The Sonic the Hedgehog Continuity Thread of Love and Timelines

(Sorry, they're doing a Return of the Jedi showing at the theatre that we're going to see, couldn't resist)

 

That's interesting, they referenced Labyrinth in an illustration and a Q&A when he references Eggman replaced his shoes so he couldn't jump and run.

 

I’m pretty sure the Q&As aren’t supposed to be canon… And Labyrinth being canon is dumb anyway. I’m not sure why this is seen as some kind of loss.

 

Honestly, even after them stating that the continuity was being put back together, it's hard to care when they still keep shuffling things around; it feels like they're deciding when something's canon depending on what side of the bed they wake up on.

Sonic will mention the events of Sonic Labyrinth, making it seemingly canon, then 2-3 years later it's not canon anymore. Or, when we think that Sonic Boom is all but gone, they will mention Sticks living on Angel Island(?) without anyone ever mentioning her presence even one time.

My brother played Sonic Frontiers with me a while back, and we were lucky enough to get the Tangle line, and they asked who they were. They play the games but don't read the comics, so it's a bit confusing if you have to explain a character who doesn't exist in the games but everyone (in-universe) apparently knows.

 

Gonna quickly step in: this was just a concept by Ian to bring Sticks into the mainline canon, it's not actually been employed yet, if at all.

Oh hey, an example of my concerns about having multiple media merged into one like this playing out.

 

I’m just annoyed that on a whim they are changing things that we’ve all accepted as facts for years. By retroactively changing things in the past it makes the old things lose their charm in my eyes because ultimately none of it matters. I get that it’s their franchise and they can do what they want but after so long you should really just let it be.
Also by explaining everything they are leaving less room for fans to speculate and imagine. I just hope they stop meddling and get it all figured out sooner rather than later.

 

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But then which do you go with, the new canon of Sonic Origins or the actual canon of the JP manuals?

 

So non-canon Game Gear games include but are not necessarily limited to:

- Sonic Labyrinth
- Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (AoStH)
- Sonic Spinball? (presumably superseded by console version)

It'd be cute if Origins Plus had a little timeline lore for each game accompanying them in the museum. They already explained where SCD fits in, after all.

 

The Q&As always try to stay true to the current canon and characters, even when they give funny responses. This time around, they seemed to stick even closer to the canon than the ones done by SoA, I'm guessing because Sonic Team was more involved.

So if they referenced a non-canon game, it would be weird when they could've focused on things like the light speed or soap shoes instead. Like when they asked about Sonic's favorite scenery earlier in the Q&A and Sonic said it was the Land of the Sky or Lyric's Lair, that wouldn't make sense.

Maybe it was just meant to be a joke and they didn't care if it was canon or not.

But some people thought the game was canon because of the 27th anniversary illustration they made for it and because Sky Patrol is canon, which is seen as the companion adventure to Labyrinth.

And it's not just because people love the game - a lot of people believe that certain past games are in current flux right now in canon, which can be frustrating for some.

 

Actually it's the opposite. Details in the manuals are being disregarded since, I don't know, ever. Maybe more now than ever.

 

And the interviews have been more consistent? At least with the manuals, we've got it written down officially somewhere.

 

The problem with supplemental material such as interviews, Q&As, books, etc. is that even if we do get answers, the original content is still unchanged. They could give a perfect explanation for whatever's going on with Blaze in Rush and 06, but to me that wouldn't be much better than not getting any answers at all. I want to enjoy a story, and not someone talking about how a story could hypothetically be improved and make perfect sense if it had X, Y and Z. No newcomer is going to play Rush and 06 and feel that Blaze's situation makes perfect sense now that there is an explanation they might not even know about it anyway somewhere more than a decade later.

It's two times as bad with Sonic because any answers we get aren't necessarily going to be valid forever. The continuity has been changing constantly outside of the text, look no further than the discussions about the two worlds that were all over the internet up until last year!

The thing with Sonic is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to "fix" the continuity instead of rebooting the series (or at least stop compromising to a single continuity where almost every game is canon to eachother) because they want to be able to tell us about how rich Sonic's 30 years of history and its world is, but ignore all inconsistencies that comes with it. It's an anomaly in storytelling that I see far too much in long-running series, where a huge amount of narrative content isn't part of a narrative, but supplemental material, when it is something that could improve or change a lot of what we know about the stories that are out there. They expect us to pretend that everything before made sense and that it's going to be consistent moving forward. Guess what? This is not enough, you can't make decades worth of narrative and say that I should just consume the version I created in my own head to make sense with what we're getting going forward and not the products that actually exist.

