I mean, people are paying money for some of these questions. I think he largely doesn’t want to brush them off, even if he sometimes has to anyway due to the nature of his work.
Wait... People are paying them to manage to pose questions? I hope it's money worth a coffee or so, because those answers aren't worth much more than that. (Yeah, I may be sounding rude, but if they can answer only that much, they gotta set some lines)
Okay but why does he have to give definitive answers, even if it's "I don't know and you shouldn't think about it too much", instead of engaging with the question? Might as well expose and explore the contradictions and process behind decisions, even what-ifs, even if it means he won't give a clear cut answer that wouldn't feel satisfactory anyway. Imagine you're some guy from like Salamis making a journey to Delphi to ask the Pythia about crops or whatever and she simply replies "lol idk". He's building the lore from the crumbs that the games left, no need for this.
He’s not the guy building the lore, he’s one of many guys who offers their input on it and also is presumably behind some NDAs that prevent him from going into it much on his podcast. Ultimately the purpose of a Q&A is to get answers, not listen to someone philosophize about the question. People usually ask him their questions because they want definitive answers, except for the ones who are specifically asking about his opinion (and a lot of them are!). Plenty of fans are in fact angry that his answers aren’t “definitive” enough.
Fair, but we know we aren't talking about whatever is behind the NDAs or what can have a straight answer, and we know it isn't him alone or even the lore team alone doing that. "Philosophizing" is simply exposing the problems in the questions and what can be done about them. How is "eh who knows" any better? So this looks unsustainable to me. The answers will never be definitive enough, and ultimately the input everyone gives and the discussions the team has etc. exist anyway. People are only angry the answers feel hollow sometimes because the inherent promise of a single, all encompassing timeline is that they shouldn't be. But we know that's basically not possible. So what is this model going to achieve?
If I had to place Sonic Prime in the same timeline as the games, I'd place it sometime before Forces, since Sonic seems to be all about the power of friendship in that game, and he was kind of an ass in Colors. It's a stretch, but it's what I think works the best Prime is written without taking the games into consideration most of the time tho. Like, it has a few references, but nothing that requires it to be part of the actual game continuity, I don't think we're seeing Nine or the Paradox prism in any mainline videogames About Ian Flynn... honestly, I don't blame him, people are paying him for that, and he also seems to be invested in the topic of continuity, I mean, he's the guy who wrote the game that references almost every single other Sonic game developed by Sonic Team. It's inevitable that he won't be able to answer all questions in a satisfying manner I just don't care about word of god answers, it's much more fun to piece everything together through the text, than to just be told by the people behind it that "this is how it's supposed to be". This is how people start to argue about things such as the existence of money, even though there have been multiple references to the concept (both before and after Ian talked about it), the text says one thing, but the people behind the series seem to disagree with it, even if the text is consistent about what it says And I use the word seem because Flynn is not the only person working with the series, obviously. He frequently talks about not knowing a lot of the stuff that is happening internally at Sega. Chances are, when a question gets answered by him, the information could be outdated already. Everything answered in the Bumblekast is part of a telephone game, particularly because Sonic fans spread a lot of misinformation, so it's very easy for anything that Flynn says to be taken out of context and become something else entirely in the wider fandom, creating unrealistic expectations... he does have the annoying tendency of hyping stuff way too much sometimes though Also, a lot of people ask Ian about things that aren't necessarily related to him and there's only so much he can tell us about stories he didn't write. Then there's his own stories, and like... he's the writer, and also happens to be currently working in the series, which means that a lot of these questions might eventually be answered in future works, so we get the #KnowingSmile™ I can't help but feel like people are being hasty by expecting Ian Flynn to be able to explain so much in his Bumblekast, rather than waiting to see how future works are going to interact with the past of the franchise and each other... but I can totally get the feeling, since I don't put a lot of faith into this whole idea of making Sonic's world and continuity more cohesive, it's like we're being told to wait for a "special meal" that we're all sure is not going to be any better than what you already eat everyday
I mean, aren't we? The process behind these decisions seems very plausibly behind NDAs, otherwise I expect he'd go into more detail. A lot of the explanations are followed up with shit like "I don't like it either, but it's what Sega decided, and I can't really say more". I personally don't lose any sleep over not getting definitive answers. The thing I'm most curious about is what Flynn understands Iizuka's headcanon about the order the games take place in to be. I like timelines. I've been making Sonic timelines for like 20 years, and the prospect of getting (even crumbs of) an official one that includes most material (even if sloppily) is interesting to me. At this point the pre-Adventure stuff has been largely put in order, and now I'm just waiting to learn when the Game Gear games, Chaotix, and Fighters take place relative to Spinball, 3D Blast, R, and SegaSonic, but I'm not so desperate to know that I'll pay money to (maybe) find out.
