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After a couple of my Archie Sonic critiques, I got several people saying that I was a bit too harsh and should be more constructive when I talk about the comics. AND THOSE PEOPLE… have a point. While I don’t take back one thing I said about the comics, I do admit I should try to be more constructive when I talk about this series. Now this does not mean I am going to be nice for the sake of seeming balanced, this means I will try to not be as judgmental in my statements and try to throw in recommendations as to how things could be fixed and improved. And I will start with this series.

As I have said before, I have a major interest in reading this series because I tend to use it to help me understand basic storytelling fundamentals and learn about what I enjoy in storytelling. However, I only get to do that because this series fails in the fundamentals. So in this analytical series, I want to explain the issues I have with the comic and what I think should be done to fix them. However, I want to say two things first.
One, I don’t care about the mandates. Not only are they contradicted and many of them come from rumors, every show, movie and comic, especially when they are attached to a franchise, has mandates and I have seen many of them with harsher mandates still work. Two, this is not an objective post. To me, there isn’t a way to be objective for talking about your perspective. What I will do is to state my perspective and back it up as much as evidence and references as possible.

As for talking about the comic, the best way to address the problems I have with this comic is to try to answer one simple question. “What does Archie’s Sonic have to offer?”
Well, the best answer should be the characters. Besides this comic being an adaptation for Sonic, characters has always been one of Sonic franchises biggest assets as almost each character has their own following as fans attach to them for their own reasons. And this would be a great selling point for me. Almost all of my favorite stories like One Piece, Steven Universe, Doctor Who are at their best when they are character focused. Establishing characters, their personalities and their motivations, and setting them in stories to challenge and explore them is basic techniques for a character study and always works to get me invested in narrative. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case here.

When I read Ian Flynn commentary on writing the comic in his “Lost Hedgehog Tales” series, one part of it really stood out to me.

“The comic had settled into a comfortable pattern of “Sonic and the Freedom Fighters always come out on top.” My objective between Sonic the Hedgehog #225 and Sonic the Hedgehog #275 was to break the team as badly as possible and watch as they put themselves back together. Cruel? Sure. But by the end of the whole arc, there would be no question why this band of heroes always triumphed. I wanted to put them through the absolute worst case scenario, and then show how they managed to overcome all the odds. On the whole, it was meant to be a testament to the strength of their friendship, their courage, and their heroism.” –Ian Flynn

In which he did this by turning one of the leads into a robot and having an antagonist become the leader of their town legally. While these events aren’t bad on their own, the execution of these plot lines does nothing to achieving the goal of testing the character’s bonds.

To me, testing a character should be about giving them a challenge that conflicts with them in some way and seeing what decisions they make when dealing with said challenge. Out of the 8 leads, only 2 (at best) have their dedication to the group challenged, Sonic and Amy. Sally is a mind controlled robot, so her character loses agency and can’t make decisions, therefore can’t be challenged. Antoine is unconscious for the arc so the same applies to him. Bunnie leaves the story to go get legonized, but again out of the story so nothing can be shown about her on screen. Rotor is just on a different team and doesn’t have much happen to him after leaving the council, so nothing there. And Nicole, while does have a conflict of feeling like an outsider, it was settled by Mina going to meet with her and apologize. While this is a decent conflict, it doesn’t have anything to do with her relationship to the others and by having Mina resolve it, keeps the conflict from involving the others.

So Sonic, Tails and Amy get the challenge right? Well, not really. Sonic does start to doubt himself for the beginning of an issue from all of the bad things that had happen to him up to this point, but that is resolved by Amy yelling at him to get over it and he does. That’s it. Amy’s only conflict comes from her yelling at Sonic and Tails just cries a bit earlier about this to his Dad. So basically, no one had their relationship or commitment to the group challenged, besides Sonic that which only deals with him mopping for a brief moment. Yes, the arc never completed, but Flynn said specifically about this arc that, “I only got as far as the breaking point”. Which means that he set up all of the challenges for the characters, yet none of them were set up to challenge their “…friendship, their courage, and their heroism.” However, this isn’t the only area he has a problem with character writing. He has a problem with character arcs too.

