Manga AU Sally coz I felt like drawing her and been thinking about this AU. Need to practice drawing her more anyways. Yeah, there's a high school setting, coz y'know, its a manga! Been revisiting some old anime/manga, like Sailor Moon and Yugioh and stuff, and have had much inspiration!

Bit of lore for Manga Sally! She was raised by her two Aunts, Rosie and Julayla, and befriended Nicky due to their similar circumstances, as he was also being raised by his Uncle instead of his parents. She has a golden ring as a keepsake from her parents which she wears as a necklace. Her best friend after Nicky is Bunnie.

Sally had feelings for Nicky right from the start, but being an awkward teen struggling to deal with her first crush, she ended up distancing herself from him a little. She believes that this was the reason they grew apart (while Nicky thinks it's his fault) and desperately wants to make up for it but doesn't know how. Nicole arrived in her life exactly when she needed it and became the perfect excuse to restart their friendship.

Like the most seriously anyone took Sally's statement was unhinged people using it as ammo against her general existence, arguing that the book was taking her side despite her being obviously wrong and therefore she was a horrible Mary Sue.

(Do they still do that? Are there weeb soldiers still fighting Sonic War II ten years after it ended?)

Like, my reading of the scene in Issue 134 has long been that they're both right and both wrong. Sonic does have to keep fighting, because they were already pushed to the brink without him and they need the -299 IQ nerf that Eggman gets whenever he sees Sonic to even the odds again. But he's also injured and will be out of action for a bit anyway, might as well spend that time helping Sally, right? Meanwhile, Sally is an isolated, depressed teenager dealing with years of emotional abuse from her father and over a decade of being the face of a war and she desperately needs the man she loves for emotional support right now. She's not okay, and Sonic's blunt refusal, without even a hint of trying to find a compromise, lights the touch paper on a bomb that's been building up in her head since she was six years old. He doesn't mean to. But he does. Neither of them are bad people for this, they're just two kids that had to grow up too fast being bad at feelings.

And that's why I find it interesting that Fiona later repeats the accusation in a very different context and different tone in Issue 153.

Both come from Bollers' pen, and I feel like Fiona saying it in 153 while being pretty calm and pointed, and calling Sonic out for the way she thinks he's been treating people (it was actually Scourge) was like. Very deliberately separating the line from the context of Sally's breakdown. Like Karl was going ''No that wasn't just Sally lashing out. It's a serious accusation."

Like, Archie Sonic's track record with women is. Not great. Right from the jump it was weird about women and they didn't really fully wash the stink off until the reboot. Fiona herself is one of the biggest examples of this because they stapled a new personality onto her to turn her into a different dude's love interest at least twice, and she never stopped being that until she was removed from existence. And so a lot of the narrative surrounding 134 from people who aren't mad at Sally for daring to exist in the comic effectively wrote off what happened as "Oh they turned Sally into a Hysterical Woman," and I don't think that's wholly on the mark either.

Fiona bringing up the accusation in a level-headed way and effectively getting the last word in the conversation, to me, indicates that she's not meant to be wrong.

Now, I don't blame anyone for not picking up what Issue 153 was putting down because in the grand scheme of things, that conversation is so incongruous that it might as well be non-canon. Two issues later, Penders blatantly ignores Fiona's expressed views on Sonic and shoves them into a romantic relationship that nobody liked. Nineteen issues later, Flynn blatantly ignored her expressed views on what "Sonic" did and decided to permanently glue her to the arm of the guy who actually did what she was calling Sonic out for, and that, in fact, she'd always been into him for that. I refer you to the above paragraph about how little they gave a shit about this character. But it is understandable that it ended up forgotten when Penders blatantly ignored it (as was his usual habit) and Flynn either forgot it or chose to leave it out of his plans, given that he inherited the status quo created by Penders' wilful ignorance. Dude was new and those puzzle pieces did not fit together, hard to blame him for throwing out the less-relevant of the two.

But that doesn't mean that Sally and Fiona didn't have a point.

Because like, Sonic actually is pretty Not Great at compromising. He does think his way is best and refuses to back down from it. This is a pretty consistent thing across almost every version of the character He does not like giving ground once he's decided how he wants to do things. Just over a year after Issue 153 dropped, SEGA released a game where his theme song contains the lyrics "In his world, compromise does not exist."

It seems to me that this is what Sonic did wrong. His inability to compromise with Sally was what lit the fuse on Sally's decade and some change of badly needing therapy and blew the whole thing up, and it would take recovery on both their ends for them to get back together. And that is pretty selfish, actually. Like there's probably a whole essay that could be written about how Archie's version of Sonic, despite being the iteration of the character with the most romantic development, is actually a pretty shitty boyfriend until Issue 222, and his inability to compromise with his partner is a big part of that. Like, relationships require compromise sometimes. So yeah, they're not wrong, or at least, they have a point.

I guess it makes it poetic that the last drip of character development Archie's Sonic got before that became verboten was finding a middle ground with Sally after like 88 issues. Like, the whole "If you let me keep up"/"I would slow down for you" hits as hard as it does because it's Sonic learning to compromise. The people who got Big Mad about Sonic/Sally lost their fucking marbles over that line because "How dare they say Sonic would slow down at all", which they then mutated into "SALLY DEMANDED THAT SONIC BE SLOW" because of course it fucking did, and guys. Dudes. Buddies. It's a fucking metaphor. It's Sonic saying that he's willing to meet Sally half-way, that's all. He's not actually going to stop running, he's just acknowledging that if he wants a life with her he's going to have to meet her needs as well as his own.

Sure would suck if that was immediately followed with Sally spending the rest of the timeline as a characterless robot, but I wager that the only reason Flynn got away with Issue 222 at all is by telling SEGA that he was going to fake-kill her for two years before they got a second date, and he was either vaguely hoping that the two year gap would placate them enough to resume doing Sonic/Sally stuff for a bit afterwards, or he was going to use Sally's Mecha Sally trauma to break them up without making either character look bad. Which is unfortunately the nature of the beast with late-stage Archie Sonic, and it's why I don't fault Flynn at all for dropping Sonic/Sally from the reboot, despite being a Sonic/Sally shipper since I was a kid. Recognising that SEGA were never going to let it fly and scaling back to me, feels better than endless Sonic/Sally bait that was never going to go anywhere. I mean, it helped that I like Sallicole too (Sally has two hands) and so I was happy with the direction they pivoted to, despite being upset at the loss of the pairing I'd been invested in for practically as long as I knew Archie Sonic existed.

Also, I don't think it's bad thing that this version of Sonic is selfish, or at least that he was before he grew out of that. I don't mind that he's not a perfect paragon. I like that he has flaws and I like that he gets over some of those flaws. Sure, they over-egged the pudding here and there (we all hate Geoff, but dude, save it for when he's not mid-breakdown about his dead wife. Time and place, Sonic, c'mon. Also why are you at a trial and not using the Master Emerald go Super and save Mecha Sally?), but I do think the character is overall richer for it, and why, for all the vitriol I've had for the comic over the years, it's still my Sonic. At the end of the day, I got mad at it because I loved it- If I didn't, then the things that pissed me off wouldn't have done that, I would've just moved on. Well that and my blatant need for a pressure valve on my own mental health issues, no wonder I take Sally's side.