but he is absent for most of the show as if he was and like the Duke he was separated from his daughter when she was little, a daughter who gets a crush on Sonic. Elise and Blaze show that royalty is done in the games as well. So clearly any argument that royalty isn’t Sonic-like is bunk now because Sega disagreed twice.

  SatAM has wizards like Naugus and Lazar, and the games had Merlina the wizard, and Wendy Witchcart who actually lives in Sonic’s universe. That’s where the similarities end but still wizards and witches can exist in the games. Griff and Ari and the Wolf Pack don’t have equivalents at all.

  Now I’m going to start thinking about a strong female character who was rude to Sonic multiple times and is in love with Sonic, hurts Sonic a few times, is a worrywart who’s jumped to thinking she’s doomed instead of assuming Sonic would save the world, was nothing but a worrywart for all of a story, and is nothing but the stereotypical level-headed bland nice girl for a whole story.

  I wasn’t talking about Sally. This is Amy since she stopped coming on too strong. In Forces she’s nothing but a worrywart instead of the beacon of optimism she was before, I challenge you to look back at all of her dialogue in Forces to see what I mean. Since Lost World she’s no longer being shown as infatuated with Sonic and not respecting his personal space anymore and making him scared that she’ll hit him with a hammer, almost all of the things that made her not Sally.

  In Frontiers, Amy rudely talked to Sonic as if he’s selfish for not wanting to help Kocos before rescuing Tails, showing skewed priorities. Sally’s also been rude to Sonic and called him selfish. Now all that keeps her from being Sally is that she’s not a princess. In Archie her cousin is a king so she’s royalty.

She’s been rude plenty of times in the games from “ What’s your problem?! “ to Sonic in SA1 to “ This time there’s no way outta marrying me! “ to chasing after him with a hammer in Riders to yelling at Vector, ” This was all because you were dragging your tail, Vector! ” and calling Cream a " useless kid " and so on in Free Riders and wanting to hurt Cream in Sonic Rush.

  Other than her coming on too strong and her Sonic Battle behavior, which hasn’t been the case in a long time, she’s got the same flaws as SatAM Sally, and all of this is stuff that if Sally was doing in her place, Amy’s fans would call Sally a bad character. She’s even argued with Sonic in Frontiers, so now all she has to do is do that frequently in every appearance and she’d have the same dynamic.

  Before, you’d think she’d be supporting and trusting him on everything and they only didn’t get along because she came on too strong, or because he wanted to focus on stopping the main bad guys instead of helping out in a minor way, not because she disagreed with him and thought his whole personality sucked. And even then she said, “ He can be such a brat sometimes, “ in SA2, when part of Sonic’s whole appeal is that he’s ” a brat ” or in a nice way that he’s rebellious and cocky.

  It sure would make her look like Sally if the next main game had her constantly disrespecting all of the flaws of and arguing with Sonic. The irony of treating Amy as more legitimate than Sally is that Amy came from a Shogakukan manga, the first long-running manga Sonic had which wasn’t even 1 to 1 with the games, while Sally was based on one of the creatures you rescue from robots in Sonic 1.

She was just Ricky with a bow who got redesigned for SatAM, but even in the UK books she has the same personality. So it’s not about loyalty to the games, it’s that Amy’s not American… and about Die for Our Ship, usually. “ But she hasn’t done most of the horrible abusive stuff in a long time so it’s FINE, she’s a totally different person now but we’ll never let anything Sally’s done go. I wonder why people aren’t letting what Amy did go? I guess we’ll never know. ”  

  Maybe because Sally hasn’t tried to beat him up with a sledgehammer hoping he’d marry her or pressured Sonic into going to Twinkle Park saying that cute couples get in free or use Sonic’s robot friend as a practice child with him or starve and overexercise herself into hallucinating to get Sonic’s approval. Maybe because her whole dynamic with him isn’t “ Reverse the Genders and It Stops being Kid-Friendly or Tolerable. “

  They’ve indeed fixed Amy by not having her do stuff that extreme anymore. The reason people always held all this against her is out of compassion for Sonic. Now imagine if a loved one of yours had to deal with Amy doing all of that. If you don’t see anything wrong with all of that I don’t think you ever cared about him in the first place.

And I’d hope the downplaying of it living up to Double Standard Abuse Female on Male is all from guys who’ve never had to deal with someone like Amy. I can’t imagine why someone would still just be a stan for Amy after knowing everything selfish she’s done, without it being because they’re as hotheaded and immoral.

  Blaze is ALSO a princess who’s usually level-headed and calm and composed but has gotten mad at Sonic to the point of being even more violent than Sally’s been at one point, and rules a kingdom with no king in sight. Aside from her getting into a fight with Sonic, she could’ve looked like Sally and had her name and been seen as perfectly in-character, and even better because of the fire powers.

   But here’s why I didn’t discuss Blaze first; Blaze isn’t in the same role because she’s not part of Sonic’s main group of friends, though she could’ve joined Sonic’s team with the excuse of wanting a vacation, since IDW was allowed to get away with her taking a long vacation in Sonic’s dimension but not “ Chaos Shadow. “ Elise is ALSO a princess who’s usually level-headed and calm and composed who says she lost her father when she was a little girl due to the actions of a mad scientist, and she even gets a crush on Sonic.

  It’s even to the point of having a psychosis moment at one point making her selfish, though being told to smile is all it takes to calm her down and get her to do the right thing. But Elise isn’t in Team Sonic like Amy became in Sonic Lost World. She also doesn’t constantly bicker with Sonic and insult him and show disrespect for his whole personality.

  I doubt the SatAM cast would be put in the games because they’re older non-Japanese concepts while Sticks had the appeal of being a way to market something currently making them money, but if they ever did then calling them adaptational differences would look as wrong as calling Harley Quinn an adaptational difference from the source material now. Roboticization the Underground variety made it into the games through Lost World.

  This was something no one ever could’ve predicted for the same reason I assume the Freedom Fighters won’t be put in the games. That’s why I had to specify that it didn't use the SatAM variety, which I wouldn’t have known to do before Lost World.

And Sonic loving chili dogs made it into the games through Black Knight which wasn’t even written by an American, so notice that a person from Japan respected it enough to put it in the games, even though it was exclusive to American continuities and the French show Sonic Underground.

  And this is even more wild because it wasn’t in the Stay Sonic book that all of the UK Sonic continuities took inspiration from that functioned as a Sega Bible. Him preferring chili dogs wasn’t even in the Sega of America Bible and still made it into the games. My same logic for why they’ll never put the SatAM characters in the games also applies to his love of chili dogs but it still made it in. It doesn’t need to be able to market something. They just need to think it’ll make fans happy and not annoy most of them.

  I never thought Eggman would take over the world in the games, but in Forces it was the whole premise. I thought a fundamental aspect of the games’ continuity was that Eggman never could take over the world. I assumed Sega was telling me he was too incompetent to do that. So after being wrong 3 for 3, maybe thinking they don’t have a chance is cynical, because there’s no excuse at this point.

  Sonic’s love of chili dogs and roboticization should’ve also been copyrighted to the Dic cartoons and Archie because it came from them too. How would they not share the copyright with Sega for a concept when they do for characters? How were they allowed to put that in the games?

  Roboticization was still a threat Tails faced in Lost World, no shared copyright stopped that. Even the name Robotnik is an American invention, but still made it into the games officially with a level called Robotnik Winter in Sonic Triple Trouble. It became his canon real name in SA1, and they didn’t even have to use it in SA2, because SA1 sold really well. So they didn’t think they HAD to do fanservice by having it be in text in the background when Eggman was making his speech to the world.

  At this point I can only assume the reason they don’t have the SatAM characters make a cameo while they’re at it is because the vocal criticism online for them made Sega overestimate their hatedom by assuming most fans are like that. They made Frontiers dark so they clearly know that darkness isn’t hated by most of their customers by this point.

Game Purism means permanently hating every adaptation and 99% of adaptational changes and characters just because of the initial feeling of “ different = bad “ and so even a potential flawlessly written adaptation would get hated for one difference.

Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Flattery, Appeal to Ignorance, Appeal to Pity, Because I Said So, The Perfect Solution Fallacy, Appeal to Novelty (in favor of only the games and its changes), Appeal to Minority, Appeal to Tradition, Confirmation Bias, Everything Except Most Things. That’s 11 fallacies.

How else can you disprove an opinion than by showing it’s only supported by a lot of fallacies? Taken from the Fallacy Fallacy description itself, “ if the only reason to accept a claim is a fallacious argument, accepting the claim anyway is unreasonable. “ And it’s very easy to claim that an opinion is based on facts and be wrong, for example you could claim French Fries are entirely healthy because of the fact that they’re made of potatoes but we all know they’re junk food that go with burgers and milkshakes.

There’s going to be another article containing even more fallacies. They use 19 fallacies after that when they’re arguing against people, and a few I’ve seen to justify an assumption that I think only game purists would use but I’m not sure, so it’ll be in another article with the rest, just to be fair to any game purists who don't waste time their time insulting and arguing with people who don't agree with them, any ones that are just polite instead of causing problems.

1: Appeal to Authority: They say Sonic Team and Sega of Japan should be adhered to at all times by Sonic and only the game purist who’s currently speaking is allowed to criticize them, because they made the Sonic games and have authority over them, therefore they must always know best.

  This ignores that not only has Sega of Japan made mistakes before but Sega of America’s CEO Tom Kalinske said Sonic should be a franchise instead of a tech demo so they’re the ones responsible for the franchise existing. The two Segas are the mother and father of Sonic. Sega of Japan’s the mother who wanted to terminate the pregnancy. And Izuika said he preferred Mario in an interview.

It ignores all of Sega of America’s help with the series like having the Genesis come with the first two Sonic games and doing a marketing campaign against Mario - both ideas that SoJ hated. The Japanese Mega Drive flopped from not doing that. “ Duh but Japan’s not its primary market “ not a gotcha when the Mega Drive flopping proves that Sega of Japan’s Japanese appealing policies aren’t profitable and trying to appeal to people who’d agree with them like game purists isn’t profitable.

When Sega of Japan tried to pander to Americans themselves we got Shadow the Hedgehog and Rise of Lyric, yes they were responsible for some of the latter game which is why it was like Jak and Daxter. Sega of America’s point was to appeal to Americans better because they’re from America.

  And then they stripped away their independence and then wondered why Sonic Boom failed. And it ignores all the money Sega of Japan made off of licensing Sonic out so much, when I thought they loved Sega of Japan, or do they just love Sonic Team, because they like the Sonic Channel comics they made too?

It’s proven that Sonic wouldn’t have made as much money to fall back on if SoA had no independence, for all we know after their consoles failed Sonic would be bankrupt if these adaptations didn’t exist.

  And Americans could’ve come up with Sonic because Sonic the Hedgehog’s full of Western influences. He only originated in Japan because it had a monopoly on 90s mainstream games, and in the 90s no game developers cared about story in their platformers. But game purists treat Sonic like an anime regardless and put the Japanese at the top of a hierarchy. They’re oddly silent on the fact that the creators of Sonic, Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, like SatAM, the latter having a SatAM box set. And Yuji Naka spoke English so he did say Mobian in interviews.

  So what’s the point of being a purist if even the Japanese who made Sonic don’t agree with you? I said hierarchy earlier. Game purism’s all about believing that hierarchy’s good, but only the hierarchies they like, so anything that reinforces or bolsters them is good, and that the status quo’s perfect so anything breaking or adding to it must be bad, and they want Sega of Japan/Sonic Team to have had full domination over the series the whole time and for all time like a dictator.

Does that belief structure sound familiar? “ Hierarchy’s good, only the hierarchies I like, so anything that bolsters them is good, and we should have a strong authority rule. “

That’s fascism. You can mostly have non-fascist beliefs but the beliefs I outlined fall under that. Treating every continuity equally like it’s its own thing is equality.

2: Appeal to Flattery: “ Claiming that a certain conclusion reflects well on anyone who agrees with it or poorly on anyone who does not. “ If they didn’t believe that being a game purist reflected well on you they wouldn’t be game purists. That's why this is in THIS post. Game purists all claim that no true Sonic fan isn’t a game purist who can’t take criticism of the games.

The concept that other people can apply criticism out of love because they just want improvement is alien to them. Some of them must have abusive parents if they can’t conceive that you could insult something or someone without hating them.

3: Appeal to Ignorance: “ The claim that a statement must be true because it wasn’t proven false, or false because it wasn’t proven true, instead of admitting any uncertainty. “ This is them when they say something isn’t like the games because they assume it never will be because the games didn’t give them enough info on Sega’s image of its world and characters to know better. You could use this to say that the echidnas won’t be based on Aztecs after looking at the Sonic Adventures comic that came out long before SA1.

  Without knowing that was the plan for them in the games it would look like that comic got them wrong, but no one had any way of knowing Sega’s plan yet. They must have said before Unleashed that Game Sonic doesn’t love chili dogs like SatAM Sonic did first because the games didn’t prove that.

They also stan Lost World despite it having Tails be threatened with roboticization in the style of Underground and looking like he was briefly. So when the games do something identically it’s fine. Then how is an idea is bad just because it wasn’t in the games yet?

  STC had the Emeralds be something aliens used in space that happened to land on the planet. So at the time they would’ve said that’s not true because it didn’t happen in the games but Frontiers did that later. STC did the concept of Amy fighting with a weapon first. You could look at that back then and say Amy would never fight in the games because she hadn’t done it yet and so the idea sucks. Most people like ideas in fiction without caring about where they appeared first.

  Game purists have basically said, “ How do you know that they needed Sega of America to have Sonic succeed? “ despite in the same paragraph acknowledging that they told Sega of Japan not to have Madonna and a rock band for Sonic. They conveniently leave out that the reason Sonic 1 sold 15 million copies was because of the American CEO Tom Kalinske’s idea to package it with the Genesis, and just leave it at saying that Sonic 1 selling well is somehow proof that SoJ did enough to humor America.

  Meanwhile Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles bombed in Japan and it didn’t have the same marketing campaign as the West and they weren’t packaged with the Genesis. Yet they claim that because you can’t go to an alternate universe and see Sonic go the way of Alex Kidd because it was handled the way it was in more than just Japan, that “ absence of evidence is evidence of absence “ of Sega of America being necessary for Sonic to make it this long.

  Ignoring that Japan had the Genesis and 32X bomb which proves how bad the way Sega of Japan’s way of handling things is, the OVA not making it into a full anime, only the West getting a 3rd season of Sonic X, sales in Japan usually being worse even after you account for them having a third of the population of the US, the Sonic movies all flopping in Japan…

  The same logic for respecting Sega of Japan applies to Sega of America too. Their difference is nationality. Do they believe authority should be respected or not? The only thing game purists believe is that their personal preferences are the only ones that should be respected with fiction. These extremists are the result of anime fans getting into Sonic because they think of it as an anime and only emphasize it as a video game series to mask that because the games came from Japan first.

  Whose idea was it to have a separate Sega branch for America anyway-it was Sega of Japan’s idea because they’re the original branch to exist. I thought they thought Sega of Japan was always right. No they think they should’ve said, “ You can’t do that with our brand “ a lot more in the old days, they’re all in with the Brand Era of Sonic, which means they don’t even respect old Sega of Japan in practice and only claim to to have convincing arguments for why old adaptations should be 1 to 1.

   How many purists were introduced in the Brand Era? The era you start in can create a false impression of how a series is supposed to be. Maybe it’s only Sonic Team they respect. But Sonic Team was never in charge of what the story of Sonic would be, and they didn’t make Sonic the Hedgehog, Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima from SoJ and the American mother of Sonic who came up with Madonna did. The purists need to read a book called The Console Wars.

4: Appeal to Pity: “ Attempting to make someone feel sorry for either the arguer or the subject of the argument to convince people to believe the argument. “ One of their main arguments is you should feel sorry for Sega of Japan because other continuities have their own interpretations and new ideas, that they could’ve prevented but didn’t, because they’d disapprove of that and you should have empathy. But what about Sega of America’s feelings, why not feel sorry for people who get harassed for liking other continuities?

How about if the people responsible for the adaptational differences got harassed? They deserve empathy too! So only the Japanese and game purists deserve pity? Not the people who made the franchise a franchise, not writers who weren’t told enough stuff by Sega of Japan? And again Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima liked SatAM. Yet these purists would only see Appeal to Pity as manipulative if their opponents use it. “ Feel sorry for the board of directors of SoJ that fired the American CEO for having profitable ideas they hated. “

  Just because there’s a few people who like one work of fiction and harass people who don’t doesn’t prove that adaptational differences shouldn’t exist either, if the logic is fans of “ spinoffs “ don’t deserve happiness because there’s a few bad apples and some are tired of the games, that logic could be applied to, game purists don’t deserve what they want because there’s bad apples and they’re all tired of the other continuities.

Some adaptational differences shouldn’t have existed, because they’re bad. I think most are bad so far but I only listed those of the shows. Usually I prefer the spinoffs like the games. They wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater though.

5: Circular Reasoning: “ Such an argument can be simplified down to ” it’s true because it’s true.”  The basis behind all of the actual game purist beliefs. They’re like, “ Everything but the games are bad because the games are good because Sonic Team made them and so anything not made by Sonic Team is bad because the games are good! “ But they don’t hate the Mario movie for not being 1 to 1, and every other franchise they like that isn’t made by Sonic Team and is nothing like Sonic, and yet they still don’t know why people like adaptations.

