#Also the fandom's woobification of Silver into an infantile anxious uwu character just... gets on my nerves

[childofaura]

I guess I’m just gonna be filled with bad takes this December but I’m putting out one more while I work on my Sonic Forces comic:

I get kind of bugged about the fact that a lot of the Sonic characters are moving away from their original core personalities, and not in a “the character is growing” sort of way like Shadow when he hit peak character writing in 06 (Yes I said it, I’ll write an essay on why 06 was Shadow’s highest point as a character). But more in a “These characters are slowly losing the aspects of their personality that defines them, either by the franchise writing their characters to fill roles that don’t show those traits or sometimes by well-meaning fans.” I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been around (kind of) long enough to know how the characters were or if I’m just slowly becoming grouchy about it, but let me start:

1. Knuckles. Knuckles is starting to slip from his “rough and tumble and ready to fight” personality. Most of the portrayals I’ve seen from him are starting to slip more into the “cocky overconfident butt-of-the-joke” scenes, or in the case of Forces where he had absolutely no personality at all. Knuckles is supposed to be confident, yeah, but he’s also ASSURED in his might. The most cocky he’s gonna get is when he knows he can take a good swing at someone or something. And he’s stubborn.

2. Silver. For some of the most part, Silver’s thankfully stayed kind of the same, but he too is tripping into OOC portrayals (like that awful line in  Forces “I’m an optimist but I’m also a realist”. I swear that line was written by someone who read a summarized bio of Silver and said “Okay I think I’ve got this”). A lot of the time I’ve seen him get put into the “anxious nervous baby uwu” camp, though mainly that’s been from a few comic panels and the fandom that I’ve seen (and honestly I haven’t read enough of the comics so I’ll be happy if I get proved wrong); everyone forgets that Silver’s anxiety wasn’t in the form of “literal baby” but more “I’m so fucking sick of seeing everything in my life get destroyed” to where he has bursts of temper. His intro in 06 shows him floating through Soleanna and when he sees an Iblis flare, he very angrily backhands it psychokinetically. I’ll grant that Forces gave us a brief moment of Silver’s true personality when he rushes into a fight against Infinite (that should have lasted WAY longer and the fact that they crippled my boy’s power level for that scene still peeves me), but that was it.

3. Tails. Not a whole lot to say on this one but this kid is slowly losing his bravery.

4. Amy. Surprisingly, this one actually irritates me the most. For some reason, everyone loves changing Amy the most despite the fact that she hits a very nice medium of personality with her character that most people don’t realize. People don’t allow Amy to be cutesy anymore, and almost every time I’ve seen someone re-draw her or whatever, they aggressively squash out her crush on Sonic and they say, “Well now she’s gonna be more INDEPENDENT and HEAD-STRONG!”

NEWSFLASH.

AMY WAS ALWAYS INDEPENDENT AND HEADSTRONG. YOU GUYS DON’T LIKE HER BECAUSE SHE’S A CUTE FEMININE GIRL WHO DREAMS ABOUT LOVE.

In Sonic Heroes, she rallies up Cream and Big to go save Chocola and Froggy while also wanting to look for Sonic, taking the role of leader in Team ROSE. In Sonic 06, she manages to break into Eggman’s base somehow by accident without being detected and singlehandedly rescues Elise. She also apologizes to Silver and promises to help him find who he’s looking for, and she throws herself in harm’s way to help Sonic. In Riders Zero Gravity, she gets Storm under her boot just by being intimidating. A twelve year old girl!

Let her be head over heels for Sonic. Let her be a cutesy girl who ends up being the damsel in distress sometimes (because a good chunk of the time she also saves herself and scares the shit out of whoever treats her badly). Let her be that compassionate “I pray for peace” character she always was.

And honestly that covers MOST of the characters I’ve had issues with (There’s also Team Chaotix, but the one who gets the shit end of the stick the most is my man Vector). There’s some characters like Shadow, Blaze, Omega, Rouge (Though she’s kind of slipping too), Cream etc, who are staying relatively true to their characters but they’re also kind of slowly being lost.