#AND MILES TAILS RAINBOW DASH PROWER MY BELOVED

[piko-power]

DUDE WHAT THE HECK I JUST WANNA WATCH SONIC PRIME ALREADY WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S COMING OUT IN DECEMBER?!?!?!

THAT TRAILER WAS EPIC LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOO

[sage-nebula]

Longer thoughts on Sonic Prime, now that I've had a few days to sit on it. Under a cut because of length / those who don't care / spoilers / whatever else.

Like I said before, I thought it was fine. It's definitely not a bad show by any stretch and I think that younger kids who are perhaps new to Sonic / only know Sonic from the movies / don't know Sonic at all but want to watch a new cartoon will enjoy it. I can't fully explain why it didn't pull me in. It could be the fact that I binged all of it partly out of obligation because I felt like I had to watch it as soon as possible to avoid spoilers, so I didn't give myself time to just pace through the show normally. But I mean, I've binged other things and loved them (see: season four of The Dragon Prince), so I don't think that's exactly it. I think it's more to do with the writing, but before I talk about that I want to talk about some things I did like about it, first.

The vocal performances were, for the most part, excellent. Knuckles' VA was kind of . . . eh . . . at times, and it's very hard to separate Tails / Nine / etc from Rainbow Dash, but Devon Mack absolutely KILLED IT as Sonic, which is a big deal since Sonic is the main character of the show. I wouldn't mind Devon taking the lead on voicing Sonic in other projects, because he did a very good job. So happy for him, especially since he was a fan of Sonic before landing the gig.

The animation was very good too. I like the little animal quirks the characters were given, such as ear twitches and whatnot, and it was fun to see Sonic so expressive when he's supposed to be an expressive / emotive guy. The action sequences were easy to follow and nicely done too; it's a very fun show to look at, you can tell the animators had a good time with what they were doing.

I noticed some musical callbacks to the games at times that made me, a nerd, pretty happy. There weren't too many of them, but there were enough that it was a "oh hi there" moment when I caught them.

I like how Rouge has been handled for the most part, from her having outfits that are more legitimate outfits to her having little quirks like sleeping like the bat she is. I will say I think she should've been the captain in the pirate saga, but like, whatever, I like that even though she's clearly there so they could have more than one girl in the cast, she's still being treated with respect overall.

Miles "Nine" Prower and Rusty Rose are my beloveds. The rest of the cast I could take or leave, but those two are my morally grey, ruthless babies and I love them so much.

Now for the writing . . . I think my main issue is that, outside of Nine and Rusty, I feel like I haven't been given much reason to care. Like, yeah, Sonic is having a hard time—but Sonic is always having a hard time and he always pulls through so it's like, whatever, he'll be fine. He's been infected with a metal virus, he's been cyber corrupted, he's going to get vivisected in Scrapnik 3 next week, he's always having some kind of issue, and he always ends up fine, so I'm not too invested in that. Insert a variant of the time knife meme like "yeah yeah Sonic having a bad time we've all seen it." Like that just doesn't capture my interest much anymore. Sonic emotionally going through it, mayhaps, but physically? Nah.

But like, where Nine and Rusty have interesting stories and characterization and circumstances to me (Nine being ruthless and morally grey, Rusty potentially gaining her own agency and personhood and hopefully still killing people along the way because she deserves it and I'm here for women's wrongs), I just can't say the same about the others. The Eggman council is just—if I can be unabashedly negative here, I hate the entire concept. It's so cartoonish and stupid. Which, I know this is a cartoon, but for a dystopian universe it feels over the top ridiculous to have a fucking baby and moody teenager and whatever else, not to mention OoC for any version of Eggman to want to share power with anyone, even other versions of himself. And "Mr" and "Dr" are both prefixes (with "Dr" denoting more respect than "Mr") so to have them layered as "Mr Dr Eggman" is just so stupid and irritating—

But I digress.

So I don't care about the Eggman council, and despite spending more time with them I don't see enough depth or potential for rebel Rouge and rebel Knuckles to really care too much about them either. Putting aside my irritation at jungle Tails being called "mangey" even though he doesn't have mange (mange is an actual skin disorder in animals and he clearly doesn't have it, just call him FERAL, that's what he ACTUALLY IS), I felt the jungle episodes were just kind of a slog to get through even though watching Amy yeet the others out of the forest with her hammer was pretty funny. (although, missed opportunity calling her Thorn instead of Briar, you know, like Briar Rose.) It's not helped by the fact that we only spent two episodes there, so there's not time to give more depth to the characters—but with two episodes already feeling like a slog, more might've been worse? It's hard to say. And with the pirate episodes, again, they didn't really get my attention until Rusty showed up. That's when things got more interesting, for me. Otherwise, I just didn't feel much of a reason to care about these variants. It seems to be much less "here's how these characters naturally would have developed in these circumstances" and more "hehe hoho fun costumes yay :)" with Nine and Rusty being the exceptions to that rule.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that, I'm not the target audience for this show. Yes, I'm a Sonic fan—but this is a show that's clearly intended for a younger audience, one that's perhaps not that interested in Sonic lore, and that's fine! Not everything is going to be for me. I am not a fan of the Archie comics, for example, from what little I know of them. I'm not interested in Sonic X. I think SatAM is overrated, so on and so forth. I do enjoy the movies for what they are, but mostly because a.) I'm glad they weren't a trash fire, and b.) I am ALWAYS going to be drawn in by found family of any type for reasons relating to being raised on AoStH and also my own messed up childhood / adolescence. But I don't have to love every single piece of Sonic media just because I'm a Sonic fan. As I've said, the great thing about Sonic is that there's something for everyone. Prime isn't really for me (outside of Nine and Rusty), and that's OK. I'm cool with that.

But that said, I do think that there are places where the writing could be improved. There are places where the dialogue feels clunky (as in, "people don't talk like this"). There are names of variants I take issue with. And I think that if a bit more thought was put into WHY the characters are the way they are other than "jungle people" or "pirates" it would be better. But little kids aren't going to care about that, and little kids are the ones this show is for, so again. It's not a big deal. And at the end of the day it's not something I'm going to lose sleep over.

I will probably still watch season two, just so I can see how Nine and Rusty develop. If they weren't in the show, I probably wouldn't bother lol. But since they are, I will Do It For Them. Nine and Rusty, my beloveds.

But yeah, those are my thoughts. It's OK. Not really my thing, but I don't hate it either. Would take a whole spinoff about Nine and Rusty, though. Let Nine say fuck. Let Rusty murder. It's what they deserve.