  Ask how it could be possible for Sonic Team to be incapable of making mistakes and they’ll say “ Because the games are good. “ They’re like, “ Most people who like something besides the source material of Sonic or Castlevania or Pac Man hates the source material! “ Why? “ Because I think they do! If you criticize something, that means you hate it. “ How do they feel about Sonic 06? Well one of them literally said, “ I actually like the games, ALL OF THEM. “ What about Spinball for Game Gear? So they’re either liars or crazy.

  What they actually believe is just, “ It’s always bad for an adaptation to be different from what I’m used to in JUST the source material for the series I believe this about, because fiction should only be catered to me. “ If asked why, they could either be honest and say, “ Because I Said So! “ meaning because they’re selfish, or make up excuses that sound objective by being broad.

6: Because I Said So: “ A variant of Appeal to Authority, this fallacy is more formally known as Proof by Assertion. This fallacy posits that something is true or false, right or wrong, simply because the speaker says so, shutting down anyone who asks them why this is the case. “ It’s also their defense for Tails’ bragging in Lost World not meaning he was egotistical when Sonic’s bragging in IDW means he’s egotistical. The literal defense is, “ No he wasn’t, “ and then insults.

  That’s all. They’re like “ maybe he wasn’t! “ Well then maybe in other continuities Sonic wasn’t egotistical either! And I would try to explain why if I thought that. But any reasoning would still have it be a maybe. They talk about Tails as if they think he’s a real celebrity whose feelings are getting hurt by people criticizing him for cowering to Chaos 0, and so they must defend his honor and one criticism of him not being the badass he was in the Classics anymore is a blockable offense.

7: The Perfection Solution Fallacy: “Rejecting an idea because it doesn’t solve all addressed issues. “If we can’t fix it perfectly, we shouldn’t try at all.” “ They do this, they say the adaptations like IDW shouldn’t exist and wish they never existed, because even hiring new writers is probably not gonna make them good for them because their idea of good is just 1 to 1. Never mind the joy they brought others or money they made Sega, which morally means it’s a net positive that they exist. They only care about themselves.

  “ the Perfect Solution Fallacy is arguing that a course of action is no good because it is not perfect. “ Like saying that the making of all of the adaptations amounted to being no good because they’re not perfect to them. Because none of the adaptations live up to their imagined impossible scenario where they’re just like the games, they conclude that none of them can be good.

The fallacy being that of course an imagined scenario is idealized so that’s not fair to do a comparison on and makes it impossible to like any of them and takes a defeatist attitude to them that would’ve had Sega make far less money if they took it.

   So there’s a reason they didn’t let this get them down. “ Art subverting my expectations is always bad! “ Talk about missing the point of art. For millennia even back in ancient Greek statue sculpting the most beloved art has been the art that surprises the audience and innovates, while an artist that isn’t creative or admires the status quo will bore people.

8: “ Appeal to Novelty is a logical fallacy where someone claims that a proposal, idea, work, or trend is better or more accurate than what came before, solely because it is newer or more recent. “ Game purists even do this, as whenever confronted with inaccurate characterization in the games they deny it’s inaccurate at all, which has to be because of this fallacy that because it’s the newer characterization that means it’s accurate, because it was Sega of Japan updating them.

  THIS ignores that it’s still inaccurate to their bios. So if Knuckles in a new game became a fruit salesman and says he’s never guarded any Emerald, it’d be accurate? Amy being not Amy anymore would be defended as being an updating of her for sure. She was updated for modern times because feminists took issue with Amy Rose being a bad role model for girls. I don't miss her creeping Sonic out, because I care about Sonic. So I’m not saying it’s always bad to change a character.

But it’s not good JUST because it’s new and it is still not Amy. And no, updating her Generations bio didn't make this okay. That's revisionist history censorship that still doesn't change the fact that she wasn't always like this and it's never explained why she changed.

  They deny Tails being egotistical in Lost World with just “ No he wasn’t, “ even though his character bios debunk the idea that he should be bragging to himself. Sure, he bragged to Sonic about his biplane in SA1, which must be to make sure he stays proud of him, but he would never brag to himself as he’s trying to reprogram the roboticizer in a completely straight-faced way with nothing in his tone implying that he’s only kidding himself, no nervousness at all.

  And if you feel the need to insist that a character’s trait is just a façade it looks like you’re not comfortable with it regardless of whether you’re right or wrong. I said that about how Sonic’s too egotistical in the movies and the novels and picture books based on SatAM.

Their insistence that Sonic’s humble based on cherrypicked evidence like him looking bashful in a cutscene for a recent Classic Sonic game and one 3D Blast cutscene means they aren’t comfortable with him being cocky even in the games or else they’d say nothing of the sort and only compliment him acting arrogant.

  But being confident is one of his core traits from the start that got Sonic popular. Being bashful or even skeptical of praise is from insecurity, obviously out of character for Sonic who bragged his way through Forces. But because it’s new, they make too big a deal out of the Superstars out of character moment that make no sense for the guy who wags his finger in the Classic Era and looks confident on the title screens and boasts that he’s gonna crack this Eggman wide open.

 Their entire basis aside from Appeal to Authority for supporting this is it’s new and thus an update. Downgrades are also new! And yet they’ll never apply this logic to adaptational changes, because SoJ their lord and savior can’t downgrade.

So despite how their criticism of Flynn appeared to me at first, they aren’t against stanning of Flynn for being stanning, they’re against it because it’s worship of a different god than theirs. I never thought they’d fall under THIS fallacy because the stans of the newer continuities are the ones most guilty of this.

  But what else do you call them doing stuff like seeing Cream cower from Egg Pawns with Cheese for several seconds until Knuckles save her and not calling it out as disrespectful and out of character? They must not see it as Out of Character because it’s from Sonic Team, so it’s updating her, even though that same game had her fearlessly jump into a portal to go fight a mechanical montrosity.  The cowering has no place in even the game it was in. But apparently it’s fine because it happened after that!

  They also defend Knuckles not guarding the Emerald like he’s supposed to. I can defend it with the Ad Hoc that Tails made a subtle security system for the Master Emerald like an invisible force field around it or the island itself or a robot. That way Knuckles isn't risking anything so it doesn't insult his character. THEY say it’s offscreen Character Development that he wanted to explore and have fun and that because at the end of Heroes Rouge said the Emerald must be somewhere nearby because Knuckles is there it means Knuckles has the Emerald buried nearby any time he’s with the heroes.

  Never mind that it’s still careless because of the very strong possibility that whenever he goes with Sonic he’s gonna end up far away from wherever he buried it, so Knuckles doing that with the Emerald is still carelessly risking it getting stolen. Since Rouge figures out the Emerald might be relatively nearby because she saw him, he should know he’s putting it at risk by being off Angel Island because Eggman with the 300 IQ would figure out what she did just from seeing him.

  After Sonic 3 he would’ve learned not to stray from the Emerald. So saying it’s in-character because of Sonic 3 when the point of the game was he learned Eggman wouldn’t stay away from his Emerald would be like saying Amy again trying to beat up Sonic to get her to marry her would be in-character or Shadow wanting to destroy the world would always be in-character because of SA2. And yet nobody liked it with King Shadow, because he was regressing. So why is that only bad when the comics do it?

  If Sonic Team did it they’d only briefly insult it at best. Character Development is just a positive way of phrasing “ a character is Out of Character from how he was earlier for a reason “ and they do it without any evidence that his carelessness is good and thus not Character Derailment, and how is restating what other people say about Knuckles refuting their point? Game purists complain about Archie fans doing that when they say it wasn’t meant to be like the games because " that’s what I'm complaining about! "

  Archie fans are saying that in a nice way in the same sense that Transformers wasn’t meant to be like Sonic. I say that because a game purist likes Transformers One. Game purists are saying that the game characters now are off as if it's not bad as well.

The only reason you would say it’s a good thing that Knuckles was smacked by Amy in Generations as comedy relief and was carried away by Flickies as comedy relief when he was taken seriously in Sonic 3 aside from you hating Knuckles would be that it’s new by Sonic Team therefore good. How far does that go? Knuckles could beat up chao and they’d tell you to stop whining.

  Best case scenario they’d complain once but then stop minding, like how they were with the changes to cutscenes in Sonic X Shadow Generations. They sugarcoat Knuckles being off his island as Character Development when he wasn’t ever off it in Sonic 3. Because him being careless is fun to him so any game character doing anything he likes is good! So if he got a girlfriend in the games to kiss they’d like that, but only when it’s the games, not because they share in the happiness of any characters.

  But they rip apart the idea of Surge having any offscreen Character Development that would justify her being different than how she first started, because it was offscreen. They don’t whine about him still guarding it in the Sonic Frontiers short by the way. If it was a comic book not produced by Sonic Team they would, I know because they DO complain about Knuckles being glued to the Emerald in IDW. If the fanbase was just them, then Tails and Shadow wouldn’t have been playable in SA2.

  They were playable because fans complained about them not being playable in their original idea for SA2. It was just gonna have Eggman for the dark side. They won’t accept any explanation for Surge’s characterization that’s not explicitly shown. They insist she couldn’t have been told anything about Sonic’s adventures because it wasn’t shown.

  No one saw Professor Pickle inform the people who were scared of Dark Gaia’s monsters about Dark Gaia so they’ll know what the hell was going on, realistically, therefore they never thought about why the general public would know about Dark Gaia. This took me seconds, they would’ve figured this out if they weren’t in bad faith. Also the movie Tails spied on Sonic with technology from another freaking world somehow, at that point Starline could do the same thing for Sonic and Eggman and HE’D make sense as a stalker.

  Starline never saw Dark Gaia as far as we know therefore Surge couldn’t know about it, because offscreen stuff can’t be canon if it defends the comics, but saying offscreen Character Development actually justifies main characters getting brain transplants is fine by them, because it defends the games. That’s their entire thought process, never mind that the first makes sense and the latter doesn’t.

  They complain about the mindset Comics Good Games Bad but do the inverse just as mindlessly without seeing anything wrong with that because the games are better than the comics now. But IDW fans are like that because they think the comics are better than the games. What’s wrong with both mindsets is that everything should be treated equally, it’s immoral to be otherwise, and that means treating everything and everyone with equal scrutiny!

  But as the most extreme of them put it to excuse rudeness, “ Morality is fake, we made it up. “ Instead they insist that not every writer deserves as much scrutiny as Flynn and Evan. That is having Double Standards, and those who have it are usually called hypocrites, when it’s not literally that by definition, so that was usually what I meant in my article about how hypocrisy in game purists is rampant.

  I could go on and on. And I had to to prove my point because it’s so shocking that Appeal to Novelty would apply to them and not just their rivals. They defend Shadow’s official character bio now that says he has no love for humanity and acts like he’s still evil to avoid spoiling SA2 and won’t mention Black Doom created him, and then they wonder why he keeps getting mischaracterized as evil by Flynn. He’s also made like that by the writer of the Sonic and the Tales of novels.

  Multiple game purists have said Shadow has no love for humanity simply because his NEW character bio lies about the canon of the games. Why did he fight Solaris then?! Oh it was only for Maria all of a sudden? Sure there may have been room for interpretation, he never says it’s not only for Maria, but they never apply that leniency to Archie so why should I here?

Also the same game purists take it seriously that at the end of Shadow the Hedgehog he says, " Goodbye forever Shadow the Hedgehog, " and throws away Maria's photo and leaves the ARK even though you can't just get over PTSD. They take it seriously by thinking Sega's still going with the idea that he's not being a hero to take Maria's place anymore even though that game was unpopularly written. This is doublethink. Either he's not being a hero for Maria anymore or he IS! But they switch what they argue for depending on what lets them criticize an adaptation.

  Because it’s newer you also won’t see the normally traditionalist purists complain about the Chaotix having their personalities completely changed for no reason after Knuckles Chaotix in the games, how Vector was given a cool redesign for no reason, how they’re detectives now, and Charmy’s no longer 16. Instead they’ll give Archie shit for not portraying Charmy as childish because they were going with Sega’s old age for him.

  Never mind that nearly everyone finds Charmy annoying specifically because he’s a kid – as the same traits are present in characters they like that are older – so this was clearly a bad change. You also won’t see these normally traditionalist purists hating on the Modern redesigns of the Sonic characters, because they’re newer. Then by the same logic they should’ve preferred the Riders redesigns and been mad when the games after them didn’t keep using them.

  Being new isn’t bad, but not inherently good, so it’s a neutral that’s good in the absence of anything bad about it. In terms of a viewing experience for the first time it’s good because the point of experiencing a new story is to experience something new, so it needs enough bad to cancel that out. So no not all Archie fans are dominated by this fallacy.

With the game purists’ track record they would defend Tails not accompanying Sonic in the adventures anymore with this fallacy. But that’s all his character was when he first showed up!

  They never complained about Tails not fighting during the scene in Forces where everyone was fighting. But they freaked out at him not fighting in favor of carrying Belle towards a place to keep her safe. Even though keeping her safe was a good excuse morally, while he had no excuse for not fighting in the games.

But “ Sonic Team good comics bad beep boop anything new of theirs is justified. “ But they know it’d be stupid to say the same about “ Western writers. “ That’s why they frustrate me, how confusing it is that even someone smart in some situations can be wrong in others.

8: Appeal to Minority: " The inverse of Appeal to Popularity, which is the belief that something is true because most people believe it is. Appeal to Minority can be summed up as ” everyone says I am wrong, therefore I am right.” “ If they didn’t think this they wouldn’t still be game purists.

  They by definition hate every alternate continuity including the movies which means the entire fanbase would hate any one of them they saw but they repeatedly mention that they’re being corrected all the time and respond with shit like the literal quote, “ …because I’m literally always right and always winning! “

  Neither fallacy answers the question of whether it’s more moral and smart for Sega or a writer to go with what the majority want something that’s meant for entertainment of people and making a lot of money to be like even if it is inaccurate. You can only answer that question with your empathy and common sense because it could bomb financially from alienating the 99.9% or make more money than just okay if it does the alternative.

 “ The “silent majority” argument combines this with Begging the Question, since the lack of existence of popular support is held to show something is so popular nobody bothers to openly declare support for it rather than so unpopular nobody supports it. “

  Game purists think the ones who only like the games are the majority and therefore only game fans should be catered to because the games are the most famous property and those who like SatAM are an extreme minority – even the Nostalgia Critic loved it and he once thought Sonic could swim. Shows are easier for non-fans to get into and see all of them than potentially hard games, go figure.

  People voting with their wallets IS open support. Most people didn’t buy Lost World when it first came out, not even the PC and 3DS versions, but stans of the games would. That’s how I know game purists aren’t the silent majority. Despite their lying otherwise they aren’t purists because they like the games. Most people like the games but most people aren’t canon fascists.

You don’t even have to like the games to hate an adaptational difference in Sonic or even know about it being inaccurate because some differences are bad even in a vacuum. There are other reasons they have a mindset of conserving the status quo which is a conservative mindset... such as...

9: Appeal to Tradition: “ Claiming something is superior to something else because the first is older. “ There it is, the most important fallacy for them of them all! The games were thought up first, therefore they create rules that to them must be marched in lockstep with for all time without thinking first about the pros and cons of doing so!

  Even when the games themselves change the rules they’re still perfect and they just conveniently stop caring about said rules almost as if they never actually loved the rules in the first place! Why would anyone get mad that Green Hill takes up too much space on the Forces globe and is on a continent instead of South Island? We were always at war with Eastasia!

  They won’t complain about animals not popping out of badniks in everything because Heroes put an end to that for no reason. Who cares about Sonic’s identity right? I’d think they would more than anyone! So, if the games had Eggman stop being evil, they wouldn’t complain and would instead try to impose that on the comics? Do they stan for Sage because she’s a game character?

Well the most extreme purist I saw is a Frontiers stan but another purist hates it and her. So it’s about how extreme you are. The most radicalized of all are only really invested in their agenda. If you see a series screwing up the characterization or world and are only interested in pushing your agenda again about one hierarchy being better, you don't care about its characters and world. This applies to stans of ruined characterization in IDW too. I’m never unaware of when the fallacies apply to the other extreme.

  Sonic 1 might have not been the first Sonic property to come out. All I could get about when the Sonic 1 manga came out is that it came out in the same month of June as Sonic 1, but why would it come out the same day as it when it was meant to advertise it and day 1 sales are important?

And that manga had Sonic in a rock band as the lead singer in the first issue. Should I jokingly suggest that every continuity should do the same thing? But sure, the games were come up with first and they aren’t interested in Sonic enough to learn it came out before Sonic 1.

  Sonic being in a rock band was one of the earliest ideas in Sonic history to the point of getting rejected in the initial concept phase for Sonic games after being come up with by Yuji Naka. Ironically they did demonize the removal of that and talk like it was unnecessary to do so, notice that Americans removed that idea so clearly that’s why. It furthers their agenda to defend this band idea. So going by Appeal to Tradition why don’t they complain in every adaptation and new game that Sonic isn’t in a band?

   Why aren’t they singing the praises of Sonic Underground to high heaven at least for using the band concept in something copyrighted to Sega? Because they don’t like the band idea, they’re just saying whatever they could to try to get people to be game purists like evangelicals. It’s ironic that the most extreme purist is an atheist who dislikes Christianity then.

  I thought the Master Emerald embedding itself in Eggman in a movie was cool, even though it was already done by Master Overlord and done with a Chaos Emerald alone with Mammoth Mogul before. I like ideas being reused if they’re done well and are good enough.

With these people it’s never done well because Sonic Team didn’t make it. You should notice that this double standard is the only thing that's getting me riled up in this. Sonic’s not allowed to brag in the other continuities but he can brag in Colors, Forces and Heroes as obnoxiously as he wants. “ Best boss beating ever! “ Not really Sonic, that wasn’t a hard boss. But he’s only unlikable when he does it in the same tone the same way anywhere else.

