So, it seems Sonichu is back and it’s here to stay. Before, I would dread its return, but after a pretty decent showing, I’ve decided to continue reading the comics. It had been about a few years since I riffed on the comic, so things have definitely changed on both ends. Especially with Chris-Chan now being Crystal. Let’s see how things have improved.
We open the story with a flashback of Robbie. She explains how, as a kid, she was surrounded by such a compassionate family that it desensitised her to violence, unlike her fellow, male classmates. When her sisters grew up, they told her of the boys that harassed them and how she’s “one of the good boys”. However, as she and Magi-Chan later discover, she feels more female than male. Magi-Chan in particular because he directly identified Robbie’s soul as female. Thus leading Robbie to a transformation into a transgendered woman and hence the pronouns relating to Robbie referring to the feminine variant. She even touches base with the school bully and he outs himself as a closeted homosexual.
I gotta say, we’ve went 180 from how Crystal originally presented homosexuality and I think it’s great that she’s looking at this with more tact than you could find in a regular comic. Crystal isn’t introducing transgender and homosexual characters to make her stories “all new, all different”, but instead presents the story in a rather human approach. It makes the universe, which previously had the belief that homosexuality (as well as Asperger’s) was this insidious disease that needed to be cured, more palatable.
We also see that Magi-Chan has pretty much been promoted to full-on Big Brother, with him and five Alakazams monitoring the town, though they say that it’s not 100% Big Brother since privacy is respected by them. He has Roberta go through listening to a CD that will project waves to promote female hormonal changes. He’ll also have Roberta become a woman via psychic powers.
Okay, so… I think we found a bit of a road bump to this storyline. I get the CD altering your hormones, especially when psychics are involved, but… Outright changing a person’s gender without surgery? Roberta even mentions how her parts were changing without the need. If it’s done by tricking the body into believing it can change genders on the fly as though it were a hermaphrodite (like a clownfish) before shutting that part off once it made the switch, I can get that, but if it’s doing it like magic, then I think we may have a problem.
Thing is, the way the story presented this transformation (a six-to-eight week process), it isn’t like magic which leads credence to my former theory. Yes, there’s holes in the theory, but if it makes this shift easier to swallow, then so be it.
Roberta even finds romance in a girl named Vul… OH FUCK YOU!
NO! SERIOUSLY!
You were going with this nice, warm and fuzzy story about a tomgirl discovering her feminine side with the same amount of seriousness as an Oscar-nominated movie, and you then strip that away by naming her first love after part of the female genitalia and a euphemism for said genitalia?! RWBY was more subtle with the names of their LGBTQ characters, and one of them had their last name translate to rainbow and another’s name being based off the first lesbian!
This isn’t even mentioning the reason Miss Pie moved out of Roberta’s life is because her mom was one of Crystal’s IRL ex-girlfriends that she reviles so much. Hey, at least she got more dignity than Ivy did. Yes, I consider her literally singing out “I’m a bad troll” a la Troll in Central Park to be more dignifying than being hung off screen in tune to the IRL person’s supposed suicide method.
Oh, and while getting context for that scene, I noticed that one scene (where Roberta’s sisters hugged her to the point where she evolved) had Roberta… Erm… doing something that was the title to one of the Lonely Island songs.
You know what this is? This is the SAO moment. You know what the SAO moment is. It’s that moment where, you finally think a show has moved away from its worst moment before it rams its head riiiiight back into that territory. A moment that makes you say “THERE’S THE OLD SHOW WE ALL KNOW AND LOVE!” In the Trope Namer, we have the Attempted Rape scenes. You can’t go through one season without one scene. With this? It’s going through one issue without Chris-Chan venting out against some ex or authority figure in his life.
The only, only redeeming factor to this one comic page (yes, one comic page was all it took for me to rage) was that the name of Roberta’s love interest was not of Crystal’s own design, but rather of her ex’s. But still, you changed the names of everyone else who were based off IRL characters, yet you decide that “nope, V-Pie is gonna be her name from now on!”?
Oh, and on the very next page, we have Crystal deciding to embark on a crusade over Sonic’s arms being blue in Sonic Boom. WHICH ACTUALLY HAPPENED!![](\"https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/external_link.gif\")
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGG!!!
YOU KNOW, FOR AS FUCKED UP A STORY AS CHRISTAIN HUMBER RELOADED WAS, AT LEAST VASHBLADE NEVER FUCKING MIXED REAL LIFE WITH FICITON! AT LEAST DAVID KINTOBOR NEVER DOVE TOO DEEP INTO REALITY SUBTEXT FOR IT TO STOP BEING A WORK OF FICTION AND MORE OF A SOAP BOX! AT LEAST POOH AND HIS FRIENDS TRY TO ADD WEIGHT TO THE STORIES THEY CROSS OVER INTO!