When Sonic had begun to doubt himself, while not a bad idea, ends up being resolved in a very rushed, haphazard way. However, this isn’t the only time this has happened. From 252 to current 278, 4 of the main characters, Sonic, Sally, Tails and Rotor had to deal with their own character conflicts, however, they all fail in the same way, mainly because they were the same arc. They each had different problems, but the execution was all the same. Something bad happens to them, they sulk about it, someone tells them to get over it, and they do. Sonic’s Werehog/The Hulk Conflict, Sally falling for Eggman’s trap, Tails getting embarrassed at the tournament, and Rotor finding his Dad, all have the same structure. Though the arcs hitting the same beats alone isn’t great and ending them with the moral, “Get over it” is a bit lazy, the main problem with these arcs is that they don’t do anything for the characters.

Characters dealing with conflict is meant to give the characters and audience an idea as to who they are. However, all of these arcs end with nothing new revealed about them or nothing about the character growing as individuals. The conflicts don't contrast with that character’s personality traits, leaving it to be a conflict that any of the characters could go through, sans job titles. Once the conflict happens, they get sad about it, which does establish what makes them sad, but then they are just told to get over it, and then they do. Leaving the character without a realizing moment of growth or change. Basically, they have the structure of character arcs, without actually being character arcs.

OK so the characters are meant to be static archetypes that just bounce around in the story like other long runners? Actually no, most of them aren’t established or interesting enough for that. While Sonic, and to a lesser extent Amy and Antoine, consistently show their behaviors, view points and beliefs in their actions as well has have their own personality quirks, the rest don’t. Besides the leadership dialogue from Sally, you could swap most of the main cast’s dialogue around and nothing about them or the scenes would change, mainly because it’s usually either exposition dumping or exchanging pleasantries. So trying to have these guys just be static archetypes doesn’t seem to be the comic’s focus, mainly because the focus is more on the events rather than character development.

In the Lost Hedgehog tales, Flynn mentions that he likes to focus on long term pay offs. To quote, “Intentional or not, it’s when the author ties together elements from the entire life of the story to bring things together in an epiphany.” However, he does this in a way that the events in the story are the only driving forces of the story. While the freedom fighters are in the action, the story isn’t about them going for specific goals and challenging them on those decisions. Events happen in the series in order to build up to the “epiphany”, but the characters are just along for the ride. For example, while the current Gaia arc has involved the main cast, outside of the tangential Werehog conflict, none of the characters have had to deal with a conflict or challenge that comes directly from this arc. They have been involved, but their actions have been incredibly generic, to the point that they could be swapped with each other or removed and nothing in the arc or their characters would change. Or the “Waves of Change” Arc, where if you removed Sonic, Amy and Rotor from the story, nothing in that story line would change. This is why, to me, the series comes off incredibly impersonal. When none of the characters stand out or deal with anything to define who they are, they come off more as constructs to move the story forward rather than characters.

And this problem seems to get compounded by the fact that the cast is always too large. Now having 7 to 12 characters in the main cast would already be too big for series with a longer story runtime, because it would be hard to near impossible to have every character to get screen time, let alone development (which is why we rarely see them all together). But this series seem to have a weird habit of overloading its cast with tons of characters and even they tend to get arcs and conflicts more than the leads. Honey and Dr. Ellidy both characters who are brought into the series with interesting (and creepy for Dr. Ellidy) character conflict that are inherent to their actions and viewpoints, such as dealing with a disturbing version of her own greed in Breezie or dealing with seeing a robotic zombie version of his daughter (Told you it was creepy). It’s like the writers aren’t interested in doing anything with the leads and will create new characters instead and add to the overstuff cast they already have. I know the SEGA characters are, in Flynn’s words, “protected by SEGA’s licensing armor”, but I have a hard time feeling sympathy when it he can’t seem to write the 5 characters he does have control over.

Now the weak character writing would always be a problem for me, but I would be willing to overlook it if I had something else to be invested in like the story. Which considering that Flynn said that long term story telling is his focus, it should be a hook. But it isn’t.

