#also it IS important to mention that certain characters vanishing WAS affected by sonic 06 being a financial disaster. but the thing is

[seventeendeer]

if you feel up to infodumping about it, i would love to hear your opinions on the Weird Writing for sonic the hedgehog's female characters. i've always had a massive soft spot for elise she's such a strange person when you look past the Generic Love Interest framing of her story and i really wish she'd gotten her own game

Ahhh thank you for enabling me, I have SO MANY THOUGHTS on this subject!! I've been super fascinated with the weird gender dynamics emerging in the franchise ... nearly since female characters were added at all. I think I've only really been able to put my thoughts into words recently, but it's a subject I've been interested in since I first got into the series as a kid.

(Also, I feel you on the subject of Elise - super interesting character more or less accidentally emerging from a very bland role)

Note: As usual, I’m mostly talking about the mainline games and Sonic X. While Sonic has a lot of spinoffs, I think Sonic X is so close to the spirit of the games that it is not a stretch to count it as an entry in the series’ core installments, particularly the second series/season 3. Especially because it originated in the same era as most of the lore currently defining the games, and there was a lot of migration back and forth between the two continuities regarding both characters and worldbuilding.

Anyway! On the subject of gendered writing in Sonic stories!

IMO, the biggest paradox in the Sonic games' and anime’s approach to female characters is that sexist writing is all over the place ... and yet the female cast is overwhelmingly the most layered and thematically interesting! Which they're then generally tortured and killed for. Whoops.

In order to understand why, I think it's important to remember that at its core, Sonic is very heavily inspired by shonen anime. If anyone's interested, look into the games' weird copycat relationship with Dragonball Z, for one. Sonic games wish they were Dragonball games so bad, it has negatively affected much of their history (Shadow's repeated Vegeta-ification is a good example).

Like shonen anime (it's right there in the name!), Sonic assumes a male player, a male audience. For this reason, you'll have a wealth of "cool" male characters to play as. Cool designs, cool powers, more diverse roles. Playable female characters are extremely limited, with only Amy and Rouge being sincere attempts to diversify the central cast just a tiny bit (Cream and Blaze used to qualify as well, but I'd argue they eventually graduated to the second category I'm about to talk about; more on them later). The main downside of this role is that characters the player is expected to project onto become limited in the kinds of stories and arcs they're 'allowed' by the writers to participate in. They're intentionally kept static so they can neatly slot into multiple narratives without being disruptive. Many of the male characters have vestigial emotional arcs - Tails' insecurities, Knuckles' complicated feelings toward his ancestors, etc. - but they're never allowed to go anywhere, directly influence the narrative or conclude in a meaningful way. They’re here to observe, then save the day, and that’s it. Anything beyond that would complicate continuity between games - or worse, jeopardize Baby Boy’s First Power Fantasy.

On the flipside, many of the story-heavy games employ one-off supporting characters as the emotional core of their respective narratives. And what kinds of characters make great foils to cool, powerful, emotionally repressed dudes primarily existing independently of their own stories? Less action-oriented, highly emotional girls absolutely fucking drowning in that narrative sauce.

Let me be clear: it’s sexist. Defining male characters by their cool powers and ability to save the day, while female characters are defined by their suffering and need for help, is deeply sexist.

Let me be clear, part two: characters who are closely tied to their narratives, who embody the themes of their own stories, who are allowed to struggle, who are allowed to express emotions and for those emotions to directly influence the narrative, are largely much more interesting characters.

Characters who come to some form of resolution are more interesting.

Unfortunately, Sonic games are largely a strange exercise in placing cute, simple cartoon animal characters into weirdly brutal, tonally inconsistent stories that circle themes of sacrifice like sharks smelling blood.

And so the girls die. Or they’re emotionally broken. Or they’re separated from their friends - and thus the spotlight - forever.

A rundown of major female Sonic characters, their narrative purpose, and the price they had to pay for it:

- Tikal: A peace-loving ghost girl serving as a spirit guide in her sole game appearance. Revealed to have been betrayed by her power-hungry family, forcing her to seal her soul away for thousands of years in order to prevent the end of the world. When the threat passed, it seems her spirit did too.

- Maria: A deathly ill 12-year-old who lived in a sterile care facility on a space station, but retained hope that one day she would be well enough to return to Earth. She stood up to armed military forces to save her brother figure/best friend, and got fridged for the trouble.

- Cream: Introduced as a playable character, but largely discarded by the franchise after her sole moment of real character focus in the anime. A character introduced as a pacifist who hates violence, eventually forced to beat a close friend to death in order to protect her other friends.

