The Sonic the Hedgehog Headcanon Thread of Lore and Time Stones

Well that's completely silly though, isn't it? How could Two Worlds in X possibly be an attempt at appealing to western media fans when the western media in question either ignored or completely erased the idea of there being Two Worlds? It's a concept that no western media fan would be accustomed to either way, which is why pretty much everyone assumes that Sonic being from a different planet started in X, because it might as well have! And no, Archie Mobius having two names doesn't count, the real Earth has had hundreds of different names at different eras in history without suddenly evoking a whole new planet. Come on.

 

Depending on how you look at it, it's not that farfetched.

It's not that they took the idea of the Sonic universe being set in two worlds from that old US comic. It's that they tried to consolidate both the Japanese and western depictions of Sonic's world by having a human world and an anthro world simultaneously, with Sonic traveling across them. Just like the localization of SA1 tried to consolidate the Eggman and Robotnik names.

Of course, whether or not that was the reason they did it is unknown.

 

That seems even more farfetched. On the face of it, I'm not sure I agree that one side of the world and the other viewed Sonic as being in exclusively "human world" and "anthro world" to begin with, but even if they did, if they wanted to make a show with both human and furry worlds to "match western depictions", the western depictions already have both. StC, Archie and Adventures of Sonic all have worlds populated by both furries and humans simultaneously (humanoids? whatever AoSTH has). And that's probably how the overwhelming majority of people perceived the game world even at the time of the Adventure games, however big a shift it may have been to have Sonic running around cities full of people. SA1 has humans investigating echidna ruins, X has to rip Mystic Ruin out of the ground and shove it onto Earth so they can go there.

But even still, to suggest this was all in service of catering to fan perceptions, that would imply that they let this one worldbuilding element allegedly gleamed from western material govern the entire premise of the show, which seems silly again. Sonic X is a fish-out-of-water story. It focuses on humans and their contrast with Sonic and co. as aliens on Earth, because humans are "relatable" and Sonic and friends being in an unfamiliar world is an excuse to give exposition to the audience about their lives, and characterize them in how they react to human stuff. It makes sense for the construction of a TV show no matter when the idea of two worlds first entered the conversation. You might as well claim they ripped it off from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, since that also had Mario and Luigi originally being from real-ass brooklyn, and that's made it into their new movie as well.

And either way, what was this "merging of east and west" even for? We never actually see anything of Sonic-world in X to begin with, since they're on Earth for the first 2 cours and go off into space for the third! It was only ever a framing device to create distance between the Sonic characters and the human ones, the worlds themselves are kind of irrelevant! Especially when you get into whatever the hell is going on with the Robotnik family lineage in X.

 

No, the common view was definitely that Sonic's world was predominantly populated by anthros, with humans being a minority. That's how it was shown in all old western media until Archie introduced "Overlanders" in the mid 90s, and even then they were mainly featured as part of the Great War backstory. In the comic's present time humans character were still extremely rare until the Adventure era.

STC even went as far as to eventually introduce Earth as a separate planet from Mobius where humans resided.

In fact I remember old Usenet debates in the mid to late 90s about whether Mobius was "real" or an invention of Sega of America that wasn't recognized by SOJ. Then when SA1 trailers showing the human-populated Station Square came out, people started using that as evidence that Mobius was non-canon, as in their minds humans = not Mobius.

We literally can't know the official reasoning behind the dual world thing in Sonic X and the Pontac/Graff era games until Iizuka or someone explains it. Until then it's all speculation.

 

This fanbase has this very strange tendency to blame early western adaptations for stuff that they didn't like about the writing of Pontac and Graff - especially AoStH for whatever reason.

And I simply cannot put it into words how baffling of an assumption this is when shit like Colors and Lost World are pretty much glorified Sonic X filler arcs if anything. Orbot and Cubot are quite literally just Bocoe and Decoe with new names and designs. Sonic X was a recent series that really helped boost the franchise's popularity after Sega fell out of the console business, and I'll be damned if it was not Sonic Team's primary inspiration from the mid-aughts to the mid-2010s.

Genuinely, go ahead and look at the humor, characterization and narrative tropes seen in Sonic X and compare them to those of the Pontaff games. They're really not that far off at all.

 

No? The characterizations between Sonic X and the Pontac/Graff games were quite different, especially for the title character. In one he was a semi-aloof guy doing his own thing, in the other he was a buffoonish motormouth who couldn't stop making quips every minute. If the first Sonic X episode had been written like Pontac/Graff games, Sonic would have made quips and cracks at Sam's team throughout his whole "race" with them. I also don't recall Sonic X Tails ever snarking at Sonic. Orbot and Cubot might have been inspired by Bocoe and Decoe, but were nothing alike in terms of personalities.