  Or maybe it’s because he constantly smirks in an evil-looking way beyond the games while bragging. That draws a big spotlight onto what was always a problem. Is a character flaw a problem objectively? Character flaws are by definition going to be annoying. But Sonic wouldn’t have been cool if he never acted confident, and how can Sonic have a cool cocky attitude without bragging, which is silently what the finger wagging was?!

10: “ Confirmation Bias (also known as cherry-picking): Presenting or accepting only data that supports your predetermined position and ignoring data that damages your position. “ That’s almost any time they demonize other adaptations and worship every game even Lost World. That’s them insisting that Sonic is humble instead of confident based on cherrypicked data. They never admit anything good’s about Archie. They almost never admit any adaptational changes are good either.

11: Everything Except Most Things: “ A generalization with so many exceptions that what remains is less than impressive, if useful at all. “ They say without hard evidence that all of the adaptations have no respect for the source material and were made by people who hated it, because to them even one difference is usually unacceptable. NONE of them are anything like the games huh? (deep breath)

Sonic the Hedgehog Story Comics The Official Sonic Yearbooks Sonic Sunday Strips Sonic 1’s Promotional Comic Sonic Adventures Comic The UK Sonic Novels Sonic the Comic The Dash Spin Manga Sonic X Sonic X Comic Chao in Space Sonic Mania Adventures The choose-your-own-adventure books!

At least 13 adaptations off the top of my head in order from most to least like the games! How many people have corrected them on this?! Maybe none are exactly like the games but my point was they’re in a world like the games and are mostly like them, and look just like them to the average observer. Their assertion even excludes the Sonic Channel Comics where Sticks watched TV with Game Tails! Yet they insist they’re canon whenever the subject comes up.

 I left Sonic Mania Adventures for last because morons would insist that’s canon to the games for being mere Youtube short ads for the games instead of a real TV show when the games never confirm that they’re canon by referencing them, so there’s just as much proof Archie is canon as them or Dark Beginnings.

Sonic never canonically hangs out in a Chao Garden and with his preference for physical activity I’d never expect him to, so Chao in Space can’t be canon to the games. Why didn’t that ruin it for them?They turned their brain off to Sonic being out of character because of who made Chao in Space. Looks like their beliefs are even more specific. “ It’s bad for adaptations to break the rules when they’re not made by Sonic Team! “ Well that doesn’t look objective.

Idiot Balls happen a lot but I'm not guaranteed to hate an Idiot Plot, DESPITE Idiot Ball being one of my biggest pet peeves right up there with Informed Wrongness, Deus ex Machina and Diabolus ex Machina. Lately usually the reason I point to for why I hate a story is that it's an Idiot Plot. But since that's not a guarantee for me hating a story, the real reason I hate it must actually be because it also failed in other aspects of writing which could have made up for it to me, probably Creativity and Pacing.

It's easy for me to like a story if I associate the story with concepts I love without that being cancelled out by concepts I hate because thinking back to it would just have me focused on how much I love the ideas of the story. It's probably mostly about whether the goodness of the concepts outweigh what sucks, which is subjective. And that kind of thing is why I take pride in being as analytical as possible to find as much is good and bad as possible when reviewing because those are more likely to be objective things about the story, so I want all that mentioned so all of the pieces of the puzzle are there for everyone else.

If a story's uncreative then slow pacing is very likely to ruin my experience because it's already bad enough that I'm not getting what I went to a new story for, I'm also being forced to put up with an already boring situation for way too long with no reprieve from the boredom. But it's still possible for me to like a story that's uncreative.

Writing Components: Creativity, Characterization, Worldbuilding, Logic, Dialogue, Respecting of The Appeal of the franchise, Pacing, Tone, and then Plot-Threads getting Resolved instead of left dangling forever. In bold, I think you need to put effort in two of these things right at minimum or it can’t be a good story. Characterization is in bold because how can I like a story if I hate all of the characters the whole time or hate them at pivotal moments? Personally I heavily value creativity because I see a new story hoping to get a new experience to justify it, but it's not in bold because I am capable of liking stories that don't actually do anything new.

Characterization is very important because if I hate all of the characters in the story when it comes to that particular story due to what's happening in it, well how can I enjoy it if the story isn't all about seeing the characters I hate getting slapstick that shows the impact every time without being gory? Even then it would still be a little boring if it was nothing new happening the whole time, if it wasn't being interesting, like literally just characters punching each other while walking.

A story is experienced as characters in a setting, so if the main characters suck, I'm left with nothing. Doesn't matter how great the setting is at that point, because the setting's just trivia, there for the characters to do stuff in. Worldbuilding's how you make a setting go from good to great, it makes me really love a setting, and not just think it looks nice when that'd hardly be unique to it.

So worldbuilding that specifically gives a setting stuff that's unique to it alone is great if what's unique isn't enraging. The story shouldn't have me hate the characters though or I'll still hate it despite appreciating that it explained the history or lore about a setting. And the worldbuilding should never have its series make LESS SENSE.

Logic can overlap with characterization very easily because if a character’s behavior isn’t believable at all, I’m just going to be baffled and perhaps even frustrated instead of whatever emotion I was intended to feel, and that’s really bad when it happens as a way of making the plot progression completely unnatural. But nearly every story has plot holes, so bad logic alone isn't what ruins a story for me.

Bad dialogue provides a barrier to entry but ultimately the story can turn out good anyways after it’s given a chance, like the Pinky and the Brain comic book story where they were singing the whole time. A lot of Archie Sonic had bad dialogue but that almost never stopped me from liking a story by itself. Having a story be almost entirely narration is another big barrier to entry for me, it made me take a long time to read a comic story one time. However, usually you can just skip narration and still understand the story.

I don't need a story to be just like Sonic 1 to like it, so the one about Respecting the Appeal of a Series/Subseries isn't vital to me, but it's extremely important to game purists though which is too bad for them because if you put too much stock in that then you can easily end up hating the majority of a franchise or continuity within it when it is usually doing stuff that isn't just based on the series' main premise and the main characters of its source material.

That's the problem, if Appeal matters too much, it can make Creativity look bad at every opportunity, because " it's not what I come to this series for! " What I come to a series for, is its characters, but I can still like characters that weren't the earliest possible ones.

It's great when a plot thread gets resolved, properly anyways. I don't need plot threads to be resolved though for the most part, it's only frustrating if not resolving it is insanely forced and every story using the element/character is making me wonder at all times why it's not resolving the plot thread, especially if not resolving the plot thread comes off as mean-spirited against them. Like, characters that were once kidnapped from their parents never ever getting the cops going up to them saying that their parents want them back.

Finally, tone isn't guaranteed to ruin a story for me either, as long as it's not outright mean-spirited, and a dark element can easily feel that way if it's completely forced by unnatural writing. So what I mean when I say you have to get the tone right is that if there's something forced about the story that's also dark at a character's expense, that could be a deal-breaker, or if the story with a dark conflict drags on too long!

It's more likely to be than, it trying to tell unfunny jokes constantly, because I just move on after that, it's only a big deal if the pacing keeps stopping dead because of that to just be about the joke making the story boring or it makes the character awful to experience while it's happening. And even then notice that I'm mentioning Pacing and Character anyways, so it's not even a comedic tone itself being what is the problem.

I didn't think to mention theme in writing components because most stories don't center around a message, even unintentionally. As someone who primarily views family friendly media, I don't see the value in having a theme, it's completely unnecessary as I've never found myself wishing anything had a theme let alone notice its absence and most of the time I end up hating any story that has a message as its point, even if I agree with it. Because it can bore me from stopping the Pacing to state the obvious, even if it doesn't get too heavy-handed, which only happens because of either it stopping the pacing or the writing gets forced to push it so that's really another component failing again.

I didn't like the anti-smoking episode in Pinky and the Brain despite despising smoking as a concept, partly because I didn't like being reminded smoking existed. Sabrina the Animated Series is all about every episode having a message, as if it isn't bad enough that Sabrina in general has this irritating theme of " magic usually backfires! " even though the only reason you go to Sabrina is to see magic get used for good and most fantasy series don't have this message. Of course if the message is terrible then that's even more annoying, and that can be where Informed Wrongness becomes a potentially story ruining pet peeve.

Like if the message is " it's bad to prevent a kingdom from collapsing and make it last forever! Never mind all the deaths that'd prevent, just take the characters' word for it that it's bad! Protagonist centered morality! " But the writing being forced also contributed to pissing me off on that front, since a character could just ask the all-powerful " villain " to do something that'd make there be no negative consequences to it anyways. Logic and Character can very easily be both gotten wrong because failing a character can be making him act impossibly.

Keep in mind they've hardly talked about it.

Johnny found it frustrating that in IDW they keep feeling the need to re-establish the status quo

and the characters aren’t able to grow and be explored, and wonders if Sega is being too strict on it.

Lewis at least recognizes that there’s quite an emphasis on OCs.

Lewis said the Metal Virus arc was only a good CONCEPT, because the ending was rushed.

1: Captain Theory, disappointed tone, “ The Wisps are still here in this day and age… “ 2: Captain Theory “ I feel like her design is TOO detailed, “ is only complaint about Tangle, that the Chaotix are pushing it as it is,

1: and Roger agrees.

2: Issue 5 Roger: “ So we discussed the first four issues BEFORE and I have a specific complaint, mainly that it felt like the same thing over and over… it was kind of, dull to me… The next issue is still kinda like that. “ It feels like just a first act, not a comic book, when it’s just about fighting badniks and avoiding lasers.

He said, “ Why would I care about all the fights? “ Even Rough and Tumble aren’t much of a focus. Normally he wouldn’t care that Sonic’s just sleep-walking through all of the IDW enemies, but it’s a problem because the characters care so much about the fact that the enemies are being a problem, so Metal Sonic was a relief for putting up a fight, unlike Issue 8 where Sonic’s still fighting badniks. So Roger thought it was funny “ overkill “ that Burning Blaze fought badniks. It reminded him of his animation of Knuckles fighting chao.

3: He wished it could be an episodic thing like Sonic Boom or a Simpsons episode, but instead Issue 6 is about the mystery over whether Eggman lost his mind or is Eggman, but “ I hate that because there was no suspension for me because I KNOW they’re gonna reset Eggman, I KNOW they’re not gonna do anything interesting with it and that’s kinda the problem with the IDW comic being directly connected to the games, if it was a spin-off like Sonic SatAM or the Archie comics, this would’ve been more interesting because then, it’d actually genuinely have a chance that they’d take the story in a completely different direction… (Yeah right.) There’s no tension here so, I really hate the fact that they take this seriously, like a mystery and everyone’s discussing this, I’d much rather just have, a fun adventure with Tinkerer and just kinda move on. “

3: Captain Theory AGREES. “ That’s kinda the problem with long-time villains… I personally love a good villain-turned-hero. “

4: Captain Theory’s not a fan of Modern Shadow here.

4: Neither is Roger. He finds it so annoying that people are surprised Shadow is helping at all with the zombot virus.

Issue 6

5: Captain Theory: “ Sonic actually starts talking about all of the times Eggman did help them, which felt really weird!... Even EGGMAN doesn’t seem like, Sonic would ever come to his defense like that. “

5: Roger: “ That’s right. “

6: Roger: “ Now they’re clearly in Sonic Forces the anthro world and yet they’re clearly happily referencing the events of the human world, “ Roger is wishing they would explain that.

6: Captain Theory “ I found it weird how they portrayed Chaos Control in this issue, where, Shadow just warps very short-distance only… “ He wonders why he warps past the Chaotix “ instead of just warping from the forest to Eggman’s location. “

7: Roger: “ That’s right, yeah. “

Issue 7:

8: Roger: “ It just makes it weird that so little happens in the comic… “ because it starts out with Sonic already on the way to the airship.

9: Roger admits the OCs “ are the only ones who can actually have an interesting story happening to them “ because they should be allowed to have romance and stuff while the game characters are “ set in stone. “

Issue 10:

10: Roger called Shadow an asshole for getting in Metal Sonic’s face ruining the plan since Metal Sonic got to copy his data because of that, and he never got a redemption moment. Captain Theory thinks Shadow’s beyond saving, as he already implied before.

Episode 3: Sonic Annual. Story with Sonic on the plane; 11: Roger “ After endless stories of Sonic fighting badniks we get a story where Sonic fights a badnik and spoiler alert, he wins, how exciting… I found this comic boring. “

about the Evan story: 12: Roger “ …wasted, there were some interesting story set-ups and then they never get anywhere. I guess we’ll never get a proper follow-up.

about the Jon Gray drawn one: 1: Luke “ I’m not exactly a big fan of Jon Gray’s artwork… “ only for this one story.

Episode 4. Tangle and Whisper Miniseries: 13: Roger: “ It felt very weird to me… “ because it’s so dark even though he likes it. “ It’s such a weird thing to me to think that this is Sonic Colors Eggman!... the fact that it’s connected with the main games makes it so weird. “

7: Captain Theory says he didn’t see why Whisper went into the trap because they should’ve left Mimic there where he was waiting for them at a trap. Captain said, “ Or just go get some reinforcements. “ As usual they all agreed with each other.

1: MeltingMan says they should use bombs on the place Mimic was in.

14: Roger says they should lock the door and melt it shut. He says they should’ve gotten “ all of the Sonic characters, “ saying that “ hey, there’s a dangerous guy over there, Shadow, Rouge, Sonic, Tails, come over, beat him up. “

8: Captain Theory says he found it “ very stupid “ that Tangle and Mimic didn’t realize that “ Whisper “ not whispering gives away the disguise. They know she doesn’t talk like that.

15: Roger says that’s a shame.

9: Captain Theory says about Mimic, “ He specifically calls out that he can shapeshift clothes… but it’s weird that his own clothes disappear. If there’s any Sonic character that is justified in not wearing clothes, it’s Mimic. “

10: Captain Theory says there are a couple of weird moments. “ After the betrayal… Mimic disguises himself, and, like, we see it from Whisper’s perspective, him looking for her, which means he’s not using his mask to look from her point of view... “

16: Roger agrees with him, “ Yeah that’s kind of a plot hole, yeah. “

11: Captain Theory says it was weird that the Shadow Androids look wrong.

2: MeltingMan agrees with Captain Theory, “ Yeah that was weird. “

12: Captain Theory says they break outta the vault “ way too easily… “ “ making me wonder why she was worried in the first place. “

Issues 13-16 17: Roger says Eggman DID do carpet-bombing on Sonic in Sonic 3.

13: Captain Theory’s amused at a character asking how Sonic got somewhere so fast.

18: Roger finds it weird that Eggman’s being so menacing when Colors Eggman would’ve slipped on a banana peel by now.

Issues 17-20 Issue 14: Captain Theory pointed out Sonic argued with Gemerl even though he was right that he should’ve run to get the virus off him.

19: Roger and Captain wouldn’t like Eggman’s flunky betraying him later and Eggman becoming incompetent later because they were praising the fact that neither of that was true when the arc started. Yep, Captain was disappointed in Starline. “ Yeah now they’re doing exactly that. “

20: Roger sees his point. “ It’s just the usual backstabbing assistant again. “

21: Roger finds it irritating that it wasn’t directly confirmed that Rouge is working for GUN and instead it’s just a similar-looking green truck being driven by Shadow.

16: Captain Theory somehow thinks Sonic wasn’t wrong for keeping Shadow from preventing the Metal Virus arc, so Shadow “ rubbing it in “ made him mad.

17: Captain Theory shouts, “ That IS the reason he’s the ultimate life form, because he’s immune to disease, and he gets INFECTED ANYWAYS! “

Issue 18: 18: Of course they hated when Shadow was turned into a zombot for refusing to run, especially Captain Theory. Somehow they forgot he had Chaos Control though. “ There is a difference between courage and stupidity! “

22: Roger says he could’ve just intentionally sacrificed himself.

3: MeltingMan: “ Yeah that is really stupid. “

23: Roger said it feels like a Shadow hater is writing Shadow. “ Even if Ian Flynn screwed up, Sega definitely isn’t helping. “

Issue 20: 19: Captain Theory “ I hate that Shadow destroyed Omega… he’s one of my favorites. “

20: Captain Theory doesn’t enjoy the first half of the issue.

24: Roger said, “ I could imagine it’d be very stressful reading these, where it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. “ He called the annual of the arc “ depressing. “

Issue 21: 25: Roger says “ we still know literally nothing about the Zeti at all, what their house looks like… “ He was amused that they’re still completely obsessed with Eggman even in their spare time.

21: Captain Theory sees Metal Charmy be brought into the base and says it was “ annoying to watch. “ He knew that any potential lame excuse for it “ didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying to watch. “

26: Roger agrees. As soon as he saw Metal Charmy get brought into the base he knew what was coming and didn’t like it.

22: Captain Theory wondered why Zavok got mad at Zeena not wanting to go back to Eggman. “ Why would she be so mad about her being cautious “ after what happened last time?

27: Roger was confused that Eggman remembered being nice because he thought it was “ completely gone out of his head. “

23: Captain Theory says Eggman’s losing control of the virus is… “ ruining the fact that, he didn’t plan for this… I liked when he was in control, he was this threatening serious villain who could’ve conquered the world. But, now he’s not… he just kinda threw a virus together and, hoped it would work out. “ The gamble he took trusting people in SA2 was a “ calculating gamble. “

28: Roger sees his point.

2020 annuals: 29: Roger said about the story where Metal Charmy was captured that, “ …because you know how it ends it’s just frustrating. “ He called it that 3 times.

