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2021-05-22
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混沌緑柱玉・要約した | Konton Ryokuchūgyoku - Yōyakushita | Chaos Emerald - Summarized

Summary:

By mid-2018, I had started my own Sonic fanfic series. Over time, I began to regret how I had written the first stories in the series, so I tried to "remaster" my work several times. Besides, I'm having trouble to keep writing since late 2019: I don't have time, I have other matters to attend to in real life, I've run out of ideas and motivation to continue my work... So I decided not to post my following fanfics but just a list of ideas I had for them. I'll just leave it here, waiting for someone to find it some time and be inspired to turn all these loose elements into a more or less decent story.

The first chapter -a sort of prologue- has some info on my fanfics' world-building but also some of my rants on various topics, which could be a bit controversial for some readers.

[Last edited on March 25, 2023.]

Chapter 1: 序文 | Jobun | Preface

Notes:

Last edited on March 25, 2023.

Chapter Text

In mid-2018, I started writing my own Sonic fanfic series. As my writing skills improved and my personal ideas changed with them, I began to regret how I had written the first stories in the series -a series that was still really far from finished, to top it off- and I tried to “remaster” my work at least three separate times. Besides, I'm currently having many problems to keep writing since November 2019 more or less: I lack time, I have college studies and other real-life stuff to focus on, my ideas are running out, I'm not even as motivated as when I started with this... So I decided to not post my next fanfics but only a list of ideas I had for them. I'll just leave that list of ideas here, waiting for someone within a long time to find them and feel inspired to turn those loose elements into a somewhat decent story.


Alright, before starting with the summary of the ideas I had for future stories, I'd like to start by making some clarifications, sharing some opinions (which have mostly turned out to be rants when I realized), talking about some things I did in my work, some of which I'm proud of, and some of which I regret having done.


I apologize in advance if these summaries feel “hollow” due to the lack of dialogue, details about the relationship between the various characters, scenes of daily life, "slice of life" episodes, or what happens when the story’s focus moves away from the main plot and the most important subplots. I'm not good at writing that sort of thing (as well as fight scenes), and I often have in my mind some loose headcanons and this extremely vague idea of how I’d want those scenes to play out. If you ask me what the scenes involving Team Dark (Shadow, Rouge and E-123 Omega) should be like, I’d just say “Uh... like in the Archie comics, I guess?”; something similar goes to the portrayal of Sonic's biological family (Uncle Chuck from Sonic SatAM, along with Jules and Bernadette -Sonic's parents from the pre-reboot Archie comic-); if you ask me about the ideal portrayal for Sonic, I’d recite a list of ramifications of the franchise and what the ideal Sonic should have in common with each of those versions of the character, which may result in a mix of traits that very easily end up contradicting each other.


Honestly, I think it's time for me to give closure to the “Sonic fan phase” of my life. I’ll keep playing the games if they pique my interest, but in terms of the stories they tell and how their characters are portrayed, these games no longer appeal to me. The comic currently published by IDW isn’t complete garbage nor does it have so much drama and controversy surrounding it, in addition to having Whisper and Tangle, two characters I really like at least on a conceptual level, but the story and characterizations are leaving me deeply disappointed and sometimes fall even lower than the recent games written by Pontac & Graff, namely with regard to the characterization of Sonic himself.

The continuity of the TV series Sonic SatAM and the comics published by Archie was always the branch of the franchise that truly caught my attention and is my main source of inspiration for writing stories; in fact, SatAM was the way I found out about Sonic and became a fan in the first place. But this “North-American continuity” is already as dead as the Mega Man Legends saga, and it looks like the vast majority want to forget it as if each and every one of its elements and ideas inherently had just been a massive nightmare regardless of its execution by the writers. At best, the fandom currently sees this branch of Sonic as some silly “edgy” attempt to take the franchise seriously, something that may have been laudable but was always foolish and doomed to fail and is such a risky gamble that it's not worth trying again.

I'm also getting fed up with the Sonic fandom in general, despite sharing a lot of opinions with some individual fans. Yes, I know there are already many who have declared this for the most varied reasons, be it the “shipp wars”, something in Sonic or even the franchise as a whole suddenly becoming “cringe” due to a whim of a majority portion of the fandom, or the way Sonic reuses "hackneyed" tropes in an alleged demonstration of lack of originality; however, when someone gives Sonic the middle finger for this kind of reasons, they usually do it hypocritically.

No, what got me tired of the Sonic fandom is the way everyone becomes obsessed with picking one branch of the franchise, calling it "the true Sonic", claiming this is the only pure and genuine incarnation of the “soul of Sonic” (if there really is such a thing), marking as “foreigner” every character, concept or element from any other branch of the franchise, and demanding from the fans of those other branches to get on their knees and be thankful that the "True Fans (TM)" even allow them to stay in the fandom. Note that I’m not accusing fans of only one specific portion of the franchise: there are such people among fans of the videogames’ continuity (the infamous "purists") but also among the SatAM and Archie-Sonic fans, such as the “nostalgic” delusional pissbabies, blatantly homophobic and conservative, who are now supporting Twitter hashtags like “Rally4Sally” and “Udon4Sonic”. You may think this is actually something typical of all fandoms, but it’s not: this is truly something unique to the Sonic fandom; I don't see huge hordes of Mega Man fans bullying the Legends fandom or making fun of them for the way their favourite saga ended two decades ago; even in the Dragon Ball fandom, despite constant discussions about what is canon and what is not, there’s some kind of tacit consensus that GT and Super are two offshoots of the franchise, equally valid although not coexisting in one same fictional universe (although Shūeisha itself seems to officially support this view, which certainly helps prevent some discourse), while the only part of Dragon Ball universally despised (and rightly so) is Dragon Ball Evolution; the only other place where the situation could be as bad as in the Sonic fandom is the Star Wars fandom due to the controversy surrounding the situation of the Expanded Universe in its last years (since Lucasfilm started making the computer-animated 3D Clone Wars TV series, until George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney), and almost a decade after those events, Star Wars fans seem to have already calmed down about it as well.

I'm sorry if this hurts some people’s sensibilities, but if I decide to write a story with any given set of characters, elements, concepts, setting, internal rules and whatnot, the only thing in my mind will be to write a mildly decent story. I'm not here to “honour” -let alone honour at all costs- some supposed legacy and traditions that some people say should be upheld by each and every Sonic content creator. And let’s be brutally frank: we’re talking about a franchise that started as platformer 16-bit videogames whose sole purpose was to show SEGA’s consoles were better and handled speed better than Nintendo's; SEGA never really intended to tell a story or portray its characters consistently, only later did the cast begin to receive more defined personalities and the games start telling stories because SEGA suddenly saw this would make them sell more, and even that varied wildly according to whatever seemed more convenient at the time; not to mention SEGA's unique habit of entering vicious cycles of failure and over-correction, where Sonic Team makes a few mistakes in a game that did everything else more or less well, SEGA throws away the entire game along with the foundations on which it was built and the story that was told by that game, Sonic Team makes a new game with absolutely everything replaced and makes mistakes again but those mistakes are different from those of the previous game, the process is repeated ad nauseam and no-one is ever satisfied with anything. A few Sonic fans trying to impose on every other fan a supposed single Sonic canon with some kind of official approval seal by SEGA & Sonic Team is something quite backward, because that single official canon almost never really existed, and if it does exist, it makes no sense and is internally inconsistent, dependent on the creation of new games, and very likely to be retconned, overwritten and modified at any time.

There are other "bad habits" of the Sonic fandom that have led me to break ties with them. One of them is the way many fans take one trait of a character, be it simply one of many facets of their personality or even a physical trait, and turn that into the entire personality of the character; many of those same fans are also massive hypocrites, complaining (albeit rightfully) about how SEGA oversimplifies Shadow into either “Sasuke the Hedgehog” or “Vegeta the Hedgehog”, but then they do the same as SEGA. One of the cases in which this is most evident is when they make Sonic's personality boil down to "gotta go fast" and "be a free spirit"; based on that, they denounce that Sonic saying "I would slow down for you" to one of his closest friends (even if Sonic and Sally weren’t a couple when he said that and/or you don’t support that shipp, it can be said she was at least one of his closest friends in the SatAM-Archie continuity) contradicts the very essence of the character, or they do something even worse: saying that "being a free spirit" means being away from your friends and not having "ties" (like... literal ties, made with ropes, the ones that are actually a bad thing) with anything or anyone. It's like when Goku is portrayed by Dragon Ball fans as far more insensitive than the actual way Akira Toriyama had conceived him and always wrote and portrayed him in his official work.

There are also the plainly disturbing ideas many fans seem to have about personal relationships, judging by the opinions they give about the relationships of Sonic and the rest of the cast. In addition to making everything revolve around vaguely defined words and concepts they throw right and left almost without thinking about their actual meaning, they also seem to believe that having friends and caring for them, or any kind of responsibility no matter what kind it is, is nothing but a drag, like rat-s*** stopping you on your way to "freedom" (this is just amazing: they say the entire Western canon is edgy and the British comic’s Sonic is a jerk, but if you think about this for a bit, these fans’ version of Sonic turns out to be even edgier and more of a jerk than Shadow in his spin-off videogame); in the case of Archie-Sonic, there are all the abuse apologists supporting Scourge and Fiona being a couple, even though you don’t need any “meta” analysis to see he’s (at the very least) verbally abusive towards her and had attracted her by posing as someone else in the first place.


Originally, I had added a fan-character of my creation, Leónidas Proción. To be honest, I was being a bit self-indulgent when I did that, and I had also planned badly what was going to happen to him, since I got him into a romantic relationship with a Sonic character about whom very little was still known at that time and who only later received the spotlight, leaving many things I had established in my fanfics “obsolete”. Anyway, when I introduced fan-characters, I always took the precaution of keeping them as secondary characters -recurring characters at the most- and making sure the story’s main plot could still move forward the way it’d do even if that fan-character is absent or replaced by someone else (in short: avoiding to create another Tommy Turtle).


In large portions of every fandom, it looks like it prevails the idea that you can only take one of two positions: praising the story in every respect, including both the ideas themselves and their execution by the writers, or admitting not to like the story and not to praise any element of it at all. I think my ideas regarding the Archie-Sonic comics and the Sonic franchise in general cannot be pigeonholed into either of these two extremes.

I loved all the world-building in Archie-Sonic, the elements the comic introduced, their many characters and the potential to tell stories about them; I also really liked much of the art and personal styles of several artists Archie-Sonic has had throughout its history, with very few exceptions (and such exceptions include Ron Lim, of course). That's why, of all the Sonic continuities, I often use the pre-reboot Archie-Sonic comic as the primary source for world-building elements and story ideas.

What really makes me feel bad about that comic, what motivates most of my criticism, is the ideas’ execution by the main writers, as well as aspects that I think are more linked to each writer as a person, the unique way in which each of them has written their stories.

Firstly, Michael Gallagher: the writer for the first few dozen issues of the comic had a terrible sense of humour, and this hurt the comic hugely since those first issues were fundamentally based on that low-quality comedy style. The characterization of the entire cast also suffered greatly from this; in Sally's case, something quite ironic happened too: Gallagher portrayed her as bossy, annoying, temperamental, usually bickering with Sonic, and now that's also how Sally is seen by many fans of the videogames’ continuity (at best). Other than this, not much more could be said about him.

Karl Bollers wrote quite decent stories with some nice comedy, with “Return to Angel Island” being his best work, one of the best stories in the entire comic and perhaps even one of the best in the franchise; but Bollers’s work was "torpedoed" by Ken Penders and then-editor Justin Gabrie, which ruined the stories’ final versions sometimes or led to elements introduced by Bollers being "retconned" and overwritten by whatever Penders smoked and decided to do when taking over. The characterization of Fiona Fox is one of the main examples, with Bollers's Fiona being a quite under-utilized character but with a great potential that would later be wasted by both Penders and Ian Flynn. Another similar case was Sally breaking up with Sonic: Bollers tried to give context to such a drastic decision by Sally and show how she was the one who was suffering the most at that time and also that both she and Sonic were partially right, but Penders and Gabrie didn't let Bollers develop this subplot properly and all we had was a quite infamous scene that unfairly made Sally one of the most hated characters. It’s also known of several plans Bollers had for future stories, and one of them was Antoine being corrupted by the Source of All and turning into a villain; this had the potential to be a good story by subverting the concept of the Source of All and making it an actual threat, but on the other hand, it’d have meant resorting once again to the resource of "this character isn’t doing anything, let's make them evil", something quite disappointing, which later would have disastrous results when Flynn did the same with Fiona a few years later. However, these plans of Bollers were just ideas, and the quality of a story created from them still depends a lot on execution. In the end, I can't say anything about how good or bad Bollers was as a writer, simply because I have no way of knowing what his stories would have been like if he had been given more freedom and had stayed as the writer longer.

There were two writers who influenced Archie-Sonic comics far more than any other writer in its history: Penders and Flynn. The first of them was a retarded pervert with an overly inflated and fragile ego. He became obsessed with the primitive, toxic ideal of "family" North-Americans have. He wrote nonsensical, contradictory stories, having already decided the end down to the last detail long before even thinking about how the story would come to that end (I also made this specific mistake a few times when I was just starting to write fanfiction, I must admit). He increased Fiona's age in order to be able to pair her with the Don Juan that Sonic had become, which also ruined Fiona's characterization forever. The issues 150s -right before being replaced by Flynn- were the worst part of Penders’s run, as Bollers was no longer there to put a stop to his madness in any way, and it was at this time when there was the most egregious case of Penders pouring into the comic his worst perversions and retarded ideas: he hinted at a sex scene in one of the most infamous cases in the history of the entire Sonic franchise, although it wasn’t infamous for the implied sex per se but rather because what happened was technically a rape by deception; to add insult to injury, the writer implicitly blamed the victim some years later when asked about it on Twitter.

I could go on talking about “Ken Perverts”, but I think that's not necessary and would be a waste of time since, as everyone here already knows, he's been the laughingstock of the entire Sonic franchise for years; Tumblr user “ponett” even has a whole secondary blog called “Thanks, Ken Penders”, mainly dedicated to this. On the other hand, there’s still another writer who has also contributed a lot and also made huge mistakes but is not criticized in the least by almost anyone, simply because he was better than Penders.

Ian Flynn usually reduced the characters to slightly oversimplified portrayals, similar to the personalities of the characters in the most recent videogames. Under his pen, Sonic was more sympathetic but his words sometimes sounded too empty and shallow, his apologies for past mistakes didn’t lead to genuine changes on his part, and sometimes he even seemed plain insensitive to all the tragedies happening around him, especially at the Mecha Sally Arc (I nickname Ian Flynn’s Sonic "Plastic Smile" for this). Admittedly, this had already happened several times with previous writers (Penders portraying Sonic as a Don Juan, as I already mentioned), and this is why I think the original Sonic from Sonic SatAM was always better for feeling more "genuine", less "empty", and more heroic and likeable as a result. Perhaps the only ones to escape the oversimplified portrayal have been Shadow and E-123 Omega, whose characterizations in Archie-Sonic were the best in the whole franchise.

Besides, Flynn had strong favouritism for Amy Rose, which only made things worse because this Amy was much more similar to the one in the videogames from Sonic Heroes onwards. Anyway, this also happened with previous writers, like when Amy wished to be younger at the cost of a chance to save Sally's mother and no one ever berated her for it.

Let’s look at the villains. Unlike the typical Eggman from the videogames, with his follies, eccentricities and other absurd aspects, the Robotnik “inherited” by the comic from Sonic SatAM was explicitly a genocidal bastard and crueller while at the same time being sane enough to realize everything he was doing (the Tumblr user robotnik-mun already spoke in detail about this once); however, Flynn tried to combine the two characters into the pre-reboot Archie-Sonic Eggman, and the result created problems with the stories’ tone. Something derived from this was how Sonic let Eggman live and even felt sorry for his fall into madness, in addition to treating him as if they were the Sonic and Eggman from the videogames, Sonic X or Sonic Boom; it’s worth remembering this Eggman technically is a sort of reincarnation of the SatAM Robotnik (his exact nature is quite complicated and includes parallel universes, but yes, he’s supposed to be exactly the same as the SatAM Robotnik, with memories and everything) and this Sonic is supposed to have fought a bloody decade-long guerilla war against him just like his SatAM counterpart.

Scourge was turned into a massive Mary-Sue who achieved easy victories, as subtle as a huge neon sign saying "the bad guys win"; he was also an abusive manipulator towards Fiona Fox, and Flynn was unable to show that properly for fear of making his pet look no longer cool, which makes you wonder how alike Flynn and Penders might actually be in some ways. To clearly understand the horrible damage this has caused: it not only created a generation of young Sonic fans -mostly boys from the USA- who romanticize abuse either consciously or unconsciously, but also there are even women -including scholars, committed feminists and transgender people who are also activists for social justice- who either sympathize with Scourge or think Fiona made a right, wise, rational or informed decision by joining him in the story (I’ll not give names of those women, I’m not really eager to get into heated fallacious discussions about “the true meaning of Feminism”... You know what? Screw it. They're the Tumblr users “ponett” and Rachel Beth Hines. There, I've said it); to top it off, among the writers who started working with Ian Flynn either on IDW-Sonic or the last years of Archie-Sonic, there’s at least one person who got the job of writing official Sonic comics after gaining quite a bit of fame with a fan-comic where they used the pairing of Scourge & Fiona to inspire its readers to feel sorry... for Scourge (yes, it's Evan Stanley, aka "SpiritSonic", the writer of "Ghosts of the Future"). And speaking of Fiona specifically: the subplot of her career as a villain was ill-conceived, was built by using as a cornerstone the A-story of Issue #150 (that quite infamous and widely known story written by Penders where Scourge may or may not have raped Bunnie by deception), and was also seemingly "abandoned" as Fiona ended up merely being Scourge's new abuse victim girlfriend and her status as a traitor didn’t even have a significant emotional effect on the Freedom Fighters.

Flynn also followed something like a pattern of taking tropes from famous works and then using them when writing the comic but not actually understanding why those tropes had worked in the first place. Perhaps the prime example of this was Scourge giving Sonic the Joker's "One Bad Day" speech: it almost felt a bit like giving the same speech to the Batman of Batman vs. Superman, as Sonic had already had a whole "bad decade" and was still a hero despite it; also, Sonic's answer to that speech (telling Scourge it only takes a tiny bit of selflessness and decency for him to be a good person) wasn’t that great, not at all compared to the mildly masterful answer Batman had originally given to the Joker in The Killing Joke, and it even made Sonic look more like a bad judge of character.

Lastly, the entire Mecha Sally Arc was poorly planned, had some contradictions with itself and with previous stories, was stretched through dozens of comic issues no matter if that felt forced, and the main events and plot twists throughout the story arc were heavily based on shock-value without giving any substance to this or making it a bit more sense when putting it under scrutiny; meanwhile, Flynn always seemed to have quite a hard time when writing long story arcs, so these long stories looked like he was trying and outright failing to imitate Toriyama (someone quite known for putting together stories ad-lib according to what seemed most convenient at the time).

Despite this, it looks like those Sonic fans who are still interested in material outside of the videogames will keep buying and reading whatever Ian Flynn or one of his colleagues writes, simply because they’re better than Penders. Even though it's been 15 years since Penders wrote something official about Sonic, so we should have gotten over it by now, instead of continuing to compare all material in the franchise with Penders's work, which sets the bar too low for any official content creator (now that I think about it, Penders's work is to the Noth-American Sonic canon what Sonic 2006 is to the videogames). Right now it looks like it's also forbidden to criticize Flynn as a writer at all, just because he's a much better person in his personal life and engages with fans more directly through his podcasts, or because Flynn is truly progressive while Penders claimed to be progressive and feminist but his work showed how misogynistic, perverted, retarded, virulently conservative, reactionary and downright sick he was; also, now saying something about Flynn other than complete blind admiration for him and his work, even asking for the Freedom Fighters to return in the IDW comics, has become synonymous with agreeing with those assholes who cry "Rally4Sally" or "Udon4Sonic" on Twitter: "nostalgic" fans of SatAM and Penders's work on Archie, in their 40s or 50s, deeply conservative and absurdly paranoid, who claim that those new inclusive cartoons such as Steven Universe or She-Ra "are ruining their childhood", are mad at Flynn just because he hinted Sally and Nicole may be a lesbian couple (and that was something rather platonic, not even romantic in the traditional sense), and try to justify their own warped ideas and fantasies about SatAM by ignoring any “liberal” political messages SatAM may have had at the subtext level.


Since I often judge elements and stories from Sonic based more on their potential, it’ll be extremely rare for me to entirely dismiss a specific character, concept or idea from canon when writing these summaries.

Romances involving main characters from the videogames are usually ruled out, and with increased awareness about the LGBTQ+ community in general and the aro-ace (aromantic & asexual) spectrum in particular in recent years, the headcanon of Sonic being asexual and/or aromantic is now a favourite of many. I have no problem with others having that headcanon, and I'd even prefer SEGA to make this official rather than keep their characters in a sort of limbo, as they’d at least start being serious about storytelling and portraying their characters in compelling ways; on the other hand, I cannot unsee this is mainly due to the fans’ disappointment with how romances were written in both the videogames and the Archie comics, being something very vaguely defined and ambiguous in the first case and a hot garbage mountain of poorly-written drama typical of a soap opera in the second one. There’s also another thing I cannot ignore: it’s true that many people from the aro-ace spectrum are just desperate to get the representation they deserve, they see Sonic and think “yep, Sonic being asexual makes sense”, and I must admit that Sonic being aro-ace and still keeping his typical "90s", "radical", "in your face" attitude would make a pretty cool contrast; however, aromantic character headcanons sometimes also originate from sexist ideas (comments like "Pfff! Women... Who understands them?" are a classic). Something similar happens with gay & lesbian pairings: fans are disappointed with the canon’s frequent straight romances that are also poorly written, see two same-gender friends with better chemistry with each other, put two and two together, and conclude those same-gender friends being a couple makes much more sense.

Headcanons are always quite interesting and it’d be a shame if they weren't used. But I don’t want to dismiss the canon pairings, because I still see their potential, their failure is only due to how certain writers handled them (as I mentioned before, the relationship between Sonic and Sally as Bollers planned to write it could have turned out very well if Penders and Gabrie had not torpedoed him), and fans themselves have also thought of ways to better portray these same canon pairings. So I’ll do my best to include "the best of both worlds" in my work.

On the other hand, among those very few things that I’m not going to include at all, there are Big the Cat, Cream the Rabbit and her mother Vanilla. The role of the latter two is primarily to add a "cuteness factor", Cream was over-powered every time she was a playable character, and Big was supposed to shine for his lateral thinking and his peculiar world-view, but this only served as a bad taste joke about the mentally disabled as early as his debut in Sonic Adventure 1, and since his reappearance in Sonic Heroes, that was all that was left of him. Even if they had some potential, it’d certainly only be useful in a story set in the videogames’ universe; whenever Cream and Big appear in Western comics comparatively darker than the Japanese canon -be it pre-reboot Archie, post-reboot Archie or IDW- my only reaction is to want to yell at them to go home or somewhere safe and get away from the battlefield, it feels like those characters have been shoehorned into the plot, much of their actions and dialogue generate a massive dissonance in the story’s tone, and their roles on whatever team they join are always undefined.


Something I was still very conflicted about until recently is Amy Rose’s presence and roles in my stories.

When she was created -or at least when she was given a more elaborate and detailed personality, in the Adventure series-, she was supposed to stand out for her compassion, unwavering optimism, a strong and bright character capable of inspiring others to act, and a contrast between her actual personality and some stereotypical superficial traits (her dress, her taste for anything romantic and sweet, having bubblegum pink and red everywhere). The Adventure games have shown this quite well despite Amy's fixation on Sonic, and when she asked him to marry her in exchange for getting him out of jail in Sonic Adventure 2, that was also supposed to be a joke.

But from Sonic Heroes onwards, each of these traits got hyper-simplified, with gruesome results (yeah, Sonic Heroes is to blame for a lot of trends still present in this franchise). The joke about marrying Sonic, which could have been some kind of game between them? Amy actually meant it. Her stereotypical attitudes, which could have been merely something quirky and anecdotal, with no influence on her actions when the going gets serious? Now they’re present at all times, regardless of whether the situation warrants putting them aside. Her unwavering optimism? It’s a disconnection with reality, Amy lives in a fantasy world. Her strong character, which keeps her from giving up on a problem no matter how big it is? It becomes possessive, pushy and invasive behaviour and a lack of respect for others’ personal boundaries. Her ability to inspire others to act and follow her? That becomes important only in Sonic Heroes when she teams up with Cream -a little girl even younger than an 8-year-old Tails- and Big -the franchise's signature walking ableist joke-; in any other case, the method by which she gets others to follow her is actually just to threaten them with her hammer. Her feelings for Sonic? Now they are everything and kill any chance of her being independent; on the other hand, that romance between Sonic and Amy that SEGA likes to advertise so much never materializes either (mainly because one of the few consistent things in Sonic videogames is Sonic himself being portrayed as aromantic) and Amy's "relationship" with Sonic becomes almost purely parasocial. Her character development in the Adventure saga? Apparently, it never happened.

[SEGA certainly isn't helping, since they portray Amy Rose like this (or they have her just stand there and say something vaguely inspiring or deep about love, which indicates that someone at SEGA momentarily realized what's wrong with the way they're making use of the character) while also having her remain the series' main female character by technicality. Predictably, many fans are upset and demand the introduction of other female characters to replace her, or simply ask for other existing female characters to have a leading role again (in the same way these fans propose to create unique villains for each Sonic game again -as Perfect Chaos and Mephiles were in their respective appearances- so that they complement Eggman without necessarily replacing him or relegating him to a secondary role). To add insult to injury, SEGA doesn't bother to write Sonic stories in such a way that their creative choices are explained and justified within the fictional world of the series: they never explicitly show why Amy Rose still deserves the female lead role, or they do show it but it ends up feeling like the writers are a bunch of lazy hacks and used the "because the IP owner said so" excuse. Now there are a lot of people still rooting for Amy Rose, but that's because she's officially the female lead (or even the only female character present at all) in official material released by SEGA; many detractors (or rather, a vocal minority among them) criticize the character, but they only do so out of misogyny and contempt for anything "girly" (something related to male chauvinism among videogame fans in general), not presenting legit grievances even though there are reasons that make genuine and constructive criticism possible; faced with this bad faith criticism, the Amy Rose fandom ends up reacting in an extreme way, defending the character and even defending the lazy and/or problematic way in which the writers are portraying her, celebrating when SEGA does the bare minimum to give women representation in the Sonic series (the most recent example being when Amy Rose was included as a playable character in the additional DLC for Sonic Origins Plus).]

With the IDW comic being published since 2018 and starting the story around the point where Sonic Forces had ended, it was established Amy was the de facto leader of the Resistance and Knuckles was just a figurehead, the organization’s visible face; this fact, along with the way Amy began to be portrayed in IDW-Sonic and the kind of leader this version of the character was, made many notice a strong similarity between this version of Amy and Sally Acorn, leading the North-American continuity’s most nostalgic fans to criticize the new comic’s writers for their apparent lack of originality. This may surprise more than one, but I think that Amy would be a better leader than Knuckles, and even that writing Amy like this actually makes sense... albeit in a very, very ironic way. You see... It’s almost the same thing the British comic published by Fleetway had done all those years ago: taking those basics on which Amy Rose's character was created in the first place, going their own way to develop Amy from there, and ultimately getting a version of Amy Rose who leads the fight against Robotnik/Eggman, has got the knowledge, skills, training, and sanity to play that role, is still "feminine" in her own way, isn’t obsessed with Sonic and is even able to draw attention to call him out for his mistakes (although this is probably also due to the British Sonic’s... “peculiar” personality, which would have stopped the British Amy from idolizing him). The big difference between the British Amy and IDW's Amy is that the British one had the necessary development to justify her being the leader of her team, was the only version of Amy who ever received any character development at all, and was conceived from the get-go as someone better and quite different from what would later become her counterpart in the video games. On the contrary, it’s clear that IDW's Amy is the result of a hasty, rushed attempt to give the character something else to do, after several years during which people were deconstructing gender roles in both real life and fiction and realized the "official" version of Amy was the opposite of something romantic, adorable, admirable, cool or exemplary.

For a moment, I considered the option of writing Amy just like in the British comic, but then I saw that this would lead to basically having “two Sallys” in one place. I finally found a way to develop Amy, and I can already tell in advance that it’s tied to the more mystical and less Chaos-related side of the Sonic franchise. But I must warn that this version of Amy might seem unrecognizable to most Sonic fans.


Initially, the purpose of my fanfics was almost only to think of a possible continuation of the events of Sonic SatAM, adapting things from the Archie-Sonic comics (and taking some licenses in the process), and trying to better write Antoine's transition from his self in the cartoon to his self in the comics, give more importance to Tails and better portray his parents, Amadeus and Rosemary. But then I realized how abysmal the differences between the two versions of Antoine were, while it was also harder for me to think of a way to write Rosemary coherently.

In Antoine's case, lately, I came up with an alternative to make him develop and stop being what he was in the TV series:

Immediately after the original Robotnik has been defeated, Antoine leaves his team behind. He actually doesn't know how to fight, but he still has good marksmanship, so he becomes a hitman. However, he's eventually convinced to leave behind that life without honour, begins to train in real fighting skills and becomes a genuine Freedom Fighter once and for all. In any case, he develops an opinion of "the end justifies the means" and keeps thinking like this for the rest of the story, being critical of his former team.

As for Rosemary... I don't like to say it this way, but she was a total b**** in the comics. I came up with a way to show her in a better light, but in no way could it have worked with the comics' Rosemary as she was. I'll talk about it later.


