#epau

A quick sketch for @radioactivesupersonic‘s B-day. Basicly mashing OVA/Sonic CD Classic Sonic with the EPAU Sonic. A little band-aid on his nose, mech arm but noodle-limbed instead, hair that splits into ponytail, MC Hammer Pants.

Left the shoes/feet at the standard blob-ish ones sorta out of laziness, but I hope it still looks good.

So okay let’s talk Sonic stuff for a bit. Well-timed, anon, because I was just talking to a friend about Sonic.

And here’s what I’m going to say.

The Sonic lore- at least the gameverse lore, that I’m the most versed in- has plot holes that you can drive a mack truck through.

What are the Emeralds? Where did they come from? How do they work?

There are so many questions even just on that one subject that any exercise in meta building pretty rapidly becomes it’s own fan-continuity.

(which, incidentally, is where I’m taking my read on the Sonic series)

While I’m shamelessly plugging, I might as well talk about my personal read on the Emeralds and how they work. The long version gets pretty lore-heavy- they are one of the major consistent plot elements of the games- but the basic deal is that the Emeralds are unpredictable and unstable in the sense that their very presence creates a ripple effect that distorts reality around them- hence chaos emeralds. Normally this is so small as to be barely discernible on a macroscopic scale but things that rely on being very carefully ordered like, say, electrical equipment, doesn’t do very well in their range of effect. And bringing them together makes them even more volatile and deepens the distortion effect. 

So basically: while the Chaos Emeralds offer literally limitless power, much like a nuclear reactor, it’s not as simple as just putting all the Emeralds together in a bell jar and working off them. Especially because as a sort of built-in countermeasure to not shake a hole in reality, the Emeralds have a tendency to just nope right out of there via teleportation if you force too many of them too close.

But there’s definitely a context where you can string all the emeralds together, and, that’s where people get involved.

Because the Emeralds also have a particular sentience to them, and they gravitate towards certain people who resonate along similar frequencies. People who can work with some of the Emeralds is fairly common- basically anybody with any kind of energy manipulation is less affected by the distortion effect, but certain, very rare people, actually create a kind of feedback loop with the Emeralds that causes them to stop rejecting each other entirely and thus achieving what amounts to omnipotence- for… a limited period of time, proportionate to their stamina reserves, as it only holds up as long as the person maintains the feedback loop.

As for the distinction between Chaos and Sol Emeralds, and whether or not one can switch the two around… That goes more into the nature of what exactly these shiny little rocks are, and their general significance. 

I’m so glad you asked!

Endless Possibility AU (EPAU) is a purely fanmade and freestanding Sonic AU of my own creation. In less words, it’s my personal project, and has been since high school! It draws inspiration from basically all of the canon ‘verses I’m aware of but mixed in with a lot of original content. My goals with it are:

1. You don’t have to know squat about Sonic to approach and understand the AU, it should be self-explanatory on its own, though you might miss some of the in-jokes and references.

2. Events are juggled around, reimagined, and adjusted so knowledge of the various canons won’t tell you exactly what’ll happen next.

It centers around a three-person team of Sonic, Amy, and Tails, though other characters come in there, and it features unique design components. I aspire to one day turn it into a webcomic (and until then, nothing’s final, really)

That said, I’m gonna go through my tag and clean it out (the posts will all still be on my blog, because it’s good to keep a record, but I’m removing the EPAU tag from anything not reflecting current ‘continuity’) in preparation for Actually Trying To Make This Happen. I’ll happily take questions about it, and might create a sideblog if it gets enough traffic that it’s interfering with the regularly scheduled space rocks. That said, there’s only so much I can say about certain topics and sometimes my response will be intentionally super vague, because spoilers.

What I will say is: the general focus of EPAU is bringing the complex narratives and sense of history of the Adventure games to a bright, colorful world reminiscent of the early games. For those of you who’ve followed me for a while, I’m a super big fan of Steven Universe, and that show has been quite a formative influence on what I want this project to be!