From what I've seen he does say "I can't talk about it [yet]" when he actually can't talk about it. But sure, my position comes from a place of not really liking official timelines for Sonic in the first place, so I'll be biased. I don't lose sleep over any of this either because I won't take it too seriously no matter what, but it does seem to be generating a lot of confusion-- that I don't think should be needed. But I could be wrong, of course.
As in, he teases that he can talk about it at some point, when he can't actually talk about it at all? I can see how that'd be grating, yeah. Can you say more about the 'confusion' that it's generating? Like, confusion as to his role in deciding the answers to lore stuff, or confusion as to the official stance on the lore stuff itself?
Oh no, he says that when there's something related to the question about to be released or something. The #KnowingSmile kinda thing. But the confusion I'm referring to are situations like Sonic Prime's placement, that -- as I understand -- sparked this whole discussion.
Gotcha. This got me curious so I looked back through the thread to find the comment that sparked this expectation, to see if people were maybe just reading too far into what he said, but sure enough: "and you haven't finished watching the show yet" was definitely a misleading thing for him to say with how finishing watching the show doesn't give an answer. But it was also a rather pointless thing to say with IGN's review having already told us that it takes place "sometime in the future, in relation to the game series". Had people expecting there'd be more specificity when there's none!
That was stupid indeed. Because this last season actually gives no answer at all. It's not like we could at least infer something. It gives nothing. We can't even say "oh but it takes place some time after Advance 3" because we already knew that from the get-go. Orbut and Cubot are present in episode 1, so this thing is at least after Colors! (I mean, I don't think there's hard proof that Advance 3 takes place before Colors, but we also don't have proof that it doesn't, and modern timeline kinda follows date of release for the most part, so...)
Not surprising at all, but: 1:29:14 - so now that Dream Team exists does that mean Mobile Games are canon again? or is it only Dream Team that's canon? Just Dream Team.
So I decided to check out Sonic Advance 2 to see if I could get a clearer picture on Knuckles, what with some thinking he was tricked into working with Robotnik due to Sonic commenting on how he was duped again, despite that flying in the face of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles. So the manual does actually clarify somewhat on page 2: Knuckles got abducted, so he wasn't actively working with Robotnik.
I don't see how that meshes with what we see in the game. He was clearly piloting the Egg Saucer. I'd say the manual is wrong here. Maybe he was originally going to be abducted like the others but they later changed it, and forgot to update the prologue in the manual. Or maybe whoever wrote it goofed. Or perhaps the idea is that Knuckles is believed to be abducted since he vanished from Angel Island, but when Sonic meets him in-game it turns out that he was actually duped and went with Eggman of his own accord? They might not have wanted to give away that "plot twist" in the manual, so that the player would be surprised upon seeing Knuckles piloting the Egg Saucer. I know I was surprised myself, expecting the boss to be Eggman like always.
Not really. The Egg Saucer does what it does regardless of what Knuckles does, while Knuckles constantly seems to be smacking at the window, and when Robotnik's seen in it after getting Knuckles out, he's not doing the same motions suggesting it's not controlled in that manner. 5:55 4:49
Then why is Sonic mad at Knuckles afterwards, and accuses this one of having been duped, which Knuckles doesn't deny?
Because Knuckles has super-strength. What's Robotnik more likely to do, overpower him or outwit him into a trap?
