It always amazes me how much random shit got spackled onto Sonic. There was never a clear vision, and it just snowballed down a hill picking up random crap as it went along. Even on the Japanese side, they basically just cribbed from Dragonball at a certain point. There were attempts to flesh out the natural lore with the whole "Explorer explores Ancient Civilizations and finds Ancient Mystical Rings" stuff, but a lot of that was lost in translation and/or superseded by the myriad of adaptations. It's no wonder there's such a divide over lore. I mean, it's understandable if they didn't want to focus on a game gimmick, after all it's not like the Mario adaptations featured coins. I feel like having a focus on the Rings was actually one of the best parts of the movie. It reintroduced them as a mainstay of the canon IMO. But I'm starting to go off-topic. How's about them Lara Su Chronicles? Kek.
When did they do that? As far as I recall the rings were never given much focus or backstory in the games' lore, except for special ring types like Chaos and Dark Rings in Chaotix, or the World Rings in Secret Rings. The lore in the classic games usually focused on the background of the current locale and the Chaos Emeralds (or whatever MacGuffin was used in their place by the current game, like the Time Stones or the Chaos Rings).
Didn't Sonic 3 also have story elements about Sonic finding an ancient ring? Or am I misremembering? In any case, they were always important within the universe. The JP Sonic 1 manual even mentioned South Island itself having a ring shaped migration pattern, didn't it? Chaotix expanded on it lore-wise, but like I said, none of that lore expansion ever made it to the West. In any case, they were given as much story as you could in a mostly textless platformer, in an example of "show don't tell". It seems like whatever story concepts they were working with internally didn't make it too far outta the dev rooms. Didn't the Sonic cartoons feature Power Rings for a time before discarding them? I always felt it was kind of silly to abandon key concepts from the games. Everyone wanted to do their own thing with the property.
re:"why rings", mind you that a motif of early Sonic games is circles. Sonic rolls into a circle. Eggman is a circle with legs who flies around in a circle-shaped pod*. The rings are basically rotating circles. The chaos emeralds and time stones are faceted but circular. If South Island does migrate in a "ring-shaped" pattern, that is even more circles. *this is why I really hated the american cartoon and comic versions of Eggman, because they looked at "cartoonishly, impossibly perfectly round" and translated it to "grotesquely fat"
SatAM always had the rings but never a mention of the emeralds. AoStH featured neither at first, but eventually had a story arc around the emeralds. I'm not very familiar with any of the later shows at all, but I don't think they featured rings at all. Not sure about emeralds, either.
I don't think underground had rings. There were emeralds though. And sonic in X had rings as his go-to trump card.
According to him he can. I really want to see it happen, just to see what happens. But all he does is talk about things he's working on, so...
I'm pretty sure he'd have broken 271 different laws and a good third of the Geneva convention if he did half the shit he said he would in his tweets over the year. But since he never did ANY of those things, he's in the clear I guess. This man is exhausting...
I love that this guy sues Archie for using some characters he created for the Sonic comic, reaches a little settlement... So what's the logical next step? Well now he owns Sonic the Hedgehog, of course! And all of Archie. And SEGA! Screw it, let's just give him Nintendo too. Life is just so hard when you're Ken Penders, he's entitled to anything his heart desires I honestly haven't been following Penders for the past few years because it's all so absurd, and also genuinely concerning because he spends so much of his time thinking about and obsessing over this franchise
Pendies owns the stories, not the characters. He'd probably have to scrub off most of the names of the SEGA-owned cast, and even then it still carries Sonic's iconography. I have no doubt that SEGA could find something wrong with that, but I have even less doubt that he's actually going to do nothing, because that's what he always does. All he seems to crave anymore is attention.
I just want him to finish at least part of the Mary Su Chronicles and release it so we can all laugh at it.
Screw Ken Penders. I know this has been said before, and may get trashed, but I think that every once in a while someone needs to speak these words of truth. He acts like he owns Sonic because Archie licensed his Knuckles fan fic. He owns Shade because he muttered the words Echidna in some proximity to a Nintendo DS. Maybe he owns Mega Man, because he wrote stories with Sonic, Sonic is in Smash, and Mega Man is in Smash. It's scary how close that is to his real logic. If I had a book with every time Ken Penders was an idiot, it would have 121 pages and counting. I love this thread because it's the only place where people can come together and share their complete hatred for a man. Also, I will 100% Celeste with 0 deaths if the Mary Sue Chronicles ever releases. This is not a joke. I will record that and release it on the fourms. Screw Ken Penders. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
If he does finish THE LARA-SU CHRONICLES, someone upload copies of it to the wiki so we can all laugh at it while not having to pay for it. It’d be a win-win situation.
Endgame was pretty epic as a kid but looking back at it, it has some pretty WTF elements to it. Like the whole thing with Dulcy being able to tell that Sonic was innocent because Mobian dragons have the ability to tell when someone is lying. That's... a very convenient character trait to suddenly pull up at this point in the comic's run. And more importantly, where the hell was she when the trial was going on?! Had she been there and pointed out that Sonic was innocent then, or overheard "King Acorn" talking to people afterwards and realize that it wasn't really him, that possibly could have made for a more interesting story. The fake King could be revealed at that point and then Robotnik and his robots show up and start wrecking Knothole, and then the rest of the story could have Sonic and the others fighting to defend what's left of their home while dealing with the emotional fallout of Sally's death and the trust between Sonic and his friends being shaken up due to the false accusations made against him. If this hardcover edition gets released I will be very surprised, but given his track record I doubt it will.
That was a blatant deus ex machina, but the ending was equally bad. It had to be one of the most anticlimactic cop-outs I've seen anywhere. After all the trouble the heroes went through to stop Robotnik's ultimate weapon --and failing, with Knothole getting obliterated--, we learn that the weapon had been previously tampered with to only disintegrate Robotnik. Knothole was still all right, it was just sent a few hours into the future or some nonsense like that. That's right, the whole ordeal was pointless -- the good guys were never in any danger. They could just have sit back and let Robotnik kill himself.
Just retire quietly, you old fart. Sheesh. Anyway, Penders is pretty old now, right? I’m not about to wish an early demise upon the guy, petty and self-absorbed as he is, but I do wonder if his eventual passing will change anything. For example, perhaps SEGA would start putting Shade in spin-offs as some kind of ludicrous deep cuts for people like myself who are old enough to have been young enough to have enjoyed Chronicles when it came out and have nostalgia for it. Of course, that’s assuming he doesn’t set up some estate to ensure the integrity *snrk* of his illustrious le-he-hegacy isn’t bli—ahahahahahahah, no way could I finish that with a straight face.
Yeah I didn't get the temporal rift thing either. It was confusing as a kid but I just accepted it because "ok, well at least they're alright", but as an adult it's still confusing. I just... what? Is my knowledge of space-time continuum that bad? Why didn't time just reverse itself so Knothole never got destroyed? If it was only tampered with to destroy Robotnik why did it do anything to Knothole at all? I need a beer.
I've been reading the archie comics again. I first did about 2 or 3 years ago, but I only read the main series. This time I'm reading the knuckles comics/stories, the specials, Universe, the works. I just finished sonic's court martial after the mecha madness arc, and so far things still hold up. But I know endgame is when things started getting weird (which is also the story that Ken considers his pride and joy. Strange, isn't it?), so I've got my reading work cut out for me, huh?