The manuals are the actual text, heck, even Origins is, so I can at least accept that those scenes are supposed to represent a new version of the story. But I can't just be told that Sonic 1 8-bits is now a new adventure sepparated from Sonic 1 without asking how any normal person is supposed to know that since there is nothing in the text, be it the original or a revised version, that even implies that.

I don't think things like interviews can be completely ignored, although I'd say a work both as how it was originally conceived and its in-text revisions (Origins) are far more important. These people are working with the series after all, so anything they say can appear into the text, while I mentioned the two worlds earlier as a thing that was abandoned, it's clearly something that was influencing official material, that's why there are no humans in Forces and IDW after all, but unless they actually show us the changes that are supposed to be happening with Sonic in terms of continuity, I will gladly pretend that they are no more relevant in-universe than any headcanon from a fan, except that the one's making the headcanon are Sega and Sonic Team themselves

 

Certain long-running franchises, like Gundam, tend to put out supplementary material like novels, games, etc.
It might help at expading and/or correcting a few inconsistencies, but fans gotta know nothing will ever be perfect or plothole-free.

This same logic applies to the Sonic franchise, if not even moreso nowadays.
TV shows, comic books, Q&As, all that jazz either went their own ways with the storytelling and canon or tried to address inconsistencies and/or plotholes but made them worse.
Like I said before, I don't see with good eyes SEGA's attempt at unifying canons and handwave gross inconsistencies just to ease intel digestion for newcomers.
So many things that simply don't mesh together, so many explanation that seem way too forced, so much suspension of disbelief.

And don't get me started about this all being about a blue rodent with an attitude.
Whatever the premise, whatever the plot, whatever the circunstances, a story that tries to appeal to many gotta be as consistent, cohesive and uncomplicated as possible.
When a franchise's age reaches 2 digits, it's as good a time as any to sit down and think back to all that was done and if it's best to keep going that way or risk starting it all anew.

A HARD reboot might make more wonders for said new generations...if done right, of course...
Keeping all the good and historical elements of the franchise while modernizing the canon and such.
Said inconsistencies and plotholes could be addressed better if SEGA had the slate clean to do so ^^"

 

I’m worried that a reboot would lean in the SoA direction (movie, Prime, shitty Lego ad) rather than something I’d want. Yes, a reboot would be ideal, but I don’t think it’d be what most of us would hope for.

 

True Story...unfortunately...
Sonic never fared that much well in its land of origin, so the west has more power over it nowadays.
They might as well dump all that crap over a new canon and even go New Freedom Fighters way for all we care.
(I kinda dropped IDW because at first it seemed to be heading that way, using Forces's backstory as a spring...)

But...many of the people working nowadays on Sonic games have been old fans of the franchise.
Were there no chances of such people managing somehow to salvage the best of the original canon and strive onwards from there?
I'd rather take a chance at believing on such small star of hope than going full pessimistic here...

 

Gimme a franchise and watch me

Gimme this franchise and watch me

 

When you start rebooting, you've crossed a line. Then where do you stop?

Say we get a reboot to simplify continuity now. What do we do some years down the line when new inconsistencies crop up, or continuity gets convoluted again? Do you reboot again? And again? And so on, until the fans get bored of the endless reboots that keep retelling the same story and never allow it to evolve?

 

I like what Marvel did with Ultimate Marvel, where they did a reboot but didn't overwrite the original comic line and instead ran them concurrently.

Of course, then things started getting out of hand, but the initial idea was good.

 

A comparably likely scenario would be people not knowing who Cream is due to Advance 2 and Heroes being before they got into the series. Hell, Frontiers drops references to a bunch of characters and entities, plenty more obscure than Tangle and even Sticks and doesn't explain them. Given all the cultural cache he has, Zavok is about as likely to provoke "who?"s from casual audiences, never mind the likes of Gaia temples, the Black Arms, the Babylonians, etc.

Ironically, the best way to remedy this would be to actually give Tangle on screen appearances in the games so, even if casual players don't become invested in the comics, there's still repertoire of Tangle appearances in the games that establish a game-specific presence for her.