Characterization in the Sonic Franchise

Ok, but no, that 's not how I think they deal with rolling/spinning.

Sonic's spin attack was a "technique" not because hedgehogs don't roll by default, but because thanks to his speed his rolling becomes a weapon, he's like a living chainsaw. More than Amy can or cannot spin, thing here is she wouldn't do it at supersonic speeds, less so if she's both young and untrained, but at some point she got a magical hammer and learned to use that instead in a better or worse way.

Now yes, Tails and Ray spinning is stupid because they're so fluffy; even if rolling wasn't weird for foxes or squirrels, they have no natural weapon. It makes a lot more sense for Tails that said tails are dangerous during his propeller flight for the same reasons those tails allow him to somehow follow Sonic's speed; if we're gonna have impossible natural skills, better exploit the signature ones instead of cloning what the main character did first.

But now that we are with impossible signature skills, fluffy animals rolling still make more sense than an echidna gliding, and we don't complain about that, do we? It must be some acquired chaos power, right? There's no other explanation for that.

So yes, you can say real world species are not a factor in deciding this stuff, but Mighty is an armadillo with a hard shell and amradillos also roll in real life, so being that hard excuses him from becoming a wrecking ball, and Ray glides because he is, well, a flying squirrel; are you sure real world species is not a factor?

Truth is, only convenience and cool design are factors. I always found brutal they removed back quills from Amy, brutal as in they mutilated her, but she had to look more like a girl and less like a Sonic, yes? Because there are a Sonic MkII (Shadow) and a Sonic MkIII (Silver) who retain enough of a hedgehog look, much like all the mecha doppelgangers. In all those cases, they're reinventing Sonic in some way, but that's not the case with Amy, so they demote her from being a hedgehog or make her a hedgehog again when they need to. Convenience and cool design, as I said.

I mixed a couple of things here to both show there are explanations of all kinds for things you're asking them for, but also that this inconsistency and constant change of mind is deliberate and obeys to nothing but the development of each individual project as much as continuity does, so yes, Amy now rolls, now she doesn't, and only hedgehogs grind rails, and only male hedgehogs can become super in modern games.

 

I don't think calling it " Honor " is the correct call, I don't think eggman should have honor. But eggman being an egotistical weirdo who needs to see his opponent broken I feel is fitting depending on the interpretation. I do agree maekawa's eggman was weird, mainly because nothing was done with it. They give him a grandfather a cousin that should be some sort of influence on how he became the eggman, but after all of it doesn't seem like he cares. At this point you could reboot sonic adventure 2 and the connecting games to have Gerald and maria be unrelated to him and the story would play out exactly the same.

And I think i'm ok with that? I don't know if I want my eggman having any real depth these days, i'm ok with him staying relatively simple

We don't talk about how Blaze got stuffed with silver who was at the time and to many now, a giant looser to push him for summer slam. His push failed, and instead of just pushing blaze they just kept them together and gave up. There's a lot of things you can say about a lot of the sexism that has existed in a lot of this series, only male hedgehogs can go super is still a rule, but the thing that happened to blaze sums it up niceley.

They created a cool character, didn't value you her because she was a woman and let a lot of her potential wash away into nothing. It sucks

I feel like sega internalizing some of these surface level comparisons has actively made the material worse. I guess that is what happens when the people making the material or the company that owns the IP don't get why people ever enjoyed the material or what make sit good. And/or a lot of the people who made it good or either long gone, or are restricted by the IP holder who doesn't understand what makes it good

I think shadow, at least written well at his core, wants to fufill maria's wish and help people where he can. I think the title of ultimate life form, didn't mean that much to him besides the last thing he has from the incident. Well untill recent character changes

 

"rival" has always been really loose in this context; technically speaking, the context people use that term in when it comes to Sonic or other battle Shonen franchises is a "foil".

But eh, rival is just a catch-all term I suppose.

 

Shadow and Metal Sonic are textbook rivals because they both want to be faster than Sonic. Knuckles wants the emeralds so he's a rival too. Not the most stellar motivations but we are talking about Sonic stories here.

