#morganzephyr

The Magnemite line? Don’t be silly, those are just a

hello! ◕‿◕ ooh hhh this is such a fun question, thanku (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄)

Okay I've actually been sitting on this ask for a while and I HAVE THOUGHT LONG AND HARD 😂

So the (how very) glib answer is "every love interest she's ever had including the unrequited ones. I mean, Minfilia was functionally her boss. 🥲 Haurchefant (in my headcanon) had a Reputation with adventurers. Urianger was the guy who, at the time, she probably knew best for lone-wolfing it and deceiving his closest friends. Arguably there was some aspect of "against better judgment" for all of them.

The non-glib answer is that Ariane's good at seeing the best in people, and in every one of these cases she saw that there was more to these people than the outward image they projected. And when she was able to muster the courage to reach out, she made those deeper connections that were profoundly worth it.

And maybe the surprise answer is... that was true of Hildy, too. Even though what they had was a casual thing and was Ariane trying to distract herself from what she actually wanted and didn't think she could have, she could've picked a much worse person for it. For all his absurdity, Hildy's got a good heart. He might have been disappointed when she broke it off (and I hope you're picturing the comic exaggerated smile-drooping-into-a-frown complete with sound effects, because I certainly am), but well, he's a gentleman! He wasn't the type who was going to hold it against her or make it so they couldn't be friends.

Yeah!! Although they're not 1:1, I took some liberties with them. For Peter it's obviously John Bubniak and MJ is based of a model - Alicia Herbeth. ngl I'm still struggling with their faces

No haha, but dang yeah it’s great getting to enjoy seeing like a better version of your own style/taste and not having to expend any effort at all in order to enjoy it’s existence 😌, 

Laurel Austin knows where it’s at u got the angular muscular ladies and big boyes and eye position expression changes that’s what i’m TALKIN about!!!

OH KEN PENDERS ... INTERESTING SPECIMEN, THAT ONE

so, the basic rundown is this: at some point in the past, this joker somehow got himself hired on the Sonic Archie comics as headwriter. a lot of the unpleasantness of the series can be traced back to him in one way or another. aside from being an atrocious writer and artist, he’s also antisemitic and a massive sexist, and has a lot of disturbing ideas of right and wrong. he’s also got no sense of what’s ethical to portray in a comic book for children. a cute cartoon bee dying of a drug overdose? overt and extremely disrespectful Holocaust references? child abuse framed as a-okay because it comes from a place of caring? making one of the primary romantic relationships incestuous? that’s all that Ken Penders brand flavoring, baby!

now, one of mr. Penders’ most unfortunate traits is that he is absolutely obsessed with Knuckles’ character. and I mean obsessed. he spent most of his time on the comics making stories about Knuckles. in his mind, Knuckles is quite literally the cartoon animal equivalent of Jesus (not a metaphor! yes, seriously). because he’s spent so long adding asinine lore to the character, he’s also convinced that on some level, he actually kinda owns the character. writing about Knuckles is apparently his life mission, copyright laws be damned.

then a funny thing happened back in the mid to late 00′s: real, completely decent writers saw his extensive work on the comics and thought “you know, maybe we can do something with this? we’ll dust off the sexism and the incest and the child abuse, and then we actually have a pretty cool plot! let’s see if we can salvage these ideas”

see, different Sonic media doesn’t tend to mix - the games are basically a source code that various spin-off stories pick up and alter to an extent to make their own stories. it’s extremely rare that anything from the spin-offs is re-incorporated back into the games, as I believe the copyright process gets tricky. however, back in 2008, a game called Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was released, and unfortunately for everyone, it had the gall to try to adapt some of Ken Penders’ Knuckles-related lore in a copyright-friendly way that fit into the game series’ canon.

they never should have. Ken Penders, somehow furious that something he had created for a franchise he didn’t own was being used elsewhere in the franchise, filed a lawsuit against SEGA. and unfortunately for SEGA, the legal documents that stated that Penders didn’t have the rights to any characters he created for the comics were lost in a fire years ago.

the lawsuit was successful, Penders obtained the rights to his 100+ awful characters, the second Sonic Chronicles game was cancelled, and the Sonic Archie comics - a series which had been building up continuity and stories for over a decade - had to be rebooted with a giant chunk of its cast and stories missing.

since then, Ken Penders has been trying to make his own comics with his characters, and the art is uglier than ever ... also Knuckles is apparently still involved in the series somehow, because copyright only matters when it concerns characters that he made, it seems

on the one hand, the whole fiasco is a little funny. reading about all his horrible stories is entertaining and the man is now a laughingstock among Sonic fans. on the other hand, I feel really, really bad for the people who loved the Archie comics and followed them for years. I don’t like them, but other people do, and this one idiot single-handedly destroyed the entire series.

also, as much as I want to fist fight Ken Penders, the Sonic Chronicles adaption of his stories is ... good. it’s so good. it’s one of my favorite stories in the whole game series. I don’t know who the writers of that game are, but they took all the fun and potentially interesting parts of the comic lore and cut out all the bad stuff, and then added some really cool and creative elements, and I just

look. the central character introduced in that game - Shade - she really stole my heart when I was a kid and I still adore her. it’s been over a decade and the legal problems have never been resolved, her story was never finished, and she has never appeared in another game. she isn’t so much as referenced anywhere in later games.

Ken Penders is a fantastic source of unintentional comedy. he’s also a terrible person who, aside from being offensive, also just ruined a lot of people’s fun.