Hi molinaskies,
I just got back into writing Sonamy fics, and recently read most of yours as well. Obligatory kudos for I Love You - Come With Me - I'm sure at this point you know how special that fic is to the community.
Wanted to ask about something I noticed while reading ILY-CWM - what's your approach to squaring higher-level writing with trying to keep Sonic, Amy, and other characters, well, in-character? I'm a big fan of the IDW comic series, and while the writing in those comics is very good, there's still a little bit of a disconnect with how the characters communicate in a canonical source (which we know the IDW comic is) and well-written fanfic such as yours.
Obviously, some of this can be chalked up to the fact Sonic is an all-ages series (or, to put it less diplomatically, aimed at kids), something I'm painfully aware of as someone in his late 30s. But I loved your analyses here on Tumblr of Sonic's character and his relationship with Amy, and it's crystal-clear that there's more to the development of their characters and relationship, especially in the IDW series, than meets the eye.
This is something I've struggled with in my own writing - putting those layers of emotion and adult-level communication in my stories without making Sonic and Amy sound so contemplative, formal, and grown-up that it takes them out of character. However, they clearly aren't dumb - especially when you look at how the IDW comics have shown the depth of their capabilities and social intelligence - but I've had to make sure I stay away from that thing that can happen with shipping fics where not much is going on outside of two characters giving long-winded monologues about their feelings or talking to each other like therapists.
Shameless plug alert, I was thinking about finding this balance pretty much the entire time I was writing a fic I published a couple days ago, "One Equal Temper." It's a 6500-word short story, so it's not super-long if you want to check it out, and it's set in the canon game/IDW continuity: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14490674/1/
I don't know how many times I asked myself "Would Sonic or Amy feasibly actually say this?" before the story went live.
Anyway, thanks a bunch for reading and considering all this. I absolutely love the pairing and am looking forward to reading more of your fantastic work in the future.
Hello! Thanks for your kind words! It always brings me joy to hear that people like my work!
I'm honoured to be asked a question like this! I am by no means an authority on this subject, be it the subject of WRITING or the subject of SONIC, but I'm willing to share a bit of what my process looks like behind the scenes. I suspect some of the disconnect one might feel between canon sources and canon-compliant fan works is the lack of internal thought processes we are afforded in official media, and this is entirely due to the differing mediums.
Side note: It's absolutely not a requirement to be "canon compliant" or mostly there when making fan works, btw. Live life, breathe air, write that AU, share that headcanon!!
The long and short of it is that the calibre of storytelling and characterization this franchise is known for is far more mature than we give it credit for, in my opinion. Mind you, the highest rating this franchise has ever seen is an E10+ in North America, so lets not get lost in the sauce here, but I think it's fair to say we have more "Sonic Adventure 2s" in the franchise than "Sonic Lost Worlds."
When it comes to finding that balance, you said the core of my take quite well, already: "they clearly aren't dumb." Sonic and company have seen enough demons to have learned a thing or two along the way about how to live a meaningful life, but the vast majority of the cast are also teenagers. They have big problems to solve and not exactly all the emotional tools they need to navigate them, so it's completely natural for them to have a deep breadth of emotions and internal conflicts that are worth exploring.
I prefer to write with the more mature versions of Mainline Canon Sonic in mind. I firmly believe that Sonic is a highly emotionally intelligent character: someone who is capable of having fun and making the job look easy, but who also never loses sight of the mission and the severity of the stakes (immediate and long-term; of all varieties). When I enter that headspace, a lot of the rest comes naturally to me.
But let me get a little more technical, from a craft perspective.
How I write dialogue differs from how I write narration. When people communicate, they're making hundreds of calculations in their heads without even realizing. The way I speak to my family is different from how I speak to my friends, which is different from how I speak to people I work with, and so on. Yet, ALL of that is different from how I speak to myself.
There is room for flexibility when writing narration because in essence, the character is talking to themselves (or, an audience---it depends on one's writing style). Their thoughts are in the purest, unfiltered form. Sonic's raw thought process is different than how he might express an idea, in dialogue, to Amy, which itself might not be an idea he'd even consider expressing to Tails.
As someone who most often writes in first-person POV (usually Sonic's, sometimes Amy's), I point my focus toward:
How would they say this thought? Would they?
How would they describe something?
Would they use a metaphor here? Which one?
Is this something that would even catch their attention? AKA, Is this something I should even address?
I think a lot about word choice and sentence structure. A lot can be shown implicitly about a character through the words they default to. Sonic uses a lot of slang and sometimes truncates his words (Think: "Nah" instead of "No"), but again, only in dialogue. Tails leans on bigger words. Amy tends to ramble. Sonic and Amy are also quite impassioned orators, which means I have more room to consider literary devices like rhythm and repetition in my phrasing.
Children, in particular, are tricky because it's very easy to make them too cognizant. Young children aren't dumb by any means (naïve is a better word to use, and in fact they are highly observant), but they often lack the vocabulary and nuance to effectively comprehend and articulate exactly what they observe and how it makes them feel.
Therefore, a child's thought process is a lot less introspective. Their sentences are simpler; their words, less specific; their ideas, seemingly tangential. A child's thought might make an adult's brain skip to understand it because it's not said exactly the way an adult would think to say it, but all the information is there.
It's worth mentioning that a character like Tails is quite different. Intellectually, he is on par with many characters far older than he is, but he is still quite childish. His childhood is better shown through his lack of experience with people and emotions, his mannerisms, and his behaviours. It's one of my favourite things about Tails, actually: he is a child, and despite how vital he is to the protection of the world, when he is "off the clock," everyone in his corner does what they can to protect that childlike wonder within him.
Anywho, that's all I can think of. I hope this was insightful and/or even answered your question lol! Again, I'm no authority on this! I'm literally just a one and a zero on the internet.
There's no right way to create. Just do what feels right to you :)