24: Captain Theory called this arc depressing. A lot of his friends were asking when it would end.

25: Captain Theory said it looked like Whisper was strangling Amy when she was keeping her from running to Tangle after she got roboticized.

26: Captain Theory said Tangle hitting a zombot with a chair when already infected was pointless. “ If a chair can protect you, why can’t your shoes? “

27: Captain Theory said Amy somehow has the Babylon Rogues’ phone number.

28: Captain Theory said Cream says she wants to see “ Cream “ again.

29: Captain Theory is not happy that Starline was betrayed. “ No. “

30: Captain Theory says, “ I’m also not happy with the idea that they can just warp the virus away… it has melded with their flesh and not just coated them… So… the idea that they can just warp it away is very concerning, it would have to be on this weirdly precise microscopic level. So… I think Dr. Starline is right to be concerned about this plan. “

31: Captain Theory said “ it was a very dumb idea to send Gemerl after one of the Deadly Six! “

4: MeltingMan said, “ Yeah, that’s true “ about Sonic’s plan, which Roger said about that Sonic said it was risky.

30: Roger said “ They did not think that through, no… ESPECIALLY since GEMERL HIMSELF is usually very smart on this. “

32: Captain Theory said “ And the same goes for the Babylon Rogues… “ saying that they should’ve known their hoverboards would get taken over immediately… Everyone else, the plan immediately falls apart. “

33: Captain Theory said about Gemerl, “ He somehow destroyed the electromagnetic receiver in his head, and that gave him control of himself somehow? “

31: Roger “ … it’s kind of confusing. “

34: When Captain Theory said Gemerl was puppeted with weird energy strings,

32: Roger says, “ Yeah that’s also kind of confusing. “

35: Captain Theory said “ Gemerl uses it to tie up Zeena, somehow… which you’d think she could just get out of by stomping. But whatever. “

33: Roger said the ending of the arc with Sonic being sent to another dimension “ kinda confused me. “

34: Roger said Shadow sitting things out is annoying. He didn’t fight Zavok.

5 MeltingMan doesn’t like Modern Shadow in the Chao Racing stories.

Halloween Special:

35 Roger “ Too bad Sonic immediately… barges in and steals all the attention (from the Chaotix) but uh… “

1 Luke “ Yeah he’s not even wearing a costume! “

36 Captain Theory “ For almost no reason Tails is just flying the Tornado at the beginning… That doesn’t seem handy for trick-or-treating. “

37 Captain Theory “ Also somehow Tails spotted the Chaotix from up in the sky. “

1 Elise “ Full disclosure Mimic annoys me. “

6 MeltingMan “ …I’m not that big a fan either. “

2 Elise “ …he did my boy dirty! (about Mimic against Silver)“

7 MeltingMan “ (about Flynn writing an excuse to have Blaze go on vacation and ignore everything about her) But that’s a rant for another time… Ian Flynn’s attempts to kinda just streamline Blaze, kinda went too far in the other direction where, the last story that Marine was featured in, was basically just a lazy way of just… “

8 MeltingMan “ (about Silver and the lack of info about his past)… they, stripped away everything about his character. “

9 MeltingMan “ … worldbuilding, that was another big thing which I’m not really seeing that with IDW Sonic because so FAR, we’re like close to 75 issues and it’s just, oh we have, random generic village, random generic village, Scrapnik Island, random generic village, some raceway in the sky, and the fan favorite, random generic village. “

36 “ It’s a shame yeah. “ -Roger

10 MeltingMan also didn’t take it seriously that the Fang Miniseries ended by saying “ oh THAT’S how Eggman contacted him and blah blah blah! “

11 MeltingMan “ … and then you have Clutch who’s, EE, I, yeah he does stuff but I dunno he hasn’t really done anything to impress me so far. “

38 Captain Theory admits that it’s annoying that IDW has no humans.

12 MeltingMan “ … oh yeah that CAN be annoying especially when like a good chunk of these characters are very dull or generic, you know, basic recolors, the artist throwing a random OC that they found online. And yeah it’s especially really annoying because there’s this one story where Sonic and Blaze go to Spagonia on Blaze’s quote unquote vacation, and yeah when they get there the whole place is just a ghost town, there’s no humans anywhere. “

37 “ That was just particularly weird. “ -Roger

Sonic always chooses tricking robots over fighting them, usually via disguise. This takes much longer and is annoying because I’m wondering how the tricked was so stupid as to fall for it, as the only blue person nearby was Sonic and usually his disguises still look like blue hedgehogs or at least blue people.

And it makes me wonder why Eggman doesn’t reprogram those robots to have better facial and voice recognition or think that everyone but Eggman should be captured, as Badniks do, which wouldn’t matter if he only sends them to a place where only Sonic and Tails are. He never has a problem with seeing the robots get hurt, so he just does this because he likes tricking.

In general he’s too immoral in this show and that’s bad because it’s not in a relatable and cool way. It takes creativity to come up with a different disguise and lie every time. But they could’ve expended that creativity elsewhere. Even Eggman gets tricked by his disguises despite his distinctive voice being hardly disguised if at all. This and the absence of any real challenges Sonic had to face made Sonic a Creator’s Pet from the first episode!

Bad

Eggman having two main robots who constantly try to capture/kill Sonic who can be repaired endlessly, means he’s not as proactive as if he did it himself, which makes him more like Bowser. They could’ve had Eggman be a robot who looks like Classic Eggman and has a backup drive of his mind, so then he would’ve been able to receive the same slapstick intended for this type of show.

Bad

  That wasn’t including the SSS Squad by themselves as Differences, it’s just the concept of these robots existing in place of Eggman that could also be made in the games but weren’t for a reason. These characters don’t have an exact equivalent in the games. Orbot and Cubot don’t try to capture Sonic with Wile E Coyote traps.

  A show could be exactly like the source material but still look insanely unfaithful by the end if you included new characters as differences just because it had to create a huge amount of OCs. If you counted every new character as a change and ranked him, but most of them sucked, it’d artificially make the continuity look like it has even more negative changes and is even less like the games even if most of the new characters aren’t even in the majority of the stories so it wouldn’t be representative of the show.

And I remember most of the new characters in the show as being bad, which is because the show was a comedy always pushing the agenda that Sonic should only be funny and silly with no consequences at the end of a story in a series about a man trying to murder children with machines and then overthrow the governments and pave over nature for fun. Let’s not demean the main villain by downplaying his evilness.

Sonic can engineer things at high speed at that like a giant slot machine that can send water gushing out of it, or a race car or a catapult or a bunch of walls. It’s inspiring how smart he is at least. It gives the message that maybe even the average person could learn how to make things.

Good

Sonic can also rewire something on a wall to make casino machines of Eggman’s send money to people. Again he’s really smart which is cool.

Good

Eggman’s mother is a character in three episodes. She’s abusive, hitting him with stuff like an umbrella a lot, and lectures him for not being evil enough and capable enough. It explains why Eggman turned out the way he is. This is bizarre but no more hard to believe than Eggman’s evilness. I hate her design though.

Good

The Chaos Emeralds are more imaginative because each one has a power of its own like Superstars did for them just fine so this is only a difference because the powers aren’t the ones from Superstars. These powers are exciting and seem like coming up with them took effort because they’re not elemental. One’s for invisibility!

Good

One’s for super strength and makes you have huge muscles everywhere.

Good

One can cause immortality in whoever wears it as jewelry! One of Eggman’s ancestors was wearing it in a sarcophagus! I got to see Eggman’s ancestors in so many episodes of this show, and his mother twice. They were just like him so nothing special. At least it happened once.

Good.

One of them can create living beings out of anything!

Good.

It’s nice that it makes Sonic happy that he kisses some girls and appreciates their beauty on occasion with them enjoying it too.

Good

  That barely happens and hardly takes up any time anyways and is realistic and makes sense because it’s what anyone would expect out of a cool guy who’s meant to be the paragon of coolness. None of those girls are in more than one episode. Maybe a few come back in that clip show episode but they never talked or did anything so it’s not like he infringes on his own freedom and exploration of the world by committing to one girl.

Amy wasn’t canon yet because Sonic CD hadn’t released yet so this didn’t contradict any evidence against it in the games. It only did in the sense that the games didn’t show him doing that but the games didn’t show him using the toilet either, but he would still need to use it anyways. And in the Classic Era for sure there was no hint in the games that Sonic was outright asexual and against kissing just because he wasn’t into one girl.

  The only compliments there are to have about Sonic being shy about girls and not wanting affection from them are that it’s relatable, flawed, sympathetic, the same compliments that get demonized by game purists whenever they’re applied to how Sonic’s different from the games in other continuities in a way that also makes him realistic.

  So it’s only okay for Sonic to be relatable and flawed when it comes to a flaw that the games alone merely imply? I thought making a character more relatable didn’t make him better. Then doesn’t that mean it was a mistake to have Sonic like that, to have him respond to Elise’s crush by looking uncomfortable and saying uh?

This is what not actually thinking hierarchy’s evil results in, making exceptions constantly for what you said you believe because you don’t treat everything equally just because of their nature, a nature they couldn’t even help. Making exceptions makes it look like the beliefs weren’t really believed in and were just being used as defenses for having an opinion. People like and hate the fiction they do entirely because of the brains they have based on nature and nurture, so nobody can help that.

  Tails is gotten right in this show in theory because he was acknowledged as a genius inventor in 2 episodes. After Tails invented a flying bike for Sonic, Sonic said, “ Tails is a genius! “ and there’s another episode where Tails makes a truck into a flying truck with teeth that can fight. He just chooses not to invent stuff most of the time in favor of going on adventures with Sonic, like in the Classic games. He isn’t making a new invention in most of the games either in favor of just using the Miles Electric.

  I hate how much he’s kidnapped. He got held captive way more than in the games. But he’s kidnapped in the games as well, just far less. Give it time, and he’ll end up having been kidnapped just as much in the games as well, so I’m not gonna count that as a difference just because “ the games totally won’t have him need saving that many times! “ when I only thought that at first because of my sheer hatred for how much he gets kidnapped in the show and the sheer amount of times he got kidnapped.

But if it’s just based on feelings with no irrefutable proof, it’s probably not true. Since Tails has been captured in Frontiers and Generations and Advance 2 and Sonic 2 8-bit I only had to think about that thought for a few seconds to realize it was just an assumption based on nothing.

  I keep forgetting to mention that Eggman never looks like he’s supposed to in the old Sonic cartoons, because it has nothing to do with the plot and it went without saying. His personality is what really matters. In THIS show Classic Eggman would’ve suited its tone and him not ruling the world.

Sonic making him cry in the first episode was made even worse by his black and red eyes not meshing well with it. His Classic design wouldn’t have fit SatAM and Underground where he ruled the world, but I still didn’t like his design there due to the scary black and red eyes. But it’s supposed to be okay for a villain to look intimidating. My feelings say it’s bad but objectively there’s nothing about bad about the design so it’d be a neutral score at best.

  But when it comes to rating an aesthetic difference what is even the point if you aren’t going with your actual feelings on it? Because an aesthetic difference is something that the goodness of will be rooted in subjective personal preference and what would be the point of the rating if it’s entirely subjective? It’s why I hardly talk about the art of comics.

I already had to ignore my feelings when it came to figuring out whether it was good or bad for SatAM to have Sonic kissing Sally, because I didn’t like that he was kissing someone almost nothing like him who is usually rude to him instead of someone compatible like Bunnie. But that’s just feelings, something isn’t bad just because you dislike it.

  What would be the point of making a list of adaptational changes that matter and whether they are good if it’s not based on critical thought and counting the pros and cons that objectively exist and instead just based on surface level feelings that are rooted entirely in subjective personal preference? Anyone could do that and it’s what most people would do.

I liked that YMS said in his stream about editing a review of the live action Lion King that he wanted to consider whether an adaptational change was something he hated because it was bad or just different, and if he couldn’t explain how it was actually bad he would keep it out of the review. That was mature of him.

  Is it even fair to call “ the character looks different “ as an adaptational change when that’s inevitable from changing mediums? Sonic Channel Comics have an adaptational change then because it’s monochrome color comics, so then the characters don’t look exactly like they do in the games then, epic fail. The game characters look a little different in every continuity.

But if they’re still shaped the same and are basically the same colors what’s the problem? I used to think how Tails looked in the start of Archie and AoStH and SatAM was horrible simply because it wasn’t yellow but orange’s close to yellow anyways, and Tails was orange in the Classic Era, so it was actually disrespectful to the series’ roots to make him yellow for no reason. It’d be like if the games made Sonic purple. And after enough exposure to get used to it I prefer him that way, it makes me think of a Tails who follows Sonic into the action.

  This show's writing doesn't make any sense. On the one hand, it's creative. There's a lot more effort the writers have to put into thinking up new traps for Scratch, new disguises and tools for Sonic to win with as opposed to just him spindashing. It's not a games' ripoff plagiarizing all its content from the video games without crediting anyone. There's not even any game adaptations in the show.

I love how colorful and wacky Mobius looks, making it a charming and interesting setting compared to just ripping off Unleashed's world. It also keeps things simple with a small main cast instead of a huge cast of mainly BAD comedy relief. These are things about it that I respect. After I watched Sonic X, I appreciated this show more for being interesting, so it doesn't annoy me as much when people are too positive about it anymore. But it makes no sense!

The biggest problems with AoStH are, Scratch and Grounder’s idiocy and ridiculousness, and Sonic seeming invincible. I didn’t grow up with Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. I have no nostalgia for it at all, so maybe that’s why I only laughed from it 5 times watching it as an adult, but I can personally attest to the fact that it might not just be me; occasionally I had a five-year-old watching the episode as I was recording and reviewing it, and the ONLY time he even kind of laughed at it was when he saw underwear.

And that’s the target demographic! This isn’t a funny show. Sonic fails at a lot, so it makes sense that it’d fail at comedy, even in what I was expecting to be the funniest continuity and that turned out to be Fleetway instead.   This show is basically nothing but slapstick where the characters don’t get genuinely injured and stay that way the rest of the episode, so it’s slapstick without consequences. That does nothing for me. I’ve never laughed at the slapstick, I laughed at the occasionally really funny line from Grounder or Robotnik. Like when Grounder said about buying shoes in the afternoon, “ that’ll be really useful if I ever get feet! “

  Honestly, I just find the show too repetitive, basic and predictable because it’s just about slapstick against completely unbelievably idiotic robots with a textbook Invincible Hero, who honestly makes the VILLAINS look more sympathetic, and that’s messed up writing.

Basic good writing rule number 1 to me is “ make the villains NOT the ones you ROOT for! “ but they’re such incompetent underdogs in this show that I end up hating Sonic for being a smug sadistic trickster who’s obviously only keeping the villains alive to keep torturing them, since he could’ve easily destroyed Scratch and Grounder’s CPUs from the start, and he had MULTIPLE opportunities in the show to take Robotnik to prison, like when he was in bed asleep near him or trapped in an ice cube, and instead he took off.

  Unlike SatAM, with its laundry list of problems, this show only has a few problems, but they’re major enough to outclass those completely. Scratch and Grounder are by definition forced. There’s no way Robotnik would keep putting up with such incompetent, unbelievably gullible robot minions when they lose against Sonic personally so many times. He would’ve scrapped them, reprogrammed them or ditched them in the first episode   I don’t care how stupid they are, they wouldn’t be fooled by Sonic’s disguises every time that come completely out of nowhere, making his victories unsatisfying. SO MANY of his victories are completely unsatisfying, because they’re just too easy! They feel like even more of an ass pull whenever the villains have been a genuine threat up to that point, and usually they’re not even that.

Robotnik is reduced to a parody of himself, being pathetic, quote unquote comical, a coward, and he doesn’t even rule one city, let alone the world, when this could’ve been the perfect opportunity to, like Fleetway, show us how he would rule over PEOPLE and not mindless robots. With Robotnik being too pathetic and self-aware of how he always fails and yet insistent he'll win this time, he's literally written like how a fanfiction writer would parody him because of a dislike for the character.

The writers might be just as disrespectful of the overexposed main villain as I am specifically when he's just making the same inventions over and over in the form of killer robots and mechas. That's no excuse not to make him a threat in an official continuity.

  So Scratch and Grounder are ridiculously gullible, incompetent, waste time bickering with each other, and all around should’ve been scrapped no matter how charming they end up being in spite of their stupid voices, because honestly the idea of robot sidekicks like them who lose against Sonic personally just doesn’t work, when you'd expect Eggman to kill robots for their failure. Orbot and Cubot work because they don’t lose to Sonic directly, and are assigned to tasks they could actually succeed in, like catching Wisps.

And the disguises are bullshit, where do they come from and why do they always work, even against Eggman? This isn't Looney Tunes, this isn't Wile E Coyote, so gags like this don't work when they're ripped off for another franchise that sometimes takes itself more seriously. The whole show makes me feel like it’s treating me like an idiot, being overly saccharine easy for the smug Gary Stu Sonic.

  It’s not like it doesn’t have its moments of brilliance, I loved the one story arc with the imaginative Chaos Emeralds, I love that they brought back some original characters, and I loved that sometimes Sonic’s flaws would backfire on him, that he was attracted to and had fun kissing girls instead of the paragon of coolness being uncool about girls for no reason, and that Tails was acknowledged as a genius inventor in at least one episode. But he keeps getting kidnapped insultingly easily! It happens way more than in the games or anything.