I have to admit it: I didn't pay due attention to the characters' development, especially in the case of women: I thought to avoid making them passive stereotyped housewives, along with creating a team of Freedom Fighters where men and women are present in equal amounts and both fulfil equally important roles in their missions, would be enough. At least, this was better than what Penders did in the comics. However, Fiona had so much potential to explore her turbulent past and the physical and psychological abuse she suffered at the hands of Scourge, and also to later show a relationship with Tails from her own point of view... and I've wasted that potential. I tried to focus occasionally on Bunnie too, but I failed to do as much as I could and should have done.


As I said before, the characters' behaviour during Penders's era made no f***ing sense: Sonic being indistinguishable from Scourge, Sally becoming someone passive and letting King Max influence her life, Max himself being something totally opposite to what had been suggested about him in Sonic SatAM and in his first mentions in the comic, abusive characters (Scourge, Max, Knuckles's dad) going unpunished, the victims of that abuse (especially Sally) being victim-blamed, the writer implying the victims owed something to their abusers... It'd probably have been much better if I had directly skipped it all and pretended it never happened. However, when I started writing my stories, I wanted to challenge myself, trying to make sense of those events and at the same time tell a moreorless coherent story that doesn't ruin the characters in the same way Penders's writing did.

This didn't only give rise to the idea of Naugus posing as King Max and carrying out an emotional magical manipulation. For example, I planned to portray Sonic as someone who, after the victory against the original Robotnik, falls at a low point in regard to his attitude (like what he was when Penders was writing), but later realizes each one of his mistakes -although sometimes he has to do it the hard way- and slowly becomes someone better, someone as noble and selfless as he used to be during the war (similar to what he was in Sonic SatAM). This was supposed to be evident in the second story arc of AFF2, but that never came to fruition.


The way I portrayed Sonic in some parts of my stories (that is, someone who sees the war against Robotnik/Eggman as a game and didn't appreciate his teammates' efforts due to the fact that he had superpowers, someone with an ego too big for his own good and that of others) unfortunately resembles how he was at Penders's era. I planned to make Sonic learn from his mistakes and become better, just as I mentioned before, while Penders apparently had no plans to do such a thing and was more focused on keeping playing favourites with Knuckles and, via that character, writing bland stories and spreading his own twisted ideas about Politics and family (and his misogyny). On the other hand, this misperception of Sonic by me dated from before I even knew the Archie-Sonic comics existed.

Already when I first saw Sonic SatAM (when I was about 11 or 12 years old), I could identify the nice, admirable traits of Sonic as a character, just as I could also notice the chemistry between him and Sally, but I also felt like he was being terribly conceited, too little serious despite the situations in which he got into, and very little appreciative of the work of anyone who didn't have superpowers just like him.

To be honest, for a long time I had trouble trying to imagine an improved version of the TV series' Sonic. Even after reading fanfics whose authors succeeded in this same task, I still have some doubts about how to achieve it.

I’d like Sonic to have sort of a soft side and openly show emotions such as sadness or despair for his friends’ well-being, like in SatAM. I’d prefer a Sonic who likes to “be a free spirit” but in such a way that his friends still feel they can count on him, either to help them fight a battle or to give each other emotional support; I'd like for “being a free spirit” to not be a stupid slogan, nor an excuse for him to neglect his friendships, nor an impediment for him to build closer personal relationships with others; otherwise, I’d like to at least see Sonic using that “free spirit” thing as a mask to hide his feelings from the people he protects, having internal conflicts between his responsibility as someone with such a power to be a hero, his desire to just live his life and be happy, and his concern for his loved ones, which would also make him feel responsible for them in particular... and then his friends coming to his aid and emotionally supporting him in gratitude for everything he did for them and the world. I’d wish his super-speed to only hint at an aspect or facet of his persona but not become literally his entire personality. I’d also like Sonic to be like on the Adventure saga: a bit more pragmatic, able to take things seriously when required, actually able to read a situation and deduce the motives behind an enemy’s actions and other things beyond what others might be seeing, but also willing to see when giving a villain a second chance might actually backfire, and thus defeat that villain by any means necessary when it becomes apparent they’re not a mere joke. I’d also like him to have the sensitivity and emotional intelligence he showed in Sonic & the Secret Rings and Sonic & the Black Knight. Hell, even Sonic being more like Goku would be nice! (I mean the Goku from the original Dragon Ball, DBZ and the DBSuper anime, not the one from the DBSuper manga or the parody versions that may be funny but are being used too much by fans as a reference for the actual Goku)


My difficulty in portraying Sonic well is usually that he has that faux anarchist style North-Americans just love; as for concrete actions, aesthetics aside, I still imagine Sonic as someone who fights for freedom, but I'm from a different country than the USA and my concept of freedom, my ideas of how to fight for it, my beliefs about how much priority freedom has over other rights, are very different from those in the USA's culture. Whether intentionally or by accident, "lawful good" heroes are always portrayed as ineffective jerks or even literal tools of the oppressors, laws and rules per se are seen as obstacles to the advancement of good or even as the quintessential instruments of evil, and instead the story glorifies the "chaotic good" hero who does the right thing just because they want to (and they apparently always know what's the right thing thanks to... What? A divine revelation?); needless to say, I don't agree with that philosophy, and I don't trust "chaotic good" heroes, let alone their personal criteria to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong.

I liked the Sonic from the "Storybook saga" (the unofficial name given by the fans to the games Secret Rings and Black Knight), mainly because of his concept of freedom and how that was reflected in the plots of both games: he fights for the freedom of the genie Shahra, who was suffering from Erazor Djinn's emotional abuse, and later for the freedom of a Mobian version of Camelot, which was under the reign of a corrupted King Arthur. In both cases, he calls into question the reasons for paying allegiance to both tyrants, rejecting titles and honorifics such as "Master" and "Your Majesty". Sonic postulates as an alternative an authority not dependent on fear; an authority based on someone's merit as a leader, rather than based on divine right or some kind of blind loyalty or something set beforehand regardless of which exact person the leader happens to be or which actual qualifications they have for the role; an authority that implies mutual respect and always remembering the inherent equality between those in the position of authority and those who aren't in that position. Something similar happens with the Sonic from Sonic SatAM, which is to be expected since he's literally a guerrilla fighter facing his own version of Robotnik, who in turn has already managed to conquer the entire world, rules it with an iron fist and has as his favoured method to subjugate the population something as horrifying and abject as turning them into robots in order to take away their control over their own bodies and then use them as slave labour or even cannon fodder.

The concept of freedom espoused by Sonic in SatAM, Black Knight and Secret Rings isn't empty words or an ode to extreme individualism. In other videogames and TV series, this deeper concept of freedom, more closely linked to all other rights of people, less vaguely defined, much harder for an oppressor to twist, distort, misrepresent or manipulate, is still present but insignificantly and/or only at the subtext level, which is disappointing; these versions of Sonic often seem to believe "authority" is synonymous with "authoritarianism".

On the other hand, the Sonic from the IDW comic -a Sonic that has recently become very popular- is something I never want to use as an inspiration, albeit not because he's some insensitive anarchist who only cares for himself like what I described in the first paragraph, but rather the opposite. IDW's Sonic is obsessed with certain principles, namely a strict moral code commanding him to do no harm to the villains and always trust they'll repent of their actions someday; this matches the archetype of the ineffective "lawful good" protagonist North-American writers sometimes create -with flaws that are still recognized and pointed out later and become the focus of the character's internal conflicts- only to generate drama that ends up feeling very contrived. This Sonic constantly gives second chances to the likes of Eggman, Metal Sonic or Zavok, even when Eggman and Zavok are openly unrepentant, "Mr Tinker" -Eggman's personality for a brief time when he was amnesiac- didn't make Eggman after regaining his memories any different than he was before the brainwashing, that "Mr Tinker" persona was possibly a smokescreen put up by Eggman as well, and Metal Sonic is programmed to obey Eggman and carry out his will at all costs (in the IDW comic, it's even explicitly mentioned that Eggman took steps to prevent Metal Sonic from once again rebelling the way he has in Sonic Heroes). He's also massively hypocritical, being more than willing to shift the blame onto his own closest friends in order to justify himself. His excessive mercy towards the villains has reached such an extent that Sonic made Tails provide Zavok with the means to escape back to the Zeti homeworld, and then Sonic insisted again on how much he believes in his "principles" during a brief debate where Zavok himself warns him about this mistake but Sonic ignores him; to top it off, Sonic did all of this in front of Tails, and the latter should have been triggered after having been captured and almost turned into a robot slave by Zavok and his Zeti lackeys in Sonic Lost World, so he should have been very pissed off at Sonic's actions (and very confused by his big bro's actions as well, as Sonic in Lost World had been a much better friend and sounded quite willing to put the Zeti through a world's worth of pain). By the way, IDW-Sonic is supposed to be a direct sequel to the videogames -specifically Sonic Forces- unlike Sonic SatAM and Archie-Sonic; however, Sonic's portrayal (and also Eggman's, for that matter) and actions directly contradict either the events of Sonic Forces (of which IDW-Sonic is a direct sequel), the events of Lost World (a game whose events are required to have happened exactly the same way in the IDW-Sonic universe at some point before the events of Sonic Forces, are indeed referenced in the comic, and are vital to understand who Zavok even is and where he came from) or elements of the videogames' canon that, despite SEGA's lack of concern for continuity, had managed to remain consistent from Sonic 1 through Sonic Forces and should therefore reasonably be taken as canon for the comic.


I was chatting with "JoshTarwater" on Twitter... Or rather, she wrote an essay about Amy Rose [https://twitter.com/JoshTarwater/status/1481689142622765059], that inspired me to write a long, disorganized tweet thread with my own opinion on something related [https://twitter.com/LProcion/status/1481852694415425537], and she provided her own opinion in another tweet thread [https://twitter.com/JoshTarwater/status/1482027383087681536]. This made me aware of the extent to which the characters, interactions and settings created and written for the videogames' canon, starting as early as the early Japanese canon -that is, the classic games for the Genesis/MegaDrive and Mega CD consoles and the manuals associated with their Japanese versions-, were made ad hoc, tailor-made, for the medium in which the Sonic franchise and its particular non-traditional way of telling stories were born (Japanese 16-bit video games).

The characters introduced in the classic games (Sonic, Tails, Eggman, Amy Rose, Knuckles) being static characters; Sonic being more like an ideal for his friends and the audience to aspire to, instead of a person for the other characters and the audience to relate with, just someone admirable who builds his friendships with other characters and still has his own desires and internal conflicts and can change, learn, develop as a character; Tails eternally remaining a sidekick mostly in a support role; Eggman always running away from Sonic at the end of every game or apparently dying but then coming back on the next game, for whatever reason, which leads to theories about what the relationship between Sonic and Eggman is actually like and whether or not Sonic truly wants to put an end to Eggman's villain career; Amy Rose always "chasing" Sonic and having a sort of pseudo-romantic relationship with him, which may be sweet and unique and interesting in the Sonic universe but certainly doesn't and shouldn't look anything like a real-life relationship; Amy's personality in general, the way her obsession with Sonic sometimes gets in the way of her character development, how this sometimes clashes with the seriousness of a situation, and the way she still seems to have an innate talent for convincing other characters to join the heroes; Sonic seemingly expecting his friends to be able to "keep up with him" and also rejecting any type of commitment or compromise, as if imposing duties on himself in relation to others curtails his freedom even if those self-imposed duties stem from genuine love and concern for others' well-being, which outside the videogames' universe would make Sonic look like a colossal selfish prick who's not hostile to others but simply indifferent (and headcanons about asexual/aromantic Sonic shouldn't be done only to justify that behaviour, as that'd imply someone on the "ace & aro" spectrum is emotionally stunted, and being ace/aro doesn't work like that at all); lack of concern for continuity and lack of interest in referencing previous games or telling a story across multiple games (especially since 2006, for well-known reasons, but also in the 15 years of Sonic content before then); each game's stories being somewhat repetitive sometimes... Everything gives the impression that if we tried to adapt the Sonic games into a long-running cartoon or comic where we try to keep a consistent continuity, where all the characters change and develop over time, where the existence of an actual continuity forces Eggman to fully demonstrate his qualities and capacity for villainy, and where Sonic's and other protagonists' weaknesses aren't exacerbated or completely changed but are addressed instead of being swept under the rug... it wouldn't work, it just wouldn't. Sonic may turn out to be a good role model for the audience, but the character himself and his personal life would no longer be interesting; Tails would always try to overcome his fears and believe in himself but he'd never succeed and that'd get really annoying really fast, and only half of the people would complain about that while the other half would unironically love this static Tails because they genuinely liked Tails the way he was in the very beginning of that story; Amy would be straight up the worst part and her dynamic with Sonic would make both of them look very bad, but there'd still be a lot of people supporting Amy exactly the way she's portrayed because she'd still be the main female character and those fans would defend her in an extreme reaction to the haters, who'd probably criticize Amy solely out of misogyny and contempt for everything "girly"; Knuckles would have nothing noteworthy to do most of the time; lastly, Eggman would indeed be competent, a fearsome strategist, a remorseless villain, and Sonic wouldn't let him get away but would intentionally leave Eggman stranded in situations where he shouldn't be able to survive (his own ships/facilities exploding, outer space, an inter-dimensional void where time doesn't exist, you name it), but Eggman constantly escaping á la Team Rocket with no proper explanation, plus the apparent lack of a more violent response from Sonic or any of his friends or anyone else in the world to Eggman's constant acts of terrorism, plus the fact that Sonic doesn't seem too upset by this but just snaps back at Eggman and his robots every time the latter tries something new, would get repetitive and make all the characters look like idiots for seemingly not learning from past experiences, and this would raise serious questions about Sonic's true intentions and how capable Eggman would be as a villain if Sonic "took things more seriously".

I guess that's why I always had some preference for the Sonic SatAM and Archie-Sonic canon, despite all the mistakes and utterly disgraceful stuff in their execution in the pre-reboot comics: from the start, there was at least a shred of intention to tell a single story, with all of its elements interconnected, and everything is set up to work for that kind of story. I like the Sonic videogames, their characters and plots, and I'll adapt them as faithfully as possible, but I like their unchanged original versions only as stories separated from each other and remaining limited to the videogames' medium, the only place where their elements work while being exactly the same as in the source material. Making them work in a single long-running "traditional" story will always require changes, perhaps even the kind of changes that would make this Sonic story unrecognizable.


When I see people talking for the umpteenth time about Knuckles’s family in Archie-Sonic, the Brotherhood of Guardians, and the atrocities committed by its members in general and Knux’s father Locke in particular, I’m more and more convinced of how absurdly easy it’d have been to make Knuckles’s dad, grandpa and other ancestors collectively one of the comic book’s main villains. In fact, I strongly believe Ken Penders unintentionally made a Dragon Ball reference: Locke, in terms of his personality and perhaps also his goals and methods, is very much like the Great Demon King Piccolo (father of the Piccolo we’re all now familiar with, who in turn has also been frequently compared to Knux himself).

On second thought, Locke and the other Guardians would be more like what would have happened if King Piccolo and Kami had fused again in the form of the original Nameless Namekian but the evil half’s personality had dominated over the good half’s.

Something even better would have been for the Brotherhood of Guardians to be villains and also be indeed a reference to Kami but subverted, thought from a different perspective, with his traditional “non-interference policy” taken to the extreme, with his name’s meaning (神 => “Kami” => “God”) and his role as a planet’s Guardian degenerated in the form of a superiority complex, delusions of grandeur and the sick idea that only the Brotherhood of Guardians knows what is best for Mobius. It’d have been pretty nice since, well, it’s exactly what the writers of RWBY do when taking characters from classic tales and re-imagining them in totally different, novel and interesting ways, such as when CRWBY and Rooster Teeth took the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and re-created him as the villain James Ironwood.

To have Guardians officially be villains would also have made a nice coincidence with the Adventure saga: the members of the ancient Knuckles Clan -with the obvious exception of Tikal- were conquerors, pillaged other peoples’ resources and had become nearly extinct because of their own hubris, while Knux’s story wasn’t about reviving and continuing their ancestors’ legacy but about fixing their mistakes and avoiding making them again (besides, Knux was explicitly like “Nope, I don’t wanna know about that Clan or whatever” at the end of his story in Adventure 1).

The only reason we didn’t have villain Guardians was Penders himself: he genuinely believed an exemplary parent is someone psychologically abusive and manipulative whose children have to blindly honour and obey them, follow in their footsteps in life and raise their own children in exactly the same way. Take Penders and his intentions to frame the Guardians as the comic’s good guys out of the equation, and the story will instantly make a lot more sense.


Firstly I'd like to establish some basic rules of how Chaos Energy works in this fictional universe.

I’ve already given it a Japanese name: 「混沌・気力」 [“Konton Kiryoku”]. “Konton” means “Chaos”; in the original Japanese version of Sonic Adventure 1, when Tikal recites her famous prayer, she refers to "the seven Chaos" by the Japanese word, instead of using "Kaosu" (from the English word “Chaos”) as Sonic and the others do when mentioning the Chaos Emeralds. “Kiryoku” would literally mean “spirit power/strength/force”, although it’s usually translated as “willpower” (even though there’s already another specific Japanese word for that); "spirit power" describes quite well the nature of the connection between Chaos Energy and the person who manages to harness it, and it also makes for a good nod to Dragon Ball, since the kanji 気 [the one pronounced "ki"] is the one used to name the radiation of the "energy attacks" used by its characters, as well as to refer to the Far-Eastern concept of "qi" or "chi", a kind of life force that flows and circulates throughout one's entire body.

The original Japanese versions often call the Chaos Emeralds "Kaosu Emerarudo", made up of the words "Chaos" and "Emerald" borrowed from English. But there’s a distinctly Japanese word written with kanji to refer to the concept of chaos; likewise, there’s also a Japanese kanji word to designate an emerald: 「緑柱玉」 [“Ryokuchūgyoku”]. So I came up with the following Japanese names for the Chaos Emeralds, the Super Emeralds and the Master Emerald:

「混沌・緑柱玉」 [“Konton Ryokuchūgyoku”, “Chaos Emerald”]

「(混沌)主要な緑柱玉」 [“(Konton) Shuyō na Ryokuchūgyoku”, “Main (Chaos) Emerald” (the Master Emerald)]

「(混沌)超緑柱玉」 [“(Konton) Chō Ryokuchūgyoku”, “(Chaos) Super Emerald”]

In official Sonic media, the Super and Hyper forms are quite easy to attain compared to the many SSJ (Super Saiyan) forms, their counterparts on Dragon Ball: you just have to find the Chaos Emeralds, have the Master Emerald on hand to turn them into Super Emeralds if you want to become Hyper, and pass some trials in the Special Zone depending on the videogame, which doesn't even happen sometimes; quite the contrary, on Dragon Ball, it took intense feelings of anger to get Goku to become SSJ 1 and Pre-Teen Gohan to become SSJ 1 & 2 (yeah, Goten and Trunks went SSJ with extreme ease, but that could be for another reason MasakoX posited on a video called “Super Saiyan Genetics – Solved?”). To solve this and make going Super truly a feat for Sonic characters, here's how I'd make it work:

=> Anyone with the precise knowledge needed to harness Chaos Energy can use the Chaos Emeralds and the Master Emerald to power machines.

=> On the other hand, to be able to become either 「超」 [“Chō”, “Super”] or 「越えて超」 [“Koete Chō”, “Beyond Super” or “Hyper”], one has to pass trials in the Special Zone. The trials might appear only of physical prowess to a visitor to the Special Zone, but everything they see there, the environment and the objects actually embody the inside of their very mind and various elements of it, their own body on the Special Zone is actually their soul, and what's put to the trial is the spirit, not the body, of the one who wishes to use the Emeralds' power to become Super and/or Hyper. Just like the Master Emerald itself, the Chaos Emeralds are also sentient to some extent and are the ones who create the tests and evaluate the visitors to the Special Zone.

=> Depending on the development of a person's spirit, the Super form may be reached with fewer Chaos Emeralds and after passing easier trials, and reaching the Hyper form would still require all seven but may be reached with the Master Emerald far away.

=> On the other hand, “forcing” the Super transformation -by various means- on someone who’s not yet ready may have catastrophic results. Someone suffering from emotional pain could be dangerous and/or careless, their Super form may have more raw power and at the same time be less effective and last less time. As a general case, going Super while being dominated by some specific feeling can lead to slightly different variants of the Super form, each with its own pros and cons. In an extreme case, if someone is bottling a lot of pain caused by trauma and the emotions generated by that pain, a forced Super transformation will lead that person to become a Super form called 「超・凶暴」 [“Chō Kyōbō”, “Berserk Super”], a weird way to "vent", letting those bottled emotions, pain and sorrow generate an overwhelmingly powerful, out of control, grotesquely muscular Super form with the potential to cross through several parallel dimensions and back (y-- yeah, it’s a reference to Broly...).

=> The 「混沌・物質」 [“Konton Busshitsu”, “Chaos Matter”] is the substance of which the Chaos and Master Emeralds are made; it’s native to an unknown parallel universe that responds to different physical laws. Everyone in Mobius has in their DNA at least hundreds of 「混沌・遺伝子」 [“Konton Idenshi”, “Chaos Genes”] made of this same material, which allow them to have an aptitude for a whole range of extraordinary abilities if they receive the proper training; Mobians have a higher average number of Chaos Genes than humans since the latter lived isolated in city-states when the Chaos Emeralds arrived on the planet (yes, here Mobius is also a post-apocalyptic Earth and the story is set in a very distant future, although I cannot yet specify how distant exactly). There are people with so many Chaos Genes that, if their power is unlocked, their bodies behave like one entire Chaos Emerald; these are the 「混沌の達人」 [“Konton no Tatsujin”, “Adepts to Chaos”], or simply 「達人」 [“Tatsujin”, “Adepts”], which include Sonic and Tails.

=> Being an Adept to Chaos helps slightly in transformations, but only when one has achieved some emotional development and maturation by themself; after all, that Chaos Matter within an Adept’s body works pretty much like one more Chaos Emerald, also requiring a certain mental and emotional "fitness" to allow its use, perhaps even more than an ordinary Chaos Emerald. The Chaos Matter within an Adept helps in the following ways: firstly, it allows to "feel" the Chaos Emeralds in a similar way to how Knuckles detects the Master Emerald's shards; secondly, it makes the trials in the Special Zone -both to go Super and to go Hyper- a bit easier; lastly, a certain level of spiritual development would usually only allow becoming Super with one less Chaos Emerald, but with the body's Chaos Matter "activated", that same spiritual development would allow using the Super form with two less Emeralds, although the Hyper transformation would still require all seven.

=> Technically, everyone in Mobius has pretty much the same potential to exploit Chaos Energy and become Super or even Hyper without the help of machines, having only their own body, mind, spirit and willpower. Similarly, if a group of people agrees, there are techniques to use the potential of all those people and empower a third party chosen by that crowd (a reference to both the Spirit Bomb and the ritual to summon the Super Saiyan God). One of these techniques was the one used at the end of the events of Sonic Adventure 1, something that was probably discovered by accident: the God of Destruction Chaos had just depleted the Chaos Emeralds’ energy to become Perfect Chaos, but then the millions of inhabitants of Station Square, without having previously had any training to harness Chaos Energy, used their thoughts and their support to Sonic to replenish the energy stored in the seven Chaos Emeralds in the hedgehog’s hands, thus allowing Sonic to become his Super form and neutralize Perfect Chaos.

=> Access to Chaos-Energy-induced transformations depends on a person's soul. Therefore, a machine with sentience and free will has virtually got a kind of soul of their own, so the rules for a flesh-and-blood person to access the Super and Hyper forms also apply to artificial beings. That may have been what allowed Mecha Sonic to harness the Master Emerald's power and become a sort of "unstable Super form" in Knuckles's story of Sonic 3 & Knuckles.


Since the day I found out about the Archie-Sonic comics (2013, precisely when they were in the middle of the reboot) and read about them, I already had some opinions formed: Fiona Fox's betrayal was badly written; the message it sent (“if you did something slightly wrong once or you had a slightly shady past, you’ll always be bad again”) was one of the worst messages that could be sent through a comic for children and teenagers, and it could even be read as something classist and sexist if analyzed enough; Fiona had potential as a hero and could have also given the Freedom Fighters some much-needed nuances, due to her having a very different and much tougher childhood than the rest of the team; pairing her up with Tails might work out due to the kind of interaction that could be developed between them if we only solved the age gap problem -which Ken Penders had created as he poured his own perversions onto the comics’ panels-. As years went by, my ideas about relationships and how to write them changed, and I also watched RWBY, which inspired and influenced me quite a bit; all this made me realize the serious mistakes I was making and others still make to this day when writing stories pairing Fiona with Tails, other ideas I used to have only got confirmed, and now I know new and better ways to write a story. I’ll delve into the latter in due time, in the corresponding parts of my summary of ideas, while now I'm going to explain some things I think the fandom is misunderstanding when writing Tails X Fiona stories.

First of all, it seems that many people don't seem to fully understand the implications of the kind of relationship Fiona had with Scourge. The relationship wasn’t violent both ways at the same time, and not only has he always been a womanizer who most likely used Fiona as a “trophy girlfriend” and cheated on her (long after the moment he and Fiona had supposedly started dating secretly, he was still working with Rouge and very visibly flirting with her): Scourge was psychologically abusing Fiona.

Let's start by reviewing what happened in the comic and what we can deduce with some certainty.

Fiona was originally determined to fight any villain after having suffered a gruesome childhood because of Robotnik; it had been mentioned she was the field medic for the Freedom Fighters, and despite the fact that this was never shown (due to Penders's habit of ignoring and retconning everything written by his co-writers) and the other fact that a character with a medic’s role is difficult to write in stories like those on Sonic, Fiona has been shown openly expressing concern for the physical integrity of her comrades, something consistent with her being a medic; she had held a grudge against Sonic for not rescuing her from prison, but later she had left that behind when Sonic sacrificed himself in Issue # 125, and it can be easily deduced that had inspired her to join the Freedom Fighters in the first place, spending at least a whole year working as part of a team specifically dedicated to helping the weak and helpless.

How’s it possible that suddenly, in Issue # 172, Fiona began to invoke the "survival of the fittest" and claimed no one can be trusted and she had simply grown tired of being a hero, as if it were just a whim or a passing phase of her life? If she became so cynical and was disappointed in the Freedom Fighters, she’d probably have gone to the other extreme: she’d have accused her team of not doing enough, of being too soft, of following the “no-kill policy” too rigorously, of just maintaining the status quo rather than eliminating the villains for good, or even of having become some kind of “exclusive club” and not accepting or trusting her as another comrade; her trust and abandonment issues and the feeling of having been apparently betrayed again by her friends would have been quite powerful, but so would the memories of her own childhood, of Robotnik's atrocities in general, of all the other victims she has surely met while working as a field medic for the Freedom Fighters; as a result, she’d have defected from the team but to become what TV Tropes calls a “well-intentioned extremist”, an anti-hero, someone with convictions as strong as those of the heroes but opposed to them due to the radical practices she has adopted, which would also have forced the heroes themselves to re-think their own ideas and methods, to acknowledge their own mistakes and the ways in which they themselves fell short of their ideals.

This leads to another question: when she betrayed the heroes, why did she do it in favour of Scourge? He’s literally the opposite of Sonic: he has none of Sonic’s heroic qualities, has his most reprehensible aspects exacerbated (the same ones Fiona had criticized about Sonic before Penders reduced her to a mere satellite love interest to him), had first introduced himself to Fiona posing as Sonic while also sleeping with multiple girls at Knothole (if you wanna win someone's love, that's the worst first impression you can make on them), and even called himself “Evil Sonic” before the accident with the Master Emerald that turned him into Scourge. A plausible-behaving Fiona (in the sense that, even if she starts acting less rationally, her behaviour and those irrational reactions still make readers say "yep, I probably would have done the same in her situation") would have treated Scourge like just another villain, and if she had felt like she couldn't count on her friends, then she’d have tried to kill him off on her own.

Only one possibility remains: Scourge manipulated Fiona, acting when no-one else was present, pretending to be trustworthy (literally posing as Mobius's Hero and her team's “field leader”), exploiting some moment of weakness of Fiona; he put ideas into her head, and by the time he officially became Scourge and could no longer pretend to be Sonic, he had gained Fiona's trust and perhaps even started to convince her to burn down the bridges she had built with the rest of her team; he gaslit her, making her stop trusting her own perception of reality, and moulded her ideas in the way he saw fit.

And we’ve not talked about age yet: because Fiona's backstory is a mess full of plotholes, it’s likely she was 14 when starting dating Scourge, despite what’s implied by her design, excessively sexualized even for a 17-year-old girl (Fiona’s age according to Ian Flynn on his personal forum).

ToaArcan has already been talking about all this in detail previously, so I recommend reading his posts since he explains it better than I do. Now is the time to get back to the topic I wanted to talk about in the first place: what are some Tails X Fiona fans doing wrong? After all, they write stories where Fiona escapes from Scourge's manipulation or is not even his victim at all. What can go wrong?

If you’re going to write a story where Fiona walks away from Scourge, it’s important to do these three things: give Fiona a wide support network, acknowledge the extent to which she’s a victim, and give back her agency, he power for her to do with her life whatever she wants and is best for her. A victim of abuse and/or gaslighting needs, first of all, a support network rather than a romantic partner, especially when the previous partner was the abuser and surely the victim will still be afraid that starting a sentimental relationship of this kind with someone else will go just the same; avoiding blaming the victim is vital, too. What I’m seeing in many stories is Tails refuting Scourge's arguments and promises with amazing skill (Tails accomplishing something like this is credible, but taking public speaking classes and having truly got The Smarts is futile if you want to actually convince a victim of psychological abuse to break up with their abuser), Fiona escaping the manipulation fairly easily, with no mental scars and starting a romantic relationship with Tails too quickly, a support network almost nonexistent except for Tails himself, and almost a replay of the relationship between Fiona and Scourge although with the green hedgehog replaced by someone who’s much better intentioned but repeats the cycle anyway without realizing it and still fails to give Fiona true independence and decision-making power over her own life; it’s even claimed Fiona has "redeemed" herself, as if she’d had to repair a mistake of hers, implying the writer is blaming the victim.