 

There's also Shadow's "I'm the coolest", line, which suggests that he also would like to be cooler than Sonic.

 

I agree in regards to Knuckles because he's most concerned about the Master Emerald. They were only rivals in Sonic 3 because Knuckles had been fooled about Sonic's intentions.

But Shadow? I think you can definitely argue that he wants to be faster than Sonic. He can teleport but it's highly suggested in SA2 that even that advantage isn't so useful when he's up against Sonic. It's not explicit competition between Sonic and Shadow, but they clearly have banter around the fact that one is not as fast as the other. It's part of the reason their rivalry is as engaging as it is. Because they have a contest over something very tangible and core to the franchise.

The same is the case for Metal Sonic, only it's far more explicit. Him wanting to be the real Sonic is only really a Sonic Heroes thing. In almost every other appearance he wants to be faster than Sonic which is why he chooses to race him all the time. In Sonic CD and Mania he even mocks Sonic by wagging his finger before the race starts. I think the fact he wants Sonic dead has no bearing on the fact they are rivals.

 

Oh yeah I agree with that. All three characters have definitely degraded over time.

I think Metal Sonic probably holds up the best. You are right that he's basically just a murder robot but I think you can easily infer that he wants to be better than Sonic and that obviously involves being faster than him. Even in his appearances in weaker games (Sonic 4 Ep 2 for example).

 

More like characters who don't actually do anything relevant.


But in general I agree; on paper, Sega probably does consider those characters are "rivals" to Sonic, but in practice they're just kind of wasting away on the sidelines because Sega have no idea what to do with the supporting cast in general.

Its more of a marketing gimmick than anything.

 

Maybe it's semantics but when I think of a great rival character I think of someone that has the same goal as the protagonist, but is going about getting it in a different way.
Sonic doesn't have a goal that he really shares with anyone. Game-to-game it's "stop Eggman", but generally that's circumstantial for any of Sonic's "rivals". Knuckles doesn't care if it doesn't involve his island, Shadow doesn't care if it doesn't involve his little crew. Even Sonic doesn't pro-actively go after Eggman unless Eggman starts shit first. It's kind of tough because Sonic's goal isn't even to go faster. He just goes his speed, and it's never been written that leveling up Goku-style is a goal either. Occasionally one might try to out race the other, but it's not a rivalry in that it's something these characters really seem to care about outside of the moment.

 

Its not like a rivalry needs to be a constant because its not like you're always competing with somebody, rivalries by their nature are circumstantial.

Like I said, the proper term is "foil" rather than rival; we just use rival because it's just a colloquial term, everybody is going to know what you mean when you say it. Like Vegeta has been Goku's ally forever, yet he's still ubiquitously called "Goku's rival" despite that. It's pointless to get semantic, because the term isn't ever used properly in the context people generally use it in.

More to that point, people seem to think that a pair of "rivals" need to constantly be at each other's throats for their to be a rivalry when that's not really true either. It's why these types of conversations are so aggravating, because it's such a broad and general topic. Sonic & Tails had a little confrontation in Lost World, guess they're rivals too now

When people use the word "rival" in this context, it's almost always generally referring to a character being a functioning narrative foil for the protagonist, namely the character that serves to highlight traits the protagonist lacks or vice versa. Sonic is blue and runs, Knuckles is red and punches. Sonic is easygoing and laid back, Shadow is serious to a fault. Sonic is organic, Metal is artificial, etc etc etc. All of these characters serve the narrative role of serving as thematic opposites to Sonic. They don't ALWAYS serve that role mind you, I'm just speaking broadly because as mentioned, none of those characters have really served any thematic role in the series as of late to even be an effective narrative foil for Sonic.


Which to be fair, makes sense; there's only so many times you can have Sonic go up against Knuckles/Shadow/Metal Sonic before it stops being interesting and just becomes monotonous. I'd argue that's the problem with Shadow's character nowadays; he succeeded so well at being a narrative foil for Sonic that Sega are constantly try to recreate that regardless of the context, and it's doing a disservice to both characters.