But it’s not as bad as Robotnik, where it feels like the writer just hated him. Though I know the writers enjoyed making him hammy, but he wasn't treated with any kind of respect as a character, and if he didn't have the menacing black and red eyed Robotnik design, it wouldn't feel so OFF to me that he's portrayed as a complete buffoon.   Sometimes too lighthearted can be a bad thing, because things are too easy for the heroes and you end up rooting for the villains. Just like in Wile E Coyote, the show this show is ripping off instead of being confident in originality. And I feel like this is the only Sonic continuity where characters like Sonic constantly save the day with materials they shouldn't logically have pulling them out of nowhere because the writer wrote himself into a corner. Compare this to SatAM which had Sonic have a backpack to explain where he pulls his Ring from every time.

4/21 good fundamental differences in the universe and main cast. 21 divided by 4 is 5.25! So it was very heavily a bad thing that it was different. SatAM and Underground had a better score than this. The actual score of SatAM is 3 and the actual score of Underground is 1.69. Last time for SatAM I divided the adaptational change number by the amount of bad differences instead by accident.

This show early on acts like Sonic needs to power up with a Ring to be able to spindash through even regular robots because he uses it before doing so. Why make him a wimp? All it does is add boring padding between him being in the action and getting handed the Ring. It’s not like he needed to be more flawed, because his personality is flawed fundamentally in this show.

Bad

I hate that the Rings aren’t explained to protect Sonic from harm because there goes the only way to explain how the heroes don’t die or get injured, let alone how they survive being up in space without bubble shields. Maybe they still do, it’s never said that they don’t, but the problem is that when Earth is a separate planet that’s more realistic, it’s harder to believe that even it has a bunch of protective Rings everywhere that are just invisible like when Sonic absorbs them to explain why the heroes survive slapstick.

Bad

When Sonic’s first sent to Earth, he looks shocked and the camera pans out to show a modern city with cars which means that’s what he’s shocked by as if he’s seeing it for the first time. But there were modern cities in the backgrounds of places like Casino Night Zone, so this means that in Sonic X his world is technologically backwards, which is degrading to it for nothing. The show hardly spends any time in that places anyways and doesn't show the entire world so it's just a minor thing.

Bad

When he sees humans he gets all confused and doesn’t even know the term for them, which means he didn’t grow up in a world with humans on it, so a lot of padding gets spent with people like him hiding from humans and with a human trying to find out where they live, and with a whole episode where Sonic has to rescue Cream from people researching her, though that was interesting and used the story potential in a way that wasn’t just padding, so there it was worth it. But that was one episode where this was good.

It’s also responsible for the heroes getting stared at by a whole crowd and eventually pulled at, and Amy getting pulled a few times because she had to pretend to be a plushie. And it also makes you ask why those humans 50 years ago made Shadow to look just like Sonic’s species, but never get an official answer.

  This was a while after Sonic Adventure came out and suddenly established subtly that humans have been sharing a planet with him for quite some time, because they are used to non-humans and don’t recognize them all and think of them as the exception.

It’s more unique to have a world where humans always shared it with anthropomorphic animals, because tons of franchises based on the latter have their worlds only consist of them, to be immediately believable to everyone. This chooses Believability over Creativity and part of the Appeal of the whole series.

  All of those are important writing components that can make or break a story single-handedly, so it’s not inherently bad to choose one over the others since there’s nothing inherently wrong in a vacuum with the concept of there being 2 separate worlds for humans and non-human people. Whether you hate this depends on which writing component you value more which is subjective, preferring any one of them is valid. I care more about creativity and appeal so I think this change is bad. There’s 2 things wrong with it – it’s uncreative and misses some of what’s good about the series – so it ends up being bad, but only barely. So it’s no wonder this doesn’t make me angry.

Bad

All of the game characters constantly hang out in one mansion and have meals there for two seasons. Most of them live there the whole time. Amy gets her own place after a while but since we never see it, it doesn’t matter. Neither does this because the plots would’ve been the same either way if they always ate at their own place and just always happened to hang out at one house anyways with Chris visiting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a mansion or main characters like this being in it a lot.

We wouldn’t see their bedrooms either way and since it’s a mansion they still could’ve had bedrooms that showed their personalities anyways and they’re never inconvenienced or helped by being separated from their old possessions, in a way that’s either interesting or bad. The characters get served meals fit for the rich 3 times a day a lot as a result, all of the cooking is being done for them. So in-universe it was good.

  But this shouldn’t be the norm, the characters deserve to get to have separate houses from each other, and there’s no way this could be the permanent norm in the games, because they’re only getting fed by that family because they’re aliens and they don’t know a rich family who would regularly feed them in the games. But it could happen, because Sonic’s a celebrity so some would invite them to dinner with them. So this doesn’t even need the adaptational difference itself to exist for the pro of it to exist.

Bad

Sonic is barely in the show compared to the other characters in the first season after the second episode. He’s supposed to be the protagonist of the series and he’s one of if not the most interesting character in the show, even though he is a jerk.

Bad

Technology works less the closer an Emerald is to it unless the Emerald’s powering something specifically designed for it like a giant robot. When technology like a construction crane touches an Emerald, it causes the crane to go out of control from the power, and the TV footage of it has static keep happening. This is interesting and new and emphasizes that they’re powerful Cosmic Keystones more which is respectful. This however doesn’t cause something bad OR good to happen that matters to the main characters and thus plot.

  This just applies to a few episodes, but it’ll be counted because it’s a difference in how the universe works as a whole based on the Emeralds being different. That’s why I won’t include separate points in this list for Chaos having an electricity power once and Emerl’s whole mishandling - they’re not main characters, and the Sonic Battle “ adaptation’s “ not most of the show. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of every difference no matter how forgettable and minor. I’d have to see the whole show again for that.

Good

When Emeralds are close to each other a lot of energy discharge results. So in one episode they can create a huge pillar of light that tells Eggman where they are to make a plot around it start. So good thing for the heroes that’s not usually the case. So, this is only bad in-universe. There’s nothing actually bad about it for the audience. It’s just interesting and new, doing something extra with the Emeralds, that emphasizes their power more and respects them as Cosmic Keystones of the cosmos. This just applies to a few episodes.

Good

When two Emeralds are in the same room in Episode 23 they cause a huge amount of electrical sparking. This is only good in a vacuum, having all the same good things as above, but it contradicts earlier episodes. One time they were all in a little containment thing, why didn’t they spark?

Bad

Sonic keeps beating Eggman’s mechas in one hit at the end of the episode in Season 1 by powering up with a Ring. In the games, they take 8 hits. Later not even a Ring is needed for it; most of the SA1 bosses including Perfect Chaos are beaten in one hit. Most of the average episode isn’t about action so it’s lame to end the action so fast instead of having a longer fight and cutting out padding to make room. It’d be boring because all it’d consist of would be Sonic doing the same attacks we already saw in the games while we’d know nobody would get hurt instead of using the environment against the robot or making it attack itself.

  I’d still rather see that be the content of the episode than just see characters moving their mouths with pointless dialogue, because it’d involve things happening and it’s an action series. In Season 1 most of each episode has all the action reserved for the end so you’d save yourself the boredom by skipping to there. In the games the story has a balance of action and talking, even when it’s only because the action’s in the gameplay. But having almost nothing happening most of the time is accurate when just considering the cutscenes.

Bad

It hardly ever shows the impact when anything gets hit by an attack. Usually when it does it’s just a freeze frame of it and then a new camera angle which ruins the immersion so it isn’t satisfying to see. This even ruined the tournament arc. If there’s hardly any fighting or hitting shown there’s no real appeal to seeing it instead of a different story in Sonic X. What’s the point of an action show like this?

Bad

Amy swims once. Good for her. (She's also shown cooking, that's nice but since she lives on her own in the games it can already be assumed that she knows how to cook for herself.)

Good

Amy’s shown changing into multiple different clothes in one episode in a montage because she wants to do that as soon as she can get access to a clothing store, yet she doesn’t wear something new the whole show after this so she still prefers her red dress. This expands on her character with her love of fashion and gives us visual variety.

Good

Sonic either has no social intelligence or is a jerk to the point where he isn’t normal as for no reason he doesn’t tell his friends stuff and that backfires on them a lot. His friends look for him for an episode because he didn’t tell them where he was gonna sight-see, so they get kidnapped. He doesn’t tell his friends why he’s gonna start illegally destroying stuff that was powering the things lighting up the city when it was in darkness even though this makes him look like he’s gone rogue.

What kind of a Sonic would intentionally distance himself from his friends at every opportunity, to the point of refusing to stand with them in a group? He wasn’t next to them before the solar eclipse, and was sitting above them. There's like 30 examples of how much he fails at social skills. It’s engaging when it doesn’t inconvenience anyone in just a frustrating way with nothing good about it, but usually it does!

Bad

He's also dissonantly cheerful especially in Season 3 no matter how dangerous things get so that he doesn’t seem to care about his friends and is too unrealistically confident that it’ll be fine. He was smiling and sounded happy when he said about Chris being gone and facing a Metarex with just Cosmo, " He's gone too. " There's enjoying the adventure, and then there's just being TOO cheerful to the point of taking you out of it and making you wonder if he’s neurodiverse.

His idea of calling out Shadow for trying to murder Cosmo all episode was to cheerfully say that he's " quite a mystery, " rather than being mad. This is completely unrelatable, and not even in a debateably good way where he’s just different because he’s so much better than us. This is just off-putting and creepy. I’d rather he be relatable and fit the bare minimum required for a well-written character of seeming like a real person.

Bad

Eggman gets surprised to learn that he was born on Earth. This raises the question of how he ended up on Earth when he was too young to form permanent memories. Without explaining why, it makes it less good that Gerald is still related to him because now that’s confusing. And there was never even any story about when he came to Earth, it wasn’t actually taken advantage of, so it wasn’t worth it.

It gets more confusing since time speed is so different between the 2 worlds, because if you think about it this means that either Eggman was several decades Maria’s senior despite the two being cousins, or he’s much younger than he looks, perhaps from mad science or magic gone wrong.

Bad

Rouge is very incompetent. She always fails to get the jewels and that failure is so often. Even the one time she looked like she got one, it turned out to be fake and she found out. This is just frustrating with nothing good about it. She was already flawed enough, and it’s not like she was overpowered. It also looks like Amy and Tails are incompetent because they usually just need Sonic to save them, but they're going up against Eggman's mechas, so it could really just be that his mechas are really competent. It's still a shame that they aren't usually shown fighting something on their level.

Bad

Amy’s meaner in Season 3. Even early on she showed signs, bickering with Knuckles in the first season a lot in one episode. She gives an order and when Tails says he's supposed to do that she says just do it. She also snarks about Knuckles being stupid.

Bad

Tails having a crush on Cosmo for just one episode is hardly used so it ends up just a pointless tease that never benefits him or shows anything good happen because of it. In fact it just makes him even more upset when he has to kill her. What was the POINT of the show shipping Tails with Cosmo if she'd, one, not be able to understand and enjoy his engineering and techno babble to make an ideal life partner for him that he’d enjoy having long conversations with from a common interest, and TWO, she died at the end anyways, and three, THEY DON'T DATE at any point!

   It’s also implied the crush is only a result of a love spell because it only starts then. Oops, it’s actually brainwashing. It's good because the idea of them being in love made people happy, but if you never enjoyed yourself imagining them as a couple, just got impatient at them staring at each other with no kissing, you got nothing out of this but misery, and most Sonic fans haven’t shipped them, unless most Sonic fans watched Season 3. I doubt the ratings of the last season were at over 4 million people. Of course Tails does deserve a girlfriend, but he never got one in the show itself so that isn’t even the adaptational change here.

Bad

Sonic would’ve beaten Dark Oak as Super Sonic so he’d never scatter the Emeralds like that. Super Sonic’s not a wimp. He could've flown straight thrown him and made him explode and I wouldn't have questioned it. He beat the Death Egg Robot, that was way bigger than Dark Oak. Super Sonic can beat Perfect Dark Gaia, Perfect Chaos, the Biolizard, Metal Overlord, but a guy no magical powers who's way smaller than that? Couldn't do it, he ran low on Rings before he could beat him. And this version of Sonic beat Perfect Chaos in one hit. And yet he can't one-shot Dark Oak. Cosmo does.

Bad

Shadow has no excuse for working for Eggman in Season 3. He’d still have his morality even with amnesia. So he seems either evil or stupid, and I go with the latter because sadly it's less OOC. I can't bring myself to despise it though because it's a reference to SA2 which was almost the only Sonic game I played until I grew up, so a lot about how I view Sonic may come from that, like the fact that I don't view Sonic vs Eggman as the be all end all, that Eggman doesn't have to be fighting Sonic most of the stories, because he never fought him with a mecha in SA2.

That and the Monster of the Week formula was the standard after SA1 with only a few exceptions in the canon games, so why would I see it as always a problem that a villain other than Eggman's being used? When even Sega of Japan and Sonic Team think just Sonic vs Eggman could get boring, I don't see how someone's not a real Sonic fan if he knows that. That'd mean Sega and Sonic Team aren't real Sonic fans.

Bad

Oh yeah the show shows Knuckles getting angry a lot. This makes me remember him as uncharacteristically hotheaded but it was justified by the context though to the point where Game Knuckles would've acted the same way - of course he'd get mad at Rouge trying to push his buttons, and of course he'd get mad at Sonic when he thought Sonic was being selfish. Of course he got mad when all of his friends were pressuring him into playing baseball when they could just beat up Eggman for the Emerald. So the real problem is putting him in too many situations where he gets mad. I found his anger cathartic.

Sonic X; the characters are mostly incompetent parodies of themselves, the animation is too low-budget, the pacing is so slow before Season 3 and the focus is so not on action that it makes the stories boring to watch, to the point where you're better off only watching the ending with the action in it, and even the writing is so full of plot holes that most episodes are poorly written.

And worst of all, the setting, being a normal city on Earth, is so inherently uninteresting that it’s part of why I had to force myself to review the first two seasons. That and Sonic F is so much better! There’s almost no originality in this show at all until the Metarex arc, which is fascinating but plot holes-galore.

  The third season is almost nothing like the other two, and that’s for the best, because that’s what the show should’ve always been; instead of being trapped on boring realistic Earth with the same stale formula every time, the heroes are AT LEAST going through space and fighting aliens, though I wish they didn’t have so much focus on that boring-ass spaceship fighting, when it’s mostly just the characters’ faces being focused on as they talk about boring spaceship techno babble.

We always knew they were gonna be FINE no matter what, and they might as well not use Sonic characters at all in that stupid spaceship, since most of the time they don’t use their unique abilities and just talk about the spaceship fight. I wish that Blue Typhoon got totally destroyed at the end, that would've been cathartic.

The arc failed to take into consideration anything about how space travel and alien planet travel would be like; the characters except Chris have no problem in the vacuum of space or foreign atmospheres, when Archie gave the Sonic characters spacesuits just fine, and all aliens speak English, when Archie gave Sonic a universal translator. The perfect opportunity to worldbuild the planet that the show started on was completely wasted.

  It took until Season 3 for them to get the action scenes right, where they actually had them last a decent length. Before that, I was shocked at how many times the action scene got ended in literally ONE attack from Sonic! It’d make sense if the attack was strong enough, like a bomb, but one spindash? You just don’t do that. Bosses take 8 hits to kill, not 1.

  And eventually I really grew to hate how lazy and budget the animation looked. After all the time I spent staring at the show in editing when making my reviews, it seemed like if there was any corner they could cut, they’d cut it, and that’s why they have so many shots that linger on just the characters’ faces with them talking, which isn’t interesting to look at and made the spaceship fights even MORE boring!

And that’s why they INSIST on freeze frames or cutting away instead of showing the actual hits sometimes, which is UNACCEPTABLE!

I don’t remember ANY of the previous Sonic shows having animation so bad that I was constantly insulting it, not even Sonic Underground! I have no idea why people think THAT show’s badly animated!

Speaking of bad fight scenes, I really hated when they had a dust cloud instead of just letting us see them punch the Chaotix. I always assumed that when Shadow ” beat up Chris “ he’d be punching him a lot, but instead he just lamely force-pushes him away a measly TWO TIMES, which was the lamest thing ever!

   Chris is hardly the biggest problem with this show. In fact I appreciate him for being a deep character! He’s got some interesting issues to deal with and he’s actually pretty NICE, not a horrible brat. He gets really scared of Sonic dying and doesn’t wanna lose him.

When I first started watching the show, I assumed that every episode would have a lengthy subplot focused entirely on Chris doing mundane schoolwork. This was partly because of how bad the Western fan reception to him was.

The fans talk as if he takes up way more screentime than he actually does, but 99% of the time when he’s there, he’s just interacting with other characters, which made him feel like way more of a minor character than I expected.

I thought every episode would have most of its padding be a pointless subplot for Chris, but I was relieved in that department. Sure Chris is more the main character than Sonic but so is LITERALLY EVERY other major character in that show, to an equal extent, like Tails or Amy, because they're shown just as much.

  Chris is hardly what ruins the show, it has way bigger problems than THAT minor nitpick! It’s the fact that it’s not nearly action-packed enough, with no real comedy to fill the void, and is shockingly boring as a result, having such slow pacing to the point where, before Season 3, you’re better off skipping to the end of every episode.

  Season 1 was painful for me because Sonic F is a million times better than it, and Season 2 was also really hard to review because most of it is just pointless game adaptations that aren’t nearly original enough, when the whole appeal of an alternate continuity is giving you brand new plots to experience!

It was also really hard for me to start watching Sonic X because I knew I’d have to put up with horrible voices for most of the characters, like Amy, Tails, Knuckles, Rouge, Vector (which ruined all of his appeal in this show to me) and even Sonic! I liked Sonic's voice early on, but when he started sounding like the Sonic we know from the games, he just felt so UNREAL and unnatural!