- Blaze: Also initially a playable character who had one Big Moment(tm), then vanished from the plot after only starring in a single followup game. Once best friends with Silver, she chose to absorb a rampaging god into her soul in order to save him and the rest of the world. Time and space were rewritten, and she resurfaced in a parallel universe where she grew up alone and horribly bullied. Though she and Silver have met again, they never have officially reconnected and don’t remember their past life together.

- Elise: A vessel for a powerful evil who grew up emotionally distant from all other people in order to keep the evil contained. When she finally made a friend, she was forced to rewrite time so they would never meet in an attempt to save the world. There’s a chance she’s faring better in the new timeline, but how would we know? She vanished from the plot as soon as she’d made that sacrifice.

- Cosmo: The last of her kind, save for the small group of villains who murdered the rest of their people. Went through hell in the one season of the anime she was featured in, then promptly died in order to gain revenge on her enemies and save her friends.

- Shade: We don’t know if there were more plans for her character after her debut game, but as it stands, she showed up, was first brainwashed, then betrayed by her own people, and chose to leave behind everything she knew in order to protect the world from her family and former friends.

Note that these are all the major female characters who show up in the games and anime, save for Amy and Rouge. And that’s not even counting the female leads of the storybook spinoff games, Merlina (a hero turned villain who did everything in her power to save her world from future ruin, defeated and left to grieve over her inability to change a thing) and Shahra (another girl who died to save a friend; revived at the end of her story but never seen again), or Molly from the anime who did some kinda sick speedrun strat, showing up in ONE episode where she had her heart broken and committed murder/suicide after she was betrayed by people she trusted.

By contrast, we have exactly one male character who follows the same pattern - Shadow, who went through similar emotional troubles and was intended to die at the end of his debut game. However, due to popular fan demand, he was brought back to life and added to the roster of recurring male characters. He even had much of his depth culled from newer games to match the rest.

Much spin-off media does better in certain ways, but I don’t know ... there’s something about that extremely consistent pattern in the main games and anime. It’s such an interesting paradox, having the female cast be simultaneously the most layered and well-written, but also the ones at highest risk of being emotionally tortured and discarded.

It’s definitely not a pattern unique to Sonic either, but by virtue of being such mindless feel-good stories where a good attitude and good friends can literally work miracles, I think it just stands out all the more. This loyalty to the concept of altruism and respect for soft emotions, paired with insistence on tragedy.

But only if you’re a girl. If you’re a girl, you are at once special and expendable.

You’re the only one who’s allowed to really embody the emotional truth of whatever absurd plotline the writers have cooked up this afternoon, you’re the only one who’s allowed to really express what this story is about at its core, but also you have to die for it. Or be sent away. You can’t be here anymore, at least.

I have no idea who writes these games. I could not tell you if there really is an emotional core, if anyone is actually putting in effort. I don’t know if it matters, either. Death of the author, etc.

What I do know is that there’s a meta-narrative here.

Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Silver, Omega, Vector, Espio, Charmy, Big, and sometimes even Mighty and Ray, go out on fun adventures to save the day. Amy and Rouge are here for flavor. We’ve decided Shadow can come, too, if he stops talking about his dead family all the time.

Tikal, Maria, Cream, Blaze, Elise, Cosmo and Shade (etc) show up for just a moment in time, go through trauma and heartbreak, and then disappear. Maybe they’ll have an unvoiced cameo later. If they’re lucky. If people like them enough.

There’s no real point to this, aside from explaining why I’m weirdly invested in just ... the concept of female existence in a children’s franchise mostly aimed at boys. Where everything will be okay, except when it won’t. Except when we need that bit of salt in the wound, so the victory will feel important, earned.

The price of getting real for just a moment being narrative death, if not straight up literal death.

Above all, Sonic games are cute. They’re appealing because they’re stupid and wholesome and weird. I love the male characters too, I’m not here for attempts at complexity, I’m here to have fun.

I’ve just also been feeling incredibly tempted as of late to write an ‘escape the narrative’ type deconstruction of these exact tropes, heavily inspired by Sonic and other children’s media in the same genre.

“Boys do stuff but have no feelings, girls have feelings but should endure all manner of suffering in order to protect others” is ... not an irrelevant theme to explore in our current media landscape, if you ask me.

even if I never get around to writing that, at least I made a sick Sonic AMV about all those poor girls going through hell for the sake of The Narrative, I should upload that sometime lol

also hey I haven’t finished Sonic Frontiers yet - sure hope nothing bad happens to our new melancholy girl character closely tied to her debut game’s story and themes ..!