YES! YOU’RE MAKING ME VOUCH FOR POOH’S ADVENTURES NOW!
So, yeah, now I’m back to thinking negatively about this comic. To the point where I’m mentally picturing Roberta’s new love interest having a timer on top of her ticking to when she suddenly becomes so irreverent to Crystal that she either gets killed off tastelessly or leaves without any word of her departure. Hell, by the time next issue rolls around, we’ll be forgetting Roberta’s new girlfriend. I’m not even going to give her the dignity of saying her name. She’s just gonna be Roberta’s Bond Girl.
So, we have Roberta then proceeding to do a Sonic Rainboom dressed as a rainbow and we end our chapter there. There’s still more torture to go.
We open with a battle between Crystal and Silver as Crystal gives a monologue about hatred. Namely how she’s not fond of it.
…
Then can you care to explain why, just a few pages ago, you decided to not only have your character go off to mace a dude over blue arms, but also write a love interest out of the show because her author was a “bad troll”? I mean, you talk a big game about ignoring trolls and all that, but then you write up a page where you wrote out a character because of a troll. Ironically, saying you were trolled is basically acknowledging and thus feeding the troll.
Crystal also brings up how she won’t reboot Sonichu, something that I like. Before, I had said that someone should reboot Sonichu and have a cleaner story, but then Hollywood overused reboots like it was Blaxploitation in the 70’s. Now? It’s far easier for both audiences and authors to keep going with the story but fixing the problems. Of course, this won’t fix every problem and may make some even worse retrospectively.
Because for fuck’s sake, we already know how Bruce Wayne became Batman or what happened to poor Uncle Ben, we don’t need twenty-five retellings of it if they don’t even feel different.
Back to the story at hand, you’d think this would be a different take on the final battle between Crystal and Silver, but nope. Instead, we go back to earlier in the day, during the SLGBTQ (basically LGBTQ but with S standing for single) Pride festival. Also, the map seems to be based off a custom map made in Modnation Racers. Anyone remember that game?
We’re briefly introduced to someone named Dan Steckle who is thanked by Angelica for his large donation. No. He isn’t important. He has one panel to himself in a lot of detail but all he’s really there for is to acknowledge that he funded part of Chris-Chan’s comic. You noticed that I’m now going back to calling Crystal Chris-Chan, but that’s because…
Crystal is still with the group. As in the inner spirit person Chris-Chan spent an arc to save. So… Let’s get this straight. We have:
- Christian Weston Chandler, who in the comic is called “Chris-Chan”, has changed her gender and thus her name to Christine.
- However, I can’t call her Christine because there’s already a character named Christine. So, I call her Crystal as a nod to her inner spirit being also called Crystal.
- Turns out Crystal is still a character in this story, so I can’t call her Crystal as well.
- Cryst-Chan doesn’t roll off the tongue.
So, yeah, I’m sticking to Chris-Chan and I should have called her Chris-Chan from the very beginning of this subplot because not only is it a lot more pragmatic, as you can still call her Chris-Chan, but also to prevent this confusion. So, in quick summation, nothing has changed, pretend that all references to Crystal from the revelation that Chris-Chan changed genders to now were referring to Chris-Chan, and we’re all good.
SO! We have Chris-Chan talking about her training with Magi-Chan. It then divulges into the group reuniting and sharing their experiences with each other, all while Punchy becomes a colorful Michelin tire guy. Also there’s a new character named Heather who speaks a bit of Spanish. Yay Bilingual Bonus! More characters come back (including, to my surprise, Patti and the punk skunk) as Silver looks on in his ridiculous BDSM getup. He notices that Chris-Chan has changed.
He confronts Chris-Chan about using the “phobic gay-removal” on him and explains how, after being defeated and living with Kel, he can’t shake off the feeling of not only being all powerful, but also gay… Oh boy.
The sad part is that, aside from that little tidbit, Silver’s backstory… or rather in-between story is very tragic and simple. A former villain has the chance at happiness, but realizes that he has an addiction to his power that outweighs his love for another.
After spending some time travelling (and another nod to Dan Steckle), he meets up with Chris-Chan and lays onto her the mother of all rants. Seriously, it’s an entire page of words drawn in all over Silver. To which Chris-Chan fires back with the mother of all Shut Up Hannibals. And it shows just how heavy the Author\'s Saving Throw truly is, as part of Silver’s rant is over the whole “curing the gay away”, to which Chris-Chan admits that she was naïve about it at the time. Also, in a cool nod, both Silver and Chris-Chan have backgrounds that are different. Huge and aggressive a la Dragon Ball Z for Silver, and soft, light, and full of roses a la Sailor Moon for Chris-Chan.