  Though the way he’s portrayed as having no social skills at all doesn’t help with making him feel like a real person either. There’s no way he doesn’t have something wrong with him. I love that this makes me engaged and interested in his character, but seriously, what kind of a Sonic would intentionally distance himself from his friends at every opportunity, to the point of refusing to stand with them in a group? There's like 30 examples of how much he fails at social skills.

He's also dissonantly cheerful in Season 3 no matter how dangerous things get, to the point where when he said, " He's gone too, " about Chris being gone, and facing a Metarex with Cosmo, he was smiling and sounded happy. There's enjoying the adventure, and then there's just being TOO cheerful to the point of taking you out of it.

His idea of calling out Shadow for trying to murder Cosmo all episode was to cheerfully say that he's " quite a mystery, " rather than at least punching him, if not say something like, " You're a sociopath! Maria would be terrified of you! You're no better than the guy who shot her! "

Yeah, Shadow sucks in Season 3. Big idiot who works for Eggman too easily when HE'S supposed to be the one doing the manipulating as a villain, and if he can just warp without an Emerald, then why didn't he save Maria from being shot? Well he could've been out of energy to do so, but why didn't he just warp Dark Oak in the ending to a star or black hole and beat him that way, warp various parts of him apart from each other?

  I also really grew to hate how most of Sonic’s friends were USELESS and just there for a joke, especially the CHAOTIX! Amy and Knuckles are so unlikable that it’s shocking how bad they’re portrayed, and it’s sad that it’s what everyone thinks of when they think of these characters.

It’s everything that’s wrong with Modern Sonic after the Classics, the voices suck, most of the characters suck and Sonic’s ridiculously overpowered though here it's only after his spindash gets powered up to a Deus ex Machina by Rings.

  I hate that the Rings don’t simply protect Sonic from harm because there goes the only way to explain how the heroes don’t die or get injured, let alone how they survive being up in space without bubble shields, especially since Earth's not Sonic's home planet and they go up to space in one episode without being back in their universe.

So I still have to assume there's a bunch of invisible other Rings everywhere that do work like the games, but now I have less reason to believe it. The only things that are original about this continuity are the characters and Rings.

The characters are usually not deep characters at all and are stereotypes at worst, so they’re not exactly impressive, although I did end up respecting Ella for her badass moments and being great at cooking, and I did grow to love the robot sidekicks for how considerate and nice they are.

Decoe and Bocoe like helping others, particularly in the sunshine ball episode where it’s made the most obvious how nice they actually are! While their designs and names suck, telling you nothing about them, I like that they have a good team dynamic instead of tediously arguing all the time like the SSS squad.

  I just wish Eggman didn’t have self-destruct switches in them, because it’s thanks to those switches that they couldn’t survive ditching him for the heroes anyways. I wish they and WE always knew about those to JUSTIFY why they never ditched him forever.

  So we’ve got the original characters, when every continuity has to have those, and we’ve got the extremely arbitrary way Rings are portrayed wrong, and the Metarex with Cosmo, which had a grimdark crappy ending that made NO SENSE with 4 Deus ex Machinas, with everything coming out of NOWHERE!

The third season was at least a really engaging mystery that knew how to portray tension well. So I LOVED reviewing/watching it. But what was the POINT of the show shipping Tails with Cosmo if she'd, one, not be able to understand and enjoy his engineering and techno babble to make an actually compatible life partner for him - seriously she'd be so bored with him as her husband - and TWO, she died at the end anyways and three, THEY DON'T DATE at any point! That shocked me!

I thought they'd be like Bunnie and Antoine! NOPE! I thought they'd be holding each other and kissing all the time after the love spell, and that it'd happen in the middle of the arc. Nope, so why bother making her and Tails blush around each other, and why even include Cosmo then if she lacks what I thought was her whole appeal?

Oh right, to have the real main character not be Chris anymore, but instead be her, when she barely does anything useful and just whines and gets the heroes in trouble so much that she even apologizes for it. She's basically Antoine and Archie Sally fused together.

  Bottom line is, while I hoped otherwise, it’s not a good show. Most of its episodes sucked. Even without the plot holes where tons of Season 1’s episodes were just Idiot Plots, it’s usually pretty boring. Season 3 was a huge step in the right direction, but its logic fell apart.

The whole arc never would’ve happened because Sonic would’ve just beaten Dark Oak as Super Sonic right away, he’d never scatter the Emeralds like that, and Cosmo would’ve died from crashing into the planet, and Eggman wouldn’t have saved Sonic and nursed him back to health without at least putting exploding nanites in his body.

  And they really should’ve told us why the Metarex were being one-dimensionally evil right from the start. Destroying and conquering are THE generic cliché evil villain plots, so I couldn’t find them believable and see them as anything other than generic bad guys because how could an entire race of aliens support that?! Well apparently it’s because a war drove their kind to become a powerful army to fight back. OK, wish I was told that by the show from the start! They’re still pure evil though!

Their voices are SO deep that it comes off as trying too hard and with the voices being robotic, it does a crap job foreshadowing that they’re actually organics in armor. They’re so desperately grim dark with their voices, menacing designs and pointless planet destruction, and all I’m wondering is, how is this logical at all, WHY would an entire race of people approve of making themselves this way and destroying worlds? They WOULDN’T. So it’s just stupid.

  THE ONLY good thing about the Metarex is that they’re refreshing and creative because they’re plant aliens with a backstory to them, which is a surprising touch since they were literally nothing but generic bad guys up to that point. They have a backstory where they had the nature vs technology argument, and Sonic’s always been about that.

But the dumb transformation death problem that led to them becoming the Metarex felt so arbitrary and confusing that it made the technology ban in the Knuckles Comic look logical. WHY were they transforming?! Why did they want to make it last instead of never happen at all, when it made them look like horrible giant monsters?! Couldn't they just fight wars the NORMAL way? I expected to be fascinated by their backstory but I mostly felt confused as well!

  They could’ve had them be simplified to make more immediate sense; have them go after the Chaos Emeralds of each world and NOT Planet Eggs out of nowhere. Get rid of the “ transformations “ thing, but keep the war so they’d have an excuse.

And have the Metarex wanna roboticize/badnikify people, which goes with their technology schtick, and NOT try to make everyone become trees and wipe out all flesh creatures! That plan of theirs made no sense when they’re destroying trees by the billions every single time they steal a Planet Egg, so if anything, it came off like they wanted to destroy all nature ever.

  When I first saw a Planet Egg get stolen, it made me immediately think that SatAM Robotnik wouldn’t be out of place doing that same kind of plan, and yet apparently the Metarex want nothing BUT trees, and their ultimate goal is FORESTATION? Wouldn’t it make more sense if Earthia wanted that instead? She already got pushed to the extremes saying she had to destroy all the Metarex.

Instead, the Metarex at the end felt like two different potential villains mashed into one with a plan that contradicted their backstory. How do you rule over and conquer people when you’re turning them into trees, who can’t pay taxes for you and make supplies for you at all? That’s not making a new ORDER because there’s no order!

Why was Earthia weakening again? Why is the show so inconsistent with how the disappearance of a Planet Egg affects planets? One time a desert planet became a water world, so the loss of the planet's life force, made it LESS lifeless. How can a planet have a life force? How were the mother of the Seedrians a tree, which would obviously have a totally different DNA structure?

  Why is Cosmo so special just because she’s a main character? WHY did she age up and get that confusing Deus ex Machina power at the end when her amulet was never magical before and why did Tails HAVE to kill her to save the universe and repopulate her clan?!

She didn’t know Chaos Regeneration existed at the time – another Deus ex Machina – so how did she ever think being completely vaporized would let her bring back her clan when there would be nothing left of her?! If Chaos Regeneration could exist, why couldn't Sonic just bring Cosmo back completely at that point? They didn’t have to write it so that Tails would be made so miserable.

So here we have the most charming opening sequence in all of Sonic. GUN is taking Sonic to prison in a helicopter called SA2 (subtle), but somehow, he breaks out, he’s ” taken out everyone aboard, ” and he jumps out of the helicopter, breaking off a part of it to use as a snowboard, and jumps off the helicopter and into the city to escape.

This cutscene not only immediately grabs the audience’s attention because Sonic is being treated like the bad guy for once, but is also an awesome moment because it shows Sonic escaping the helicopter effortlessly and proceeding to snowboard down a sloped city street on a piece of a government helicopter. Sonic’s theme starts playing as soon as he escapes from the helicopter, and it’s cheery and upbeat electric guitars.

Now we come to Shadow’s introduction, one of the best cutscenes in all of Sonic history. Seriously, you want a contender for the most badass villain entrance scene in all of Sonic, this is it. I love Shadow’s theme, Throw It All Away, both the music and even the sad singing and guitarless interlude that reflects his tragic backstory. It’s so perfect for him as a villain, especially one who just showed up and is shrouded by mystery.

You hear it and see him as this strange being that appeared out of nowhere and is mysterious, but at the same time, is very powerful, calling himself the vague title of, ” the ultimate life form. ” I love how the music starts playing only after a few seconds of silence with Shadow staring at Sonic, because the silence makes you pay attention, and makes hearing Shadow’s theme for what’s probably the first time, all the more impactful. Shadow’s lines are great in this game, perfectly suited for a villain.

” It all starts with this… a jewel containing the ultimate power… ” And his voice actor’s acting is mostly perfect in this game, even better than the voice for Rouge. I’ve always thought of David Humphrey or however you spell his name, as the Shadow Villain Voice. It suits him as a villain, but not as anything else. It’s perfect for this game, at least. Sonic’s voice is also markedly improved, being at its best in this game.

As Shadow picks up the green Chaos Emerald (so was it powering Big Foot?), Sonic is shocked, and actually gets angry taking things seriously for a change, saying that the military has mistaken him for Shadow, and runs at him furiously while calling him a fake hedgehog. ” My name is Shadow… I’m the world’s ultimate lifeform… There’s no time for games… FAREWELL! ”

I really love how when Shadow says, ” Farewell! ” he teleports away with a cool animation at the same time, and Sonic flinches from the bright light looking vulnerable, and then wonders, ” What is he? “ something that the audience would be wondering as well if they started with the Hero Story.

Now we get Rouge’s introduction scene, where Rouge and Knuckles are arguing over the Master Emerald, and Rouge is calling the emerald hers. Knuckles says, ” What are you talking about, that emerald’s mine! You got that? ” and reveals that the Master Emerald neutralizes the power of the Chaos Emeralds, something that will come in handy later on in handy foreshadowing.

Eggman steals away the Master Emerald with a crane from his Eggmobile and Knuckles makes a smart and pragmatic decision by shattering the emerald and scattering its pieces around the world rather than let Eggman get all of it at once again. I LOVE Rouge’s scream when he shatters the emerald, it’s hilarious! And it’s so melodramatic, too, which perfectly suits her character.

Rouge grabs him and shakes him while he looks comically dazed and complains about what he did to the emerald. I love how Knuckles says, ” I did that to prevent the Master Emerald from getting stolen, you idiot! ” I love how he calls her an idiot! The way the line is delivered there is just perfect, and it’s pretty funny, while also making Knuckles a likable and relatable character from the very start. Rouge says, ” All the world’s jewels are MINE to keep! ” which is a great establishing character moment for her.

This cutscene can have one of two music tracks over it, Knuckles’ track and Rouge’s theme, depending on what story you’re playing, and I definitely think Knuckles’ version of the cutscene is the best one because of how perfectly suited to the scene it is.

Its jazzy music sounds comical, highlighting the situation where Rouge is claiming the Master Emerald is hers and Knuckles is calling her an idiot, and the way the music has the saxophone playing at the exact time that you hear the Master Emerald shining while Knuckles is explaining its special powers, it perfectly matches up with what he’s saying and what the camera is focusing on, emphasizing the mysticalness of the emerald. I never thought a saxophone could make something sound mystical, but there you go.

I love Knuckles’ voice in this game, and I especially love how he talks to Rouge. He has the best lines when talking to Rouge in this game. In fact, I’d say his interaction with Rouge is the source of his most entertaining and sympathetic dialogue and behavior in the entire series! So it’s all downhill from here. After this, he’s back to being an unlikable jerk and even gets Flanderized into an unlikable idiot as of Sonic Advance 2.

I just love how Knuckles is so deadpan and snarky with Rouge, having the clear moral high ground, and isn’t just shouting like an idiot who I wouldn’t relate to at all. Instead, he’s a Deadpan Snarker to her for being a jewel thief, being very relatable as he says what the audience is thinking. Knuckles is at his best here. This is the only game where I not only don’t hate Knuckles, but actually like him, more than Tails and Eggman!

I really wish he kept this characterization as the serious Deadpan Snarker. Just because Shadow is one doesn’t mean Knuckles shouldn’t be. He can be the serious one reprimanding Sonic for not being cautious all the time. As for Rouge, she has the best voice in this game, perfectly suited to her character as a materialistic feminine jewel thief who likes to tease people. And I don’t mean tease as in, she’s the tease, I mean that she teases people in a charming and funny way, like a big sister would tease her little brother.

I love how she teases Eggman and the spot-on delivery of that line. I love the way she talks in this game and the way she sounds. I don’t find her being feminine, offensive and weakening to her character. If anything, it makes her even more charming! She’s a competent spy who’s confident in her skills and her confidence isn’t unfounded. Her interaction with Eggman in this game is where she’s at her best. I admit it, I like Rouge as a character, in THIS GAME. All the life was sucked out of her after this.

So, this cutscene is the perfect Establishing Character Moment for both Rouge, and Knuckles in this particular game. Knuckles is at his best arguing with Rouge because he’s a Deadpan Snarker saying what the audience is thinking, making you actually respect Knuckles for once, and Rouge demonstrates how she’s a feminine jewel thief with the personality you’d expect with her every line, and I love the way she talks.

In the next cutscene, Tails is flying in the Tornado-2 (the best-looking of Tails’ planes to me) to reach Prison Island. At least it’s explained why Tails knows where to go to find Sonic, in a brief throwaway line they could’ve not given us about satellite TV. Tails has a much better voice in this game because he actually sounds sympathetic. We also hear Tails’ theme for the first time, playing on an Indian sitar, and I actually like it. It suits him. I hated Tails’ theme in the previous game, so this is a vast improvement.

Then, Tails transforms his plane into a badass battle mech to fight the Egg Walker, and engages in a fight with Eggman to prevent him from kidnapping Amy. So Amy finds Sonic in a cell walking back and forth impatiently (good characterization display there), and releases him. She tells him immediately, ” Keep your voice down, ” showing that she knows it’s a serious situation, and then says cheerfully, ” Have no fear… Amy Rose is here! ” and spins around to show that she’s not intimidated by the situation.

Amy playfully asks, ” If I tell you, will you marry me? ” and when Sonic bluntly says, ” No way! ” she’s like, ” I thought I had you this time! ” and then tells him anyways, showing that she was just joking around with him. And yet in Sonic Heroes, she tries to fight him for not marrying her? Flanderization at its finest. In this game, she’s at least sympathetic.

Amy tells Sonic that she saw Shadow with Eggman, and then asks if Sonic wrote the writing on the cell’s walls (drawing attention to it to show that it’s important/yet another Chekohv’s Gun). That writing is apparently Gerald Robotnik’s writing, as is revealed later. Sonic leaves while Amy is talking about it, and she complains about Sonic leaving and says, ” He’s such a brat sometimes, ” showing that she at least knows that Sonic isn’t perfect. She may be madly in love with him, but she’s not idealizing him.

And the fact that she says this also means the story itself is portraying Sonic as not being perfect, because there’s no indication that she’s wrong about saying this. Good, Sonic’s not a Gary Stu in this game! Don’t get used to that. After Metal Harbor, Sonic reaches Green Forest, and he has the iconic, ” I found you, faker! ” cutscene.

I actually like how Sonic’s line overlaps with Shadow’s at the end because it makes perfect sense that an impatient and confident guy like Sonic would interrupt Shadow while he’s in the middle of insulting him. The scene would feel weird without the interruption. After the boss fight ends, Eggman calls up Shadow and warns him that the island’s going to blow up soon, and Sonic and Shadow rush to escape the island. To carry on the tension into the gameplay, Green Forest has an 8-minute time limit, making the tension feel more relevant.

Sonic says that he’s gotta get out of Prison Island, ” and find Amy and Tails right away! ” getting intimidated by the situation taking it seriously right from the very first line. ” Blows up?! ” Don’t tell me you wouldn’t say that exact same thing! That is a realistic and relatable reaction to a freaking island you’re on about to explode.

After beating Pumpkin Hill, it cuts to Eggman making a global broadcast somehow, I guess by taking over satellite TV using his robots and hacking skills up on the ARK, so even the people who are standing outside in cities around the world are able to see his broadcast by looking up at the building that the telecaster is on. This is the cutscene where Eggman announces his plan for world domination and uses the Eclipse Cannon to blow up half the moon!

This freaked me out as a kid, and it’s a genuinely badass moment for Eggman, making the villain actually intimidating for once. Eggman’s screen has written messages praising him in the background, ” I am genius, I am brilliant, I am Eggman, ” as he makes his message, which not only adds humor and lightheartedness to balance out the grim seriousness of this cutscene, but also reflects his arrogant characterization rather well. After this, Tails shows off his character as the genius by making a smart plan.

He says that the Chaos Emeralds ” are like magnets. They have the power to attract each other. I can use that to find out where Eggman is. ” Again, just like at the end of SA1, Tails is showing that he understands the Chaos Emeralds. Foreshadowing! Tails says that he’s not getting a signal from the other six emeralds, and is smart enough to figure out that Eggman took them into outer space. Another smart realization from Tails!