(To Be Continued In Part 2)

Description
After a couple of my Archie Sonic critiques, I got several people saying that I was a bit too harsh and should be more constructive when I talk about the comics. AND THOSE PEOPLE… have a point. While I don’t take back one thing I said about the comics, I do admit I should try to be more constructive when I talk about this series. Now this does not mean I am going to be nice for the sake of seeming balanced, this means I will try to not be as judgmental in my statements and try to throw in recommendations as to how things could be fixed and improved. And I will start with this series.

As I have said before, I have a major interest in reading this series because I tend to use it to help me understand basic storytelling fundamentals and learn about what I enjoy in storytelling. However, I only get to do that because this series fails in the fundamentals. So in this analytical series, I want to explain the issues I have with the comic and what I think should be done to fix them. However, I want to say two things first.
One, I don’t care about the mandates. Not only are they contradicted and many of them come from rumors, every show, movie and comic, especially when they are attached to a franchise, has mandates and I have seen many of them with harsher mandates still work. Two, this is not an objective post. To me, there isn’t a way to be objective for talking about your perspective. What I will do is to state my perspective and back it up as much as evidence and references as possible.

As for talking about the comic, the best way to address the problems I have with this comic is to try to answer one simple question. “What does Archie’s Sonic have to offer?”
Well, the best answer should be the characters. Besides this comic being an adaptation for Sonic, characters has always been one of Sonic franchises biggest assets as almost each character has their own following as fans attach to them for their own reasons. And this would be a great selling point for me. Almost all of my favorite stories like One Piece, Steven Universe, Doctor Who are at their best when they are character focused. Establishing characters, their personalities and their motivations, and setting them in stories to challenge and explore them is basic techniques for a character study and always works to get me invested in narrative. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case here.

When I read Ian Flynn commentary on writing the comic in his “Lost Hedgehog Tales” series, one part of it really stood out to me.

“The comic had settled into a comfortable pattern of “Sonic and the Freedom Fighters always come out on top.” My objective between Sonic the Hedgehog #225 and Sonic the Hedgehog #275 was to break the team as badly as possible and watch as they put themselves back together. Cruel? Sure. But by the end of the whole arc, there would be no question why this band of heroes always triumphed. I wanted to put them through the absolute worst case scenario, and then show how they managed to overcome all the odds. On the whole, it was meant to be a testament to the strength of their friendship, their courage, and their heroism.” –Ian Flynn

In which he did this by turning one of the leads into a robot and having an antagonist become the leader of their town legally. While these events aren’t bad on their own, the execution of these plot lines does nothing to achieving the goal of testing the character’s bonds.

To me, testing a character should be about giving them a challenge that conflicts with them in some way and seeing what decisions they make when dealing with said challenge. Out of the 8 leads, only 2 (at best) have their dedication to the group challenged, Sonic and Amy. Sally is a mind controlled robot, so her character loses agency and can’t make decisions, therefore can’t be challenged. Antoine is unconscious for the arc so the same applies to him. Bunnie leaves the story to go get legonized, but again out of the story so nothing can be shown about her on screen. Rotor is just on a different team and doesn’t have much happen to him after leaving the council, so nothing there. And Nicole, while does have a conflict of feeling like an outsider, it was settled by Mina going to meet with her and apologize. While this is a decent conflict, it doesn’t have anything to do with her relationship to the others and by having Mina resolve it, keeps the conflict from involving the others.

So Sonic, Tails and Amy get the challenge right? Well, not really. Sonic does start to doubt himself for the beginning of an issue from all of the bad things that had happen to him up to this point, but that is resolved by Amy yelling at him to get over it and he does. That’s it. Amy’s only conflict comes from her yelling at Sonic and Tails just cries a bit earlier about this to his Dad. So basically, no one had their relationship or commitment to the group challenged, besides Sonic that which only deals with him mopping for a brief moment. Yes, the arc never completed, but Flynn said specifically about this arc that, “I only got as far as the breaking point”. Which means that he set up all of the challenges for the characters, yet none of them were set up to challenge their “…friendship, their courage, and their heroism.” However, this isn’t the only area he has a problem with character writing. He has a problem with character arcs too.