No. That’s not how it’s done. We fanfiction writers are supposed to do better than that. Also, this should be a good opportunity to show Tails doing a bit of introspection, thinking about the possibility that he may have become obsessed with Fiona or even contributed to the tough situation she found herself in, a situation Scourge used to his own advantage.

Another serious mistake is keeping the age gap and taking it as normal, stating that “both are still minors” or that “Tails is much more mature mentally”. Firstly: having a higher intellect doesn't necessarily make you more mature. Secondly and more importantly: as I already said, that age gap is artificial, Ken Perverts created it when trying to pair Fiona with Sonic while also turning the timeline into a total chaos, Ian Flynn took that and wrote it in stone while also throwing more fuel at the proverbial fire that was the messy timeline, and now those fanfiction writers are taking that and accepting it with no questions. A good alternative is to do something similar to what was done with Amy Rose in pre-reboot Archie-Sonic: she made a wish to be a few years older, resulting in her being physically a teenager of about 14 years old but mentally still a girl of about 11 years old, and the characters keep treating her as the 11-year-old girl she previously was; in Fiona's case, treating her like a 14-year-old because that’s her actual mental age despite looking like a 17-year-old wouldn't necessarily mean treating her like some immature kid, but rather it’d be more like having compassion for someone who has been trapped in a situation that has hurt her and in which she never really wanted to be.

As far as I know, ToaArcan and I are the only fanfiction writers who are avoiding repeating the multiple mistakes made by other writers and listed in this section. Actually, KivaTheDCWizard avoided them too, but it's a separate case because he decided to cut his losses: he directly said "my universe, my rules", all his Sonic fanfics are set in totally new universes, taking elements from different sources and writing his stories’ plot from scratch, and in those stories, the problem of the age gap between Fiona and Tails isn’t there, the basics of Fiona's backstory are still preserved but her betrayal and her relationship with Scourge don't happen, and much of the relationship drama is skipped.


As I discovered different fictional works and became a fan of them, the influences for my work also changed a lot. First, it was Marvel, with the first Avengers movie and all the other movies and TV series linked to it in the MCU; this laid the foundation for my first fanfics. Back in early 2016, I also discovered RWBY, which helped me a lot to rethink my ideas about character development and relationship writing. In mid-2018, I started to explore the Shōnen anime again from a different perspective than when I was just an elementary school kid and had found out Dragon Ball Z; I became a huge JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fan (in fact, I still am) and took a lot of stuff from there; I also watched Black Butler and wanted to use the basic elements of its plot; I watched Boku no Hero Academia and Mob Psycho 100, that helped me a bit with how to write personalities in a similar way to how I had learned by watching RWBY, and I also discovered alternative ways of addressing topics such as the true meaning of heroism; I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion and was quite interested in Hideaki An’no's exploration of emotional disorders, especially depression and war trauma (although the plot was quite complicated and gave me headaches more than once); lastly, I came across Dragon Ball Z Abridged -the parody made by “TeamFourStar”-, which made me re-discover my appreciation for Dragon Ball, explore the franchise from other angles, analyze it in depth and take specific elements of how it works; I became a bit of a Dragon Ball Super fan, I watched videos made by “MasakoX”, Frieza and Goku Black became two of my favourite villains of all time, I researched more about Japanese mythology and culture, and outside of my fanfic series, I wrote a post with ideas about a Sonic & JoJo crossover where I’ve also put a lot of things from Dragon Ball. Another type of anime I met was the Seinen genre, especially through The Rise of the Shield Hero (and I guess Black Butler would be Seinen, too). Among the videogames that had the most influence on me, I could include Freedom Planet (I even had plans for a crossover between that game and my fanfics once Freedom Planet 2 was released, although I'm not so sure I want to carry them out anymore), Spark the Electric Jester, the Sonic fan-games made by LakeFeperd, the Metal Slug and The King of Fighters sagas (the latter also inspired me to write a post with some ideas for a crossover with Sonic), and more recently, Metal Gear Solid. I don't know how to write comedy at all, but I like to imagine the comedy style of my fanfics would be a combination of those of Red vs. Blue, the videos by DevilArtemis, Italian movies, comedy made by Tyler Perry and other African-American artists from the southern USA, comedy sketches from the Peter Capusotto TV show here in Argentina, Dragon Ball Z Abridged, and JoJo, maybe also Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged by “LittleKuriboh” and the unfinished Megaman Legends Abridged by “TauVertex”.

All the changes in the works that influenced me, all the things added to my range of inspiration sources over time, made me change my mind about the direction my fanfics should take, and in the process, they made me also regret what I had previously written. At first, my stories were just about Antoine joining Bunnie, Tails, his parents, and Fiona (now free from Scourge's control and having joined the Knothole Freedom Fighters again), assembling a Freedom Fighters team separate from the Knothole team led by Sally and Sonic, after being disappointed in either the Knothole team’s operation or the way they were treated there; as the chapters went by, the new team carried out missions with the support of GUN, Team Dark and the President of the United Federation, liberated Mercia from Eggman's dominion, allied with Baron Beauregard’s chapter of the Dark Egg-Legion, and defeated the fake Resistance team that had cruelly banished the roboticized Mobians in the Southern Baronies, as they and their allies were also trying to figure out what would be the next move by Scourge, who had meanwhile had himself crowned King of Moebius; some kind of conspiracy involving King Max and the Order of IXIS was also gradually revealed, but there was also a situation similar to that in Captain America: Civil War, where thnd their allies attempted to establish a Democracy in the Kingdom of Acorn and fought against Sonic, Sally and their own allies while King Max -turned into a follower of the Order of IXIS- manipulated them into eliminating each other. When I got to that point, I was almost running out of ideas (and at the worst possible time, since my weak point has always been to write original battle scenes without copying other works’ battles verbatim), I began to lose the desire to keep writing, I discovered other fiction works such as RWBY and all the anime that I started watching a couple of years later, and I came up with a lot of great new ideas but these required a complete reboot of my fanfic series; I also realized that, among other things, I had turned Antoine into a Mary-Sue too.

I’m now trying to bring together elements from all my inspiration sources into a “definitive” version of my series, albeit in the form of summaries instead of actual stories. As a first step, I’m going to change the title: this story is no longer about that team of Freedom Fighters, and it doesn’t begin with its creation one year after the end of Sonic SatAM either, but it begins at the very end of that TV series and the focus will change quite a bit between the various characters throughout the story even though Tails will technically be the closest thing to the main protagonist. The title will be...

「混沌緑柱玉」

“Konton Ryokuchūgyoku”, “Chaos Emerald”.

Ok, I know this sounds like another stupid Sonic & Dragon Ball crossover, and I can bet someone has used it before for something like that. But there’s a whole reasoning behind this.

It's undeniable that Sonic is heavily based upon Dragon Ball, and even the pre-reboot Archie-Sonic comics resembled it in some ways. So one day I asked myself "Why not embrace, include and develop that part of Sonic inherited from the Shōnen anime?". Now many don’t hesitate to make clear how fed up they are to see how the typical Dragon Ball tropes are copied and used over and over again, by a lot of other works in the Shōnen manga & anime and also in other genres, but I personally am convinced this bad reputation is deserved only by the series that tried to imitate Dragon Ball for having done it wrong, and as evidenced by a video MasakoX made in September 2019 about a possible way to "fix" the Super Saiyan 3 form, even that franchise’s most infamous or laughable things can be adapted and enhanced to create at least something bearable.

Finally, it’s true the name of the series is literally "Dragon Ball" (in China and Southeast Asia, it’s translated as "The Seven Dragon Balls"), but in most of the episodes both in the original series and in DBZ and Super, including some of the most iconic moments and perhaps also the newest Broly movie, as well as those videogames with long and more fleshed-out stories such as FighterZ and the Xenoverse saga, none of the three or four existing sets of Dragon Balls is actually relevant to the plot; moreover, the times these objects and their search were important in some way (other than reviving all the dead people after defeating each story arc’s main villain) throughout the entire franchise could be counted on the fingers; the Dragon Balls did have more prominence in GT, but only because a new, mysterious, quite different set of Dragon Balls was introduced and the series’ purpose was also to give a conclusion to Goku's journey and a final curtain to the franchise; besides, the validity of the events on GT is highly questioned within the Dragon Ball fandom and almost nothing has been officially said about it. Similarly, in these summaries of my stories, the Chaos Emeralds and everything related to the Chaos Energy will always be present in one way or another, but the times when the Chaos Emeralds become secondary or even don't matter at all are going to make up a large part of the story and include a few pivotal key events.


If I could hire voice actors/actresses to play the characters that will appear here, these are the ones I’d choose. Okay, not exactly, since some of the VAs I’m going to mention have already died or just wouldn’t be able to play these roles for some other reason; in those cases, I'd mention them just to give some rough idea of what I imagine the Sonic characters would sound like.

Sonic:

=> Jason Griffith (Sonic on Sonic & the Black Knight and Sonic & the Secret Rings, both in English): the way Sonic was portrayed there was great and truly novel, Griffith's work was good, he totally nailed it in both games, and his work elsewhere wasn't too bad actually.

=> Jun'ichi Kanemaru (Sonic on the entire Sonic series in Japanese): something striking about Japanese Sonic is that he sounds “cool”, bold and cheeky but at the same time calm and relaxed, as if he didn't need to make an extra effort to look and sound “cool”, as if it really came naturally to him and wasn’t a mask; besides, his Engrish is wonderfully hilarious.

=> Masami Kikuchi (Sonic on the 1996 Sonic OVA in Japanese).

=> Martin Burke (Sonic on the 1996 Sonic OVA in English): he sounds great when acting more eccentric, like when he says that famous line to Metal Sonic: “You might know everything I’m going to do, but that’s not going to help you since I know everything you’re going to do! Strange, isn’t it?”.

=> Ryan Drummond (Sonic on the Adventure saga in English): his performance seems to be quite divisive in the fandom, but I personally never had much of a problem with how he played Sonic; at worst, if Sonic in English sounded so bad in the Adventure saga, it was the voice directors' fault.

=> Tomokazu Suigata (young Joseph Joestar on the anime of JoJo Part 2 in Japanese): his voice would sound a little deeper sometimes but would still have its own charm, and he could also make Sonic speak Kanemaru's Engrish; Burke’s English Sonic sounds pretty similar to Japanese young Joseph, too.

=> Benjamin Diskin (young Joseph Joestar on the anime of JoJo Part 2 in English): he’d make for a more cheeky Sonic, and it might sound a little deeper than usual but would still sound great and also smooth.

=> Yasunori Matsumoto (Knuckles on the 1996 Sonic OVA in Japanese): for a more serious Sonic, someone who doesn’t try so hard to be a walking advertising slogan.

=> Nobutoshi Canna (Knuckles on the Adventure saga in Japanese): a similar case to that of Matsumoto.

=> “Otaku.D Furiku”, aka “2GS”, aka “Slick Goku” (Slick Goku on his videos and on Dragon Ball Gohanverse by “Daitomodachi”): for Sonic’s “Werehog” form, but with actual control over himself (that is, pretty much the same as in Sonic Unleashed, not the "Hulk knock-off" Werehog from the post-reboot Archie comics), and maybe with a more “gangstah” style too.

Tails:

=> Daiki Yamashita (Izuku Midoriya on Boku no Hero Academia & Narancia Ghirga on the anime of JoJo Part 5, both in Japanese): he'd be great in order to give Tails that "best boy" vibe that is usually attributed to him in official media; Yamashita also makes his characters sound badass and adorable at the same time when they get pissed off and start swearing.

=> Yūki Kaji (Kōichi Hirose on the anime of JoJo Part 4 in Japanese): a case similar to that of Yamashita.

=> Lawrence Simpson, aka "MasakoX" (kid & pre-teen Gohan on Dragon Ball Z Abridged): I tend to think that, after the events of Sonic SatAM (for example, in Archie-Sonic), Tails should have been portrayed as someone slightly more serious, hardened from having grown up in the middle of a war, with some suppressed rage originating from some experiences both during and after the war against the original Robotnik, and usually a bit reserved, except when he explodes and becomes uncontrollable, a situation in which he also reveals great potential untapped until then; Gohan is quite similar -at least in Abridged-, and I know it's partly a parody but still I love how the Gohan of “MasakoX” in the final battle against Cell sounds so serious, even a little scary at times, while still sounding like a child.

=> Colleen Clinkenbeard (kid & pre-teen Gohan on Dragon Ball Z Kai in English, Funimation dub, and on the videogames Kakarot and FighterZ, also in English).

=> Ai Orikasa (Rock/Mega Man on Rockman 8/Mega Man 8 in Japanese).

=> Ayaka Fukuhara (Rock/Mega Man on Rockman 11/Mega Man 11 in Japanese).

=> Minami Takayama (Conan Edogawa on Detective Conan, Kitarō on the 2007 anime of GeGeGe no Kitarō, and Knuckle Joe on Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, all three of them in Japanese).

=> Kate Higgins (Tails on Sonic Colors, Lost World & Generations in English): I really like how she makes Tails sound truly like a pre-teen or an early teenager, with a voice high-pitched by nature but a bit raspy due to the changes in his age; that's also why, among the VAs who have played Tails before and are able to do it again, Colleen O'Shaughnessey (Tails on the entire Sonic Boom spin-off in English) is a close second.

=> Giorgia Venditti (kid & pre-teen Gohan on Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”).

=> Connor & Corey Bringas (Tails on the Adventure saga in English): of all the official VAs for Tails, they sounded the best, but that's to be expected if you hire pre-teens (something problematic by itself) to play a pre-teen character, and now it'd no longer be possible to make any of them reprise their role.

=> Natsumi Takamori (kid Jotaro on the anime of JoJo Part 3 in Japanese): for when kid Tails goes edgy.

=> Marina Inoue (Wataru Tachibana on Hayate no Gotoku! in Japanese): for when kid Tails gets a bit moody or sullen.

=> Miyuki Sawashiro (Kitarō on the 2018 anime of GeGeGe no Kitarō in Japanese): when Tails is still heroic and deeply cares about others deep down, despite being easily consumed by anger, but is also usually rather aloof and blunt.

=> Megumi Ogata (Yūgi Mutō on the 1998 anime of Yu-Gi-Oh! made by Toei -often called “Season Zero”- in Japanese): for the Tails from Sonic Heroes, supposedly 8 years old, but as badass as the Adventure saga’s Tails.

=> Masako Nozawa (kid Goku on the original Dragon Ball anime and Kitarō in the 1968 & 1971 animes of GeGeGe no Kitarō, both in Japanese): a case similar to that of Megumi Ogata.

=> Yumiko Kobayashi (Rock/Mega Man on Rockman Rockman/Mega Man Powered Up in Japanese): sounds really similar to Masako Nozawa’s kid Goku.

=> Stephanie Nadolny (kid Goku on the original Dragon Ball anime in English, Funimation dub): better suited to voice a 12-year-old Tails; after all, the Goku whom she played in his fight against Krillin was already supposed to be 15 years old.

=> Saffron Henderson & Jillian Michaels (kid & pre-teen Gohan respectively on Dragon Ball Z in English, Ocean dub).

Older Tails:

=> Yūki Ono (Josuke Higashikata on the anime of JoJo Part 4 in Japanese): for a Tails older (16 to 18 years old) but still cheerful and with some remaining "best boy" vibes.

=> Mayumi Tanaka (Krillin on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese): a case similar to that of Yūki Ono, but for a Tails only a few years older (let's say, about 14 or 15 years old).

=> Megumi Ogata (Yami Yūgi on the 1998 anime of Yu-Gi-Oh! made by Toei -often called “Season Zero”- in Japanese): for when Tails, not only as a teenager but also as a kid, starts acting more sinister but still fights on the good guys’ side.

=> Matthew Erickson (Trunks on Dragon Ball GT in English, Blue Water dub).

=> Kenshō Ono (Giorno Giovanna on the anime of JoJo Part 5 in Japanese).

=> Sean Chiplock (Subaru Natsuki on Re:ZERO in English): for a more nervous, somewhat less stable, mid-teen Tails.

=> Patrick Seymour (Commander Torque on Freedom Planet ).

=> "Jinxd4Ev3r": there's a Sonic fan-game in development, Tails Adventure: Armada, of which a demo prototype was recently released for the SAGExpo 2020; Twitter user "Jinxd4Ev3r" is in charge of writing the script, but for that demo, he did the voice of Tails too, and it came out pretty well in my opinion (his voice lines are among the prototype’s files and he also played Tails on a pretty short video); I don't know if he plans to play Tails again, either in later demos or in the final release.

=> Matthew Mercer (Jotaro Kujo on the anime of JoJo Parts 3 to 5 in English): for when grown-up Tails goes edgy.

=> Shannon McCormick (Washington on Red vs. Blue): for a more stable, judicious and already grown-up adult Tails.

=> Lodovico Zago (Emo Gohan on Dragon Ball Gohanverse by “Daitomodachi”, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”): for an already grown-up adult Tails who, on the other hand, hasn’t healed from past trauma.

Sally Acorn:

=> Elsa Covián (Sally on the Latin-American Spanish dub of Sonic SatAM).

=> Dawn M. Bennett (Sash Lilac on Freedom Planet).

=> Kara Eberle (Weiss Schnee on RWBY): on the Rooster Teeth podcasts, I've heard her speak “normally” when she's being herself; if there was some way to mix that with her portrayal of Weiss, she'd be perfect for playing Sally.

=> Jen Brown (Carolina on Red vs. Blue).

=> Miyuki Sawashiro (Jolyne Cujoh on the game JoJo: Eyes of Heaven): for a more irreverent, less "princess" Sally.

=> Jennifer Bain (Android 18 on Dragon Ball GT in English, Blue Water dub).

=> Tamara Ryan (Android 18 on Dragon Ball Super in English, Bang Zoom! dub).

Nicole the Lynx:

=> Ruth Toscano (Nicole on the Latin-American Spanish dub of Sonic SatAM): recommended for when Nicole was just a handheld computer.

=> Victoria Vitti (Syntax & Pangu on Freedom Planet): just like with Ruth Toscano.

=> Taylor McNee (Penny Polendina on RWBY).

=> Yomary Cruz (Sheila on Red vs. Blue).

=> “Ashie-Kins”: this Twitter user made a good Nicole voice on some animations made by “Chauvels”.

Shard the Metal Sonic:

=> Andrew Boa, aka "TheMajinV": made a good Shard voice on some animations made by Chauvels.

Bunnie Rabbot:

=> Barbara Dunkelman (Yang Xiao-Long on RWBY).

=> Corinne Sudberg, aka "Megami33" (Bulma on Dragon Ball Z Abridged).

=> Wendee Lee (Bulma on Dragon Ball Super in English, Bang Zoom! dub).

=> Irma Carmona (Bunnie on the Latin-American Spanish dub of Sonic SatAM).

Antoine D’Coolette:

=> Geoff Ramsey (Grif on Red vs. Blue): for a less serious Antoine but without turning into comedy relief again.

=> Shigeru Nakahara (Android 17 on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese): for when Antoine is much more serious but sounds a bit distracted.

=> Hiro Shimono (Zenitsu Agatsuma on Kimetsu no Yaiba in Japanese): for when he’s more visibly nervous.

=> SungWon Cho, aka "ProZD" (Whis on some short videos of Dragon Ball Z Abridged): for an Antoine slightly more cheerful, still mannered and rather calm but without being a total coward or becoming comedy relief again.

=> Michael T. Coleman & Shinji Kawada (Tundra Man on Rockman 11/Mega Man 11 in English & Japanese respectively): for a rather flamboyant Antoine.

Rotor Walrus:

=> Gus Sorola (Simmons on Red vs. Blue).

=> Wataru Takagi (lots and lots of different, varied roles in Japanese).

=> Ben Creighton, aka "Hbi2k" (Nail on Dragon Ball Z Abridged).

=> "lizardman234": this DeviantArt user made a good Rotor voice on some animations made by Chauvels.

=> Joshua Tomar, aka "Tomamoto" (Beerus on Dragon Ball Z Abridged): for a more grumpy Rotor.

Charles Hedgehog, aka "Uncle Chuck":

=> Shōzō Iizuka (Doctor Light on Super Adventure Rockman & Rockman 8/Mega Man 8 in Japanese).

=> Unshō Ishizuka (old Joseph Joestar on the anime of JoJo Part 3 in Japanese).

Knuckles:

=> Nobutoshi Canna (Knuckles on the Adventure saga in Japanese).

=> Yasunori Matsumoto (Knuckles on the 1996 Sonic OVA in Japanese): for a more serious Sonic, someone who doesn’t try so hard to be a walking advertising slogan.

=> Scott Dreier (Knuckles on Sonic Adventure 2 in English): he's my favourite English official voice actor for Knuckles; Michael McGaharn from Adventure 1 is a close second, specifically for his Knuckles voice on the trial demo of Adventure 1 for 1999 E3; Canna is still so much better than both of them, though.

=> Takeshi Kuzao (Future Trunks on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

=> Ryō Horikawa (Vegeta on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

=> Nobuyuki Hiyama (Forte/Bass on Rockman 8/Mega Man 8 in Japanese): Bass really is Mega Man’s Vegeta, and Hiyama truly made him sound like that.

Shadow:

=> Kōji Yusa (Shadow on the entire Sonic series in Japanese).

=> Toshio Furukawa (Piccolo on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

=> David Humphrey (Shadow on Sonic Adventure 2 in English).

=> Katsuyuki Konishi (Captain Ginyu on Dragon Ball Z Kai & Super in Japanese).

=> Daniel Woren (Piccolo on the game Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout in English).

=> Sean Chiplock (Spade on Freedom Planet).

=> Riccardo Ricobello (Tien Shin Han on Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”): for when Shadow isn't grumpy.

=> Nick Landis, aka "Lanipator" (Vegeta on Dragon Ball Z Abridged): for a more emotional -I mean, more visibly angry- version of Shadow.

=> Hideyuki Tanaka (Jonathan Joestar on the Play Station 2 game of JoJo Part 1 in Japanese): for Shadow when he was living with Maria, before being put in stasis.

=> Ryōtarō Okiayu (Blues/Proto Man on Super Adventure Rockman & Rockman 8/Mega Man 8 and Zero on the Rockman X/Mega Man X games, both in Japanese): for a Shadow who’s already opening to his friends.

Amy Rose:

=> Samantha Ireland (Nora Valkyrie on RWBY).

=> Jeannie Tirado (Android 21 on Dragon Ball FighterZ in English): for an Amy Rose a little more different from the videogames’ version (after having overcome her crush on Sonic, for example).

=> Hiromi Tsuru & Aya Hisakawa (Bulma on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

Julie-Su:

=> Kei Shindō (Kyōka Jirō on Boku no Hero Academia in Japanese).

=> Colleen Clinkenbeard (Momo Yaoyorozu on Boku no Hero Academia in English).

=> Trina Nishimura (Kyōka Jirō on Boku no Hero Academia in English).

Vector:

=> The YouTuber “DevilArtemis” (Captain Ginyu on his videos).

=> Chris Hackney (Blast Man on Rockman 11/ Mega Man 11 in English).

=> Robert Bruce Elliot (Captain Ginyu on Dragon Ball Z Kai & Super in English, Funimation dub).

=> Curtis Arnott, aka “Takahata101” (Nappa on Dragon Ball Z Abridged).

=> Yukimasa Kishino (Burter on Dragon Ball Z in Japanese).

=> Hideyuki Hori (Captain Ginyu on Dragon Ball Z in Japanese).

Espio:

=> Sho Hayami & Hiroaki Miura (Zarbon on Dragon Ball Z & Z Kai respectively, both in Japanese): please don’t confuse Japanese Zarbon with Abridged Zarbon, they’re totally different (both are good, though).

=> Hikaru Midorikawa (Tien Shin Han on Dragon Ball Z Kai & Super in Japanese).

Charmy:

=> Daiki Yamashita (Izuku Midoriya on Boku no Hero Academia & Narancia Ghirga on the anime of JoJo Part 5, both in Japanese): imagine Yamashita’s Midoriya or Narancia with Abridged Vegeta’s personality, mannerisms, pride and anger management problems, and you’ll know how I’d prefer Charmy to sound.

=> Kazumi Tanaka & Daisuke Kishio (Jeice on Dragon Ball Z & Dragon Ball Z Kai respectively in Japanese): a case similar to Yamashita’s, but with an older Charmy.

=> Minami Takayama (Knuckle Joe on Kirby: Right Back at Ya! in Japanese).

=> Chika Sakamoto (Clown Man on Rockman 8/Mega Man 8 in Japanese): the videogames’ Charmy, but a bit less annoying.

Mighty the Armadillo:

=> Marc Soskin, aka "GanXingba" (Tien Shin Han on Dragon Ball Z Abridged ).

=> Chris Cason (Tien Shin Han on Dragon Ball Z -until the end of the Ginyu saga- in English, Funimation dub).

=> Hirokata Suzuoki (Tien Shin Han on every Dragon Ball series -minus Z Kai & Super- in Japanese).

=> The youtuber “Prince Vegeta” (Gohan Absalon on Dragon Ball Gohanverse de “Daitomodachi”).

=> Mattia Giardinello (Gohan Absalon on Dragon Ball Gohanverse de “Daitomodachi”, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”).

Ray the Flying Squirrel:

=> Cathy Weseluck (Chiaotzu on Dragon Ball Z in English, Ocean dub).

Fiona Fox:

=> Monica Rial (Bulma on Dragon Ball Z Kai & Super in English, Funimation dub): for a more cheerful Fiona (for example, before meeting Scourge).

=> Marina Inoue (Yoko Littner on Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann on Japanese): for the aforementioned “happy Fiona” but in Japanese.

=> Arryn Zech (Blake Belladonna on RWBY): for a more serious Fiona (for example, after having escaped out of Scourge's abuse).

=> Kathleen Zuelch (Tex on Red vs. Blue): for a rather serious Fiona, too.

=> The YouTuber "Bulma Bunny" (Caulifla & Kefla in the videos made by "DevilArtemis"): for when Fiona unleashes her sassy and brash side.

=> Yuka Komatsu (Caulifla on Dragon Ball Super in Japanese): for when Fiona unleashes her Japanese sassy and brash side.

=> Yukana Nogami (Kale on Dragon Ball Super in Japanese): if Fiona escapes from Scourge's abuse and also gains powers of her own, a good parallel could be drawn between her and Kale, this version of Fiona being someone with a good heart and concerned about her friends but also rather insecure, with trouble managing emotions and specifically with pent-up anger due to all the pain Robotnik and Scourge inflicted on her in the past.

Rouge:

=> Rumi Ochiai (Rouge on the entire Sonic series in Japanese).

=> Amber Lee Connors, aka "Shudo Ranmaru" (Android 18 on Dragon Ball Z Abridged).

=> Elizabeth Maxwell (Caulifla on Dragon Ball Super in English, Funimation dub): for a not-so-seductive, maybe a bit angrier Rouge.

Blaze:

=> Nao Takamori (Blaze on the entire Sonic series in Japanese).

=> Erica Schroeder, aka “Bella Hudson” (Blaze on the Sonic Rush saga in English).

=> Serena Bellussi (Android 18 on Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”).

Silver:

=> Scott Frerichs, aka "KaiserNeko" (Future Trunks on Dragon Ball Z Abridged).

=> Eric Vale (Future Trunks on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in English, Funimation dub).

=> Kazuyuki Okitsu (Jonathan Joestar on the anime of JoJo Part 1 in Japanese).

=> Giovanni Pizzigoni (Future Trunks on Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”).

=> Tasuku Hatanaka (Blast Man on Rockman 11/Mega Man 11 in Japanese).

=> Pete Capella (Silver on the Sonic videogames since Sonic 2006 until Sonic & the Black Knight -as Sir Galahad- included, all in English).

=> Daisuke Ono (Silver on the entire Sonic series in Japanese): Japanese Silver doesn’t sound at all like the English dubs’ Silver many of us are used to, but on second thought, Daisuke Ono would be the best fit to play someone from a post-apocalyptic future (Pete Capella’s Silver is still good, but as a different variant of the same character archetype).

Whisper the Wolf, aka "the Guardian Angel of the Resistance":

=> Arryn Zech (Blake Belladonna on RWBY).

=> Miki Itō (Android 18 on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

Tangle, la Lemur:

=> Amanda Lott (Carol Tea on Freedom Planet).

Amadeus Prower:

=> Yuichi Nakamura (Bruno Bucciarati on the anime of JoJo Part 5 in Japanese).

=> Hikaru Midorikawa (Tien Shin Han on Dragon Ball Z Kai & Super in Japanese).

=> Riccardo D’Aquino (Piccolo on Dragon Ball Gohanverse by “Daitomodachi”, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”).

Rosemary Prower:

=> Kate Higgins: for a Rosemary who, despite having one or two major flaws, is actually well-meaning, courageous and loves his son.

=> Masako Nozawa: for the Japanese version of the “good Rosemary” I described above.

=> Kathleen Zuelch (Glynda Goodwitch on RWBY): for a more serious, calm, level-headed and less openly affectionate version of the “good Rosemary”.

=> Kathleen Delaney (Rouge on Sonic X in English): for the "alpha b**** Rosemary" from the official Archie-Sonic comics; to be honest, Delaney would sound better if she played a villain (albeit a quite secondary one in this case) instead of Rouge.

Abraham Tower, Commander of GUN:

=> Banjō Ginga (the unnamed Commander of GUN on Shadow the Hedgehog and Major Zero on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, both in Japanese).

Geoffrey Saint-John (Chauvels's version of Geoff, somewhat flawed but overall more tolerable and genuinely good):

=> Takashi Nagasako (Tengu Man on Rockman 8/Mega Man 8 in Japanese).

=> Marc Soskin, aka "GanXingba" (Jeice on Dragon Ball Z Abridged): excellent for parodying his Australian accent.

=> Chuck Huber (Android 17 on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in English, Funimation dub).

=> Jason Douglas (Beerus on Dragon Ball Super in English, Funimation dub).