He turns his mech into a go-kart, and races after the limousine so that he can use his technology skills to trace the call and find out where Eggman is. See, I like the plot of this game. It makes fantastic use of Tails’ intelligence, and at the same time, he’s not arrogant about it once, so he remains a sympathetic character. So, the president is having a video conference with Eggman to find out his demands.

I really like how the video of Eggman is of low quality or whatever, because it really makes it look like he’s transmitting the signal all the way from outer space. He asks what he wants, and Eggman threatens to destroy the country in 24 hours if he doesn’t surrender to him. Again, a genuinely threatening moment for Eggman. Then, Sonic and Tails show up, with Sonic running alongside the limo, and they jump into the limo through the hole in the roof.

There’s great and inspiring music here as soon as Sonic shows up, playing his theme to let you know that everything will be alright. Sonic sends Knuckles to find the key to progress in the base. He’s genuinely nice to him, calling him, ” The world’s greatest treasure hunter! “ And the complaining about finding the keys suits his character as someone who’s not a team player. After King Boom Boo, Knuckles complains, ” That was pretty rough. ” You said it, Knuckles. Fuck that boss.

When the space shuttle gets hit by a meteor, Knuckles gets worried about the Master Emerald pieces falling out of the back of it, a good character moment for him. Tails is discussing what he knows about the ARK, saying it was shut down after a terrible accident. Well, he is an engineer, so it makes sense that he’d be full of trivia about technology like space shuttles. Tails makes a plan to destroy the Eclipse Cannon from the inside, being shown as the brains of the team.

He actually made a fake Chaos Emerald that would do the trick, with the same wavelength and properties as a real one, but less powerful, and capable of blowing up the Eclipse Cannon by reversing the energy in it. Now, this is easily one of Tails’ most competent moments, as you can tell by Sonic’s amazed look when Tails is nonchalantly (thankfully) explaining his accomplishment. Tails making a fake but still powerful Chaos Emerald is his most glorious moment of genius in the franchise, and he’s not even arrogant about it.

And it got tons of foreshadowing beforehand that makes it believable that Tails could know enough about Chaos Emeralds to make a fake one. Remember when he figured out that Perfect Chaos used the negative power of the emeralds, and positive emotions projected by cheering could reenergize the emeralds that were drained of their power? Remember in this game when he said that emeralds are like magnets and can attract each other, and he can locate other emeralds this way?

He clearly understands Chaos Emeralds quite well, so it makes sense that he’d be able to make a fake one. Not sure what materials he made it out of, but whatever. He probably used the yellow Chaos Emerald he already had to make it, infusing its power into the fake one. I really like how Tails gets to be the smart guy a lot in this game, being at his most competent here, and is nonchalant about it instead of an insufferable brat like in later games, so he continues to be sympathetic.

Just before Sonic puts the fake emerald into the Eclipse Cannon, Eggman hacks into the communication system Tails was conversing with Sonic with and tells Sonic that he kidnapped Amy and to meet him in the research facility. This is Eggman being a competent villain, with Sonic taking the situation seriously to back that up. That gets you invested in the story. ” Long time no see, treasure hunter! Did you find MY emerald? ” ” Your emerald? That’s a good one. Talking to YOU is a waste of TIME! “

The next cutscene, I really love. There’s so much UST between these two in this game. Knuckles and Rouge are panting in exhaustion, and both demand the Master Emerald from each other. Rouge and Knuckles argue again. I like how Rouge insults him for ” attacking a lady? Shame on you! ” and Knuckles just says, ” What kind of lady goes around stealing gems, anyway? ” having an intelligent response to that. Again, saying what the audience is thinking.

Rouge missteps and falls off the narrow platform and starts falling towards the lava below, and ends up having her wrist grabbed by Knuckles, who pulls her up to safety because he’s a hero like that. The two gaze into each other’s eyes for a second or two, before Rouge pulls away and yells at him for holding her wrist.

She teases him with a smile, saying, ” You just wanted to hold my hand, didn’t you? THAT’S why you saved me! You’re such a creep! ” I just love the performance of that line! Knuckles insists that he was saving the Master Emerald (because Rouge had some pieces on her). Rouge gives the audience an Aside Glance, rolls her eyes and says with the great performance, ” No matter WHAT you say, it SOUNDS CRAZY! ” and gives him the pieces she has, with the excuse that, ” They stink like echidnas do! ”

I love how Knuckles instantly snarks at her, ” If that’s what you thought, you should’ve given them to me in the first place! ” Then Knuckles puts the Master Emerald back together, and Knuckles actually apologizes to Rouge for fighting with her, saying, ” I’m sorry… if I hurt you, ” and then leaves. The fact that Knuckles apologized at all is heartwarming.

Rouge reveals a soft side as well by smiling afterwards, saying in a clearly distracted tone that implies she has a crush on Knuckles, ” We should get going… ” and looking back at him before flying away. It goes without saying at this point that I love everything about this cutscene. The performance, the lines, the body animations, generally what happens in it, it’s all perfect! It never fails to make me smile.

However, I think Rouge’s version of it is the best because it has Rouge’s theme playing, a pleasant and happy theme that is much better suited to the cutscene where Rouge begins to get a crush on Knuckles. I love the UST between Knuckles and Rouge. I love the way he interacts with Rouge. He’s sarcastic in a relatable, witty and funny way, being a Deadpan Snarker who comes off as actually intelligent, saying what the audience is thinking. Knuckles doesn’t annoy me.

He has great lines, a great actor, the perfect voice for his role as the serious Deadpan Snarker, and his characterization is perfect compared to all the other portrayals of him; serious, sarcastic, cares about his friends enough to search them out and tag along with them on an adventure as soon as he’s done fixing the Master Emerald (instead of just returning to Angel Island and staying there like in SA1), he can make pragmatic and smart decisions like shattering the Master Emerald to save it, and he doesn’t try to hurt Sonic or insist that he’s better than him.

He’s not gullible, he doesn’t try to beat up Sonic as usual, and he’s not irritatingly proud. He’s cool, suave, and relatable. I miss this Knuckles. The game starts the cutscene where Eggman traps Sonic in a capsule and sends him into space because he found out on his own that Sonic was going to give him a fake Chaos Emerald. This is one of Eggman’s only moments where I can accept him as an actual threat.

I also like how he lets Tails think that he tricked him into revealing the truth, saying, ” Because you just told me, fox-boy! ” instead of explaining how he actually knew. It’s in-character for Eggman to be a dick like that and make Tails blame himself for what could happen to Sonic.

Sonic is in the capsule as it’s falling with appropriate music to it and remembers Tails saying that the emerald has the same wavelength and properties of a real emerald, and he actually shows depth to his character by showing insecurity rather than being cocky, something you’ll never see in any Sonic game like Sonic Colors. ” But… can I do this? ” I like how the cutscene doesn’t have Sonic explicitly state that he plans on doing what Shadow does with the Chaos Emerald. It keeps it a surprise.

It makes sense that he’d be able to use Chaos Control with a fake emerald. Not only because it has the same wavelength and properties as a real one (somehow), and not only because it’s still powerful by itself, but also because Sonic’s been exposed to Chaos Energy for five whole years by this point. He’s so familiar with it that not only could he be able to figure out how to do Chaos Control, but chaos energy might have actually seeped into him over the years from all the times he’s used the Chaos Emeralds.

Just think about all the new abilities Sonic’s gotten since he first used them in Sonic 1. Abilities that can outright defy the laws of physics, like a Chaos Emerald can. You can’t tell me that the homing-attack doesn’t defy physics. And with Sonic being able to beat Perfect Chaos in Generations without a Super Sonic form, it’s canon now that Sonic has been getting stronger as he’s gotten older. And it’s not just because age brings experience. It’s the chaos energy seeping into him and making him stronger, giving him new abilities and so on.

It makes sense that by this point, Sonic would be able to use Chaos Control with a less powerful version of a Chaos Emerald, because he has chaos energy in himself to draw from as well. Besides, he’s already seen Shadow do it, and Shadow shows all the same abilities that he has, so it’s only logical that Sonic would think that maybe Chaos Control is yet another ability shared between him and Shadow. Amy’s acting for crying over Sonic, is perfect, especially when she’s crying out his name. It actually makes you feel sorry for her!

Tails holds back his sadness and attacks Eggman with his mech like a badass. Meanwhile, Sonic appears next to Knuckles because he used Chaos Control. They actually act as friends for once in this scene!

When Knuckles sees Sonic lying on the floor, he’s genuinely worried and checks to see if he’s okay, and when Sonic stands up all woozy, he lets Sonic have one arm over his shoulder to balance himself and asks, ” Are you okay? ” in a worried tone. Considering what a jerk Knuckles is to Sonic usually and how rude Sonic is to him in later games, it’s really heartwarming.

Sonic says to him, ” I’m worried about Tails and Amy. I hate to ask, but, could you help them? ” showing that he takes the situation seriously to get the audience invested, and that he still has a rivalry with Knuckles being reluctant to ask him for help. Now we get to the cutscene where Sonic and Shadow meet up. I love the music playing here, with the dramatic trumpets perfectly suiting Shadow’s role as a villain in this game. Shadow says, ” Your adventuring days are coming to an end! ” I love his performance of that line.

Shadow’s acting performance in this game as a whole is excellent. You could argue that he sounds monotone, but it perfectly suits a character with his personality who’s experienced such a traumatic backstory so recently from his own point of view. A creepy villain like him, speaking with little emotional inflection? That suits him perfectly! Same goes for Knuckles. He sounds like he’s talking in monotone sometimes, but he’s characterized as a serious person, so of course he sounds all deadpan!

In the Hero Story, Sonic destroys the Eclipse Cannon with the fake emerald. Tails says, ” Sonic, I did it, ” into the walky-talky. He says it unhappily because he feels like he had a hollow victory, and it is a genuinely sad scene before Sonic tells him he did an awesome job and cheers everyone up, the music swelling to change the mood to a happy one full of relief as the cannon blows up.

One of the reasons SA2’s story is so good, aside from actions having consequences and a balance of action and drama, is that it starts out with an interesting role reversal that instantly captivates your attention. Most of the time, Sonic’s chasing down Eggman being the hero. Here, Sonic is being chased down like he’s a villain, while Eggman is infiltrating a GUN building, shooting around in the Egg Walker getting involved in the action himself.

Usually, it’s Sonic involved in the action, but here we have Sonic getting chased and Eggman involved in the action, and not even action related to Sonic. It’s captivating from the very beginning, regardless of what story you’re starting out with, not to mention it’s badass of Eggman, or so I’ve heard. So, yeah. Eggman breaks into a military facility of GUN’s and mentions that his grandfather’s diary talked about GUN sealing away a top secret military weapon because they feared it.

He breaks in shooting with the Egg Walker, with his theme playing, and the stage begins. I like the atmosphere of this cutscene with the echoing female announcer saying, ” Intruder alert! This is not a drill! I repeat, this is not a drill! ” and the red sirens going off. Eggman puts in a Chaos Emerald and a capsule rises in a dramatic entrance.

I love the dramatic and creepy villain music that plays here for Shadow’s entrance, with the violins and trumpets, and it combined with the camera panning around and Shadow’s acting performance and lines, makes this a perfect villain’s opening scene. ” My name is Shadow… Since you were so kind to release me, my master… I will grant you one wish… Behold, the true power I possess! ” I love it! So Shadow teleports away and into a room where the next boss is.

Eggman asks what Shadow meant when he said he would grant him a wish, and Shadow answers with the non-answer, ” Bring more Chaos Emeralds, ” implying right away that he has his own agenda and is manipulating Eggman for his own purposes. ” I’ll be waiting for you… in the central control room, on the space colony ARK. “ We cut to Shadow standing high up near a grind rail leading to the entrance to Radical Highway. He looks down on the people below and calls them pathetic. Typical villain stuff.

Then, you hear his theme playing, and in something that shocked the audience back then, instead of Shadow doing something awesome when his theme plays, he has a flashback of him running through a corridor from these soldiers with a human girl, and he cries out in anguish, ” Maria! “ showing that he cared about someone other than himself. Then we cut to him being in a space capsule about to be sent to the earth, with Maria making it tragically clear that she’s not coming with him. This gives you sympathy for a villain for once.

I like Maria’s voice. It’s in a whispery tone in this scene, and it adds tragedy to it, really making it sound like she’s saying goodbye to him forever. ” Shadow, do it for me, for all the people who live on that planet… ” There’s a silence, and she says, ” Sayonara, Shadow, the Hedgehog… ” I really like how there’s a comma between Shadow and the rest of his name, because again, it adds to the tragedy of the scene.

And she says goodbye in a different language to add more emotional impact to her saying that word by being surprising; even in the Japanese version, she says, ” Adios, ” rather than sayonara, making it clear what the intent was. Since she never explicitly states what she wants Shadow to do, this creates the implication that Shadow forgot what she said, or maybe Gerald Robotnik reprogrammed him with a serum or something to forget so that his PTSD and grief-stricken anger would let him believe that she wanted him to take revenge like he wanted.

Shadow shocks the audience (at the time) by saying that he promised that girl something and is doing something for her. A stereotypical villain, he is not! He shocks the audience again by saying that, ” I promised you… REVENGE! ” making some wonder if Maria actually wanted that and wasn’t just this innocent little girl. And I love how the music cuts out seconds before he says, ” revenge! ” because it makes you pay close attention from noticing that the music is gone, making the word all the more impactful.

The flashback has another layer of tragedy because the audience back then wouldn’t know that Maria was going to get killed. For all you knew, Maria was going to get captured and imprisoned. The soldiers were just after the ultimate life form! They wouldn’t kill a little girl! Right? Right?! And it makes it all the more shocking and tragic when Gerald’s diary reveals, that they DID. You can’t truly understand just how impactful this story was when the game first came out if you found out from the internet instead of by playing the game.

It’s a story full of mysteries and tragedy, and you try to believe that it’s not as tragic as it could be, and then the Last Story hits you like a ton of bricks. This is a game that does drama well. You start out thinking Shadow is just the typical villain, an evil Sonic, and then this cutscene shows up, and turns all of that on its head. And you can’t even say it came out of nowhere because the password Eggman used to awaken Shadow was, ” Maria, ” and now you know who Maria is! AGAIN, MORE FORESHADOWING!

Aside from the Maria model, everything about this cutscene is perfect, especially the music, the way it goes from energy-filled Shadow theme to being sad and tragic like a final goodbye when Maria shows up. If you didn’t feel anything from these scenes when you first saw them, I’m sorry, but you have no soul, because whether it’s a cartoon hedgehog or not, the fact remains that this scene is tragic and moving.

In the introductory cutscene, Rouge says into an invisible Bluetooth or whatever, ” This is Rouge. I’ve located Eggman’s base, and will proceed to enter it now… I hate to say it… I guess I’m going to have to find that KEY first. ” I like the performance given to when she complains about having to find keys. So Rouge recognizes the space transporter of Eggman’s base on sight, and apparently knows that ARK was shut down 50 years ago. She’s pretty well-informed. Well, she does work for GUN.

She says that it’s her mission to find out what Eggman’s up to. I love the performance of the line, ” It’s MY MISSION to find out what he’s up to! ” She’s so confident. Shadow’s best villain scene is here. He introduces Eggman to the Eclipse Cannon, and says to manipulate him that he can bring the world under his rule by putting Chaos Emeralds in it and threatening to destroy the world with it.

Everything about this scene perfectly creates the atmosphere, from the dramatic music to the camera panning out and around, to the visual effects after Shadow puts the Chaos Emerald into the cannon with an evil smirk. Everything about this scene is great. It’s really captivating, and I love the lines Shadow has and the performance of the actor. Shadow as a villain is the best villain in all of the Sonic games by far, much more interesting than Eggman, that’s for sure.

Everything about this scene from the creepy music to Shadow’s smirking and performance and lines to the way it looks and the dynamic camera angles, it’s just perfect! Then, Rouge appears from the ceiling saying, ” Do you really think it will be that easy? ” like she’s going to oppose them, only to instantly smile sweetly at Eggman and say she’ll help him. Talk about obviously manipulative. But that’s her character, and I like it.

I love the performance of her lines in this scene. ” I’VE got a GREAT idea! HOW ’bout MAKING a DEAL? ” She sounds so condescending and manipulative of Eggman, it’s great! She says she has an idea of where the other Chaos Emeralds may be. She mentions that she knows Eggman used a radar to find the Master Emerald. ” Now if you’d just let me borrow that radar, I may be able to HELP you! ” I love the performance of that line! She’s so condescending of him, but in a likable feminine way!

I also like how when she says, ” do you know that I am a treasure hunter who specializes in all kinds of jewels… ” she pulls out a Chaos Emerald right at the end of her sentence. The cutscene presentation in this game may not be perfect, but it’s such a massive step up from SA1. Eggman looks at Shadow, who nods, and he agrees to let her join him. Rouge flies down and says, ” I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m Rouge the Bat! But you can call me Rouge. ”

Rouge brings Eggman and Shadow to a forest in Prison Island where she knows from her, ” intelligence reports, ” that there’s Chaos Emeralds there. I like the music that plays here, it’s very suited to the atmosphere. I like Eggman’s line, ” Having to come back to earth so soon isn’t MY idea of a VACATION! “ I just love his interaction with Shadow and Rouge as his subordinates. I also love how sassy Rouge is to him, saying while making a gesture I like, ” Well, BELIEVE what you WANNA believe. “

Eggman makes a plan, saying that he’ll go in first and distract the military and will send Rouge to get the emeralds from Security Hall. He says in a nice way that she’ll be able to handle that task, and I really like Rouge’s gesture in response to that. Eggman plans to blow up the whole island before GUN knows what hit them, and he sounds really excited about that, which is pretty amusing and a good character moment for him.