When Sonic had begun to doubt himself, while not a bad idea, ends up being resolved in a very rushed, haphazard way. However, this isn’t the only time this has happened. From 252 to current 278, 4 of the main characters, Sonic, Sally, Tails and Rotor had to deal with their own character conflicts, however, they all fail in the same way, mainly because they were the same arc. They each had different problems, but the execution was all the same. Something bad happens to them, they sulk about it, someone tells them to get over it, and they do. Sonic’s Werehog/The Hulk Conflict, Sally falling for Eggman’s trap, Tails getting embarrassed at the tournament, and Rotor finding his Dad, all have the same structure. Though the arcs hitting the same beats alone isn’t great and ending them with the moral, “Get over it” is a bit lazy, the main problem with these arcs is that they don’t do anything for the characters.

Characters dealing with conflict is meant to give the characters and audience an idea as to who they are. However, all of these arcs end with nothing new revealed about them or nothing about the character growing as individuals. The conflicts don't contrast with that character’s personality traits, leaving it to be a conflict that any of the characters could go through, sans job titles. Once the conflict happens, they get sad about it, which does establish what makes them sad, but then they are just told to get over it, and then they do. Leaving the character without a realizing moment of growth or change. Basically, they have the structure of character arcs, without actually being character arcs.

OK so the characters are meant to be static archetypes that just bounce around in the story like other long runners? Actually no, most of them aren’t established or interesting enough for that. While Sonic, and to a lesser extent Amy and Antoine, consistently show their behaviors, view points and beliefs in their actions as well has have their own personality quirks, the rest don’t. Besides the leadership dialogue from Sally, you could swap most of the main cast’s dialogue around and nothing about them or the scenes would change, mainly because it’s usually either exposition dumping or exchanging pleasantries. So trying to have these guys just be static archetypes doesn’t seem to be the comic’s focus, mainly because the focus is more on the events rather than character development.

In the Lost Hedgehog tales, Flynn mentions that he likes to focus on long term pay offs. To quote, “Intentional or not, it’s when the author ties together elements from the entire life of the story to bring things together in an epiphany.” However, he does this in a way that the events in the story are the only driving forces of the story. While the freedom fighters are in the action, the story isn’t about them going for specific goals and challenging them on those decisions. Events happen in the series in order to build up to the “epiphany”, but the characters are just along for the ride. For example, while the current Gaia arc has involved the main cast, outside of the tangential Werehog conflict, none of the characters have had to deal with a conflict or challenge that comes directly from this arc. They have been involved, but their actions have been incredibly generic, to the point that they could be swapped with each other or removed and nothing in the arc or their characters would change. Or the “Waves of Change” Arc, where if you removed Sonic, Amy and Rotor from the story, nothing in that story line would change. This is why, to me, the series comes off incredibly impersonal. When none of the characters stand out or deal with anything to define who they are, they come off more as constructs to move the story forward rather than characters.

And this problem seems to get compounded by the fact that the cast is always too large. Now having 7 to 12 characters in the main cast would already be too big for series with a longer story runtime, because it would be hard to near impossible to have every character to get screen time, let alone development (which is why we rarely see them all together). But this series seem to have a weird habit of overloading its cast with tons of characters and even they tend to get arcs and conflicts more than the leads. Honey and Dr. Ellidy both characters who are brought into the series with interesting (and creepy for Dr. Ellidy) character conflict that are inherent to their actions and viewpoints, such as dealing with a disturbing version of her own greed in Breezie or dealing with seeing a robotic zombie version of his daughter (Told you it was creepy). It’s like the writers aren’t interested in doing anything with the leads and will create new characters instead and add to the overstuff cast they already have. I know the SEGA characters are, in Flynn’s words, “protected by SEGA’s licensing armor”, but I have a hard time feeling sympathy when it he can’t seem to write the 5 characters he does have control over.

Now the weak character writing would always be a problem for me, but I would be willing to overlook it if I had something else to be invested in like the story. Which considering that Flynn said that long term story telling is his focus, it should be a hook. But it isn’t.

(To Be Continued In Part 2)