King Acorn (the SatAM version and Nigel Acorn from post-reboot Archie-Sonic):

=> Remix (Kami after being resurrected on Dragon Ball Z Abridged).

=> Nobuo Tobita (Doctor Light on Rockman 11/Mega Man 11 in Japanese).

King Acorn (Maximillian Acorn from pre-reboot Archie-Sonic):

=> Jason Douglas (Jacques Schnee on RWBY ).

=> Kōji Yada (Doctor Gero, aka “Android 20”, on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

=> Kent Williams (Doctor Gero, aka “Android 20”, on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in English, Funimation dub).

=> Gerardo Reyero (Frieza -except on his 3rd form- on the entire Dragon Ball franchise -minus Dragon Ball Z Kai- in Latin-American Spanish).

IXIS Naugus:

=> Nobuo Tanaka (Dio Brando on the 1993 OVA of JoJo Part 3 in Japanese): on the old JoJo OVA, he sounded too old for a character like Dio, but would be ideal to play an experienced sorcerer like Naugus.

=> James Marsters (Zamasu on Dragon Ball Super in English, Funimation dub): either for a younger Naugus or for the current old Naugus pretending to be younger and more polite.

=> Banjō Ginga (Nightmare on Kirby: Right Back at Ya! and on Super Kirby Clash/Super Kirby Hunters -as "Parallel Nightmare"- in Japanese): a similar case to Marsters's.

=> The same ones as for King Max.

Doctor Finitevus:

=> Norio Wakamoto (Perfect Cell on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

=> Ryūsei Nakao (Frieza on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

=> Curtis Arnott, aka "Takahata101" (Perfect Cell on Dragon Ball Z Abridged): for a more eloquent, elegant, charismatic Finitevus who doesn't make his genocidal intentions so obvious (until he finally loses his cool, obviously).

=> Masako Nozawa (Goku Black on Dragon Ball Super in Japanese): for a Finitevus similar to Arnott's Cell, but colder and calmer (until he finally also loses his cool, obviously).

=> Shin-Ichiro Miki (Zamasu on Dragon Ball Super in Japanese): also for a calmer and colder Finitevus, either when he pretends to be sane or before the accident that turned him into the villain he currently is.

=> José Gilberto Vilchis (Zamasu on Dragon Ball Super in Latin-American Spanish).

Anti-Sonic, aka “Scourge”:

=> Andrew Chaikin, aka "Kid Beyond" (Dio Brando on the 1993 OVA of JoJo Part 3 in English).

=> Brian Drummond (Vegeta on Dragon Ball Z in English, Ocean dub).

=> D. C. Douglas (Yoshikage Kira on the anime of JoJo Part 4 in English): for a calmer Scourge, more convincing as a villain.

=> Patrick Seitz (Endeavor on Boku no Hero Academia & Dio Brando on the anime of JoJo Parts 1 & 3, both in English): for a more monstrous, "unleashed" Scourge.

=> Nobuyuki Hiyama (Forte/Bass on Rockman 8/Mega Man 8 in Japanese).

=> Ethan Cole (Android 17 on Dragon Ball GT in English, Blue Water dub).

=> Isshin Chiba (Dio Brando on the arcade game JoJo: Heritage for the Future).

=> Shin-Ichiro Miki (Fused Zamasu on Dragon Ball Super in Japanese): for the theoretical D. C. Douglas's Scourge, but once he's become much more powerful (by going Super, for example) and indulges some kind of God Complex.

=> Takehito Koyasu (Dio Brando on the anime of JoJo Parts 1 & 3 in Japanese): actually, Scourge would have to be an even more compelling villain -let's say, a more "majestic" one, to be worthy of such a voice actor.

Miles Prower of Moebius, aka “Anti-Tails”:

=> Sean Chiplock (Prince Dail on Freedom Planet).

=> “KALSKingdom” (Gohan Black on Dragon Ball Gohanverse by “Daitomodachi”).

=> Giorgia Venditti (Gohan Black on Dragon Ball Gohanverse by “Daitomodachi”, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”).

=> Nobuhiko Okamoto (Katsuki Bakugō on Boku no Hero Academia & Ghiaccio on the anime of JoJo Part 5, both in Japanese): for a more irate, short-tempered Anti-Tails.

=> Johnny Yong Bosch (Jonathan Joestar on the anime of JoJo Part 1 in English): for his really few moments of selflessness.

Alicia Acorn of Moebius, aka “Anti-Sally”:

=> Ashlyn Selich (Neera-Li on Freedom Planet).

=> Meredith McCoy & Enuka Okuma (Android 18 on every Dragon Ball TV series -minus Z Kai- in English, Funimation and Ocean dubs respectively).

=> Miki Itō (Android 18 on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

Robotnik/Eggman:

=> Jim Cummings (Sonic SatAM).

=> Maynardo Zavala (Robotnik on the Latin-American Spanish dub of Sonic SatAM).

=> Deem Bristow (the Adventure saga in English): he sounds quite sinister in some scenes, which reminds me a lot of Jim Cummings' version.

=> Takeshi Aono (Doctor Wily on Super Adventure Rockman & Rockman 8/Mega Man 8 in Japanese): his version of Wily is pretty much Bristow’s Eggman in Japanese, and it sounds awesome, especially when he laughs.

=> Mike Pollock (Eggman on Emi Jones’s web-audio-series Sonic & Tails R): I used to dislike his work on the videogames, but Sonic & Tails R made me change my mind; Pollock managed to sound a lot like Bristow’s Eggman sometimes.

=> Chris Guerrero, aka "General-Ivan" (Doctor Gero, aka “Android 20”, on Dragon Ball Z Abridged).

=> Brian Dobson (Doctor Gero, aka “Android 20”, on Dragon Ball Z in English, Ocean dub).

=> Chikao Ōtsuka (Eggman on the Adventure saga in Japanese): only for the videogames' Eggman.

=> Hideyuki Umezu (Doctor Wily on Rockman 11/Mega Man 11 in Japanese): could have been perfect to replace Ōtsuka.

=> Makoto Terada, aka "Mugihito Amachi" or simply "Mugihito" (Sigma from Mega Man X7/Rockman X7 onwards, Wilhelm Voigt -aka "Doktor"- on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and President Max Profitt Haltmann on Kirby: Planet Robobot/Kirby of the Stars: Robobo Planet, all three of them in Japanese).

Snively:

=> Daman Mills & Chris Ayres (Frieza on Dragon Ball Super in English, Funimation dub).

=> Martin Piers Billany, aka “Little Kuriboh” (Frieza on Dragon Ball Z Abridged).

=> Keith Silverstein (Doctor Wily on Rockman 11/Mega Man 11 in English).

=> Marc Soskin, aka "GanXingba" (Android 17 on Dragon Ball Z Abridged): it might seem odd to pick A-17 as an example of what someone like Snively should sound like, given that he's almost totally bald and his voice in Sonic SatAM didn't make him look very young, while A-17 was most likely a teenager or in his early 20s when Doctor Gero turned him into a cyborg; however, canonically Snively is quite young, roughly the same age as A-17.

=> Riccardo Ricobello (Android 17 on Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”).

=> Ted Cole (Android 17 on Dragon Ball Z in English, Ocean dub).

Mammoth Mogul:

=> Norio Wakamoto (Perfect Cell on the entire Dragon Ball franchise in Japanese).

=> Toshiyuki Morikawa (Yoshikage Kira on the anime of JoJo Part 4 in Japanese).

=> Katsuyuki Konishi (Diavolo on the anime of JoJo Part 5 in Japanese).

=> Hikaru Midorikawa (Dio Brando on the Play Station 2 game and the 2007 lost movie of JoJo Part 1, both in Japanese).

=> Kōichi Yamadera (Beerus on Dragon Ball Super in Japanese).

=> James Marsters (Fused Zamasu on Dragon Ball Super in English, Funimation dub): if Mogul tries to achieve divinity, I think it’s very likely that sooner or later he'll use his powers to regain his lost youth à la King Piccolo or even create a totally different, brand new body to transfer his consciousness to it; in any of those cases, the English voice of Fused Zamasu may be the fittest.

=> José Gilberto Vilchis (Fused Zamasu on Dragon Ball Super in Latin-American Spanish): the same as Marsters’s Fused Zamasu.

=> Ivan Anoè (Perfect Cell on Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Italian dub by “ZeroMic”): a case similar to that of Marsters.

Regina Ferrum, the Iron Queen:

=> Kathleen Delaney (Rouge on Sonic X in English): as I already said, Delaney would sound better if she played a villain.

Eclipse the Darkling:

=> Banjō Ginga (Liquid Snake on Metal Gear Solid 1 in Japanese).


I guess that's it for now. Someday I'll put together a timeline of what happened before and during the stories I did publish, and after that, I'll start with the list of ideas for their remaster and the later stories.

Chapter 2: 起源 | Kigen | Origins

Summary:

Here I'm gonna list the events that would have happened in my stories before and during the war against the original Robotnik.

My personal notes are in italics and in brackets.

Notes:

Last edited on February 14, 2023.

Chapter Text

[My fanfics' universe was a sort of extension of Sonic SatAM, almost without any influence from the Archie-Sonic comics written by Michael Gallagher. Unlike what happened in the Archie-Sonic comic, almost all the events of the TV series also happened here, and the comics' elements were introduced to fill gaps and enrich the story, rather than to replace things that happened in the TV series. Unless otherwise stated, the characterizations of all the characters are also the same as those in SatAM, not based on Gallagher’s comics.]

Sonic was born in the year 3221. His mother Bernadette -aka “Bernie”- was a law student from a group of villages in Wakokiu, an island nation on an archipelago east of Yurashia, and had initially travelled to Mobotropolis as part of an exchange program; this caused Sonic to grow up in anamalgamation of the “Wa” and Mobotropolis cultures, developing a slight Wa accent, frequently inserting a word or two from the “Wa-Gyo” language into his phrases and also yelling insults from that language when losing his cool. His father Jules and Uncle Chuck were from Mobotropolis and his family had lived there for several generations, but they had ancestors from a nomadic people in northern Efrika called “Numids”; Jules had re-learned their language and invited Sonic to learn it as well. “Numidohito Harinezumi”, the original full name Jules and Bernie gave Sonic, is a tribute to both Wa and Numid cultures, with the first name referring to the latter, the full name written in Wa-Gyo, and the surname being the same as his mother's; their son would later take the nickname “Sonic” as his new name, but only because it “sounds cool”, not because he despises his family or wants to distance himself from them or is ashamed of his heritage. Another member of Sonic's family is a purple hedgehog woman named Aleena, a longtime friend of Bernie's who came from Wakokiu along with her and eventually entered into a polyamorous relationship with Bernie and Jules; Aleena raised Sonic along with Bernie, Jules and Chuck, but when Sonic was 4 years old, Aleena had to return to Wakokiu due to her work, and she could only stay in contact with the rest of the family by mail ever since.

[Wakokiu is a reference to Ancient Japan in the Yamato period, mainly in its initial portion, the Kofun period; the “Wa-Gyo” language is basically what would happen if people started speaking Ancient Japanese today, without any of the changes it underwent in the 15 centuries in between, and then this language was influenced by the contemporary world directly. The Numids, ancestors of Jules and Chuck, refer to the Berber people of the Numidians, who inhabited the coast of Algeria; the Numidians were called by the Romans "Maurii", the origin of the word "Moor", which in turn originated the name "Maurice", which Sonic had received from his parents at birth in pre-reboot Archie-Sonic. The Wa influence on Sonic's speech pattern, as well as his basic knowledge of the Numid language, is a sort of reversal of some fun facts about the Japanese version of the character: the Japanese Sonic is multilingual, which allows him to function with relative ease in other countries as he does in Sonic Unleashed, and when speaking Japanese, he often introduces English words or even Spanish words in his sentences.]

Sally had been born in late 3220; Bunnie and Rotor, a few months before her but in the same year, and Antoine, in 3218. Bunnie is from the Southern Baronies. Rotor is from the arctic region of Mobius but his parents had sent him to Mobotropolis so that he can follow his vocation as a mechanic. Antoine and his family are from the Gaul Countries in Mercia, but he moved to Mobotropolis at a very young age along with his father Armand.

[The references of Bunnie and the Southern Baronies to the USA’s Southern states, as well as those of Antoine and his native land to France, are already well known to everyone]

Everyone's childhoods were pretty much the same as what they had in the pre-reboot Archie-Sonic comics.

[Okay, on second thought, I'm going to make a clarification regarding Bunnie in particular. Her backstory in the comics won't apply here, and most likely, his uncle Beauregard and the Southern Baronies won't exist in the universe of this story either, at least not in the same form and with the same origins as in the comics. The Southern Baronies are not merely a stereotypical pastiche of the USA's southern states, but also a specific reference to the Confederacy from the Civil War; their origins are an exact copy of the Lost Cause Theory (a piece of denialist propaganda according to which the Confederates were simply rebelling against the "oppression" of the USA's national government and northern states, when in fact the Confederate government itself admitted -via the Cornerstone Speech- to be revolting specifically out of racism and to keep slavery going); Beauregard used to be one of the leaders of that country (he literally has the title of Baron) and still holds the grudge against the Kingdom of Acorn that causes at least a sizable portion of the conflict with his niece Bunnie in the story; to top it off, he's also one of only two lieutenants of Dr Eggman who are allies with the Freedom Fighters; putting it all together, this part of pre-reboot Archie-Sonic canon ends up sounding a lot like garbage written by a Confederacy apologist. Now, what am I going to do with Bunnie's origins in my stories? Honestly, I have no idea. The only thing I've come up with so far is to either never address it, or have Bunnie come from some region that is itself a cheap Wild West rip-off based upon some random "spaghetti western" movie.]

[By the way... Congratulations, Ian Flynn. Admittedly, a backward, reactionary previous writer had written one single scene with Bunnie yelling "the South will rise again" several dozen chapters earlier, and yes, seeing that s***-stain printed in the comic sucked. However, if that had simply been left behind without being mentioned ever again, and if Bunnie had kept being like Rogue from the X-Men comics and only retained the behaviour and mannerisms of a stereotypical Southerner, then that comic panel would have just remained as an anecdote from when the comics barely made any logical sense, and even in the worst-case scenario, that walking Southerner stereotype crying out that phrase would have looked suspicious and nothing more. But no, Flynn had to go and grab that one comic panel written and drawn a dozen years before, then create one entire new nation with its own history and so on, make that nation basically "furry Confederates", and then have a longtime heroic member of the cast (along with an ally of the good guys infiltrating Eggman's forces) be explicitly a blatant racist conspiracy theory spewed by a neo-confederate. What could we have even done without Ian Flynn's unparalleled genius?]

“Whisper” the Wolf, Tangle the Lemur, Leónidas Prócion (an OC of mine), Gwenaëlle Trahern-Le Besco -aka “Tekno the Canary”- (who has been assigned the female sex at birth and is actually non-binary here, but would only realize this much later, as a teenager) and Shorty the Squirrel (later known as “Shortfuse the Cybernik”) had been born a few years before. “Whisper” comes from northern Hindustania, in southern Yurashia, and was born into one of the many nomadic tribes of the “Lomar” people. Tangle is from Vazimba Island, southeast of Efrika, and she remained there, becoming a local hero and the main member of the Resistance against Robotnik on that island. Leonidas used to live in a suburb of Mobotropolis. Tekno and Shorty are from two different regions of Mercia: Tekno is from Cambria and their mother’s family was from Armorica, while Shorty is from a village on the outskirts of Snottingham, the kingdom’s capital.

[“Whisper” and Tangle are from the IDW-Sonic comic, and both Tekno and Shorty are from the British comic published by Fleetway. At first, I considered making the origins of “Whisper” a reference to the Indian subcontinent -encompassing both India and Pakistan- because the species of wolf that she most resembles is the Indian wolf; however, from that idea I came up with another one: to establish her origins as a reference to the Romani people (mistakenly called “gipsies”), coming from the north of that same region. The name of Tangle’s homeland, Vazimba, is that of Madagascar’s supposed first settlers, quite present in the popular beliefs, cultural history and identity of all the peoples who are currently inhabiting that island nation. Leónidas and his family would be "Spaniard-and-Greek-coded", let's say. Cambria, Tekno’s home region, bears the ancient name of Wales; Armorica, the homeland of Tekno’s mother’s family, has the name the Romans had given to Brittany. Snottingham, next to the village where Shorty comes from, is in a region of a culture similar to the early Anglo-Saxon one.]

Fiona Fox is born at the beginning of the year 3225 in New Persepolis, a district of Shamar. Her parents were Francesca Fuchs and Ali Farzan.

Francesca was a biologist and geneticist from Spagonia, her mother was a surgeon, and his father was a humble carpenter from Mercia; she was flirtatious and scandalous, but also very smart, astute, brave and with a strong sense of duty with her profession, and had graduated at the university with the highest grades. Ali was a rather young but important member of the clergy of New Persepolis; he advocated for gender equality and other modernizing reforms in the city's religion, which earned him the favour of the people but also the hatred of his peers and the contempt of his parents, who had also dedicated their lives to religion; in discussions with other high-ranking members of his city's clergy, he usually responded to their conservative opinions by reciting homoerotic scenes from the Arabian Nights, which implied he also had a hidden sassy side just like Francesca.

Tails is born at the beginning of the year 3227, just a couple of months before Robotnik's coup d’etat. He's assigned the female sex at birth and is called "Militia Prower".

[My recent decision to make Tails a trans boy was inspired by “DeltaStarfire”, who had already done almost the same (although she made Tails a trans girl instead) and had also made Tekno a non-binary character]

During Robotnik's coup d’etat, Leónidas's childhood boyfriend, Ajax, is killed during a bombardment by the SWAT-bots. This leaves a 12-year-old Leónidas mentally scarred for life.

[As for Leónidas Proción: here's an OC Interview Meme I did about him on DeviantArt: coyam99/journal/OC-Interview-Meme-Leonidas-Procion-800343699]

Fiona's parents are forced into exile from New Persepolis shortly after the Robotnik Regime's rise, when she's 2 years old [if Fiona had really been born almost at the same time as the vast majority of the Freedom Fighters, she'd have been around 6 years old back then, so she'd remember what happened].

[Problems with Fiona's age were already present in the comics, and ToaArcan already spoke extensively about it on his DeviantArt and Tumblr accounts; I just tried to find a way to make sense of it. To be honest, we'd have saved that problem if all Sonic continuities (video games, Archie comics, etcetera) had done what the British comic did: not revealing the characters' ages explicitly, defining them rather vaguely, and letting the readers draw their own conclusions; that wouldn't only have prevented many headaches but would also allow more stories to be told with the same characters; besides, it was proved that asking SEGA to define the cast's ages ain't a very wise decision: they'll tell you Rouge is 18, even though she'd be 25 for anyone who saw her and heard about her for the first time ever, or they'll tell you Tails is 8 when it makes more sense he's 11 or 12, and if it hadn't been for his voice's pitch, we'd most likely have thought he's 14 or 15.]

In the face of Robotnik's attacks, the survivors of the Lomar tribes scattered themselves even more than ever. “Whisper” is welcomed by a very diverse group of Mobians, who soon after would become the “Diamond Cutters”, a team of mercenaries usually helping the Resistance against Robotnik’s world dictatorship; that's when she starts calling herself “Whisper”, just as a codename at first.

In Knothole, Antoine tries to continue his military preparation so he can help in the war when the time comes. Meanwhile, Procion realizes the relatively obsolete training he had received as a cadet would probably not be useful, so he only stays in the village, is taken care of by Rosie for little more than a year, and then builds for himself a normal life within what the ongoing war allows.

Antoine tries to earn the other Knothole villagers’ respect and get closer to Sally; however, this makes him look and sound conceited, pretentious, someone with an inflated ego, while Sally herself sees this as an attempt to continue the ways of the Kingdom of Acorn and specifically of the nobility before the coup d’etat, ways she has little interest in keeping alive or unchanged. Sonic doesn’t yet have the emotional intelligence and compassion that would characterize him later, so he reacts to the coyote's actions and apparent massive ego by taunting [although, like Sonic in SatAM and unlike Gallagher's Sonic in the early Archie-Sonic, he doesn't poke fun at Antoine at every opportunity he gets, let alone unprovoked]. Antoine doesn’t read this as a sign that he should change his attitude, he tries instead to keep his head up and not to let Sonic’s “bullying” hurt him, and this stubbornness makes him react by being even more conceited and self-centred. Sonic responds with increasingly hurtful and even discriminatory taunts, not out of genuine contempt for anyone like Antoine but as a “last resort” to the deplorable behaviour of the former army cadet. Eventually, Sonic and Antoine fall into a vicious cycle that repeats itself for years, including the entire duration of the war against Robotnik; for some strange reason, this doesn't stop Antoine from entering the Freedom Fighters.

Tails expresses his true gender and starts introducing himself as "Miles" when he's about to turn five. His friends -and also all the villagers when they're told about this- not only respect this but also allocate all available resources and knowledge in order to make it possible for him to also carry out any necessary treatment and, later, the medical transition.

At about the same time, Tekno the Canary is forced by Robotnik to create the super-alloy Megatal, which he then uses to build the Cybernik armour (a variant of the traditional Badnik technology, but able to make the user/victim dependent on the armour to stay alive) and test it on Shorty. The experiment fails, Tekno and Shorty escape and become friends, and while the canary joins the Resistance, the rogue Badnik fights on his own against Robotnik under the pseudonym "Shortfuse", and the whole program of creation of Badniks is abandoned in favour of roboticization.

Fiona, orphaned, is captured by Robotnik in 3234, at 9 years old. A few months later, Sonic appears in a prison camp where Fiona was. Sonic manages to free many people but fails to rescue Fiona.

She leaves Robotnik's prison in 3235, when she's about 10 and a half years old. In the middle of that same year, the events of Sonic SatAM begin. Over time, Fiona learns about Sonic's and his friends' feats, forgives him (in her mind, as she hasn’t yet had the chance to actually meet him or his team personally) and sometimes even thinks of joining the Resistance, but she never forgets what happened in that prison camp...

After trying to survive for about two months, Fiona learns about a treasure in the Mystic Ruins. When taking that valued object, something triggers an enchantment. Fiona loses the treasure, tries to get outta the ruins and leave the treasure behind but activates some traps and is about to stay locked or even die; she's finally rescued by Nicolette "Nic" Weasel, and then Fiona finds out her body looks 4 years older, so they both think she has lost 4 years of memories and her true age in 3235 is 14 years.

After working together for almost 2 years, Fiona and Nic went their separate ways at the beginning of 3237.

[I recommend all of you to read the work of "ToaArcan" and the DeviantArt user "KivaTheDCWizard": they approach the relationship between Fiona and Nic very well, with the latter being a combination of an older sister and a surrogate mother, not unlike what Sally was to Tails]

Meanwhile in Knothole, the Freedom Fighters meet Amy Rose, who was sent from Mercia by Rob O'Hedge, leader of the Resistance and rightful heir to the throne in his country. She had been born in 3224.

[The war against the original Robotnik ends with the Doomsday Machine and Sonic and Sally using the Deep Power Stones to destroy it, just like it happened in the final chapter of Sonic SatAM, “Doomsday”; its "equivalent" in the comics, the Endgame saga, had some inconsistencies and was quite disappointing (just like everything else written by Ken Penders) due to -among other factors- the fact that Robotnik died only because Snively betrayed him and sabotaged his brand new super-weapon in the comic (the Ultimate Annihilator), not thanks to the Freedom Fighters' efforts. However, there are still some key events that happen in the weeks leading up to the end of the war.]

In the middle of the same year, not long before the events of “Doomsday”, Fiona is captured by Robotnik again and is used as the template to create the robot "Auto-Fiona", which in turn is made from recycled parts of a robot replica of Sally that had been used in the events of "Sonic and Sally", an episode of the first season of Sonic SatAM. Two weeks before "Doomsday", the events of Archie-Sonic's two-part story "Growing Pains" happen: Tails meets Auto-Fiona on an island and dates her, Robotnik tries to capture and roboticize or kill Tails by using Auto-Fiona but fails, etcetera.

Right after the Auto-Fiona incident, still before “Doomsday”, Tails has his first encounter with the BBA (Battle Bird Armada), as he discovers a base of them in the Coral Islands, northeast of Downunda. He has already had a few bad days: the war against Robotnik had escalated, he already had serious traumas caused by some previous experiences during the war, and after what had happened with Auto-Fiona, that child feels as if he had just killed someone he cared about. After seeing the BBA subjugating the islands' civilians and planning to help Robotnik, the 10-year-old fox loses his already fragile sanity. At the end of the day, almost all the soldiers are dead and their leader, who casually was also present there, also have suffered the same fate; besides, a mysterious sorcerer tries to absorb Tails's still latent Chaos power, but they fail and the fox briefly becomes a berserk killing machine, Super Tails “Kyōbō”. Only one member of the BBA manages to survive: Lily, a Mobian bluebird engineer, about 13 years old at the time, who had actually been recruited forcibly; when Tails finds her, his rational side is already slowly taking control over him again, and that allows him to think about Lily, have mercy on her, and run away; later, she'd take that “second chance” and join the Resistance.

[This would have been the base for the second arc of my old fanfic: here the BBA would have returned looking for revenge and that unknown sorcerer would have tried to take Tails's Chaos power again. As for Tails going crazy AND Super in a moment of extreme stress and killing everyone just like the British comic's Sonic used to do, I thought it'd be most suitable for a version of Tails with such emotional issues and bad experiences that eventually explode, and that particular element of the British comic is interesting to me; there's a story I recommend to read, a four-part adaptation of Tails's Sky Patrol written by KivaTheDCWizard, where he also did something similar. And about Tails killing the BBA's soldiers even before he became that berserk Super form: we have to remember Tails threw literal bombs and even napalm at them in Tails's Adventure too, while Sonic only destroyed robots and freed the animals inside them (or destroyed robots with no living being) in his games and TV series.]

[Oh, and the character of Lily Bluebird (whom I'll talk about in a later summary) belongs to "KivaTheDCWizard" too]

Tails finally makes it to Downunda, meets its local Resistance team and spends some time working with them to defeat the forces of Crocbot: a Mobian crocodile who had pledged allegiance to Robotnik and voluntarily undergone roboticization, retains his original personality and has a habit of using his resources and robots to feign attacks and incite infighting between the many Mobian races coexisting on the continent. During that time, Tails meets Maw, a Mobian thylacine desperate for the near extinction of his race, who admires Robotnik’s Empire’s technological development and is trying to work for him; Maw is eventually convinced by the two-tailed fox to betray Robotnik and help defeat Crocbot, regardless of whether he later remains a member of the Resistance. Tails also has a couple of bitter arguments with Guru Emu for his "pacifist" ideas in the middle of the guerrilla war against Robotnik; he befriends Duck "Bill" Platypus, and develops an even stronger friendship with Wombat Stu, who once saves him from the attack of some "Wing Dingo" robots. Once Crocbot is defeated, Stu confesses to having fallen in love with Tails; the fox admits he’s not attracted or feels anything romantic for the wombat, but also apologizes profusely for it, also taking Stu by surprise; luckily, the friendship between them remains intact.

Meanwhile, as the war escalates, the Diamond Cutters are ambushed and almost entirely eliminated by Robotnik's forces. One of their members, Mimic the Octopus, had betrayed them and was collaborating with a regional sub-boss of the Empire for two months. Besides Mimic himself, the only survivor is “Whisper”.

At Knothole, as the Freedom Fighters prepare the mission to destroy the super-weapon Doomsday and defeat Robotnik once and for all, they first meet many other Resistance groups, such as the Rebel Underground, led by Geoffrey St. John.

[By the way, there's no f***ing pairing of Geoffrey with Sally here. Geoff disagreed with Sonic only because the skunk's team and the Freedom Fighters had different methods; namely, the blue hedgehog and his teammates were successful without having received formal military training or ruling themselves by the kind of discipline present in the military; besides, this version of Geoff is based upon how Karl Bollers wrote him and how the cartoonist Chauvel kinda re-imagined him. As for Amy Rose, there's no adaptation of Sonic CD here... yet.]


To be continued...

Chapter 3: 編纂:真新しい世界。 | Hen-San: Ma-Atarashī Sekai. | Group of Sagas: Brand New World.

Summary:

Here are the events immediately after the end of the war against the original Robotnik. The general tone of this part is much less dark and more optimistic than in "Sonic SatAM", showing this is a bright new world after the end of a worldwide guerrilla war. On the other hand, it never gets too whimsical, and with the exception of the downright comedic moments, the seriousness level (the edginess, if you will) remains equal to or higher than that of the Red Ribbon Army saga (during the second half of the original "Dragon Ball", before the Great Demon King Piccolo's appearance; the RRA saga's tone is already relatively lighthearted, we must admit).

Notes:

Opening theme for this group of sagas:
“Makafushigi Adventure”, the opening theme of the original "Dragon Ball" TV series.
(It could be the original Japanese version, the French translation made by “AMVF Studio”, the English cover made for the Funimation dub, or the English cover made for the Phillippines’ dub)

Ending theme for this group of sagas:
“Kawaita Sakebi”, the opening theme of the often called "season zero" of "Yu-Gi-Oh!", the 1998 TV series made by Toei.

Last edited on February 14, 2023.

Chapter Text

Right after "Doomsday", all Robians are mentally freed, although there’s no way to restore them to their organic form at the moment. In a bittersweet moment, Sonic and his uncle Chuck are reunited with the rest of their family: Sonic's parents, Jules and Bernadette, and the family’s pet, the non-Mobian dog Muttski; Aleena is nowhere to be found, not even appearing on Robotnik's records of Robians under his control. The Freedom Fighters also keep travelling throughout the rest of Mobius, initiating diplomatic relationships with more nations, dealing with lesser villains, and sometimes assisting with rebuilding efforts.