Silver accepts the apology, but isn’t instantly her friend. He’s blown away by just how much his supposed Good Counterpart has changed, right down to changing identities, he goes off soul searching. However, he ends up becoming brainwashed by Graduon, who is now possessing the Metal Sonichu and I am glad they’re calling back to that. Okay, brainwashed isn’t the right term. It’s More Than Mind Control. Basically he’s tempted with power and he took it.
Anyways, the group decide to rush into battle. Well, first they evacuate the area, then have a speech (with a strange vision of a man knocking out Chris-Chan) and a transformation sequence. Silver returns and gloats about how he has accepted his destiny as the villain, complete with a, admittedly funny, pointing out of a literal X-Box achievement.
Hell, he even inverts the You and What Army? remark. This guy’s a treat. Oh, and remember that man knocking out Chris-Chan? Yeah, that’s apparently Cole Smithey. Chris-Chan’s brother. Yeah. Let that sink in for a bit.
Where do I go with this? The fact that Chris-Chan has a brother? The fact that despite this “Top 10 Anime Betrayal” moment, we never seen Cole until the vision? The fact that Chris-Chan used the vision to her advantage and knock him out? The fact that she nonchalantly warps him to Subspace? Whatever.
Silver takes Chris-Chan his own Subspace, where he attempts to grab Chris-Chan’s medallion (veeeeeeeery tasteful how they framed it), only to realize that he isn’t able to demorph Chris-Chan again. By this point, we’ve caught up to our story and everyone partakes in the battle outside the Subspace, with everyone having their own part to play. Even Patti has enabled Friendly Fire to be active.
Eventually, the fight is over and the group celebrate their victory, though Silver is teleported out of Chris-Chan’s hands. And our episode ends with Chris-Chan telling Magi-Chan to up the defenses for Graduon’s eventual return. We have a pretty sad memorial page for Chris-Chan’s IRL father.
The final chapter for this issue is about catching up with Sonichu’s life. This includes a wedding between Sonichu and Rosechu which goes comically wrong. Magi-Chan realizes this, but decides to not intervene. Not because he’s a dick, but because he knows this will relieve tension that the group is getting over the wedding. And in his defense, it is funny. Rosechu finds Sonichu in a room with a naked Bubbles, but immediately understands the situation to avoid the Third-Act Misunderstanding. Other than that (also cake baking lizards, cats in the piano, and Ceiling Blake?), the marriage goes off without a hitch.
There’s another story about Rosechu breaking her legs and that inadvertently led to her gaining a few pounds. It’s basically a Fat Episode. Namely an episode all about how fat a character’s gotten. And Jesus Christ do they go overboard with the fattening.
Turns out Graduon had something to do with it. Because why tackle the problems of morbid obesity like a well-meaning, wholesome slice of life when you can point to a random villain and go “there’s the guy making your mommy fat!” Okay, okay, I think what he’s trying to say is that he captured Rosechu and Chris-Chan and even presents him with a Sadistic Choice: Save Rosechu or Chris-Chan. Though Rosechu soon Take a Third Option and bust Chris-Chan out while Sonichu busted her out.
Though, as it turns out, It Was All A Dream as it ends with Sonichu being smothered by Rosechu’s fat. Being told of this, she decides to start losing weight along with her daughter Cera (basically she had this crisis and became fat like her mom) and the story ends with Sonic and Sonichu parting ways.
And as far as the story goes, that’s where we finally finish this long trek through Sonichu. Granted, there’s still more stories, but as it stands, the next issue, 12-9 (because 13 Is Unlucky) isn’t complete yet. I will definitely take a read at it when it is complete, but as it stands, it’s over.
My thoughts on this issue? Mostly mixed. I mean, there’s some good and bad moments here and there, and nothing that truly made me upset (except for V-Pie, but that’s because of how uncreative it was), and thus it felt… okay. Do I recommend it? Yeah! It’s a decently told story, the pacing is just right, and, aside from the ending bit of Roberta’s story, nothing feels really out of whack. It’s pretty wholesome altogether.
And… I think this is where I’ll finish this liveblog. It was a nice two additional issues, but it’s time to finally let this story rest. Will I come back for more? Probably not. Though, I will say that Sonichu is in better hands now than it was when I last reviewed it.
Adios, Amigos.