 

"Humans are rare" is a different idea than "human world and furry world", but either way that would still be a weird assumption since all the old comics and cartoons except Underground have at least a fair number of human or at least humanoid incidentals and one-off characters. You still have to make a huge leap to go from "humans are less populous" to "two separate dimensions and/or planets". If I'm really to believe this was a mainstream opinion, then it's one that requires a degree of ignorance about the holistic prominence of humans in the franchise as a whole, which SEGA would not be privy to.

Again I'm really not seeing how the connection is even supposed to work. "Come look at our new Sonic TV show, it's just like your 90s comic books because humans and furries are separate, except they're not separate in the way they were in the old comics, which is also not true about those comics now"? Like it seems a lot more logical that they were just looking for the best way to tell the wish fulfillment "I get to be friends with Sonic the hedgehog" story for the kids watching.

Even Sonic X itself can't keep this humans vs furries shit consistent since the humans from Planet Cascadia exist in the Sonic world universe. Did you know those guys started the war the Metarex wiped themselves out fighting? I didn't. I found that out a month ago. None of the wikis mention it. You only get to see the ships for a second in the flashback episode, but they're identical to the one Molly and her group used. I feel like the Metarex being at war with humanity should have come up as a part of the plot at some point? God what a confused fucking show that was.

 

I’m sorry but I find this claim very silly, especially when it’s used as reasoning not to have Snively in the game canon. Like if you don’t like the character that’s cool, but objecting to his presence because it represents some imagined and undefined creative stranglehold based on unfounded conjecture about the connections between 2010s Two Worlds and early western material is uh… a take.

 

Two quick oneliners. A far cry from the motormouth he was under Pontac and Graff. He didn't even address any words at Sam, going with an "actions speak louder than words" approach. And then he did the same during their rematch in a later episode -- very few quips, didn't say a word after winning; showed how awesome he was through his actions instead, crossing the finish line twice.

Did you read my posts? I was going by the idea that the two worlds in Sonic X and the Pontac/Graff games were based on the respective depictions of Sonic's world from the Japanese canon and western media, to consolidate the clashing interpretations. I never implied that the western media had two worlds.

human world/Earth = based on the Japanese depiction (mainly from the Adventure games)
anthro world/Sonic's world = based on the western depiction (Mobius)

 

You very directly mention StC having two worlds in your own quote, but that's beside the point. You're not seeing what I'm saying, which is that "US = furry, Japan = human" is wrong, and has been wrong since before X was in development, if not from the very beginning of the series. The Sonic 1 story manga showed a world of furries like Sonic and human(oid)s that just have animal features. The OVA follows suit. The old corocoro manga was more like SatAM where Eggman was the only human around. Sonic Adventure portrays an area of mostly humans, but where echidna ruins are a prominent part of the world and story, where randos on the street know about little planet, where Sonic and co. are an accepted part of that world, and where it's normal for someone like Big the cat to be a bystander, if a bit of an unusual one. It's not a "human world" just because the incidental NPCs on the street don't tend to be furries. And like I said, the idea that the western depictions are furries only is also wrong, the ratio is simply different, and that had already shifted for the overwhelming majority of those depictions by the time X would've been in pre-production anyway.

And no matter how you slice it, whether they decided to take inspiration from this or not, it doesn't logically follow in any case that this would necessitate them splitting it into two planets, nor would one of those planets go completely unexplored in the story proper. If fans at the time believed that Adventure "confirmed" the idea of a "human world" and that somehow that was what contradicted the comics, then they were reading the comics wrong.

 

Some very dedicated Sonic-nerds and artists have always argued that American material is fundamentally different, and trying to fit that material into the Japanese side of things is like, to borrow words from the artist PinkGalaxy, "Fitting a square peg into a round hole" (which surely didn't stop them from trying lol).
And I never understood it? Like imagine a world without SatAM, do you think the concept of a far away kingdom that is being attacked by Eggman and Sonic has to stop him doesn't work with the series? Or Eggman having family member subordinate is some conflicting concept?

Eitherway, even if I think it'll work, I don't want Sonic Team to adapt this material out of necessity. Ian and others have pushed for this idea multiple times, and Sonic Team constantly said no, and they have their reasons for it. Maybe because of Archie fiasco, maybe because they just outright hate the material or see nothing of value in it.

I don't want these developers to work with the already massive material of American Sonic if they don't want to.

 

I dont have any particular attachment to the american sonic characters, in fact I do actually think snively is dumb and I don't really like how SatAM and the archie comics try to make eggman this super dark and serious character despite in-cannon how his first thought entering a new place is "i should build a carnival here".
With that said, I wouldn't mind if sonic started treating the fact that it has had so many wild and disparate interpretations over the years as a strength rather than something to move past, including more american elements into the games. Like how DC and Marvel treat their properties, the stories and characters get written and rewritten dozens of times by dozens of writers and have huge backlogs of history that can be called back to. Harley Quinn was a character made by bruce tim for the animated series, and has since become one of the most prominent DC characters in general. The spiderverse movies is all about combining different versions of the character together and it was a hit.
Generally, I dont see the idea of bringing Sally Acorn into the games as any different than bringing Mephalise back. Both characters are from periods in the series that had vastly different design philosophies, but was all realized that Memphis Tennessee is actually hype as fuck.