The super-weapon Doomsday was apparently not only far more powerful than any other invention of Robotnik, but it was also more powerful than the Freedom Fighters had calculated: its destruction caused the very inter-dimensional barriers to weaken. A couple of weeks after Robotnik's fall, Sonic and his friends are forced to face the invasion of the Suppression Squad, his doppelgängers from the planet Moebius. The Freedom Fighters win this time, after easily finding out the key to defeating their Moebian versions is by making each one fight with the evil counterpart of another.

A few days later, the Freedom Fighters also take a chance to rescue King Maximillian Acorn from the Zone of Silence, with no side effects this time.

Just another couple of days after that, as the Freedom Fighters freed people from Robotnik’s prison camps and eliminated remnants of their forces, they find Fiona Fox, who soon after joins the team as a field medic.

Hope Kintobor is a 14-year-old Overlander girl, a mechanic prodigy and pilot-in-training; she’s also Snively's half-sister and Robotnik's distant relative. After the fall of the Overlander nation at the hands of the dictator, Hope had migrated throughout Mobius; she eventually settles in Knothole after the regime’s fall and does her best to help the Freedom Fighters and restore the Kintobor name in the process.

At around the same time, as soon as it seems the Robotnik Regime's remnants are under control, Antoine leaves Knothole, just leaving Bunnie a brief letter where he says goodbye without saying where he's going or what he plans to do, thanks her for her support and for being such a good friend, and apologizes for “not having lived up” with her and the rest of the team.


編:七つの混沌緑柱玉の探求。

Hen: Nanatsu no Konton Ryokuchūgyoku no Tankyū.

Saga: the Quest for the Seven Chaos Emeralds.

At least a month after Robotnik’s fall, the Freedom Fighters learn that Snively is preparing some kind of super-weapon on some unexplored islands south-southeast of the former Kingdom of Acorn; Sonic goes there, initially alone, beginning the adaptation of the classic 8-bit and 16-bit games and the fan-games created by LakeFeperd, in the following order: 16-bit Sonic 1, 8-bit Sonic 1, Sonic Chaos aka Sonic & Tails 1 (an 8-bit game), 8-bit Sonic 2, Sonic Before the Sequel (by LakeFeperd), 16-bit Sonic 2, Sonic After the Sequel (by LakeFeperd), and lastly, Sonic 3 & Knuckles.

[Snively gets a redesign from here: he's a bit more athletic taller, and has hair again, which in his case is light brown and styled like Dr Starline's hair (based upon a drawing by JoeAdok aka Adokle)]

Upon arriving on the islands -called "Berilian Islands" by their inhabitants-, Sonic discovers an absurd and astonishing variety of climates and landscapes, as well as a technologically quite advanced society made up of Mobians and other sentient beings suspiciously very similar to the Overlanders but without such markedly violent tendencies; he also finds that Snively has reactivated the old Badniks Development Program and is using it to try to take over the islands, so the blue hedgehog decides to take the mantle of the region’s new local hero. Throughout his adventures, he finds six Chaos Emeralds that Snively is also looking for, probably to use as a power source; every time he picks one up, he’s taken to a pocket universe called "Special Zone", where he apparently has to overcome different tests and challenges in order to return to his homeworld and keep the Chaos Emerald he has just taken; also, when Sonic carries Chaos Emeralds with him, he feels some kind of mysterious energy emanating from them.

In the adaptations of the two versions of Sonic 1, both set in the South Island of the archipelago, the hedgehog simply collects the six Chaos Emeralds before Snively does, then proceeds to destroy the Overlander’s operations base, and for some reason, the gemstones drift away from him and spread throughout the South Island once Snively has been defeated. Each time, he has no problem with this... until Robotnik's nephew attacks the islands again and the blue hedgehog has to gather the gemstones again.

In the Sonic Chaos adaptation, also set on the South Island, Tails arrives aboard his mini-submarine Sea Fox to help Sonic, if only to explore the rest of the island.

[Once “A+Start” -aka “Son of a Glitch”- and his team release the full final version of the “Sonic Mania style” remake of Sonic Chaos, that's what I'd rather use for this adaptation]

At the end of that adaptation, Tails goes back to the continent in the Sea Fox...

[Soundtrack: Serris / Yakuza Boss ThemeMetroid Fusion OST, orchestral arrangement by “The Noble Demon”]

But a nuclear submarine manned by Snively's forces approaches him in the middle of the trip and begins to pursue him; Tails manages to resist and deal some heavy damage to Snively's sub. When the Sea Fox's ammo runs out and the drill on its prow is too damaged and stops working, the fox decides to let himself be captured and activate the self-destruction of his mini-submarine, letting its remains sink into the sea and take with them its true source of energy: a seventh Chaos Emerald.

A couple of days later, both Sonic on the islands and the Freedom Fighters on the mainland are officially very worried; they soon learn Tails has been captured and is held prisoner at Snively's new base on Westside Island, and Sonic decides to gather the Chaos Emeralds for the fourth time, initiating the events of the 8-bit Sonic 2 adaptation. It seems the hedgehog is merely trying to collect the gemstones before Snively and then destroy his base of operations and rescue Tails, but the plan turns out to be more complicated than that: Sonic trusts to be fast enough, but he also trusts Tails's slyness; the hedgehog creates a distraction of sorts, letting Snively try (and fail) to go after him and find the Chaos Emeralds or simply eliminate the hedgehog and take from his corpse whatever Emeralds he’s carrying; meanwhile...

[Soundtrack: Crisis Mission – Metroid Fusion OST, orchestral arrangement by “The Noble Demon”]

[Soundtrack: Facing A Huge ReactionMetroid Fusion OST, orchestral arrangement by “The Noble Demon” & Julia Booth]

Robotnik's nephew's base is weakened, allowing Tails to eventually escape on his own and rendezvous with Sonic.

Once Tails is safe and Snively's new base is neutralized, the six Emeralds in Sonic's hands signal him, through some kind of vision or suggestion, to go to the region of Hilltop Heights on the Eastside Island; upon arriving there, he founds out the real super-weapon Snively was building: the aerospace battle station Death Egg, which is mounted on a rocket and whose construction has already progressed considerably. As Sonic tries to stop the launching of the Death Egg, Tails is pulling the Sea Fox's wreckage out of the seabed with a little help from the islanders, after Sonic publicly gave the fox some credit for saving them from Snively; Tails also receives the plane Tornado, piloted by Rotor, after the fox commissioned his friends in Knothole to send it to him so he can update it with the technology provided by the islanders; once his submarine’s remains have been recovered, Tails secretly removes his Chaos Emerald from among them, realizes it seems to be attracted to the six gemstones in Sonic's hands, uses its energy to slightly increase his own physical attributes just as he had done in Tails Adventure, and heads to Sonic's approximate location at that time: Star Shores. This kicks off the events of Sonic Before the Sequel. In the final battle, Tails provides Sonic with the seventh Chaos Emerald, allowing the hedgehog to turn into Super Sonic for the first time, attack the Death Egg and render it useless and severely damaged.

Sonic and Tails reach the Westside Island in the Tornado, the seven Chaos Emeralds once again scatter across the island, and the duo set out in search once more; now the duo know better the gemstones’ immense power, and aside from preventing Snively from getting his hands on them, they also have to prevent him from finishing repairing and rearming the Death Egg in space. This leads to the events of the 16-bit Sonic 2 adaptation.

This adaptation is followed by the events of Sonic After the Sequel, set in the North Island, where Tails presents an invention he had developed based upon an idea proposed by Fiona about a weapon based on static electricity: a jester hat that gives its wearer great powers, either to manipulate and concentrate static electricity or to briefly crystallize the air around oneself (the hats that gave Sonic & Tails powers based on Kirby's in the game made by LakeFeperd). They also come across Elemental Shield technology, which they had already seen a bit of when Sonic used a Bubble Shield in the underwater urban district of Fortress Flow on the Eastside Island (Sonic Before the Sequel).

After the Death Egg crashes on Angel Island, the adaptation of Sonic 3 & Knuckles unfolds almost exactly the same as in the original, but with three noteworthy differences: Sonic hasn’t developed the Insta-Shield yet, Tails can access his Super form with the ordinary Chaos Emeralds and his Hyper form is the one that allows him to summon the Flicky Army of Death, and Knuckles in his Hyper form turns bright green.

[Soundtrack: Metal Gear Solid 1 main theme (version for the 1997 E3)]

Sonic and Tails explore Angel Island, usually going their separate ways and meeting again when fighting the war machines sent by Snively. The Freedom Fighters act as Mission Control, staying in contact with them, watching everything they do and helping them when needed: Rotor is granted access to the satellites of the inhabitants of the Berilian Islands, and coordinates them with each other and with his own scouting drones to scan the island's regions from the outside and give Sonic and Tails a rough idea of what they're up against; Sally and Nicole routinely chat with Sonic and Tails about possible strategies for entering each region; Fiona uses her personal experience as a treasure hunter to watch and try to interpret the inscriptions in some areas (mostly the ancient echidna constructs in Hydro-City, Marble Garden, Sandopolis and the Hidden Palace), in order to deduce if there may be either hidden deadly traps or mechanisms that Sonic and Tails can exploit to keep going.

Meanwhile, Snively gets Knuckles to let him investigate the ruins of the ancient echidna civilization. Robotnik's nephew makes some discoveries, the most important being a stone golem guarding the Lost Pyramid [this is Sandopolis's mini-boss, the Guardian, and the pyramid from which it comes out and where Sandopolis Act 2 takes place is known as "the Lost Pyramid" in the British Sonic comic] and a series of "Guardian Robots" [another element from the British comic], both with armour that might endure attacks from someone on a Super form; he experiments on many of his vehicles and war machines, trying to copy and apply to them that revolutionary "anti-Super armour", forcing Sonic and Tails to find and directly attack weak points and/or cleverly identify and exploit design flaws in order to destroy them even though they've already gathered all seven Chaos Emeralds and attained their Super forms; this can be seen in the Bowling Spin [Carnival Night's mini-boss], the Gapsule [Flying Battery's mini-boss], the Laser Prison [1st stage of Flying Battery's boss], the Big Arms [Sonic 3's final boss, a sort of "3rd stage" of Launch Base's major boss, if standalone Sonic 3 is played], the Egg-Golem [Sandopolis's major boss], the Heat Arms's giant hand [Lava Reef's mini-boss], and the Egg-Inferno —including its supply of spike-clad bombs— [Lava Reef's major boss]. To ensure the success of his plan to manipulate Knuckles into continuing to help him, Snively also shares with him all his discoveries about the echidna's own home, not holding back a single detail, as a sign of goodwill.

Angel Island is not completely deserted: there are descendants of very diverse groups of Mobians and humans who discovered and settled on the island, with Carnival Night being the main settlement. Knuckles, in his role as Guardian, used to just live on his own, make no contact with them, and ignore them as long as they didn't get too close to the Master Emerald.

Tails and Knuckles meet in the Hidden Palace, and the former tries to explain to him what's happening, his and Sonic's true intentions, and what kind of person Snively actually is. At first, Tails seems to be successful in calming things down, but one tiny knee-jerk reaction of his ruins everything: the fox is still on the defensive in case Knuckles doesn't believe him and attacks him, this eventually causes small green sparks induced by his Chaos powers to briefly run through his tails' surface, and Knuckles sees that and reads it as a sign that Tails is lying and planning to attack him from behind when he lets his guard down, so the Guardian lashes out.

[Soundtrack: Boss Theme – Mega Man 2 OST, cover made by Maxim Zhuravlev]

Tails manages to react in time, deflecting Knux's punch with a tail swipe. Then the fox begins to fight mercilessly, trying to slice the echidna with his tails immediately after deflecting that blow; Tails also keeps his distance, making fleeting attacks and moving away again. At one point, Knuckles manages to catch Tails from behind, but he uses his tails to finally slice through the echidna's defenceless belly with little effort. Knux heals his wound with his own body's Chaos energy, and now Tails has only pissed him off even more, but that doesn't seem to matter to the fox; when the Guardian lunges at Tails again, the latter dodges the blow, wraps his tail around the echidna's outstretched arm, and begins to squeeze it and try to twist it; Knuckles tries to get rid of the fox, but he doesn't give up.

*CRUNCH*

Tails shatters the bones inside Knux's arm. After one loud crack, thin strands of echidna blood slowly trickle out from between the foxtails firmly gripping the Guardian's arm. Knuckles reacts by punching Tails in the temple with all his strength with his good arm before Tails can get away again; the fox flies into a corner and lies on the ground, knocked out, with blood dripping from his head; Knux heads towards him, but Sonic grabs the echidna from behind by surprise, knocks him to the ground, then just looks down on him... and goes Super: now Sonic is genuinely angry and determined to sweep the floor with the Guardian.

Super Sonic does just that, overwhelming Knuckles and not letting him even react. But then Knux senses the energy of the Master Emerald and figures out how to use it to go Super too. The fight becomes more even until Tails —already healed though still with his own blood staining a whole half of his head— goes Super as well, ascends to their side, calmly declares "this is getting annoying enough", points one finger at Knux...

Tails: [echoing] "Bang."

And from the tip of his finger, Tails generates and fires a bullet of pure radiation at the Guardian; the fox fires several times again, but this time Knux deflects all the shots by simply hitting the energy bullets with the back of his bare fists, then the echidna tries to get to Tails but Sonic attacks him again to get him away from his little brother. Now Knuckles mostly runs away, dodging Super Sonic's strikes and the energy shots from a Super Tails who seems to be enjoying this a bit too much. As a last resort, Knuckles calls Snively and asks him to deploy the Hidden Palace's Guardian Robots, which turn out to be durable enough to be able to swarm and hold off a Mobian in their Super form; then Tails does a long and tortuous Hyper transformation, and when the transformation completes, Hyper Tails is visibly struggling to maintain the form but manages to yell a Kiai, send all of his flickies in one go and take out the Guardian Robots. With the droids destroyed, Tails immediately sends those same flickies to attack Knuckles from the sides as Tails himself attacks from behind by doing a mid-air spindash towards the echidna, and Sonic —who begins to transform into his own Hyper form as well— also does an aerial spindash from the front towards Knux so that he and Tails defeat the Guardian together. Knuckles can no longer take this and decides to do a kamikaze by releasing from his own body an explosive wave made up of almost all the Chaos energy stored within him.

Knuckles returns to his base form and is still more or less conscious and able to move, though he can't fight again yet; Tails loses his Hyper form but then falls back to his base form and also gets knocked out; Sonic exits his Hyper form, then reverts back to his base form as well but by his own choice, and is still able to fight. Snively takes the opportunity to steal the Master Emerald; Knuckles tries to stop him by holding on to the gemstone, but Robotnik's nephew electrocutes him and easily gets rid of him, then taunts Knux by complaining that he "expected more from the one in charge of protecting such a powerful artefact"; Sonic tries to stop Snively but the hedgehog's normal attacks can't even scratch the "ASA" (Anti-Super Alloy) coating the Overlander's vehicle, which is shown to have similar properties to the armour of both the Guardian Robots and the stone golem in Sandopolis.

Sonic wakes Tails up, they both tend to Knuckles' wounds, and the Guardian decides to finally listen to their side of the story and then help them retrieve the Master Emerald, giving them access to the Sky Sanctuary.

[Soundtrack: Milky Way Wishes: ShootingKirby Super Star & Kirby Super Star Ultra OSTs, mash-up of multiple versions by "Fuhi"]

The Death Egg has got its own combat drone squadron, the Lamna-class Stealthbots ["Lamna" comes from "Lamniformes" the order the great white shark belongs to], either to defend itself against external attacks or to defend the core against attempts to sabotage it from within [they look like something in between the Stealthbots from Sonic SatAM and the Fighter Aircraft A from Sonic Adventure 1 (the aerial combat drones deployed by Eggman to defend the Egg-Carrier in "Sky Chase"), and the name "Lamna" is another reference to the "shark" design of the latter]. When Sonic and Tails are already inside the Death Egg, while one of them makes his way through the decks, the other gets on one of the "Lamnas", takes control of it by hacking into it with a program created by Tails beforehand, and attacks the core of the Death Egg, powered by the Master Emerald. When the core is severely destabilized by this direct attack, Snively ejects the Master Emerald from there and stores it inside the giant EggRobo, using this mech later to fight Sonic and Tails themselves. [If this were a Sonic 3 & Knuckles remake videogame, the player would choose which of the two to assign the two acts of the traditional Death Egg level and which of the two to assign the shoot-'em-up level, and the order would be: Death Egg act 1 with one character, the shoot-'em-up with the other, then Death Egg act 2 with the first one, and lastly the fight against the giant EggRobo with Sonic and Tails together.]

Snively is shown to have used the ASA again on the pillar housing the Red Eye [Death Egg's mini-boss], the Death Ball —whose mobile mines have a less resistant version of the ASA— [Death Egg's major boss], the giant EggRobo —minus its fingers— [Sonic 3 & Knuckles's final boss (but not its true final boss), a sort of "2nd stage" of Death Egg's major boss], and the 1st stage of the Final Weapon —both the blue casing itself and the cannons and missile launchers mounted on it and all their ammo— [the true final boss, in the level "Doomsday"]. When Sonic and Tails are chasing Snively and his Final Weapon through Mobius's upper atmosphere, they coordinate their attacks, with Sonic doing the actual chase and attempting to make the Final Weapon's weapons damage the vessel itself while Tails gets ahead, flies away and attacks from a distance. They eventually get the Final Weapon to lose its casing, but this reveals the Death Egg Robot inside it has its own version of the ASA enhanced by Snively himself rather than just an imitation of the Guardian Robots' armour; fortunately, both Mobians have already mastered their Hyper forms and their attacks can pierce the ASA armour, so they continue the chase until they finally destroy the machine, retrieve the Master Emerald, and bring it back to its Guardian.

Knuckles' story in Sonic 3 & Knuckles —set after Sonic & Tails destroyed the Death Egg and brought the Master Emerald back— is not adapted here... yet.

[I briefly considered including the 8-bit game Sonic: Triple Trouble -aka Sonic & Tails 2- but found its plot to be even less defined than its predecessor Sonic Chaos. Then I thought of including, after the story of Sonic and Tails in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the 16-bit remake of Sonic: Triple Trouble developed by Noah N. Copeland, but now I'm not sure how to fit its story into this adaptation, plus I've only played the game's demos, not the completed final version.]


幾つかの副筋書き。

Ikutsuka no fuku-sujigaki.

A few sub-plots.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey and Hershey start spending time together. They're just friends for the moment: she just got out of an abusive relationship with the traitor Drago Wolf, and even though it hadn't lasted long enough and the scars left by that relationship were thankfully not as severe as they could have been, she’s still not ready to start another romance so soon; on the other hand, his friend (who's not a perverted asshole here, unlike how Penders tried to write him) is actually not even very interested in being her boyfriend. It's not until some months later that both begin to feel something for each other, after having known each other better. Geoff also begins to question the idea of honouring and following in the footsteps of his father, the late Commander Ian Saint-John, someone who may have been kind to his son but was also fiercely and openly racist against the Overlanders and also quite sexist.

When Fiona joined the team, her resemblance to Auto-Fiona had rekindled traumatic memories of fairly recent events in Tails's life, so he initially decided to keep his distance and spend more time working on his projects with Hope. However...

[Soundtrack: The water returns (M116)Dragon Ball original series’ OST]

Fiona shows quite an interest in science -electricity in particular- outside her work as the team’s new field medic, proves she’s quite smart, astute and a bit of a fast learner, and approaches Tails of her own free will. Sometimes Hope invites her to the workshop too. The two-tailed fox begins to feel more comfortable around Fiona, especially as he realizes she has very little in common with that robot: in addition to having one or two interests in common with him, she’s sassy and sharp-tongued, frequently uses rather subtle humour, and has no qualms about criticizing Sonic and Sally, something that makes her a kind of new role model for Tails, who’s also trying to be a little more independent from his “surrogate family”. The two become friends, working together on a project or two, including the jester hats with powers to manipulate electricity and light, used in the adaptation of Sonic After the Sequel.

[This version of Fiona is loosely based upon both Caulifla and Kale from the Dragon Ball Super anime, and her friendship with Tails is inspired by the relationship between Nadia and Jean in Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.]

Fiona also befriends Bunnie. The cyborg Freedom Fighter is much more open than the others to the idea of having more people on the team, and both she and Fiona find they’ve had similar experiences.

 


Someone else joins the team too: Leónidas Proción.

The raccoon had spent much of the war living relatively isolated in a hut near Knothole, visiting the village from time to time to do some small jobs and gather supplies; he was aware of what the Freedom Fighters were doing, but he only knew Sonic and Sally were part of them and he had heard a few things about Tails and the possibility of him also joining the team someday. In a demonstration of the abilities Leónidas thinks he can contribute, he does quite well in mêlée combat, although it’s nothing extraordinary; he shows a pretty simple, a bit rudimentary fighting style based on using his whole body as a sort of ram, onrushing and tackling with all his weight, and he’s quite fast, which leaves some surprised due to the kind of body he has -robust, wide, rather square-shaped-; he also uses his 大小 ["daishō"] (set of a 刀 ["katana"] and a 脇差 ["wakizashi"] short sword), made by him, to demonstrate quick attack techniques for emergencies, mainly the 抜刀術 [“battō-jutsu”] techniques of attacking while unsheathing (of course, the weapons he uses in that demonstration are 竹刀 [“shinai”], non-lethal substitutes made of bamboo). On the other hand, when they make Leonidas go through a simulation against SWAT-bots, stealth seems to be his weakness; when he attempts to directly engage the reprogrammed SWAT-bots, he’s able to dodge the fake laser shots, although it’s the first time he's forced to actually predict the shots’ direction instead of just using his reflexes after each shot was fired, and then he attacks with his daishō at the joints and other areas where he assumes SWAT-bots may be more vulnerable, but then he outright fails at the simulation when being overwhelmed by one or two squads of SWAT-bots.

Sally and Sonic aren’t convinced to admit Leónidas to the team. It’s true he's got gifts: he can fend for himself most of the time, as proved by living on Knothole’s outskirts of his own accord for a few years now; he’s inventive and capable of adaptation, having developed his own fighting style from the resources and knowledge available to him; he’s dedicated, fiercely and passionately loyal, visibly eager to help but not naive at all, and realizes how horrible war can be; he doesn’t seem to be seeking fame and glory, and the fact that he has chosen to live fairly isolated and keeping a low profile seems to suggest otherwise; on the other hand, he seems to get along with the rest of the team, being quite funny but without being unbearable nor getting trampled on either. However, Sonic sees no use in his abilities should they enter actual combat -something that seems to have been proven by their failure in the simulations of infiltration in Robotropolis and combat against SWAT-bots-, and Sally feels forced to agree with him in that regard, since the only ones with truly useful combat skills had always been Sonic and Bunnie, a super-powerful Mobian and a cyborg respectively, while the others were useful in other ways but always had to either be stealthy or be kept protected by Sonic and/or Bunnie; also, much of what Proción learned to do seems to be specifically to assassinate ordinary Mobians and this doesn’t suit her or Sonic very well, since the Freedom Fighters have fought for ten years a war where Robotnik has claimed many lives but the only ones they ever had to kill were the robots Robotnik manufactured and deployed and the Resistance had always had the sole goal of overthrowing the dictator and freeing the roboticized Mobians.

Two days after Leónidas's demonstration, he learns from Bunnie, Tails, and Rotor that the Knothole Freedom Fighters and some other Resistance teams across Mobius had made impressive technological advancements that could help make the raccoon's abilities useful in battles against robots; for example, there’s the alloy “Megatal”, capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures while also remaining solid and preserving all its properties, and Tails could try to make a more advanced version of Leónidas’s daishō, where the blade of both sabres is replaced by a Megatal filament traversed by an intense electrical current that heats it to white-hot and allows to cleanly cut robots in half almost like butter. Later, Proción is informed that Sally has rejected his request to join the Freedom Fighters, the raccoon begins to have doubts about the way he was evaluated, and heads to speak with the team's tactical leader.

Sally and Sonic explain to Leónidas their reasons for not admitting him to the team. Proción responds by insisting the team will need people like him to fight other different kinds of villains, and even if someone like Robotnik appears again, it’s also known there are Mobians who were mentally free or even organic but had pledged allegiance to the dictator anyway; the raccoon also claims the team should give its non-super-powerful members technology to combine with their already present abilities and actually help. Sonic is especially against the latter, he and Proción start arguing, the hedgehog accuses the raccoon of trying to get some sort of “special treatment”, Leónidas accuses the hedgehog of being conceited, and Antoine is eventually mentioned. Proción finds out Antoine had joined the Freedom Fighters, he asks Sonic and Sally about him, and what they tell him about the coyote is very different from the "Tony" that Proción remembers, a usually nervous but more idealistic cadet determined to become a brave and honourable warrior over time; when it’s also mentioned that Antoine had recently left the team, Sonic and Sally insist they have no idea what the former cadet's motives might be, but Proción deduces Antoine’s departure was their fault. As the discussion drags on, Proción begins to lose his composure and become much more emotional, getting closer and closer to breaking down. Leónidas accuses Sonic of being a brat and not taking the team's cause seriously; Sonic, remembering with pain and sorrow the day he lost Kat (Sonic SatAM, 1st season, episode “Sonic Boom”), angrily accuses Leonidas of never having gone out to fight, cowardly staying isolated and safe in his own bubble; Proción argues he didn’t come to their aid because he knew his abilities would be of no use against Robotnik, Sonic dismisses this and takes it as a mere excuse, and Proción replies by calling Sonic a "hypocrite" and mentioning that, when Antoine did offer to help despite his apparent uselessness, Sonic responded by bullying the coyote. The discussion escalates more and more, becoming more and more heated...

Until Proción finally breaks down in tears silently, later revealing he wants to redeem himself for his inaction on the day of Robotnik’s coup d’etat, when the dictator's forces had killed his family and boyfriend and made his mentor disappear. The raccoon ultimately begs to be allowed to participate, to be given technology to modernize his weapons, in exchange for him being absolutely obedient to them. Sally doesn't really know how to react to this. Sonic doesn’t dare to say anything either, seeing that prolonging the discussion and continuing to verbally attack each other wasn’t helpful anymore. Leónidas, thinking he has just “hit rock bottom” when resorting to pleading, decides to just walk away, forgetting the whole thing about him joining the team.

While Sally is pondering this matter in her office, Tails shows up at Proción's hut. The two chat for a while, and when the raccoon talks about his missing mentor, Tails realizes that person is his father, Colonel Amadeus Prower.

According to what Leónidas recalls, Amadeus was a quite unusual member of the Royal Army of Acorn. He was cordial and chivalrous, but also matey and not very rigid, and had found a way to healthily cope with his war-related trauma. That attitude wasn’t a facade, it corresponded with his actions; in particular, Amadeus was almost the only hierarch of the Royal Army of Acorn who focused his hatred only on the Overlander nation’s leaders, had no intention of getting revenge by hurting its people, and treated the Overlander POWs with at least a modicum of respect. The use of child soldiers from the age of 12 was common practice, and many military leaders from both Acorn and the Overland used their armies as cannon fodder; however, Amadeus tried to somehow "save" as many children as he could, and rather than just throwing his people straight onto the battlefield, he tried to train the younger ones properly to start fighting as adults or even avoid being sent to the battlefield whenever possible, and their tactics usually consisted of sending small groups of well-disciplined agents with the best possible training and equipment to attack Overlander facilities and avoid fighting head-on against the enemy army; one of those "special forces" teams included Amadeus himself, his wife Rosemary, and Sonic's parents.

The conversation is interrupted when Sonic departs back to the Berilian Islands and Tails goes with him, leading to the adaptation of Sonic Chaos. With Sonic and Tails out of Knothole, Sally asks Proción to have another meeting. She decides to allow Leónidas to join the team, but she also warns him she’ll be watching him in order to stop him from just starting killing Mobians indiscriminately, and she also recommends people to help him deal with his guilt over his loved ones’ loss. Sally also begins a program to modernize all of the Freedom Fighters' equipment.


外伝:節・針土竜・と・「混沌とした ×」隊

Gaiden: Fushi Harimogura to “Kontontoshita-X” Tai.

Spin-off: Knuckles the Echidna & Team Chaotix.

Later, on Angel Island, the events of the adaptation of Knuckles’s Chaotix unfold. Mecha Sonic, severely damaged and barely able to move and function after his fight against Sonic & Tails in the Sky Sanctuary (Sonic 3 & Knuckles), finds ancient writings about something called "Chaos Ring": so small that it can be worn on a finger, it’s considerably less powerful than a Chaos Emerald but still seems to have a high concentration of Chaos energy, since it’s still quite powerful. Quickly but secretly, Mecha Sonic makes six artificial Chaos Rings, rebuilds himself, creates his own army of Badniks and equips each unit with a fake Power Ring of his invention; on the other hand, the robot hedgehog is still not capable of powering up or reaching any kind of Super form as Sonic & Tails had achieved.

Two weeks after the events of the adaptation of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the robot hedgehog finally goes on the offensive. Knuckles tries to stop him and is kicked off the island, but he also discovers a ring he used to wear is actually the only, true, original Chaos Ring. Realizing once and for all that he cannot keep living alone or protect the Master Emerald without help, the echidna decides to set out in search of allies, and thus forms Team Chaotix:

Espio, a ninja chameleon who had left his clan, supposedly to explore the world. Actually, he also left his clan because he was the heir to the position of leader but had a totally different vocation and didn’t want to sacrifice it.

Vector, a strong but unorganized crocodile who on the other hand aspires to be a detective, with a past no less mysterious than Espio's.

Charmy, an irate and prideful swordsman with his modified stinger as his weapon of choice. He used to be the Prince of Golden Hive Colony until Robotnik destroyed it and killed or roboticized everyone except him, who managed to escape and later developed a bit of survivor guilt along with a much stronger thirst for revenge.

Mighty, a quite strong armadillo for his size, somewhat weaker than Vector but also protected by a shell capable of stopping bullets and even laser shots. He stands out for being very friendly, calm, focused and cordial, and though he's willing to use his physical strength for combat when there's a good enough reason for it, he still deeply dislikes unnecessary violence and his fighting style is mainly based on defence and using an opponent's attacks against themself.

