General Sonic The Hedgehog thread

Also technically there are three worlds now:

The two worlds from the main timeline

And the split reality world that Mania took place in

lol

The neo classic thing is more like alternate timeline than alternate world

If they HAVE to do a two worlds thing, I'd much rather the divide be "Classic" and "Modern", instead of "Hoomins" and "No hoomins"

The two worlds thing is just needless confusion. I don't take it at face value and I think izka was just talking out of his ass.

Same here.

Basically, the "two worlds" thing runs into the same continuity issues long-runners with different creative heads have — they don't want to be consistent.

Unless you're Kingdom Hearts. In which case your lore will muck itself up.

Exactly. This ain't exactly a fanbase that does that tho, so he should have known better than to say something like that without thinking it through.

At this point, the only possible option may be the Mario approach: "There's no continuity, and all the characters are actors that are merely playing a role, so don't think too hard about how we got here."

Unlike Mario, there is still a generally consistent storyline, with loose references to past games, and whenever something weird is done (like a racing game), there's usually an in-universe story that makes sense out of it (relatively, it was still super random that Eggman just decided to host a tournament, and even more random that Sonic & co. didn't find anything suspicious with a Chaos Emerald as payment).

So they don't need to go "there is no canon, shuddupaboutit", they just don't need to say weird bs that isn't even supported in the games themselves.

Speaking of different worlds, did the world Blaze comes from ever get a name? I think it did but I keep forgetting it.

I don't think so but fans tend to call it the Sol Dimension with Sonic's world being the Chaos Dimension.

So Shuma Gorath lives in Sonic's world? Okay then. lol

Would it be all that strange?

Sonic the Animation is from 1994 and it features humans. Likewise, 1996's Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie has human-ish characters. I don't buy that Sonic was intended to be a World of Funny Animals from Adventure. My only complaint with Sega's presentation of Earth/Sonic's World/whatever is that they should add some Funny Animal NPCs here and there so that Sonic doesn't stand out so much.

I've never understood the confusion between Sonic featuring humans. No one scoffs at Looney Tunes for featuring Elmer next to Bugs. I always guessed it was a generation gap between Sonic fans: those who got into it in the 1990s are so used to Mobius here and Mobius there, that humans being concretely introduced is weird. I got into the series in the 2000s so removing humans is weird to me.

I can understand demoting them to background elements or putting them conveniently off-screen, but just retconning them? It seems silly and just makes things confusing (like, how is Shadow still a thing without Gerald?) unless they want a complete reboot of the series.

You know, considering that Mania seems to be the start of a whole new "Classic" sub-series, and that Forces had something of a Grand Finale atmosphere, a total reboot would probably be the best thing going forward.

Take a look at what worked and what didn't post-S3&K, get a whole new team of competent writers, and do some actual world-building, not just: "Uh-oh, we accidentally contradicted something from an earlier game." "Quick, just make up some excuse!" "Crap, that just made it worse!"

Yeah, I think that would actually help this franchise a lot.

Edited by Primis on Nov 30th 2018 at 3:00:06 AM

Honestly, apart from characterization, the only contradictions made in the series is a bunch of stuff the developers said (oh, and how Shadow's creation's date went from "over 50 years ago" to "50 years ago", but I think everyone would just treat that as a retcon if you noticed at all).

Well, there is the moon somehow still being whole after SA2, the look of the world changing game-to-game (along with the world either being human-populated or an entire World of Funny Animals), and the in-game contradictions of wherever Blaze, Eggman Nega and Classic Sonic come from.

And what's that about Shadow's creation date? Hasn't it always been 50 years ago prior to SA2?

Okay yeah, I admit I forgot about the moon, but the rest of that isn't mentioned in the games themselves.

It's never gone "What's a hoomin? :o" Or "What's an anthro? :o", it's just gone "Hey look! Anthro people now!"

In SA 2, it was specifically and repeatedly mentioned to be Over 50 years ago, and in St H it's consistently said 50 years ago (without the "over" part)

Why bring up the Looney Tunes?

Just realized another plot hole.

Who the hell is Team Dark working for now? Episode Shadow implies someone gave them a mission to stop Eggman. Can't be GUN.

Sonic Team sucks ar coherency.

I mean, having Funny Animals ala Forces AND people ala Unleashed side by side works fine. But somebody has trouble staying on track.

Unleashed was just fine about that. Did anyone actually complain about humans being there in general? I thought it was more the realistic humans that were off-putting.

https://sonicartresources.tumblr.com/post/180689316504/super-smash-brothers-ultimate-on-sale-in-6

Official art from Sega, it's sonic's pose in smash ultimate in the style of sonic channel art (or at least one of its style)

The rest of that is in the games. Blaze and Eggman Nega are both said to be from an alternate universe in the Rush games, but then in '06 and Rivals, respectively, they're both from the future. Eggman Nega is also suddenly a descendant of Dr. Eggman, even though he described himself as an Alternate Self of Eggman in Rush.

And then there's Classic Sonic, the one that really baffles me. Not only is it made abundantly clear that Classic Sonic is from the past in Generations, that was the entire point of that game. Then Forces just went "nope, he's from an alternate universe and always has been".

The way the world looks is also obviously in-game. Heroes, for example, would fit right in with the Classic games, aesthetically speaking, whereas SA1, SA2 and Shadow would not. The problem is that all four of these games are interconnected and cannot possibly take place on different worlds, so we just have to assume that Sonic's World developed Flying Cars and Skyscraper Cities almost immediately after SA2, and then just abandoned them by the time of Shadow.

True, but "Hey look! Anthro people now!" coincided with the complete disappearance of all humans, save for Eggman. If there was any good time to confirm that humans and anthros co-existed, it was during Forces.

Oh. That's such a minor detail that I wouldn't even call it a contradiction, if anything it's just characters rounding down. "50 years ago" just rolls off the tongue easier than a more specific date.

Edited by Primis on Dec 1st 2018 at 2:06:26 AM

I thought about Silver and went 'well he makes sense', and somehow completely overlooked Blaze and Dr. Eggman Nega.

And, uh... yeah. That's like 2 in-games contradictions so far, and one really, really ugly retcon (sheesh could they be any stupider with that Classic Sonic retcon?).

Also the environment suddenly changing and one or the other citizen species appearing exclusively is a weird inconsistency, but it's not a plot hole, yet. They can still easily both exist in the world.

I brought up Looney Tunes because Classic Sonic has a similar aesthetic to and it also features bipedal animals amongst humans. Disney's Classic Shorts would probably be a better comparison, but people more remember them for the World of Funny Animals shorts.

I never thought twice about the aesthetic of the series until the "Sonic's World vs Earth" thing was brought up last year. It's a fantasy world, not our actual Earth, so they can have as many random islands, perfectly round trees, and random Green Hills blocky terrain as they want. It wasn't until recently that I noticed that others thought Heroes looked weird and too fantastic alongside Adventure.

Super Mario Bros has high-tech countries vs high fantasy ones, so I don't see why Sonic can't also take place on a planet full of contradicting technological levels.

I remember one pre-Forces fanfic explained that animals generally live in the southern hemisphere and humans in the north hemisphere. I could see the games handwaving the lack of humans/animals as "They don't tend to live together for reasons we won't explain". In Forces, Eggman took over the planet but it feels more like he took over just country. It felt small-scale compared to SatAM and other adaptations takes on Eggman ruling the world.

(x7) Maybe GUN exists in Sonic's World as well? Just replace the humans with Funny Animal counterparts.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Dec 2nd 2018 at 8:34:34 AM