 

I don't view any particular non-game canon material as any more or less-worthy of adaptation into the main canon. It's all in the execution. A lot of people argue that, for example, the freedom fighter characters would have to be so far altered to fit in the main canon that they'd no longer resemble themselves, but I don't think they were ever so rigidly defined that people would mind a little change. I think what people want is for Sally to be a cool chipmunk girl who is a good leader and probably has some element of her hairstyle and color scheme intact (though it's Sally, so those were negotiable even when she still got to exist). That doesn't seem like a radical departure from SEGA's standards to me! And I think what a lot of detractors are afraid of but tend to not say is that we're all inherently a little biased towards characters that originated as someone you play as, and anything that comes from the outside in, even if they end up becoming playable, feels like an intrusion, or like it's overshadowing the others. We already see this with IDW, and the fear that characters from other continuities being reintroduced would suddenly dominate the story with their presence is a more valid one. They certainly did for a long time in Archie, after all. But I would be wary of taking that as a rejection of the idea.

More than that though I think fans of that material don't even reeeeally care as much about all of this? It's way more about feeling kind of burned by the official side of the series, like being swept under the rug, that gets to people. Like, I get why they couldn't do the Xorda war again, or Iron Dominion, or Brotherhood of Metallix or anything with traditional roboticization again, even if they had all the rights in order. But there's not really that much stopping them from, like, drawing a Sonic Channel illustration where the gang gets coffee and donuts at the bakery Sally and her AI-generated wife Nicole run together. A thing like that, just the simple acknowledgement of these characters' presence, knowing that these people do indeed exist in Sonic's world and have lives of their own, would actually satiate a ton of fans. I don't want royal fucking Acorn family politics dominating the narrative again, I don't want Rotor failing to save his hypnotized family like four times. I do want the cyborg rabbit to beat the shit out of some badniks, but that's not a difficult situation to contrive at all. I think it is actually fair to be a little bothered if seeing a potted plant on Tails's shelf sometimes is better representation than the fans of the old cartoons and comics get.

 

Even as an enjoyer of the cartoons and comics as a child, I'm not bothered at all that they don't get referenced in new material or considered for any reimagination or canon migrancy. Kid me was able to put together that the people who made those things probably weren't the same people that made the games; and if kid me was able to parse that then I don't imagine it's too difficult to separate.

Don't get me wrong, I would use some of these characters if I had my hands on the series. The Freedom Fighters could be an activist fighting force on Westside Island. Scratch & Grounder could be Eggman's old dud henchmen that roam the earth like C3PO and R2D2. Mina Mongoose could be an "Envy Adams"-esque old flame for Sonic, and Finetivus or Naugus simply existing in the space could be more compelling antagonists than most of Sonic's rogue gallery. Hell, throw in Thunderbolt. Her dynamic with Eggman and the larger cast was fun.

But it doesn't really feel like I'm missing anything to let them be relics of the past, either. I'd almost rather the Sonic series come up with new characters that execute their ideas in a new, better-fitting way (see: Surge vs Scourge).

+ - Besides, if you really wanted to give me the keys, I would be bringing in Old Man Owl, Knuckles's cowboy hat, and the planewreck base on South Island from the OVA over any of this.. but we're getting away from the point about western adaptations.  

 

I mean, I also want to see other JP continuity stuff reincorporated in much the same way. There's just not as much of it on the JP side. X, the OVA and old mangas are pretty much all you get, and they all weren't really shooting for the same thing that the other comics and cartoons were.

 

I kinda like Anton Verruca.

Just look at this charming fellow.

As far as the ova goes, this is probably just me but I wouldn't mind if they had more characters like Princess Sara who were humans with animal features. Strangely she isn't the only time characters like that appeared in the series, there were also some groupies in the promotional manga for sonic 1 released when the game came out.

I'm imagining you walking in an area like station square that has a lot of human NPC's and some of them just have cat ears or whatever, no attention drawn to it or anything. I think its silly and fun.

 

I mean, a lot of the aspects people love about the Freedom Fighters and derivative cast comes from the Archie comic and the Archie comic alone, and therefore are off-limits almost certainly.

Nicole's Lynx form, Bunnie and Antoine's marriage and so on. These elements have basically become synonymous with the characters, yet they were nowhere to be seen in SatAM. That doesn't necessarily prevent us from getting a new physical/hologram form for Nicole or a version of Antoine who's more heroic and less interested in Sally, but I have a hard time believing that anything with more than a passing resemblance to Archie stuff would make it past Sega.