Lastly, the flying squirrel Ray, a humble and rather introverted boy. He was born to a family of circus performers but lost them all to Robotnik, and later Mighty picked him up and cared for him as if he were his little brother.

The six Mobians retrieve the six artificial Chaos Rings, defeating Super Badniks each powered by one of those rings. However, Mecha Sonic finds the Master Emerald and manages to turn into an unstable Super form (like in Knuckles’s story of Sonic 3 & Knuckles) that later degenerates into a red robotic monstrosity (the "Titan Metal Sonic" or "Metal Sonic Kai" from the final battle of Knuckles’s Chaotix). Despite this, Knuckles partially goes Super by using his original Chaos Ring and the six artificial ones made by the robot and retrieved by team Chaotix. He fights the metallic beast with the help of his new friends, and finally finds an opening to take the Master Emerald, directly become Hyper Knuckles and take down Mecha Sonic once and for all.

After this adventure, the ragtag team begins a new life on Angel Island, they and Knuckles establish their new base of operations in the Hidden Palace, and the echidna takes them to meet the Knothole Freedom Fighters shortly after.


御負け [“omake”]:

Once upon a time, Mighty was on the verge of being kicked outta Team Chaotix.

After each of the team members had done all the housework at least once, it came the day when Mighty would have to cook, so the armadillo made fried eggs as the main course, and later he made flan for dessert. Since almost everyone else in Chaotix was oviparous, they didn’t take it very well.

Ray’s mediation attempts, coupled with Mighty’s promise never to step into the kitchen ever again, were the only thing that saved his place in the team.


外伝:アントワンの復帰・と・保護天使の謎

Gaiden: Antowan no Fukki to Hogo-Tenshi no Nazo.

Spin-off: the Return of Antoine & the Mystery of the Guardian Angel.

Meanwhile, Bunnie and Proción are sent on a mission that at first seems simple enough: track down a hitman, capture them, and take them somewhere safe for questioning. That hitman has done some jobs requested by local criminal organizations, but isn’t working for the remnants of Robotnik’s Regime or for any major villains at the moment, and doesn't seem to have any loyalty to anything or anyone either, working sometimes for villages and some visibly vulnerable and defenceless people. As far as it’s known, this hitman wears some kind of electro-mechanical suit or very light and flexible armour, and they use a 直刀 ["chokutō", "straight sabre"] whose blade vibrates at high frequencies, but their signature weapon is a bow and special arrows with varied tricks and effects.

Bunnie and Procion head to the Alemannic Raetia, one of the regions of Mercia where Robotnik’s Regime has already been expelled for good, hoping to find the hitman there. Once they locate them, they begin to chase them, but to the surprise and slight horror of both Freedom Fighters, the person they were looking for is actually Antoine. He manages to get out of their grasp shortly after, but the two Freedom Fighters have caught a glimpse of his face when he had been forced to open the armour on his head and expose his face: the coyote is pale and somewhat gaunt, a physical appearance in stark contrast to his suddenly enhanced abilities.

Then the two Freedom Fighters are contacted by a mysterious independent agent, whom many Resistance teams around the world call "their Guardian Angel" and treat almost like a legend: a young Mobian Indian wolf wielding a strange kind of multi-function laser weapon; undoubtedly a hero, someone loyal to the Resistance’s cause and dedicated to protecting the defenceless, but also apparently very reserved and non-talkative, always speaking in whispers and through a voice distorter, wearing a mask similar to those of the kabuki theatre and remaining in the shadows, usually operating as a sniper despite being able to fight hand-to-hand. The agent introduces himself to Bunnie and Proción without giving any name, but the raccoon is immediately amazed and intrigued by this legendary "Guardian Angel". The mysterious agent tells they’ve been chasing Antoine for over a month, insists the Freedom Fighters allow them to keep looking for him alone, and requests details that may allow them to know him better and help to find him; Bunnie and Leónidas are reluctant at first, but contact Sally and she in turn contacts other Resistance groups, which in turn confirm the existence and description of the "Guardian Angel", so the two Freedom Fighters reveal everything they know about the coyote, begging the Indian wolf to have mercy on him and to try to bring him back so that the three of them can talk.

In a town in Batavia, another region of Mercia freed from the remnants of Robotnik’s Regime, amid torrential rain in the evening, the "Guardian Angel" finally finds Antoine. The unknown Freedom Fighter figures out what happened to the coyote: he was subjected to experiments with cybernetics and an advanced Badnik suit prototype, which included uploading combat knowledge directly into his brain via some kind of interface; Antoine broke free from his captors, but his physiology had been radically altered (including the replacement of much of his blood with silvery, mercury-looking synthetic simile, more effective than normal blood at its same functions, but very rare and difficult to produce and obtain), his new cyborg body needs special maintenance, and the coyote cannot perform that maintenance by himself or access it without giving himself back to those who made him this experimental fighting machine; that's why, although he sometimes used his new abilities to help vulnerable people, he started working as a bounty hunter and hitman in an attempt to get the maintenance necessary for his survival, either by accessing surrogates that give him a little more time to live or by amassing money to buy his former captors the means to repair and maintain his cyborg body on his own. The Indian wolf defeats Antoine with relative ease: the coyote's combat knowledge doesn't seem to include improvisation or developing new techniques or adapting to new situations or anything like that, he's only got what's strictly necessary to infiltrate and steal or kill with the least degree of confrontation possible; the only thing that seems to be a "genuine" skill of Antoine is his marksmanship with the bow and arrow, as he can shoot and be pretty accurate no matter what he's doing or the situation he's in.

Antoine accepts his surrender, claims to have been a disgrace and asks the "Guardian Angel" to finish him off. The people who turned him into a cyborg were a few Mobians who had worked for Robotnik, had gotten their hands on an abandoned experimental Badnik prototype, and were trying to produce their own bootleg versions based on it; Antoine had learned of its existence and had offered to be an experimental subject, and his reason for doing so was somewhat superficial and selfish: the coyote wanted just the skill and raw power to fight, the nullification of his own emotions so he'd never have fear again, and to stop caring for "unnecessary values and feelings" such as honour (after Antoine's former obsession with honour hasn't prevented his reprehensible behaviour during the war against Robotnik). However, the Indian wolf lets him live: they know Antoine, despite his behaviour, shortcomings, awkwardness and bad relationship with his comrades, was always one of the most loyal members of the Resistance; the coyote has left behind much of his problems, including his tendency to brag; before offering to be turned into a cyborg, he was simply "lost" and now it’s a matter of time until he finds his way again and becomes a hero, especially now that the "Guardian Angel" has a chance to establish a healthy friendship with him and achieve what the Knothole Freedom Fighters hadn't been very successful at; Also, the cybernetic enhancements are already installed on Antoine and can still be useful, they simply have to give the coyote the means to survive, let him have his own life, and train him so he puts his new abilities to better use.

The "Guardian Angel" shows Antoine their Variable Wispon, the multi-function laser weapon they've been seen with so many times; the Wispon's power source turns out to be "Wisps": sapient, jellyfish-like creatures capable of emitting their own light, who agree to lend the mysterious agent their many powers. The agent sends a white Wisp at Antoine, and the creature lends some of their power to the coyote, allowing him to stay alive and in peak physical condition for a few more years, thus giving him much more time to get maintenance for his cyborg body. The “Guardian Angel” also lets Antoine go, only proposing for him to be their apprentice, without forcing him to do so or demanding anything else in exchange for having saved his life. Time ends up proving the mysterious agent is right: the coyote stops accepting jobs no matter what they are or who pays for them, and now that he has a clearer mind, he agrees to follow the Indian wolf's steps.


Snively replaces Robotnik and tries to continue his legacy, with little success. The events of Sonic Adventure 1 unfold almost four months after Robotnik's fall, and the events of Sonic Adventure 2 happen another six months later, always with Snively taking his uncle’s place.

Bunnie also meets with Antoine occasionally: he helps her a bit on some missions, she's also willing to talk with him, and both help the people of Station Square when Perfect Chaos attacks, although he leaves again without telling anyone shortly after.

[For every event, dialogue line and element of any kind that remains unchanged from the original videogames, the original Japanese script will always be used.]


編:ソニックの壱番目・大冒険

Hen: Sonikku no Ichi-Banme Dai-Bōken.

Saga: Sonic’s 1st Grand Adventure.

[Main theme of this specific saga: "Sono Chi no Sadame", the opening theme for the anime of JoJo Part 1]

[Here's a video of the  Sonic Adventure 1 intro but with that song: y o u t u b e [dot] c o m [slash] watch ? v = 7ErW7RRWe0g ]

At the beginning of the events of this adaptation, Sonic and Sally -the latter accompanied by Nicole, still in the form of a handheld computer- go together to Station Square to take a vacation and also as an excuse to visit Tails in his new workshop near the Mystic Ruins. Sonic and Sally witness the appearance of Chaos 0, the hedgehog fights the water creature alone, and after some successful attacks by Sonic, Sally deduces a pattern, discovers the weak point in Chaos 0's brain and accurately shoots at their head, forcing the eerie creature to escape. After this, Sally calls the rest of the Knothole Freedom Fighters (at that moment: Bunnie, Rotor, Fiona and Leónidas), asking them to go to Station Square as well: if there’s any danger lurking, they can investigate and try to prevent it, and if not, they can still take this chance to take a vacation together with her and Sonic.


The beginning of Tails’s friendship with Sonic in Sonic SatAM and Archie-Sonic (on which my fanfics are based mainly) was very different than in the games, and this version of Tails has already accomplished some feats on his own and is aware of his Chaos powers and what he's capable of doing, so his character arc in these fictional universes can’t be about him learning to fend for himself. Here, his story is about him fighting against reminders of his own flaws, maybe also overcoming the fear of destroying everything with his powers.

[Soundtrack: Special BossSpark the Electric Jester 1]

In some battles, immediately after delivering the coup de grâce to an enemy, Tails -or his mind, at least- is apparently teleported to “corrupted” versions of the locations where those battles had taken place, where he’s forced to fight beings that look like demons or hellspawn, who in turn seem to be linked to Tails's insecurities and emotional issues; every time he’s drawn into these battles, his body is knocked unconscious in the real world and he only wakes up once he defeats those mysterious enemies. This happens for the first time in the fight against the Egg-Hornet, Sonic goes to help Tails when seeing his “little brother” lying on the ground, and Snively takes that chance to steal the Chaos Emerald the fox had dropped; after the fight against Knuckles and the loss of Tails’s and Sonic’s two Chaos Emeralds, Tails again falls unconscious and fights another of those creatures as Snively takes the Emeralds and unleashes Chaos 4, but the fox wakes up just in time to face the water beast along with Sonic and Knuckles; when the Tornado 1 is shot down by the front laser cannon of the Egg-Carrier, this happens again and the enemy in this battle has Sonic’s shape and abilities; the last of these battles is after defeating the Egg-Walker.

[For a moment I considered the possibility to make this adaptation of Tails’s Story in Sonic Adventure 1 be also a crossover with NiGHTS Into Dreams. But I ultimately discarded that idea, since it'd have made Tails’s story way too “loaded”.]

[Theme for Sonic’s & Tails's boss battles: “Encounter, from the Metal Gear Solid OST]

During Sonic's fight against Chaos 6, Tails manages to get the Tornado 2 flying again... by pushing it off the Egg-Carrier, falling with it and starting its engines mid-fall.

Snively's mechs are a bit more sophisticated and aggressive than in the original version of Sonic Adventure 1. In the particular case of the Egg-Walker, it has two stages: the first one is the same as the original version of this boss; in the second one...

[Theme for the “Tails vs Egg-Walker” final battle , stage 2 : “Escape”, from the Metal Gear Solid OST]

The mech radically transforms, becoming bipedal, deploying heavier and more comprehensive armour along with deadlier and more accurate weapons. Tails can no longer attack him directly, so he sends out a signal for the Tornado 2 to bring and drop weapons and ammo for the fox to use against the Egg-Walker. When Tails manages to do enough damage, Snively is forced to remove the armour from his cockpit; Tails still can't use his tails to fly up and then attack in the air without quickly falling down, so he rises to a low altitude and then fires his bazooka towards the ground to propel himself up, repeatedly slashing Snively's cockpit with his tails as soon as he reaches it.

[Soundtrack: Voodoo KingdomSoul’d Out]

Meanwhile, the spirit of Mammoth Mogul, the elite sorcerer who had founded the Order of IXIS about 1,200 years earlier, breaks free from his prison, which relied on the Master Emerald to keep him locked away. He still doesn’t make public appearances and remains in the shadows, until he finds out about Tails: the fox is appearing on television, having deactivated Snively’s nuclear missile and defeated the Egg-Walker manned by Snively himself; seeing him, Mogul senses he’ll be the main obstacle in his plans. When Tails has already turned away from the people who were cheering him on for his latest exploits, Mogul ambushes him in an alley; the fox's experience in magic is almost nil, and the sorcerer brutally wounds him, cutting his body along his left half, from the head’s top, passing through the eye, the corner of his mouth, the left half of the torso and the left leg, to the ankle, almost completely separating the fox's body into two pieces. However, as Tails is lying on the ground apparently dead, small blue flames light up along the cut on his body, emanating a shining blue smoke that in turn takes on a shape vaguely similar to that of a big wild fox as Mogul also manages to hear a sort of ethereal animal growl; Mogul freaks out slightly, mutters something about a prophecy that has just been proven to be true, and quickly walks away. Some minutes later, Tails wakes up again, discovering he’s healed and all that remains of the wound caused by Mogul is a long scar along the left half of his body, almost entirely hidden under his fur. He immediately goes back to his workshop, frightened by the fact that he’s had three near-death experiences in less than an hour, and also with many unanswered questions about this mysterious wizard and his own Chaos powers.

Later, in the battle against Perfect Chaos, Tails turns into his Super form and fights side by side with Sonic: as the hedgehog attacks Chaos directly, the fox spends most of his time away from the beast, either hovering or standing on terraces of buildings, sending his "Flicky Squad of Death" to attack specific points. While Tails is in his Super form, the scar of the wound caused by Mogul, including his entire left eye, also glows but in blue.


Although Amy Rose isn’t totally removed from the story, her role is largely fulfilled by Sally, whose missions are stealth-based, à la Metal Gear Solid (yes, with Codec and everything). Amy accompanies her most of the time, albeit reluctantly at first, since the friendship between the two is almost non-existent and the relationship between them is a bit tense, especially after Amy had tried to flirt with Sonic, which Sally didn't take well but Sonic also took really bad.


Flashback:

After Amy tries to “get close” to Sonic for several days in a row, he calls her to his hut to have a private chat. There, the blue hedgehog asks Amy questions so that she’ll reveal why she’s trying to flirt with him, and it soon becomes clear Amy is actually in love with an image of him she had created after hearing about his exploits.

Sonic explains (so eloquently that he’s amazed at himself) that although he likes to meet more people and make friends, he still has a small circle of much closer friends who are the Knothole Freedom Fighters, he trusts them much more, there are things he’d do for them and wouldn’t do for anyone else, and that kind of close relationship has to be cultivated by all the participants, which Sonic is willing to do but Amy seems to be overlooking. Amy insists Sonic to be at least her friend; Sonic, having hoped a little talk would be enough to solve this, begins to get tired, reminds Amy she has no idea what he’s like in his private life or what kind of flaws and bad habits he may also have despite being a hero, and declares she’d keep being a fangirl more than a friend, only praising him and never calling him out in case he’s wrong about anything.

Then Amy mentions Sally and says the former princess bosses him around and stops him from being “free”. Sonic was trying to hold back his anger in order to avoid hurting Amy's feelings, but that comment really hurts him on the inside, to the point that calling it "the last straw" would be an understatement: enraged and also wanting to cry, he asks how she dares to say such a thing; Amy starts to get scared when she sees Sonic like this, and he tells her how Sally isn’t only her girlfriend but has also been her best friend for years along with Tails, they had both fought the war together, he had privately shared with her many of his fears and insecurities, and they both complement each other. In the end, Sonic is still angry and now he’s also embarrassed for being forced to tell something so intimate about his life in order to get Amy to understand; in a rather ominous tone, he demands Amy to leave.

Since then, Amy begins to avoid Sonic and Sally. Sonic does the same, and Sally raises some concern that he might have been too harsh on the hedgehog girl.


Back to the Sonic Adventure 1 adaptation: throughout Sally’s & Amy’s story, the hedgehog girl is fascinated by Sally's abilities as a fighter and strategist, is surprised by how the former princess also helps her overcome a breakdown when they’re trapped aboard the Egg-Carrier, and begins to feel inspired by her to be more independent. They also reconcile and begin to better know and appreciate each other; at the end of their story, Amy also makes amends with Sonic, with Sally’s help.

The Freedom Fighters’ leader meets with Amy, who’s protecting the blue Flickie, and helps them to escape from the Badnik “Zero”; the three are captured by the robot later, but the events are pretty different than in the videogame: firstly, they and Sonic enter Twinkle Park in an attempt to confuse “Zero” by taking advantage of how extensive and labyrinthine that place is (Sally and Sonic had already gone for a walk in Twinkle Park the same day the Chaos 0 incident had later happened), then they reunite with the rest of the team and Sally decides to let “Zero” capture her so she can infiltrate the Egg-Carrier while Sonic follows them as well; the plan is successful, except for the fact that “Zero” also went after Amy, who was carrying the Flickie with her and was also captured; once on board, Sally finds escape may be more difficult than anticipated, but then E-102 Gamma is convinced by Amy to let her, the Flickie and Sally go, and inexplicably Gamma also develops a soul of their own and actually sets the three of them free out of genuine kindness and concern; during the escape, Sally steals some heavy artillery and manages to set a trap for “Zero”, and it seems both she and Amy have destroyed it. At the end of Sally’s story, as Sonic and Knuckles battle Chaos 6, Tails has escaped along with Amy & Gamma and the Egg-Carrier is slowly falling into the ocean, she fights Snively hand-to-hand on the scaffolding of the first part of the Sky Deck; she ends the fight by kicking Snively off a scaffold and letting him fall into the void, but he ends up landing in his Egg-Mobile and escaping; Sally is picked up by Tails on the Tornado 2 shortly after. Later, Amy is ambushed by “Zero” (rebuilt as a "Mark 2" variant) but she destroys it for good and takes the Flickie back to its family.

[Sally’s character theme: “Starfox - Corneria”, Synthwave remix by "Elezeid"]

[Theme for Sally’s boss battles: “Solid State Scouter, “80’s remix by "Elezeid"]

[Theme for the Sally-versus-Snively final battle: Snake’s theme from Metal Gear Solid, “80’s” remix by "Elezeid"]

[The other Freedom Fighters’ theme: the Ginyu Special Forces theme from Dragon Ball Z, “80’s” remix by "Elezeid"]

During Sally’s & Amy's story, not only the Freedom Fighters’ leader is impressed by Amy and sees potential in her, but she’s also intrigued by some abilities the hedgehog had unintentionally manifested when they were on the Egg-Carrier: Amy summoned her hammer seemingly out of nowhere, and she was moving slightly faster than normal without being aware of it at all; she wasn’t fast as if she had Sonic’s super-speed, but as if the flow of time itself was altered for her only and she was going in fast-motion. After the events of Sonic Adventure 1, Sally invites Amy to train with her personally.


Erased scene:

Amy is in a simulation room, fighting holographic SWAT-bots with her hammer. She had increased the difficulty by making the robots smarter, but now this seems to be too much for the hedgehog. After receiving about three fake laser shots, she stops the simulation.

Amy: *pant* *pant* “Goddammit, this way I'll never be of any help to Sonic, Sally and the others! How did I even manage to get by on the Egg-Carrier?”

???: “Maybe you need someone guiding you to train you and find that out.”

[Soundtrack: Ryu’s themeSuper & Ultra Street Fighter 4]

Amy looks to the side and sees Sally. The chipmunk carries a non-lethal 薙刀 [“naginata”] for training and wears its corresponding variant of 防具 [“bōgu”, “training armour”].

Amy: “S-- Sally? No way, are you really gonna help me?! Oh, I love what you and the others on your team do, show me how to destroy entire SWAT-bot squads and s***!”

Sally: “The ways of Freedom-Fighting can be learned in one of two ways: we can do what everyone else did during the war, training your mind and body for ten long, difficult years just so you know all the ins and outs of the tactics to infiltrate enemy bases and live to tell the tale... or I can show you how to spam like a pussy.”

*The music stops*

Amy: [wearing Tha Shades] “F***, yeah! Show me how to spam like a pussy!”

*The music resumes*

Sally: “The first step is to look deep inside yourself, and ask yourself what has led you to this moment.”

Amy: “Probably fantasizing about Sonic.”

*The music stops*

Amy: “What? Are you gonna tell me this is not an open secret?”

*The music resumes*

Sally: [closes her eyes] “The answer lies... [opens them again] in the heart of battle.”

The combat simulation resumes. Sally nimbly moves between the SWAT-bots, cutting some with the blade of the naginata and tripping others on its pole portion. When Amy locates Sally again, she’s already on the other side of the room, SWAT-bots holographically exploding behind her.

*KA-BOOM!*

Amy: “HOLY S***! THAT WAS SO F***ING COOL!”

*The music stops*

*BUM!*

Something falls from the ceiling, leaving a crater on the floor and raising a dense cloud of smoke.

[Soundtrack: Akuma’s themeSuper Street Fighter 4]

Sally: “It seems we have unwanted visitors.”

Amy: “But who the hell is that?”

Knuckles: “Hey! I am Knuckles, and I will teach you the meaning of pain...”

The echidna activates electricity in his fists, charging a Thunder Arrow.

Knuckles: “Prepare yourselves!”

[Yes. I made a rip-off of a “DevilArtemis” video. Deal with it.]


Big the Cat shouldn't even have been in the original game, and his story could have been removed or replaced by a different one with another character and Sonic Adventure 1 would have been a good game anyway. Therefore, here I replace his character arc with one centred on Bunnie and featuring Johnny Lightfoot (from the British comic), where both become friends and learn to see life differently: he learns strength isn't everything and he can still be valuable and a hero in his own way, while she understands she's much more than just the robotic limbs that give her the huge power allowing her to fight. Their missions would be “beat 'em up” fights against multiple enemies, a tribute to the Streets of Rage saga. Near the end of Bunnie's story, Johnny is injured and rendered permanently unable to fight, so Bunnie decides to carry on his legacy, symbolically represented by his bo staff, which will be used by her ever since; in fact, during Sonic's battle against Chaos 6, Bunnie uses both her skills & weapons and Johnny's staff combined when fighting another mech sent by Snively.

[Bunnie’s character theme: “Dashing Thunderbot” by "Elezeid" & "Ryan Thunder"]


Unlike the original game, and just like in the Archie-Sonic adaptation, Gamma survives. The E-100 series’s robot is eventually found by Sonic, Amy and the Station Square authorities, who offer Gamma to help protect the city-state.


間奏。

Kansō.

Interlude.

By the end of the adaptation of Sonic Adventure 1, the Freedom Fighters and the local authorities in Station Square managed to coordinate efficiently in rescue efforts in the face of Perfect Chaos’s attack. Once Chaos is neutralized, these events inspire the President of this city-state, João Falcão, to initiate closer diplomatic relations with the rest of Mobius and with the Freedom Fighters, as well as to launch a campaign across the United Federation for the rest of the city-states to follow Station Square’s example and for GUN to collaborate with the Freedom Fighters. Falcão also starts a project to host the Overlander people in Station Square, which leads him to meet Commander Abrahan Tower and Hope Kintobor.

In the Great War, Tower had been well-known among the Overlander forces for his great concern for his own soldiers and his respect for the rights of prisoners of war, a behaviour totally opposite to that of the rest of the leaders of his own army, including the Overlord Charlemagne; in the Acorn Army, there had been a colonel called Amadeus Prower, who had similar ideas and was also surrounded by other less morally upright military leaders; both he and Tower developed a great respect for each other, as neither the Mobian Colonel nor the Overlander Commander agreed to wage this war, and neither had contempt for the other's race. Falcão shares many of Tower’s ideas, wants to cultivate and maintain a friendly relationship with the Mobians and for the United Federation to integrate with the rest of Mobius, doesn’t approve of many things happening both in GUN and in the society of many city-states of the United Federation, and wants to change all this by taking office as Federal President; so he proposes to Tower to work together, with the Overlander commander joining GUN, becoming its leader, having the organization collaborate with the Freedom Fighters, and ensuring that Falcão's reforms in GUN are actually carried out.

Tower gets his former rank of Commander recognized in GUN. Four months after the events of Sonic Adventure 1, Falcão wins the election while his allies also win a sizable chunk of the seats in the Assembly of the Union; he takes office as the new Federal President, and with Tower's help, begins investigating within GUN.

Tower also offers Hope to work at GUN, answering only to him and Falcão directly, and begins the search for suitable people to create a Special Ops team of their own...


Once life has pretty much returned to normal throughout the Kingdom of Acorn, a provisional educational system is established, more similar to that of the university courses not requiring attendance: children and teenagers study in their homes what used to be taught in schools before Robotnik's coup d’etat, and then they attend school only to take the exams, on dates chosen by the students (no, the events of those dumb comic issues about the heroes going to school never happened here). There's a brief disagreement about the topics to be included in the exams, not only because there are many teenagers and even children who were forced by the war to mature early and now know many things or at least have learnt a trade or a skill, but also because the programs of the country's schools before Robotnik were already terribly outdated.

At one point, King Max attempts to rebuild the nobility and the Royal Court at Knothole, as a first step in restoring the old Kingdom of Acorn and its traditional system of government. But Robotnik’s coup d’etat had had unexpected effects on the country's society: the noblepeople's children had lived in total equality with people from other social classes for ten years, and in fact, that way of life is the only one many of them even know; as for the nobles of the pre-Robotnik era themselves, if they hadn’t been roboticized and used as slaves, they did have to live in Knothole and other similar villages, also on an equal footing with every other survivor and contributing to the war as much as everyone else; people had left behind the idea that some individuals deserve privileges and a higher rank than others by birthright only; the villages created at the beginning of the war, which are now beginning to become new cities, mostly govern themselves by direct democracy [like in Ancient Greek city-states, but truly including everyone]; even the national identity of the Kingdom of Acorn had faded, and other new identities had been constructed in its place by each village of survivors, eventually coalescing into one brand-new, unique national identity centred on Knothole, from where the Resistance was being led. Bottom line, Robotnik had inadvertently “rebooted” Acorn's society. Therefore, King Max's "National Restoration Program" doesn’t get any support and ends up being abandoned; he's still rather a figurehead, and the new cities -now inhabited by both Mobian survivors and Robians recently freed from Robotnik's control and even Overlander survivors- keep functioning as they used to.

Shortly after the Knothole Freedom Fighters' journey to Angel Island and their first encounter with Knuckles, Geoffrey and Hershey find out that Elias Acorn, the kingdom’s original Crown Prince and Sally's older brother, is still alive and has settled in the forests at the Mushroom Valley. During the Great War, Max had tried to keep both his son and Queen Alicia safe by sending them somewhere far away on Mobius accompanied by Colonel George Sommersby and his wife Martha, but the plane they were travelling in had apparently been shot down by the Overlanders. Now Elias makes a living as a lumberjack, married to a female Mobian squirrel named Megan, and they both take care of Alexis, the daughter Megan had had with a deceased previous husband; the Sommersbies had survived but Queen Alicia had fallen into a coma after the plane crashed on Angel Island, and Elias had been lucky to find a way to keep her alive in a makeshift stasis pod. Geoffrey and Hershey bring Elias, his family and the Sommersbies to Knothole, the prince is reunited with Sally and Max, and the Freedom Fighters use Power Rings to heal and awaken Alicia. Max repeatedly tries to convince Elias to become heir to the throne again; however, the young prince is quite disenchanted with his father's behaviour, considers Sally to be much better prepared to rule, feels the Monarchy has already lost its raison d'etre in this new world even though he still doesn’t think that system is fundamentally harmful, and decides to carry on with his simple life as a lumberjack along with Megan and Alexis, although moving to the Feral Forest, southeast of the Kingdom of Acorn. Anyway, Elias and Sally stay in touch; on the other hand, Alicia stays at Knothole with Max.


編:ソニックの弐番目・大冒険

Hen: Sonikku no Ni-Banme Dai-Bōken.

Saga: Sonic’s 2nd Grand Adventure.

[Main theme for this specific saga: “Bloody Stream”, the opening theme for the anime of JoJo Part 2]

This Sonic Adventure 2 adaptation would have more content and would take its due time to explore interpersonal relationships a little more. There are also some things from the original game's story that were present but only in an implied way, and here those things would be mentioned openly; for example: how Sonic managed to do Chaos Control with the fake Chaos Emerald, and why Shadow was exhausted and fell to Mobius while Sonic remained unharmed after both had defeated the Biolizard and stopped the ARK's fall.

Sonic is quite flamboyant in this adaptation’s events: he poses all the time; he still does things he used to do during the war, like taunting and aggravating his enemies a lot, pretending to be less smart than he actually is, and sometimes being playful and goofy even with his enemies while also liking to make more friends. Tails has imitated him, not out of blind admiration but because he has discovered he likes to present himself like this; he doesn't have much problem expressing his feelings; he’s kind, friendly, polite, selfless and humble but also shows that without fear of appearing weak -although he may still flaunt his talent for mechanics a bit- and is still determined to fight and defeat every villain.

This adaptation should also better showcase Sonic's knack for befriending people, the blue hedgehog's effect on Shadow, and how he led the "Ultimate Lifeform" to become a hero.

[Some extra notes: Sonic's clothing is relatively minimal, with a tank top showing part of his belly and tight pants, sometimes also wearing a red jacket and a really long dark purple scarf; Tails has developed his own way of presenting himself, with his hair syled into a pompadour, wearing expensive clothes such as a pair of Bally shoes, and with a dark purple Japanese school uniform he himself modified with many golden emblems, unbuttoned and pined aside in his torso’s upper half and forming an opening vaguely similar to a heart that lets the fluffy white fur of his chest come out; Tails also strongly likes vintage stuff, having in his workshop a vinyl record player and a racing car designed from the Lotus Super 7 but hydrogen-powered (a reference to the Sonic Drift saga for the Game Gear). Seeing either Sonic or Tails on the street is usually quite a... shocking sight, in any sense, for most passersby.]