Writing is hard yo.

 

Re: Vegeta/Goku, even though they're allies, they make good foils because they both have overlapping interests. Pursuit of strength and now protecting earth. The problem with Shadow is that he doesn't have the drive anymore to be the "Vegeta" to Sonic's "Goku". Rather, he should, it's just stopped being written that way.
If Sonic has one constant it's that he wants to ensure freedom, and Shadow SHOULD want to do the same because of his promise to Maria. Instead he only casually gets involved at his whims, and doesn't really seem to care about injustice anymore. Sega's insistence on him being detached and uninterested in anything is the only thing makes him a weak foil, imo.
I don't think factors like that are unimportant when it comes to characters existing as rivals, or foils, or what-have-you. It's the reason Sonic has so many characters around that supposed to be foils but rarely ever have conflicts in interesting ways past their introductions.

 

Which is incredibly ironic because one of the main criticisms people have towards Shadow lately is that "Sega are turning him into a Vegeta rip off"

It feels like one of those things where the misconceptions start becoming accepted as the truth, and start bleeding into the official products; Knuckles isn't supposed to be an idiot, but just lacking in social graces. But the constant overuse of the "him getting tricked by Eggman into fighting Sonic" trope just made people see him as stupid, and that eventually came to be true by Boom, and hasn't really been rectified. Same with Shadow, everyone just started writing him off as a moody edgelord, and now that's exactly what he is with none of the nuance of his prior characterization.

And the incredibly annoying part is that all of this is just accepted by people who either only have tangential knowledge about the series, are too young to know that there were more to these characters than what's being presented, or just hated or never cared about these characters to begin with and just accept it, so there's no real incentive for Sega to really change course as of now.

Hopefully there's a creator down the line that can remember there's more to the supporting cast than just being a walking pair of one or two tropes, and actually give them something resembling a character arc again. I'm not holding my breath and think we're stuck with the current interpretations of the cast for the near future, but things can and will change eventually.


IDW has been mostly working around Sega's mandates for the most part, so hopefully they just loosen the leash a bit more and let the creators go a bit more wild.

 

Blaze's initial appearance is the closest thing to what you guys are talking about(same overarching goal, different method). It's just that Blaze's attempts to go it alone get shut down pretty quickly and now she's happy to follow Sonic's lead like everybody else.

Every Sonic character that might have a conflicting perspective on Sonic's philosophy ends up yielding to him eventually, but Sonic rarely has to change even little bit in return. It's one of my pet peeves with how those older games were written. I kinda get it since Sonic is the face of a brand first and a character second but it's still not how I would handle that sort of thing.

Vegeta has softened up to Goku in some ways, but the critical parts of their personalities that make them different have remained intact which means that it's always interesting to see them work together. I think characters like Shadow, Knuckles and Blaze would benefit from a similar approach. Knuckles and Shadow still butt heads with Sonic sometimes, but it's usually in a way that feel a little forced and seem engineered to make them look shortsighted compared to Sonic. It rarely feels organic and interesting imo.

 

Sonic being a corporate mascot above anything else is what hurts any dynamic he has tbh, because he's ALWAYS portrayed as being 100% in the right of any conflict. It just kind of takes the bite out of most of these plotlines.

Like I get it, these are video games for children at the end of the day and are just around to sell numbers, I know that. And people have been complaining for years at how Sonic lacks consistency and feels like a secondary character in his own series.

But its so weird that they put so much effort into making these thematically interesting foils for Sonic, and then discard them the second that role isn't relevant anymore, because Sonic isn't allowed to have anyone be his equal.


Like at that point, why even bother creating characters like that if they're only ever allowed to be Sonic's followers. Or just made to look stupid so that Sonic looks better by comparison.

Part of the reason characters like that become so popular is because of how they thematically oppose the protagonist's beliefs and ideals, but if they're only ever allowed to be a strawman to show how much better the protagonist is, then it defeats the entire point.

This video goes into great detail on how these characters can be utilized better, and how Sega's been mishandling them greatly.