Cut to Shadow walking in the forest. He gets a call from Rouge, who says, ” I’ve got a slight problem… ” I like her performance here. She says that she’s trapped in a locked safe with Chaos Emeralds. ” I guess I won’t be able to call myself a treasure hunter anymore… ” Suddenly, Shadow has flashbacks of Maria, making it clear without words what’s going through his head; he already lost one female friend of his, he doesn’t want to lose another. But if he destroys the world, he’ll lose Rouge anyways, won’t he?

Again, it really goes to show you how upset he is that he’s so determined to get his revenge that he won’t notice the potential consequences for him. He says in a typical Anti-Hero fashion, ” Shoot! Troublemaker! ” it’s a good scene helping establish that Shadow is not pure evil in this game. We have a flashback where we get to see how Maria was like before she got hunted down by the soldiers. She’s a nice little girl saying, ” Shadow, what do you think it’s like on Earth? ”

Instead of properly responding to her rhetorical question, Shadow says, ” The professor said his life was dedicated to, all those who live down there… He once said that the reason for his existence was, making people happy through the power of science. Maria, I just don’t KNOW anything anymore. I often wonder why I was created, what my purpose is for being here. Maybe if I go down there, I will FIND the ANSWERS, maybe… ” He sounds so genuinely sad and insecure when he says, ” maybe. “

I just love this flashback. The piano music playing, Maria being innocent and curious, and Shadow showing that he wasn’t always the way he was in this game, showing insecurity and wondering what his purpose is, it really helps to make Shadow a sympathetic and interesting character in this game. ” Why so melancholy? ” Again, Rouge is pretty smart, she uses a ” big word ” casually. Is that a big word? Whatever. She says with a smile that his ability to use Chaos Control ” certainly comes in handy! ”

I like how Shadow has a classic Tsundere moment saying, ” I didn’t come to save YOU. I came back for the Chaos Emeralds! ” and Rouge is smart enough to see through it and say, ” Yeah, yeah, yeah, but THAT’S not the whole story, is it? ” while a throat-clearing sound is heard, I guess from Eggman walking into the room, that seems to suit the humor of the scene.

Eggman decides that now is the time for him to make his worldwide announcement threatening the planet, and Rouge is unsure, saying, ” Are you sure? We only have six of the seven Chaos Emeralds, you know. ” I love Shadow’s performance of the line, ” That’s MORE than enough for the demonstration! So, let’s get this SHOW on the ROAD! ” He sounds so uncharacteristically happy and cheerful, it’s pretty humorous. You’d NEVER expect to hear Shadow say that past this game.

This next scene is pretty humorous. Everyone in the team is bickering with each other like they’re turning against each other, with Eggman throwing a tantrum and Shadow nagging him in a deadpan tone, ” you’ll need ALL SEVEN Chaos Emeralds… ” and Eggman complaining to Rouge out of nowhere, ” WHERE in the WORLD have you BEEN? “ I just love Rouge’s teasing of Eggman in this cutscene!

Instead of getting nervous when he asks where she’s been, she’s nonchalantly asking, ” Something happen? ” and after getting the answer, she teases Eggman like a big sister, ” Throwing a tantrum like a little kid! How TOTALLY embarrassing! ”

Eggman asked where the seventh emerald is, saying, ” We had a deal! ” and without even getting nervous, Rouge says in a very condescending and humorous manner, ” Here you go, I FOUND THIS! ” while giving Eggman a newspaper, and he immediately says, ” Why didn’t you show me this before?! ” which is pretty funny. See, as drama-filled as this story is, it still does humor, and rather well at that!

The newspaper reveals that Tails was given a Chaos Emerald for saving Station Square, this game actually bothering to have a Continuity Nod from a previous game that factors vitally into the plot. Shadow says, ” Soon enough, Maria… ” and leaves. Rouge tells her boss while alone that she has yet to confirm whether Shadow is the ultimate life form or not, and she reveals that another part of her mission is to get information on Project Shadow. ” Don’t forget about my, jewels… ” I love that line and her performance of it!

So is GUN paying her in jewels? Or are they giving her a paycheck and bribing her with jewels at the same time? Maybe they hired her because as a jewel thief, she’s a prodigy at sneaking into places and people wouldn’t expect her to be hired by them as a spy to take advantage of that. This implies that GUN is looking the other way as a member of GUN steals jewels and even bribing her with them. This could show that Shadow has a point by not trusting GUN since they’re corrupt even in the present day.

Rouge calls up Eggman from the room with the Eclipse Cannon. ” What do you mean they escaped? ” She sounds annoyed. Is that good acting on her part? She’s a good liar. She lies in a sly way, ” I will go after them myself, ” and asks him for the password to get some information on Shadow. ” Tricking that old doctor is just too easy! ” I love the performance of that line! She then finds out something shocking that is revealed later, setting up a plot point for later rather than it coming up out of nowhere.

Eggman sees on a screen that there’s energy readings from two Chaos Emeralds, rather than it never being explained how he knew that there was a fake emerald. So the Dark Story gives you an extra cutscene where Eggman kidnaps Amy. He actually succeeds in looking menacing, like his actor’s performance of, ” If you value your life, you will tell me where Sonic and Tails are! ” and Amy actually sounds frightened.

Rouge acts like she’s going to steal the emeralds in the Eclipse Cannon, saying, ” I have six of them! They’re mine! All mine! ” while Rouge’s theme plays. Shadow finds out Rouge is a spy, and as Shadow and Rouge are bickering, you hear the happy and pleasant Rouge’s theme playing making this scene look like comical harmless bickering. It’s like the scene is telling you not to take it seriously. Since Rouge doesn’t actually suffer any consequences and it was shown already that Shadow cares about Rouge, the music here is actually fitting.

Then, we get to the good part. The music stops entirely to make you pay attention, and Rouge flies in front of Shadow holding an article about Project Shadow that shows the Biolizard. So that’s what she was so shocked about before! I love how Shadow’s theme starts playing after Rouge asks, ” … then just who, or what, is standing in front of me? ”

The music that plays during the flashbacks with Maria plays when Eggman calls up Shadow telling him that there’s not much time left before the cannon fires again, and this sad music keeps going as Rouge talks to Shadow some more. Shadow says, ” If you wanna live, leave the Chaos Emeralds where they are! The fake emerald is good enough for you. ” Instead of reacting to that empty death threat, Rouge is fearless enough to not care and ask in concern, ” Do you actually believe that you’re the real Shadow? ”

Shadow instantly says confidently, ” No doubt! “ And then Rouge says, ” Even your memories may not be real! ” being accidentally right. This is good because the plot is foreshadowing to what’s revealed in the Last Story’s Japanese script about Gerald Robotnik, ” I ALSO completely control his memories. ”

And when told that he and his memories might not be real, instead of spending two entire games angsting about it, Shadow says (in a sympathetically insecure tone), ” Even if my memories aren’t real, it’s still me, Shadow! And I will fulfill my promise to Maria! That’s the only thing that matters to me now… “ I really love how Shadow is acted with those lines. He actually sounds sad, and unsure of himself, and it makes him more sympathetic. This cutscene is just fantastic.

The final cutscene of the Dark Story is Eggman putting the yellow Chaos Emerald from Tails’ boss fight into the Eclipse Cannon, saying, ” This completes my plan to take over the world! ” and then the camera pans away from him as a red tint flashes through the room, and then it shows a Warning sign on the screen in front of Eggman, foreshadowing perfectly what the first scene of the Last Story will be.

After all, a Warning error message wouldn’t be appearing if the Eclipse Cannon was about to do what it was originally intended to do, which foreshadows the cannon’s override in the Last Story. So, Eggman tries and fails to fire the Eclipse Cannon. It’s humorous hearing him growling, ” WHY DOESN’T the CANNON FIRE? “ in subdued frustration. The screen in front of him goes from having the word, ” Warning, ” on it as in the Dark Story’s ending cutscene, to showing a picture of, ” my grandfather… Gerald Robotnik! ”

This must have been a pretty shocking twist back in the day, that not only does Eggman have actual family members being acknowledged in the games, but one of them was a brilliant engineer like him, and actually created Shadow. Even more shocking, and disturbing, is that it’s a video of Gerald Robotnik in a straitjacket or something with chains around his body as he’s sitting down on a chair, clearly just about to be executed and making his final speech, a speech that will now get broadcast to the entire world.

And that speech, is disturbing. With dramatic music playing for the right atmosphere, you see scenes of the humans of various countries in the world being scared as a man with a Russian accent says, ” This is a death sentence to every human being on Earth… “ explaining that the space colony ARK will collide with Earth soon, and, ” All of you will be destroyed, along with your beloved planet Earth. ” And then you see the space colony ARK hurtling towards Earth, with a trail of fire behind it to really seal the deal.

” I plan to give you a taste of my revenge once the seven Chaos Emeralds are collected. Once this timer activates, it cannot be disabled. ALL of you UNGRATEFUL humans, who took everything AWAY from me… will FEEL my LOSS, and DESPAIR… “ Suddenly the ARK starts vibrating, and you hear Gerald Robotnik’s echoing voice repeating in an intimidating way, ” All of you ungrateful humans, who took everything away from me, will feel my loss, and despair! ”

Whoever did the performance for Gerald Robotnik did an incredible job of showing his anguish, sadness and bitter resentment in those lines. Rouge enters the room, and says sadly showing depth to her character beyond a selfish jewel thief, ” It’s all over for us! I just received a message from my boss. The space colony ARK, is currently approaching the earth, at terminal velocity. It eventually… will impact Earth. ”

Amy says in a frightened tone after hearing Gerald Robotnik’s speech, ” What’s going on here?! ” at hearing what Gerald said, which is meant to get the audience more invested from proper character reactions to the villain’s speech, from important characters who aren’t random humans.

Everyone is taking the situation seriously, with Knuckles getting furious at Eggman and the other characters focusing on figuring out how to save the world with Tails worrying, ” It may be too late! ” later on. This is good to complement the tension. This is a good climax. Rouge finds Gerald Robotnik’s diary, and reads it unhappily as dramatic music plays.

It’s fantastic that they have the diary at all because it establishes more of the sympathetic side of Gerald Robotnik that we only got hints of in Shadow’s flashback, and the exposition we get here is done in a way that is both visually interesting and does all the right things to establish the right ominous tone to make it captivating. I love what they do in this scene.

They show blurry white words reflecting what she’s reading appearing on the screen, and eventually covering it as the characters listen on reacting to it with Amy being horrified, and you go from hearing Rouge read it, to hearing Gerald reading it. Again, the voice actor for Gerald Robotnik did a fantastic job here, perfectly conveying the amount of anguish and sanity slippage he was going through at the time. It works much better than just hearing Rouge read it. This works as a tearjerker every time!

” I don’t know what happened or what went wrong. Was it a mistake to create the ultimate life form? I thought it would be something that would benefit mankind… but then the military troops stormed the colony that day. They were sent to destroy the project that I had been working on. My colleagues in the ARK, my granddaughter Maria, I hope you are all safe. The colony was shut down- ”

And then Gerald’s voice says, ” The colony was shut down, probably to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. The colony was shut down, under the premise, that there had been an ‘ accident… ‘ “ ” If you wish, release, and awaken it, to the WORLLLD- ” ” If you wish to fill the world with destruction… ” Rouge says instantly.

This is an instance where the lines overlapping each other actually contribute positively to the scene, making it feel surreal when it’s already supposed to be creepy and surreal. You go from Gerald speaking in pure anguish to a creepily pleasant and at peace tone, like he’s gone from grief-stricken despair to peaceful at coming up with a plan to destroy the world. He also speaks in a creepy way, elongating some of the words.

Rouge shows another sign of intelligence when she comes up with the plan before Tails does, saying, ” We have to use your Emerald! You’re the one who told me that the Master Emerald has the power to stop the Chaos Emerald! ”

It’s great that she has a smart plan moment since Tails got enough of those already, and it’s great that she actually remembered what Knuckles told her about it in the first cutscene she was in when that cutscene implied she didn’t care what the emerald’s powers were and just thought it was pretty, and it’s even better that the Master Emerald is actually being used for something in the plot instead of being just a MacGuffin that Knuckles never does anything with like in all the previous games.

Amy is walking around alone in the ARK, and says my favorite line from her, ” Ooh, I hate it when they leave me behind! ” I love the delivery of that line. After this, Amy is finally useful, for the second and last time in the whole series. She reminds Shadow of what Maria wanted. Then, Shadow has the complete Maria flashback, my favorite one, with Shadow’s theme playing to really make the scene perfect.

That energy-filled music with Maria saying, ” Shadow, I beg of you! ” actually works for a tragic moment by reminding us that she’s saying this in panic before she gets shot. ” Shadow, I beg of you, do it for me! For a better future!… ” And then the music gets sad. ” For all the people who live on that planet, give them a chance, to be happy!… Let them live out their dreams. Shadow, I KNOW you can do it! That’s the reason you were brought into this world… Sayonara, Shadow, the Hedgehog… ”

The instant she finishes saying, ” Sayonara, Shadow, the Hedgehog, ” Shadow says, ” That’s what I promised her… and I will keep that promise… That’s what Maria wished for… ” in a sad tone. Shadow’s actor is definitely the best in the game. I really love this next scene. I love how the pulsating egg-things or whatever seem to pulsate in perfect tune with the dramatic music with the piano and drums, and that really does a good job of creating an atmosphere for the Biolizard that Rouge talked about to show up.

It’s clearly a prototype, to the point where it needs neck tubes, being on life support in order to survive, and is a primitive mammal. Considering that they devoted an entire cutscene to Rouge saying Shadow might not be the real ultimate form based on a newspaper photo of the Biolizard, this was foreshadowed. Biolizard was one of the MANY things foreshadowed in this plot before happening.

Suddenly, 3D holograms showing Gerald Robotnik get projected outwards and you hear echoing and off-sync, ” All of you ungrateful humans, who took everything away from me, will feel my loss, and despair! ” to create a surreal atmosphere of panic, and the Biolizard drops from the ceiling just as Gerald had planned. This is such a badass villain introduction scene! Then, Shadow shows up to fight the Biolizard, and tells Sonic and Knuckles without explanation to get the Chaos Emeralds while he fights it.

I’m glad they forgive him so quickly instead of being suspicious and rude. Knuckles uses the Master Emerald to stop the Chaos Emeralds by reciting the chant that Tikal told Tails, being actually useful for once while also having yet another instance where a Continuity Nod to a previous game vitally factors into the plot.

I like how he sounds unsure when he’s saying it, struggling to remember what the chant is. It humanizes him. It adds depth to his character, rather than having him be proud all the time. Maybe it gives him some leniency. It makes sense for him to get the chant wrong because he’s under pressure and unfamiliar with saying it. After Shadow beats the Biolizard, it uses its magic-infused Chaos Control organ to warp away.

Knuckles has a relatable Deadpan Snarker remark when he asks why the ARK is still falling to Earth if he’s stopped the Chaos Emeralds, saying what the audience is thinking. It’s good that they pointed this out and explained it right away with Eggman. Eggman announces with an echoing voice over the intercom that the prototype is still alive, and has ” become one with the space colony, and is determined to keep it on its collision course! “

The ARK starts falling towards the Earth in a fiery blaze, and Shadow remembers Maria’s promise as tense music plays, reminding the audience in a well-done way why Shadow’s doing this and how he’s grown. Sonic and Shadow both use Chaos Control at the same time, which makes the ARK disappear on a screen showing people all over the world cheering.

Shadow falls to earth, saying in a sad way, ” This is what you wanted, right? This is my promise I made to you, ” and vanishes, which was tragic at the time, especially considering that while this is happening and the sad music plays, we see civilians cheering, ironically, to drive the tragedy home. Sonic comes back to the ARK holding Shadow’s bracelet unhappily. The final cutscene is rather touching, with the sad music playing and the character talking as the credits play, the calm after the storm.

Sonic is considerate enough to think to give a sympathetically grieving Rouge the bracelet of Shadow, and she wonders if Shadow was really created to destroy all life on earth. Sonic makes it clear that he’s forgiven him by saying, ” He was what he was, a brave hedgehog who gave his life to protect the planet. “ That is heartwarming, and shows that Sonic himself has undergone Character Development in this game by growing so far from when he was calling Shadow an, ” it. ”

Knuckles implies that he’s gotten more friendly with Rouge by cheerfully asking if he’s back to stealing those ” jewels you love so much? ” and Rouge says, in a tone that implies she isn’t lying, that she’s going to give up stealing jewels because it’s ” too much work for too little pay. ” Knuckles says in a friendly way, ” If you say so. ” It’s heartwarming.

Eggman explains to Tails that when he was a child, he looked up to his grandfather. ” He was my hero! And I wanted to be a great scientist like him. But… did he really mean to destroy us? “ At least Eggman was nice enough to respond to Tails’ naïve and missing the point response with, ” You’re right, ” in a pleasant tone, which is heartwarming. Maybe he doesn’t hate the kid as much as we’re led to believe. They are both Gadgeteer Geniuses after all.

Seeing what looks like Sonic wiping his eyes with his hands while characteristically looking away to try to hide it, Amy asks him, ” What’s wrong, Sonic? ” Sonic is shown to be genuinely sad and mournful, and Amy is shown to be comforting and considerate. None of this ever happens in any game that comes after it.