When Snively awakens and frees Shadow...

Snively: “Awaken! My living weapon!”

[Soundtrack: AwakenJoJo Part 2 anime series]

Shadow: [makes a Pillar Man pose as “Awaken” intensifies on the background]

Sonic is in Central City when GUN -still led by Commander Hugo Brass- issues an arrest warrant against him; the Paladin Team Sigma-Alpha-2 captures Sonic, but he manages to escape, starting the events of the Hero Side Story in Sonic Adventure 2. Both Falcão and Tower are convinced of Sonic's innocence and suspect GUN is hiding something, but the brand-new President thinks he and his friend on GUN have to be cautious and go one step at a time, so they start investigating on his own by hiring Rouge. The bat learns Snively had broken into a clandestine GUN military base and taken something from there; she follows in his footsteps, and she eventually not only gains Snively's trust but also finds out all about the Space Colony ARK, Project Shadow and the Eclipse Cannon: indeed, GUN had issued the arrest warrant against Sonic, thinking they'd thus divert attention and try to keep all this a secret.

Sonic's friends at Knothole cannot officially come to his aid, should they worsen Knothole’s and its team of Freedom Fighters’ relations with the United Federation. Sally is trying to be pragmatic, find the truth and solve this peacefully, but GUN’s hierarchs give her no explanation and rudely demand of her not to stick her nose in their affairs; the only good thing she gets is the President telling her he’s also investigating to clarify what happened, without going into details. However, the princess has also given permission for a really eager-to-help Tails to unofficially go rescue Sonic from Prison Island, and the fox has taken his heavily-armed convertible mech Cyclone with him.

When Tails arrives at Prison Island, he’s surprised to see Fiona and Amy: apparently, they had thought the same as him, had enough of sitting around doing nothing and already arrived on the island, but now they’re fighting Snively, with Fiona mostly protecting Amy; Snively also has his own mech and has both Mobians on the ropes, although Fiona manages to shoot Robotnik’s nephew and blow up his ear, exploiting that his mech had its cockpit open and unprotected. Then Tails gets in the way with the Cyclone and defeats Snively; as the latter escapes, both foxes and Amy separate to search for Sonic inside the prison.

When Fiona finds Sonic locked in a jail...

Fiona: *gasp* “I never thought I'd live enough to witness this: Sonic inside a cage. How does it feel to be locked up this time, "Hero of Mobius"? Did somebody else here turn you into their prison b--?”

Sonic: “Pssh, you wish. By the way, nice to see you too, Fiona. I thought I heard lots of explosions, gunshots and a mech walking around. Tails came to rescue me too, right?”

F: “Yeah, and Sally is busy with this "diplomacy" thing. Ugh, I'm never gonna understand this sudden obsession of hers!”

S: *tsk* [starts exercising inside the cell] “Let her do her thing. She has always had a gift for solving problems through words, unlike me; this is how she settled all the disagreements between Knothole villagers and between Resistance teams for ten years. That hasn't stopped her from being a passionate fighter and leader, willing to do whatever it takes. I mean... If Tails is here having fun blowing up stuff with his inventions, it's because Sally gave him permission. Anyway... Are you gonna get me outta here?”

F: “Not so fast. Amy discovered me when I was trying to leave, so I let her come with me.”

S: “Great...”

F: “Yeah, I thought she could take care of herself without me helping her much.”

S: “Looks like Amy still didn't quite get over her crush for me either, she couldn't help but want to rescue me... Wait a sec: Amy did get over her crush! I bet she never asked you to come, and bringing her here was 100% your idea, like some kind of sick joke. Do you still hold a grudge against me for leaving you in that other jail, and now you're taking it out on me?”

F: [walks over to the cells' control panel] “Oh, c’mon... I couldn't be that evil, much less with the magnanimous Hero of Mobius, Sonic the Hedgehog. By the way, you should be able to break those bars with your trademarked spin-dash.”

S: “Stop teasing me and get me outta here. I may have let GUN catch me to see if I could find out something this way, but staying in this cell ain't useful for me anymore. Besides, I wanna teach that fake hedgehog a lesson already. It's because of him that GUN is chasing me in the first place.”

F: [presses the button to open Sonic's cell] “You mean the black hedgehog with red marks who appeared on TV?”

S: [surprised, leaves the cell now open] “Yes! That’s him! How did you know that wasn’t me?”

F: “Everyone at Knothole and the Berilian Islands knows it: we’re watching a news channel from Station Square, and their videos clearly show the guy who robbed a bank and destroyed a GUN base is someone else; the thing is, a media group based on Empire City, the Kane Broadcasting Company, is intentionally showing lower-quality images and using them to claim that hedgehog is you, and a few places on the United Federation are crying out for you to be captured and punished. I wonder how they’ll react when they find out this black hedgehog is helping Snively: I saw them together on this island.”

S: “So the Robuttnik wannabe is behind this... Alright, I’ll take care of everything from here. You can play with all those formulas written on the walls of my cell if you don't have anything else to do.”

F: “Which formulas--? [She notices Professor Gerald’s notes] MA CHE CAZZO?! This is science gold! Tails and Hope are gonna go nuts. I'm totally taking photos of this...”

S: [thinking as he runs away] (“Fiona and Tails are made for each other, I swear to Perfect Chaos...”)

With Sonic's second face-to-face encounter with Shadow in the jungle of Prison Island, the "Ultimate Lifeform" taunts the blue hedgehog and seems to have managed to hurt his pride, but Sonic also teases him in response, making Shadow somewhat flustered too, and doesn’t immediately jump into fighting the black-and-red hedgehog; then they have their first actual fight, which takes place throughout the island's jungle rather than being confined to a small square platform of flat terrain; Sonic makes some -at first glance- absurd plans, many of them being feints or ruses, which catch Shadow off-guard and lead to them ending up in a tie when they’re forced to escape before Snively blows up the island. On the other hand, both hedgehogs begin to be truly intrigued by one another: Sonic keeps claiming he's better than Shadow, but he also has a feeling that this black hedgehog is anything but a heartless villain like Snively, and Sonic doesn't dislike Shadow that much either (although the “Hero of Mobius” will never admit it out loud); Shadow still sees Sonic as a faker, an uncool copy of himself, but he’s also confused by that blue hedgehog, someone unconventionally smart, greatly determined, and at the same time carefree and not as hostile as he expected; Shadow is also impressed by how Sonic uses Chaos-based abilities, although when the "Ultimate Lifeform" asks Sonic about it, he claims not to know what he’s talking about and seems to be honest about it.

After Snively's announcement and the warning shot that destroys part of the moon, Tails contacts the Freedom Fighters, specifically Rotor, for help locating Snively, and Sonic meets again with Sally secretly. When Tails gets ready to go after the President's car, he decides the Cyclone would be too flashy... So he chooses to bring his Lotus Super 7 (as if a collector’s racing car driven by a pre-teen Mobian fox dressing like Prince didn't turn heads too).

As Tails follows the President, Rouge catches up to him and damages his car with her Screw Kick, starting another fight. Tails recognizes Rouge as the one who tried to steal the Master Emerald, based on what Knuckles had told him, and is already pretty pissed off after she has wrecked his vintage car. But then Rouge “presses the Fiona button”: the bat deduces Tails is in love with the red vixen, tells she had already met her, and claims Fiona is just a gold digger who joined the Freedom Fighters purely for convenience; this makes the fox throw his sanity and any sense of honour overboard, grab his Chaos Emerald and use it to enhance all his abilities. Tails goes berserk and begins to attack everything with his tails, slicing through things indiscriminately, including the cables of the bridge where he and Rouge are fighting; one of those tail-slashes makes a tiny cut on Rouge's ear, indicating to her he's serious. At one point, Rouge inadvertently kicks Tails in the head; the jewel thief is horrified to have done such a thing to a child, but then gapes when seeing Tails's head has a deep crack but the damage hasn’t reached the brain, and that crack slowly closes; the fox, all blood-stained and with his pompadour dishevelled, just smiles at Rouge, admitting she’s a strong and capable fighter and he’s not surprised that Knuckles has apparently fallen in love with her. In the end, he asks Rouge why she joined Snively and is still working for him if, judging by her reaction to breaking the fox's head, she's not a bad person at heart; Rouge only replies that he and Sonic should stay away from this matter and she’s already taking care of everything; the bat also tells Tails that Fiona is actually not a bad person and she only said those things about her to make him angry, but he should be careful around Fiona anyway, though not because the vixen is dangerous.

Sonic and Tails break into the President's limousine, but he and the two Mobian heroes exchange a few words too: Falcão clarifies he believes in Sonic’s innocence, tells them he suspects GUN, and warns them he has already sent someone to investigate for him. Regardless, Sonic and Tails continue as normal on their mission to find Snively's “Pyramid Base” and go to the ARK from there.

When Sonic and Tails leave the limo, Falcão is phoned by someone else: it's Rouge, who has yet to gain access to some data and is still investigating but already has enough evidence to prove that GUN was covering up the existence of Project Shadow, falsely blamed Sonic as part of their efforts to hide the truth, and had in their possession three Chaos Emeralds in a secret base without informing the government about it. The President immediately starts making calls: he removes Hugo Brass from office, appoints Tower as GUN's provisional chief and asks the Knothole Freedom Fighters for them and GUN to devise a plan to neutralize the threat Snively poses in the ARK (trying to keep out of this the Paladin Team Sigma-Alpha-2, who were apparently chasing Sonic because they also knew about the cover-up and participated in it, not just because they were following orders).

At Snively's Pyramid Base, Sally takes the place of Amy Rose but the hedgehog girl still comes with her, and Sally’s role is quite different: she runs ahead of Sonic, Tails and Knuckles to do surveillance, watching the Pyramid Base from a safe position, sending a drone built by Rotor from Robotnik's old “Surveillance Orbs” into the facility. After this, Sally leaves to meet with the rest of her team and a group of GUN soldiers, the Spider Troop, selected and led by Tower himself: they’d act as a distraction while the team led by Sonic enters the ARK.

When Sonic, Tails and Knuckles enter the Pyramid Base, and again when they enter the ARK, Fiona goes with them to take care of everything related to computers and hacking as Tails mainly blows s*** up with his mech.

In a rather stupid incident, Tails finds a room with prototypes and blueprints for a few science projects, tries to go inside to obtain them and share them with Fiona, and when trying to bypass the safety mechanisms, he loses his left hand. Anyway, he reunites with Fiona taking with him a disk with all that data digitalized. She immediately runs to check on his wound, but he doesn't seem very concerned or upset about the loss of a hand; quite the contrary, he looks disturbingly happy and satisfied, assuring his teammate that "the Freedom Fighter insurance will cover this". [This is a reference to the cutscene before the battle against the Egg-Golem, where Tails is missing his left hand.]

Once Sonic and his team have managed to enter the ARK, when they’ve not yet parted ways and are still planning what to do next, Tails presents them with his fake Chaos Emerald. When Sonic, Tails and Fiona finally go their separate ways...

Fiona: “Wait a minute, Tails: how did you manage to create the fake Emerald?”

Tails: “Oh, it was very simple: by harnessing the power of the true Emerald we had already got--”

Sonic: [with a knowing smile] “The one you got as a prize for saving Station Square.”

Tails: [blushes, avoiding looking at Fiona directly] “Yeah, that one, hehe... *ahem* By using its power, I generated heat and pressure high enough to synthesize one of those yellowish synthetic diamonds, but much larger. To store Chaos Energy within that diamond, I took samples of my blood and mixed them with the carbon I used to synthesize it. Applying lots of heat and pressure apparently doesn’t cause the stored Chaos Energy to be lost, even though the blood has been burned or evaporated, so the diamond ended up with Chaos Energy stored within.”

Sonic and Fiona look at each other, visibly concerned.

Sonic: “Tails, you've been through some pretty... heavy stuff lately, if you will. Are you sure you don't wanna talk about it--?”

Tails: [talking fast] “I’M FINE! Totally fine! Nothing bad happens to me, now let's continue with the mission, we’ll resume this conversation NEVER!” [runs off in his mech]

Meanwhile, in another corner of the ARK, the team of the Freedom Fighters and GUN led by Sally and Tower bumps into a strange creature moving through the corridors; this creature immediately attacks them, but Bunnie manages to react and stop it, then fighting it for a short time before it finally escapes and the team loses sight of it. Judging from what they had seen, it’s a long-bodied Mobian lizard, taller than the average Mobian, red on the back and black on the belly, with a set of machines similar to a life support system messily connected to its back.

While Tails and Sonic carry out the same parts of the plan as in the original version of Sonic Adventure 2, Fiona sneaks through vents and other safer but hard-to-reach spaces, looking for some station, terminal or control panel from where she can hack into the system, control the entire space colony and launch some kind of plan B. However, Snively realizes what Sonic, Tails, and Fiona are planning to do, detecting the suspicious signal of an "eighth Chaos Emerald" and a subtle side effect of one of Fiona's intrusions into the colony’s network. Robotnik's nephew finds and captures Fiona, albeit not before she shoots him with her gun and blows up his other ear.

Tails goes there first, followed by Sonic. The events unfold the same as in the original version, but with Fiona replacing Amy Rose and with a notable difference in Tails's reactions: when Snively locks Sonic in a pod with the fake Chaos Emerald and a ticking bomb to launch him into space, Tails tries to calm down after this surprise, not to reveal the Emerald is fake, and to play mind games with Snively to make him distrust himself and suspect the Emerald offered by Sonic may be the real one. Despite Tails's best efforts, the Overlander is simply not convinced by this, ejects Sonic’s pod into space, and in retaliation for being taken for a fool, fires his mech's bazooka with no warning, destroys Tails’s Cyclone, leaves Tails himself badly injured and trapped in his own burning mech’s wreckage, and forces him and Fiona to watch as Sonic's pod explodes.

Tails cannot move at all, he has his right side impaled by a piece of metal from the Cyclone. Once he’s seen Sonic’s pod explode, he immediately takes the true Chaos Emerald he was carrying with him and exits his mech’s cockpit, letting the piece of metal rip from his body and cause an even more serious injury; the wound begins to regenerate but is very severe and heals too slowly. Meanwhile, Snively points a gun at Fiona's head and orders the two-tailed fox to give the Emerald once and for all. But as soon as Robotnik's nephew finishes saying that, a screw from the Cyclone shoots out at full speed and cleanly pierces the wrist of the hand he was using to hold the gun. Snively lets go of Fiona, looks at his incapacitated hand, then turns his gaze to Tails, and is left dumbfounded.

[Soundtrack: The Crane / At Sea Again2000 OVA of JoJo Part 3]

The fox is piloting the Cyclone, battered but repaired, functional and armed, as some metal threads come out from within the cockpit to cover the wound in the side of its pilot and keep him alive, and as many threads connect with his amputated left hand’s stump and specifically to its nerves in order to make piloting as easy as it used to be. Snively has truly succeeded his uncle with all his atrocities so far, has killed Sonic and threatened to do the same to Fiona; Tails himself had also failed to fight for his friends and live up to his own ideals, but now he's ready to right both his own wrongs and everything Snively has done, by mercilessly beating the s*** out of him.

Once Tails tells Fiona to go away, his second mech battle against Snively starts. Tails wins, he even regenerates his hand and manages to heal his wound in his side enough not to need to be rushed to a hospital immediately once the metal threads are separated from his body, and Snively has to escape again.

[Soundtrack: J. Geil2000 OVA of JoJo Part 3]

However, right after the battle ends, the fox passes out from fatigue due to using one Chaos Emerald to simultaneously stay alive, enhance his abilities, fight, pilot the Cyclone by some kind of “bio-mechanical link”, heal, and use that new whole "machine manipulation” power he has only just discovered.

While he’s unconscious, someone else enters there: it’s the red and black lizard-like Mobian, the one who had attacked the mixed squad of Freedom Fighters & GUN soldiers; the creature sees the passed-out Tails, but does nothing to him, just grabs the Chaos Emerald with all the patience in the world and silently leaves.


The events of the Final Story of Sonic Adventure 2 unfold the same as in the original version mostly, at least until the Shadow-Biolizard battle. With Tails exhausted and still injured, Fiona takes his place piloting the Cyclone, and Bunnie participates too. On the other hand, as soon as Snively fulfils his part of the plan to stop the ARK's fall, he leaves instead of staying to help the others.

Amy convinces Shadow to help save the world, but there are some differences in this event as well: she, Sally, Tower and the mixed squad of Freedom Fighters and GUN approach Shadow, but Sally insists that they stay away from him due to his righteous hatred against GUN’s soldiers; when they discuss who should go talk to the “Ultimate Lifeform” and try to convince him to help save the world, Amy volunteers, and the way she expresses her arguments to Shadow is slightly different than in the original version, sounding less naive but still friendly, inspiring and optimistic. Shadow not only remembers his original promise to Maria but also details that make him suspect the veracity of that video recorded by Professor Gerald, Shadow's memories also show that, although Maria was kind-hearted, she was pretty feisty too and had activated a mech to resist the advance of GUN’s soldiers in the raid of the ARK 50 years ago [a reference to the fact that Emerl's “soul” in Sonic Battle was based upon Maria's and Emerl themself strongly liked to fight and show their powers after gaining more Chaos Emeralds and thus developing a more “complete” personality.].

When Sonic, Knuckles and Shadow arrive at some kind of altar [it doesn't look familiar to Sonic or Knuckles because the echidna still uses the Hidden Palace to guard the Master Emerald] where the Eclipse Cannon’s core is located with the seven Chaos Emeralds, they meet with that red-and-black Mobian lizard from before: it’s the Biolizard, who had mutated and evolved in their 50 years of confinement in the ARK, connecting with the abandoned colony’s systems and devising a plan. Programmed only to destroy, the Biolizard sounds more cultured and magnificent when speaking and gesturing but he never truly surpassed that programming, becoming instead a strategist and setting himself the primary goal of destroying Mobius: he had set everything up for the ARK to crash onto the planet when someone too greedy tries to use the Eclipse Cannon with the Chaos Emeralds, and he also created a fake video of Gerald detailing these plans and vowing revenge on humanity. The Biolizard introduces themself to Shadow as his “brother” (although the implicit innuendos in his voice tone aren’t few or subtle) and tries to convince the hedgehog to join him, but Shadow already remembers more than enough not to believe him, so they both fight while Sonic and Knuckles carry the Master Emerald to the altar in order to deactivate the Chaos Emeralds and separate them from the cannon’s core.

During Shadow's fight against the Biolizard, Sonic moves away from Knuckles and helps the black-and-red hedgehog, thus ensuring their victory over the reptile [and yes: before, during and after the fight, both Sonic and Shadow do JoJo poses to their hearts' content].

When the Biolizard is defeated by Shadow and the ARK stops falling, Shadow's "brother" teleports to the Eclipse Cannon itself, merges with it but stands very theatrically on the tip, and causes the entire space colony to resume its fall towards Mobius. Aside from the Biolizard's shape and personality, the battle against Finalhazard is almost the same as in Sonic Adventure 2. At the end of the battle, Shadow lunges at the Biolizard and cuts him in two, then flinging both halves towards the Sun at full speed; despite the Biolizard is capable of regeneration, the intense heat and radiation from the Sun are too much for the creature, who’s destroyed even before hitting the surface.

[As for why Shadow falls to Mobius but Sonic doesn't after preventing the ARK's collision, I'll just copy and paste the explanation provided by "ToaArcan"...]

[Shadow telling Sonic he's actually the "Ultimate Lifeform" may be one of the many mistranslations in the English dub of Sonic Adventure 2, but if taken as intentional, then it could be seen as Shadow acknowledging he's been surpassed by Sonic in some way despite being this apparently perfect being. There's a little more evidence of this since, after the battle against Finalhazard, Shadow falls for seemingly no reason while Sonic remains unhurt; true, Shadow does land the final blow if you hit the boss perfectly every time, but considering the terribly wonky flying controls and those goddamn lasers, that’s no easy feat, and Shadow falls even if Sonic did more work than him. Another bit of dialogue from the battle is Sonic warning Shadow to be careful with his Super form because he'll "disappear" if he uses too much energy; that's probably another mistranslation, with it really being Sonic reminding the player to make sure they have enough rings, but it could easily also be taken to mean that, if someone overexerts themself while using a Super form, then the Chaos energy destroys them by breaking their own body down. Shadow falls because he uses too much power; Sonic, having been using the form since Sonic 2, has mastered it, perfected his use of it, and even went beyond the Super form in Sonic 3 & Knuckles; Shadow used it for the first time here, so he's probably unaccustomed to it; to top it off, the last cutscene clearly shows Shadow using his hover-shoes to fly, so he possibly spent himself too much.]

Tower tells Tails about Amadeus Prower, comparing the young fox to his father, and offers him to work for GUN and help reform it. Tails asks to stop being compared to a father whom he didn't even know, and cordially but sternly requests that Tower and the rest of GUN earn his trust first.


[I've already touched on this in the preface, but I'll address it here as well as it'll be particularly relevant to my portrayal of GUN, the United Federation, and both organizations' relationship with Sonic, the Freedom Fighters, and Shadow. I'm aware that a large part of the Sonic fandom reads the events of Sonic Adventure 2 as a work with a markedly anti-police and anti-military message, specifically against the fanaticism, bigotry and paranoia of the USA government of Bush Jr. back in 2001, and they prefer that GUN and the United Federation government be portrayed as yet another villain in the Sonic universe, to imagine Shadow as a punk icon of resistance to authority, and to imagine he never joined GUN and the entirety of the Shadow spin-off game is non-canon; I'm also aware of a more specific and recent aspect of this: a big fear among fans is that the 3rd live-action Sonic movie, while featuring Shadow and even portraying him decently, will also end up "watering down" the original anti-authority message of Sonic Adventure 2 by having the ending be like "Shadow's creators and GUN were just a rogue faction in the government, the USA military as a whole is still a-OK" in order to avoid damaging the USA Armed Forces' reputation too much and thus get the Department of Defense to continue giving Hollywood the money and other resources needed to film Sonic movies.]

[I'll concede that GUN's actions certainly do fit in with an over-the-top but accurate enough fictional portrayal of the excesses the real-life USA military and security forces have committed and/or are capable of committing (Prison Island and Sonic being locked up there is pretty close to being some sort of abandoned Guantanamo), and I realize my plans for my stories (having Project Shadow, the Eclipse Cannon, the assault on the Space Colony ARK and all other reprehensible actions by GUN be the work of an internal rogue faction and previous United Federation governments) might not be well received by a large part of the fandom. But on the other hand, a sizable portion of the fandom's ideas are their own interpretations encouraged by SEGA not providing more information, such "headcanons" sound more like typical anarchist rhetoric from someone who has always lived in the USA and never seen what life is like in the rest of the world, and it's pretty clear that SEGA and the members of Sonic Team lack any political convictions and included such anti-authority messages in Sonic Adventure 2 only because that was trendy in the early 2000s (I don't know about you guys, but for me, Sonic casually saying "Sheesh! There always seems to be a lot of police around when you don't need them!" just sounds cheap, effortless and too contrived and convenient to take seriously); this is also part of a broader phenomenon where fans "asign" revolutionary and progressive political messages to various Japanese videogames and manga/anime series, even though this is usually an over-simplification with no knowledge of contemporary Japanese culture, very few authors write these stories with some genuine conviction for the anti-authority and anti-establishment messages conveyed by their work, and many of these stories could be simultaneously labeled both "progressive" and "conservative" by Western standards (something related to this is the fact that, in the original Japanese version of Sonic Adventure 2, that anti-cop dialogue line by Sonic wasn't there in the first place, it merely was yet another mistranslation in the localized English script). Besides, these fans are blatantly hypocritical and have piss-poor short-term memory if they're demanding today that the Sonic movies' producers not be the USA military's bootlickers, because this already happened with the two previous Sonic movies and the Marvel movies both after Disney bought Marvel Studios and before that buy-out (when Marvel movies were instead produced by Paramount, which was also pretty infamous for its nationalist propaganda not too long ago and now produces the Sonic movies), and yet these same fans praised Sonic non-stop for its supposed anti-authority message (almost non-existent in the live-action movies) and lambasted Marvel solely because its movies were being produced by Disney. The experiences of much of the world with either their police, their own military or their government as a whole are usually not as negative as in the USA; if the big underlying problem to fight against is actually the selfish and bigoted ultra-conservative elites corrupting institutions such as the Armed Forces, then it's worth mentioning that those same elites in my country have chosen the tactic of doing the complete opposite and using anarchism as a tool to take over the government and get whatever they want, not to mention the way climate change deniers or COVID deniers have turned resistance to authority into their perfect propaganda device, so perhaps it'd be better to be careful before turning the heroes of a story into champions of absolute individual freedom without an iota of critical thinking skills. And lastly, here I'm working mainly with material from the Archie comics (both before and after the reboot), where the United Federation is more like a hypothetical global government based on the UN and includes all city-states inhabited mostly by humans, while the United Federation in the videogames (and in Sonic X, for that matter) is much more specifically an allegory for the USA and encompasses only those city-states that most obviously reference the major cities of that country.]


A few days later, Sonic tells Sally he’s still strangely hurt by Shadow's sacrifice. Sally decides to ask Tower and Rouge for help to search for the black hedgehog, and she encourages Sonic to participate in the search. Shadow is found at the bottom of the sea by Sonic himself, who feels the black hedgehog is still alive and jumps into the water to rescue him, overcoming his hydrophobia. The “Ultimate Lifeform” awakens just as Sonic is about to drown, and they both manage to get out. Shadow, with his memories intact, stays to live in Knothole for a while, shows great interest in Tails's Chaos powers, and spends time with Sonic (albeit reluctantly at first).


Some random headcanons:

Jewellery theft isn’t Rouge’s only passion: she also has a vocation for Psychology. When the bat woman wasn’t stealing jewels or carrying out a mission, she studied to pass subjects of the Degree in Psychology; GUN first, Falcão and Tower later, founded her studies after she pointed out this knowledge would help her to do a better job as a secret agent.


Tails has an unspecified ASD (autism spectrum disorder), and “reading” others’ facial expressions and voice tone was always difficult for him. If he manages to understand them, it’s just because he usually interprets the understanding of non-verbal language as an exact science: he previously studies all about facial expressions and voice tone, how they’re generated and what they could mean depending on the context, watches people’s gestures and analyzes them, but he doesn’t use intuition for this as almost everyone else does.

On the other hand, he’s very perceptive: he pays great attention to details and seemingly irrelevant things, and when people do anything and he’s just near there with nothing better to do and without anyone caring about his presence, he also has a habit of carefully watching and analyzing those people and their actions and gestures. He may not initially be able to capture, for example, micro-expressions of someone he’s talking to, but if he’s given the necessary information about them as if they were accurate scientific data, he’ll be able to make surprisingly correct assumptions about what his interlocutor is feeling and actually wanna express, which helps him, for example, understand and comfort someone who’s going through a bad time and doesn’t wanna admit it. Rouge, with her knowledge about Psychology, is usually the one who helps him by providing that information.

Anyway, as is often the case with many people with an ASD, any kind of “limitation” in Tails’s ability to perceive others’ emotions via “social clues” and whatnot is a completely superficial trait of his personality: once he manages to perceive what another person is feeling, he’s fully capable of understanding emotions, as well as “connecting” with other people and feeling their emotions when observing them as if he was experiencing them himself. In fact, despite his reputation as a mechanical genius, an aspiring scientist and someone with a fairly strict self-imposed discipline, Tails can still get too carried away by emotions (which adds the problem of potential Chaos powers, closely linked to their user’s state of mind) and could even be considered the most emotional member of the Freedom Fighters.


Sonic regrets a lot of things, including some which he thinks were his fault; for example, people who were victims of Robotnik, such as Kat, while the hedgehog was busy somewhere else with something else or wasn’t available for whatever reason. His title of “Hero of Mobius” makes him feel obligated to keep this to himself, without letting that other side of him be seen by anyone, not even by his closest friends. He usually cries -a lot- when there’s no one watching him

Sonic certainly has no qualms about using lethal force against villains when the situation calls for it; quite the contrary, much of his internal conflict comes from a feeling of not having done as much as he could have done from his position: not having saved enough prisoners, not having prevented the capture and roboticization of more Resistance comrades, not having destroyed enough Robotnik facilities, not having ended the war faster, and so on. Sonic's "carefree 'free spirit' who does what he wants and helps others just because he wants to" attitude is natural, this is his true self, it's not a mask he wears in front of others; however, he has gradually become more aware of the effect he has on people all over Mobius, how he has become a symbol on whom the survivors of Robotnik's conquest depend to be able to go on, so behaving naturally as a "free spirit" feels more and more like an obligation for the blue hedgehog... and he's still not entirely sure how to feel about it: for example, he wants to keep being himself and also wants to keep helping people whenever, wherever and however needed, but there might come a day when those two desires -for whatever reason- collide with each other.

That's why Sonic totally understands Sally's situation as the Freedom Fighters' leader and main strategist as well. On the other hand, when he saw Fiona still alive and organic, and especially when she seemingly overcame any possible grudge against him and joined the Freedom Fighters, Sonic momentarily felt immense relief: everything he had done hadn't been in vain.


Sally genuinely appreciates Amy Rose, notably for her unwavering optimism, her inspiring character, her "rascal" attitude (sassy and mischievous but in an adorable way), her rebellious spirit, and her never-ending energy; the former princess is also impressed by Amy's people skills and her natural aptitude for connecting with others and being so convincing. For the chipmunk, all of this reminds her of Sonic, and sometimes also reminds her a bit of herself when she was younger. When Sally personally trains Amy, she does her best to strike a good balance, trying to make her a competent Freedom Fighter aware of the reality around her without crushing that bright personality or turning Amy into some kind of "hardened war veteran with no faith in the world".

Sonic had initially been a bit irked because of Amy: her character was slightly "overwhelming" to him (later he'd internally laugh at the irony of having reacted like this to someone whose behaviour was so similar to his own, and he also better understands how Sally feels having to live with him), but Amy had also assumed a lot about Sonic's personality even though the two barely knew each other, and that's what made Sonic take offence and react so harshly to Amy's advances before the Sonic Adventure 1 adaptation (it wasn't helped by the fact that Sonic is still quite the introvert, contrary to what his exceptional charisma might suggest). With some help from Sally, he gets used to Amy's presence later, and the two become fairly close friends. Amy's attitude keeps causing problems anyway: she can be quite teasing and bluntly honest when she wants to, and she's the first to openly point out that Sonic likes Shadow (and when that happens, Sally doesn't take offence, she's just curious and raises an eyebrow instead).


Knuckles is the one who has the typical friendly rivalry with Sonic. He recognizes the blue hedgehog is trustworthy, honest, responsible when necessary, and the one who helped him out of his isolation, even though the echidna is also easily irritated by his antics.

On the other hand, Shadow is comradely, prudent and discreet, and has developed a profound admiration for Sonic, namely the way he never seems to lose his composure, the fact that Sonic is always the one commenting on his enemies and getting on their nerves instead of the enemies doing that to him, and the way Sonic seems able to move on with his life with no regrets while Shadow still feels he owes Maria and his life revolves around his promise to her. Speaking of Maria, the "Ultimate Life Form" can't help but notice similarities between her personality and Sonic's after having unlocked his true memories about her. Something that left Shadow completely starstruck in the battle against Finalhazard is Sonic's Super form, his majestic appearance and the fact that he's so stable while Shadow was still out of practice with his own Super form. After the events of the Sonic Adventure 2 adaptation and Shadow's rescue, Shadow starts practising and experimenting with his Chaos powers, seeking to control them in the same way Sonic has managed to.

[Shadow's personality after the Sonic Adventure 2 adaptation would be similar to Proto Man/Blues in the classic Mega Man/Rockman games and Zero in Mega Man Zero/Rockman Zero. Maybe I'll include Jack at the end of Mega Man Star Force 3/Ryūsei no Rockman 3 as another example, but I still need to actually play it and see it myself. I'm not sure if I should use Eugene Chaud/Enzan Ijūin -along with his NetNavi ProtoMan.EXE/Blues.EXE- from Mega Man Battle Network/Rockman.EXE as an example either, since Chaud seems to be cockier than Classic Proto Man.]


To be continued...

Chapter 4: 編纂:針土竜の内戦・と・神性への競争。 | Hen-San: Harimogura no Naisen to Shinsei e no Kyōsō. | Group of Sagas: the Echidna Civil War & the Race to Divinity.

Notes:

Last edited on February 14, 2023.

Chapter Text

[Opening theme for this group of sagas: “Makafushigi Adventure”, the opening theme of the original Dragon Ball TV series (either the 2008 English cover from the album “Inazuma Challenger” by Hiroki Takahashi et al. or the TV-size version for the series’ German dub]

Shortly after the events of the Sonic Adventure 2 adaptation, when Knuckles just returned to Angel Island, the weakening of interdimensional barriers also allows the return to Mobius of the three factions that had historically fought for control of Angel Island: the people of Echidnaopolis -along with the Brotherhood of Guardians- and the Dark Legion -both made up of echidnas-, plus the island's Dingo community. A long, bloody war begins between the two echidna factions.

Locke and Lara-Le reveal themselves as Knuckles’s parents. Locke tells Knux about the Brotherhood of Guardians, all of their ancestors who had protected the Master Emerald before both of them. On the other hand, Lara-Le keeps a low profile, which seems quite strange to the rest of Team Chaotix, since it’s a reunion between a mother and her son.

When Knux is alone, he’s unexpectedly approached by a hermit named Athair, who was living in a cave in Downunda, reveals himself as his great-grandfather and a former member of the Brotherhood, warns Knux about the other Guardians, and tells his grand-grandson what he knows about them and Echidnaopolis...


The city had been founded by survivors of the Knuckles Clan, who invaded other peoples’ territory again; this time, with the increase in tension between Echidnaopolis and the original inhabitants of Downunda, it was decided to make the city rise to the sky, thus creating Angel Island. Shortly thereafter, for a few decades, it seemed Echidnaopolis’s society was beginning to actually progress, with a rise of Historical Revisionism. But then there was an incident: the brothers Edmund & Dimitri came up with a plan to bring the island back to the surface by means of a machine called “Chaos Siphon”, which would strip the energy of the seven Chaos Emeralds used to lift the city and keep it afloat; but the city’s High Council was reluctant, Dimitri reacted to this by using the Chaos siphon anyway, and when absorbing all the energy of the Chaos Emeralds, he was possessed by a corrupting entity who then introduced themself as “Enerjak” and attempted to take over Echidnaopolis and subdue its people. The Dimitri-Enerjak incident was solved, and an apparently dead Dimitri ended up falling to the surface, but this was used by the more conservative sectors of the government, the separation between church and state began to be lost, and many people were forced to give up much of their technology.

With Dimitri defeated, the Dark Legion emerged, being in favour of technological progress and a secular state, but also being increasingly violent and vindicating Dimitri’s actions both before and after being possessed; this helped advance conservatism, strong anti-technology stances and theocracy in Echidnaopolis. On the other hand, the theocratic State and the elite hypocritically kept using and further developing state-of-the-art technology only for their own benefit; they never tried to hide this, but instead, people without access to technology were directly indoctrinated, so now the vast majority of the population of Echidnaopolis believe this selective ban is to protect them from themselves.

The dingoes that ended up trapped on Angel Island when it was created were treated as second-class citizens for centuries, leading to a radical response by the Dingo Self-Defense Front (DSDF), which included some direct confrontations with the city's police. The DSDF was still less destructive and more open to dialogue than the Dark Legion in general, and during the fights against the government forces, the Dingoes were always on the defensive and never attacked first; that didn't stop the government of Echidnaopolis from exploiting those few acts of violence, using them as justification to consolidate its power and reinforce Echidnaopolis's already existing authoritarian “police State” traits.

The position of "Guardian of the Master Emerald" had been created for Echidnaopolis to maintain some control over the powerful gemstone; after Dimitri had completely absorbed the Chaos Emeralds' energy and rendered them useless seemingly forever, it was decided to discard them, take back the Master Emerald and use it to keep the Angel Island afloat, and in order to seize the gemstone without provoking the god Chaos again, it was extracted from Mobius’s surface along with its altar, its temple and its surrounding terrain as if it were all one single construct, and this was put inside the caverns where the Hidden Palace would later be built around the Master Emerald. Over time, Guardians and former Guardians began to form a sort of guild and develop weird coming-of-age and initiation rites for their children and successors; this led them to found the Brotherhood of Guardians, which then became and remains to this day the shadow government of Echidnaopolis, concentrating the entirety of both political and religious power. When the Overlanders launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Angel Island, the Brotherhood separated the city from the floating island and took it into a pocket universe, leaving the Master Emerald on the island for the time being; when it was habitable again, Echidnaopolis remained in a pocket universe but the Brotherhood adopted a quite perverse tradition of sending all future Guardians to the island, without memories of their family or any previous life and only with the instruction to protect the Master Emerald, making them survive on their own and watching over them at all times until the Brotherhood deemed the Guardian-in-training worthy of officially obtaining their title, knowing the truth and returning to their people and their family.

Athair had never been very much in agreement with the methods of the other Guardians or with the prevailing political ideas in Echidnaopolis. This motivated his decision to leave the Brotherhood, exile himself from the city and live in isolation in Downunda.


Knuckles doesn’t blindly believe Athair’s story but doesn’t dismiss it either, and he tries to remember his warnings. He and Team Chaotix meet the rest of the Brotherhood and help them fight the Dark Legion, but with caution. They also note that, indeed, Echidnaopolis’s society is far from ideal or utopian.

Julie-Su betrays the Dark Legion, but doesn’t go to the Brotherhood, suspecting they might still be as evil as the Dark Legion had claimed for as long as she can remember. Instead, she goes to Knuckles and Team Chaotix, who decide to give her shelter, and tells them all about the Dark Legion and what she thinks she knows about the Brotherhood...


There are different factions in the Dark Legion. There are many members who believe in the superiority of the Echidna race, but many others oppose this and often embody what remains of the original Revisionism prior to the Dimitri-Enerjak incident. On both sides, there are also those who are more isolationist and those who want to reconnect with other peoples of the world (for better or for worse). Within all these groups, there are also some more reactionary and warlike and others more willing to attempt dialogue with the Brotherhood. Within this total of six intersecting groups, there are also people with different ideas about the kind of society they want to form: the many in the Dark Legion are socially and economically progressive, but these include both reactionary and pro-dialogue Legionaries, as well as both racists and anti-racists.

Dimitri was rather anti-isolationist, progressive, revisionist and very anti-racist; before the Dimitri-Enerjak incident, he preferred dialogue. After the Dark Legion was founded, each Grandmaster was different. Menniker was more warlike, anti-dialogue and isolationist, but like his father Dimitri, he was socially progressive and anti-racist. Moritori Rex was more socially conservative, quite racist, anti-dialogue, specifically militaristic, and with delusions of grandeur. Luger, an intellectual, tried to dialogue with the Brotherhood, was progressive, anti-racist and anti-isolationist, and tried to reduce the Legion’s military branch’s power; this sparked internal fights, as many followed him for being progressive, anti-racist and anti-isolationist but didn’t want peace with the Brotherhood. Luger was later overthrown by his sons Kragok & Lien-Da, who now lead the Dark Legion: they’re progressive like his father, but only towards the Echidna race; they think like Moritori Rex in everything else, and aspire to conquer Mobius; Kragok is actually the one in charge, having betrayed Lien-Da and kept her as just a Commissar.

Julie-Su is Kragok’s & Lien-Da’s younger half-sister, the daughter Luger had with his second wife. Her two older siblings had tried to get rid of her at least twice, each time erasing her memory, killing her previous adoptive parents and giving her up for adoption to someone else.


There’s tension between Athair and Julie-Su at first, as he also knows about the atrocities the Dark Legion often commits. But this is solved pretty soon.

Knuckles, Team Chaotix, Julie-Su and Athair decide to get involved in the “Echidna Civil War” anyway but just occasionally, without following orders from either side, trusting only the Freedom Fighter teams outside of Angel Island. Knux and Julie gradually become good friends, she knows the world outside of the Dark Legion, and he tries to delve into the past of the Echidna race to find out more of the truth about them and thereby find out who and what he should fight for.

Knux initially tries to get the Guardians to answer all of his questions voluntarily, but they don’t budge. To top it all, Locke, appealing to his alleged authority as his father, tries to manipulate him, make him feel guilty and convince him it’s better not to delve into the past. Knux wisely ignores it.

Then Lara-Le meets with Knuckles secretly. She warns him about how far Locke is willing to go in order to get what he wants; her son tries to convince her to break up with Locke, but she just answers that “it’s too late for her”. She also tells him about experiments Locke had done with Knux’s egg and Chaos radiation to create the most powerful Guardian in the Brotherhood’s history.

Knux finally gets the Guardians to speak: he threatens them to aid the Dark Legion or the dingoes, claiming that he and his friends can easily defeat both armies in case they betray them.

Everything that Athair, Julie-Su, and the Dark Legion thought about the Brotherhood and Echidnapolis is confirmed to be true. Indeed, the Guardians have no interest in improving people’s lives and are convinced everything is okay in Echidnaopolis; Guardian Hawking in particular doesn’t hesitate to show his racism against dingoes. They admit they’re still using state-of-the-art technology for their own purposes, including spying on people inside and outside of Echidnaopolis. They believe that Knuckles is a kind of “Chosen One”, based on a “vision” of Locke; they don’t deny the experiments, they even try to justify them, and it’s evident they just want a living weapon. The Guardians also mention they have an interest in Tails as a possible “Chosen One”, after having watched him in the last few months, and Locke even insinuates the two-tailed fox may be a better son for them than Knuckles; then the young Guardian and Athair completely lose their cool, each one shoots a Thunder Arrow at Locke, and they both leave the Brotherhood’s HQ along with Julie-Su and Team Chaotix without saying anything else.

As Knux gets all these revelations, he begins to have serious existential conflicts, mainly due to why his mission to “protect” the Master Emerald exists in the first place. His friendship with Julie-Su grows stronger: among other things, they now share a sudden loss of faith in what each used to believe.

In the end, Knuckles, Team Chaotix, Julie-Su, and Athair decide to stay out of the Echidna Civil War: they limit themselves to protecting innocent civilians from attacks by the Echidnas of both sides, as well as acting as arbiters between them and the Dingoes. Slowly more factions are formed, made up of a mixture of Dark Legionaries and people of Echidnaopolis, and some of them include Dingoes too; Julie-Su tries to encourage her former comrades in the Dark Legion to join this new cause, and Knuckles earns the respect of General Helmut von Stryker, chief commander of the DSDF.

Knux and Athair also meet with Tails, alert him to these “Chosen One” legends, and warn him of the Brotherhood’s intentions. Tails decides to meet Knuckles’s ancestors anyway, just to play along.

[Contrary to what Penders did in the comic, I’d have treated the Dark Legion and the Brotherhood of Guardians equally: neither would have been better than the other, something Knuckles and Team Chaotix would realize. Athair calls into question the massive hypocrisy and lack of empathy prevalent in Echidnaopolis, as well as the Brotherhood’s methods and the way they’re betraying the ideals they’re supposed to uphold; Julie-Su does something similar with the Legion: many of her former comrades blindly believe everyone outside their organization is just like the Brotherhood and the use of reason, technological & social progress and the improvement of people’s lives can only be achieved through authoritarianism, but she’s convinced that’s not true, she tries to prove her point, and she meets the rest of the world in the process. And lastly: no, there’s no “Green Knuckles” or anything like that, although I did make Knuckles’s Hyper form bright green to differentiate it from his Super form.]

[There are some family relationships from the comics that are preserved here. Luger is the son of Moritori Rex, who had started in the Dark Legion some traditions that contradicted the organization’s original ideals, such as making the title of Grandmaster virtually hereditary like a Monarchy; Kragok, Lien-Da, and Julie-Su are Luger’s children, and the first two spent a lot of time with their grandfather, sharing with him their disappointment with Luger’s behaviour; on the other hand, Dimitri, Menniker and Moritori aren’t even distant relatives of each other, although Menniker was an ardent follower of Dimitri when he founded the Legion. All Guardians are part of a lineage, but the first of them, Steppenwolf, was neither Edmund’s son nor related to him at all, and the Brotherhood’s traditions were only established later. Knuckles and Julie-Su do not belong to two branches of the same family, but the Brotherhood does have an interest in using the union between the two young echidnas to force the Dark Legion to reintegrate into Echidnaopolis’s society.]

[From this part onwards, in the Echidnas’ subplot, many things will probably happen differently than they did in their original version, either in the Knuckles miniseries or in those issues of the main Archie-Sonic comic that continued the story from where the miniseries had left off. My justification for these changes? Well, the original version of the Echidnas’ subplot... *sigh* was utter bulls***. I mean... It had a lot of interesting stuff with some potential at least as a subplot; on the other hand, the many cases of Penders pouring his reactionary ideas into the comic are not exclusive to this subplot, such cases appear throughout his work in the Knuckles miniseries, the main Archie-Sonic comic and the Sally miniseries. However, in the specific case of the Echidnas’ subplot and especially its introduction and world-building during the Knuckles miniseries (where Penders had more freedom to do whatever he wanted, at least until SEGA released Sonic Adventure 1 and imposed a new canon), there are constantly all sorts of contradictions, the motives for civil war between Echidna factions are never determined precisely, and regardless of anyone’s personal opinions about whether or not references to real-life events & conflicts should be put here in the first place, allegories embodied in the Echidnas vs Dingoes conflict and the Echidna civil war certainly were badly thought or even pretty harmful, or it just seemed Penders wasn’t able to decide what/who was embodied by each faction or who were the good guys and who were the bad guys (in a nutshell: Penders's work sucked because he sucked as a writer, not because the ideas for the stories were wrong at the conceptual level). Having to work with such a salad of writing material, I’ve felt forced to pick up some things and discard others to re-assemble this subplot almost from scratch, and just like the lore of the Spark the Electric Jester videogames, it may be overly complicated or convoluted but at least it’ll make quite a bit more sense.]


A month and a half after the adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow agrees to work with Rouge and Hope at GUN, under direct orders from Tower and President Falcão. They also recruit Gamma, eventually forming Team Dark.


編:自由の戦士の一番は誰ですか?

Hen: Jiyū-no-Senshi no Ichi-Ban wa dare desu ka?

Saga: Who is the best one among the Freedom Fighters?

[Opening theme for this saga: “Mezase Tenka’ichi”, from the original Dragon Ball TV series]

[Ending theme for this saga: “Moeru HEART de ~RED RIBBON Gun wo Yattsukero~”, from the original Dragon Ball TV series]

A little over three months after the adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2, it’s the first anniversary of Robotnik’s fall. A few weeks before that day, preparations had begun for an impromptu fighting tournament as part of the festivities. A month after the anniversary, after some delays, the tournament is finally held in Station Square.

Sally defeats Knuckles, though the fight turns out to be one of the longest in the tournament: Sally had initially been overconfident, thinking Knux would fight without a clear strategy and she'd merely need to dodge his punches; in the end, he loses just because of having stepped on the ground outside the ring. Sonic and Amy aren't surprised at all, after having trained for so long with Sally and learnt about her and Knuckles's skills and preferred tactics. The Guardian, pleased with how the fight went, politely accepts defeat.

One of the fights is Tails vs Rouge. She underestimates Tails at first, but when he proves himself a decent fighter personally trained by Sally and Sonic, the bat is able to adapt immediately. For a few seconds, she tries to play the seductress and thus distract and/or manipulate Tails (several Freedom Fighters -especially Sally- berate Rouge for this, though Fiona may or may not be doing it for something other than simply to disapprove of the bat-woman's tactics), and she actually manages to distract him... because Tails finds her acting grotesquely over-the-top, laughs out loud at her and even imitates her as a parody, making the audience laugh as well.

[Soundtrack: Battle with MyselfMega Man Battle Network 4 OST, remix by "KokiRemix" (as part of the game's OST medley)]

Rouge is forced to fight Tails in the traditional way: she relentlessly throws all kinds of kicks one after the other as he also becomes more brutal in response and both chase each other; Rouge even takes the fight into the air by taking off along Tails and continuing their fight a dozen meters above the stadium's upper stands (Nicole briefly wonders how to apply the "out of the ring loses" rule when the fight turns aerial); there are moments where either Rouge or Tails stands on top of one of the lighting poles and balances while trading blows with the other.


Deleted scene:

There's also one brief moment when they both decide to give the audience a show by each standing on a different pole and doing kabuki theatre poses (helped by Nicole, who realizes what's their idea and plays the corresponding music and sound effects).


The fight eventually returns to the surface of the ring and becomes an "anything goes" sort of match for both Tails and Rouge: they bite each other's ears, Rouge disables one of Tails's tails by stepping on it and piercing it with her heel, and Tails also slices through the patagium on one of her wings with his claws.

[Soundtrack: Vs Duo (final boss theme) – Mega Man Battle Network 4 OST, remix by "KokiRemix" (as part of the final boss themes medley)]

As Tails starts to get fed up, he suddenly stops, crouching down, and stands still on the ring floor. Rouge keeps her distance, not quite sure what the fox is planning to do. Suddenly, a small circle of crimson fire ignites around Tails, then the ground cracks around him but in a much larger radius, then Tails gets back to his feet but has a blank look and doesn't seem to be himself anymore. Rouge notes some similarity between this and a somewhat risky transformation Shadow had been practising with lately; Chaos energy seems to rapidly build up in Tails, causing his entire body to glow crimson and that glow also follows a pattern vaguely similar to his muscle fibres. When the fox finally moves, he redirects all that excess energy into one of his hands, delivers a single punch to the ground in front of him with that same hand, and fires a blast of energy that speeds across the ground and towards Rouge. She can't fly and the blast is too fast to just dodge, so she tries to shield herself against it but it's no use: the blast reaches her and explodes the ground below and in front of the bat-woman, launching her up and back, knocking her out of the ring and eliminating her from the tournament. Immediately after firing that Chaos-based attack, Tails returns to normal, having only very hazy memories of what he just did.


Deleted scene:

Tails's final attack not only pushes Rouge out of the ring but also leaves her with multiple injuries. Luckily, they're all superficial and the bat soon regains consciousness as well, but the wave of Chaos energy generated by the explosion has also... *ahem* It has also torn her clothes to shreds. As the smoke clears and Tails comes to, he realizes what he just did by accident, quickly runs towards Rouge, and stands between her and the audience, with his back to her and holding out his arms in an attempt to cover her; he's also pretty upset and yelling profanities at everyone and everything.


When Sonic fights against Sally, she actually manages to put her boyfriend on the ropes, despite Sonic winning in the end.

Amy Rose shows the fruits of her training, winning quite some matches and finally fighting Bunnie; after another long fight where they both knock each other out, Bunnie gets up first and wins, and they both congratulate each other. Later, the cyborg is defeated by Shadow, who then has to fight Tails.

The “Ultimate Lifeform” notes the abundant potential Chaos power in Tails, mainly reflected in the fox’s relatively powerful healing factor, close to his own; Tails also urges his rival not to hold back against him and the Freedom Fighters not to come to his aid.

[Soundtrack: The True Power of Piccolo (M505) – Dragon Ball original series’ OST, "Epic Rock" cover made by Friedrich Habetler]

They’re both even at first, but Shadow soon begins to gain the upper hand; it eventually reaches a point where Tails is mostly running away from Shadow and desperately dodging his attacks, and the only thing stopping the fight from ending is the fox’s healing factor and the speed he developed after spending so much time with Sonic. The Freedom Fighters beg Tails to quit the fight, insisting he doesn’t need to prove anything, but the two-tailed fox makes them shut up and insists on them letting him keep fighting. Right after that brief discussion, Shadow elbows Tails on the cheek, breaking teeth, making him drool blood and knocking him to the ground; after a few seconds, the fox gets up, his mouth still dripping blood, and starts yelling at the hedgehog despite only being able to babble, demanding him to have even less mercy.

Shadow, in order to anger his rival, not only curb-stomps Tails while still being merciful enough to keep him alive and conscious; the hedgehog also tells him he’s weak due to his feelings, his own mercy and his reluctance to use his hidden potential. The fox gets up again but with more difficulty, thinking of Sonic, Sally, the rest of the Freedom Fighters, his other friends outside the team, Fiona, his oath to protect all the people of Mobius, and the love a Freedom Fighter needs to feel for the world; he also recalls that time when he had become Super Tails “Kyōbō” and decimated the Battle Bird Armada in the Coral Islands.

Then something surprising and unexpected happens to Tails...

[Soundtrack: Yami Yugi’s theme“Season Zero” of Yu-Gi-Oh!]

Unknowingly, his body generates a bright orange aura, similar to sparks of static electricity flush with his skin and fur [aside from the orange colour, it should look like the white aura around Krillin’s fist when he was holding Goku’s fully charged Spirit Bomb, during the first battle against Vegeta, in one of the first sagas of Dragon Ball Z]. Now Tails has partially unlocked his hidden Chaos powers; however, this new intermediate state between his base form and his Super form is not like the Super “Kyōbō” form at all, the fox has not increased his muscle mass nor has his body changed in any way, and he hasn’t lost his sanity… though he’s not himself either and sounds very different: quite calm, not overly confident.

Tails: [closes his eyes, then takes a deep breath] 「混沌の制御。」 [“Konton no Seigyo.”]

The fox suddenly appears behind Shadow, strikes him with his double tail… and launches him to the opposite side of the ring without taking him out of it. When the hedgehog stands up again, he’s left speechless: Tails has just used Chaos Control.

Tails: [still calm, opens his eyes and stares into Shadow’s eyes] “You’re wrong, 「究極生命体」 [“Kyūkyoku Seimei-Tai”, “Ultimate Lifeform”]. The Power of Chaos comes directly from the heart, from the very spirit. It makes thoughts come true, it turns willpower into very real, raw power. These feelings, the love for the entire world and all its people, the humility and self-denial, the loyalty to the Freedom Fighters’ noble cause, the commitment to the mission of protecting everyone from any threat… [smirks] Despite everything you’ve experienced up there in the ARK, is your soul still so blind that you see all this as a weakness? Are you still foolish enough to even doubt the sort of force this may become when combined with Chaos? Heh... Well, after you’ve beaten me to a pulp, I guess 「この魔少年」 [“Kono Mashōnen”, “This Devil Boy” but also “I, the Devil Boy”] shall have to make you eat your words and swallow your pride now. Because even if you manage to win this fight… you shall not leave here without me, my feelings, their power, my attacks fed by that power, making you doubt everything you thought you knew until today.” [uses one finger to give Shadow the “come closer” gesture] 「さあ⋅⋅⋅ゲームの時間だ。」 [“Sā... Gēmu no Jikan da.”, “Now... it’s Game Time.”]

No one gets to see it, but Shadow briefly gives a tiny smile as well, feeling genuine pride in the fox.

The fight is much more equal again. After a while, they both start to get tired at the same time. Finally, Shadow asks Nicole to set up force fields to protect the audience, and removes his inhibitor rings to charge and fire a Chaos Blast. Tails reads this as a challenge of sorts and also charges a Chaos Blast. Both he and the “Ultimate Lifeform” fire their attacks at the same time.

Tails: 「コン⋅⋅⋅トン⋅⋅⋅バーッ⋅⋅⋅クーッ⋅⋅⋅ハーーーーッ!」 [「混沌爆破!」, “Kon... ton... Bah... kuh... HAAAAH!”]

After the collision of Chaos Blasts, when the smoke settles, both fighters are still standing but they soon pass out. Shadow falls into the ring, but Tails falls out of it, technically losing the fight. Everyone is just dumbfounded by such displays of power and how Tails used his Chaos powers and reached this new higher state without using Chaos Emeralds. The black-and-red hedgehog is especially marked: he didn’t really believe what he had said about feelings being a weakness, but the fact that Tails drew power from them in such a way makes him proud of the little fox. Later, Shadow visits Tails in the hospital: the fox seems to have his original personality again and remembers most of what happened during his transformation but has forgotten some small details; the hedgehog congratulates the young fox and offers for both of them to train together one day.

[Soundtrack: One Last Shot (M515) – Dragon Ball original series’ OST]

The final is Sonic versus Shadow. The latter, inspired by Tails, uses thoughts of justice to power up, thus discovering and activating the Hero form [featured in Shadow’s spin-off videogame along with the Dark form]. However, Sonic ends up winning anyway: like Tails, Shadow also doesn’t have much experience in these new ways of using his Chaos powers, he had already made the mistake of overexerting himself when using the Super form against the Biolizard, and here he does the same when using his newly discovered Hero form; Sonic, on the other hand, keeps using his Chaos powers the way he was usually using them, “playing it safe”, using skills such as the Homing Attack and the Light-Speed Attack (both developed in the Adventure saga, practised and perfected by Sonic since then) at most, and simply escaping from many of Shadow’s attacks. Sonic defeats the “Ultimate Lifeform” definitively by waiting for him to reach his limit and fatigue again, then briefly unlocking his Chaos power itself and doing only one Sonic Wind (a technique he had already used against Shadow in Sonic Adventure 2 but with the help of the fake Chaos Emerald).

At the party, after the tournament is over, Sonic approaches Shadow and apologizes for defeating him in the final. Shadow insists he shouldn’t and claims the blue hedgehog has proven to be the best, Tails has also impressed him and the other Freedom Fighters have opened his eyes.


Deleted scene:

Sonic then tells Shadow he has a “consolation prize” ready for him anyway... as he drags the tip of his index finger across the fluffy white fur of Shadow’s chest. As the blue hedgehog leaves, the “Ultimate Lifeform” is puzzled by this gesture; he looks at Sally, and she's not upset at all but is holding back a laugh, so he gets even more confused.


During the party, Bunnie goes to pick up her things. While she’s putting them in a bag, she’s suddenly attacked by someone mysterious. The subject pierces Bunnie’s torso with a single punch, but she manages to shoot them once or twice with the cannon on her roboticized arm, and the shots alert the others. The murderer escapes, badly wounded.

When Tails sees Bunnie dead, he unknowingly activates again that higher state to which he had accessed in his fight against Shadow; however, his aura is green this time, Tails can feel his pain and sorrow from Bunnie’s murder becoming unbearable, and he also feels more and more intensely the need to unleash his Chaos powers, “explode” and “let it out”. Fearing to become Super Tails “Kyōbō” again, the fox flies off.

Amy feels something is wrong with Bunnie, so Shadow and Knuckles use their sensitivity to Chaos Energy to check on the cyborg. It turns out Bunnie is in something more like a vegetative state… It’s like her soul has been ripped away.


編:エネルジャックの帰還・と・魔少年の

Hen: Enerujakku no Kikan to Mashōnen no Michi.

Saga: The Return of the Enerjak & the Way of the Devil Boy.

[Opening theme for this saga: “Ai wo torimodose”, the first opening theme for the Hokuto no Ken TV series, remixed by “CoatedDesert921” with the version for the 1986 movie]

[Ending theme for this saga: “Whistle Concert”, aka “Protoman’s theme”, from Mega Man 3 (either the guitar cover by “MET” or the “Star Force arrange” by “OmegaManZX”)]

During the Echidna Civil War between the Brotherhood of Guardians and the Dark Legion, two weeks after the tragic final of the fighting tournament in Station Square, Dimitri-Enerjak returns and takes command of the Legion. His body had been kept underground in Mobius for centuries, with the energy entity Enerjak dormant and waiting to gain access to some power source; Kragok received information about Dimitri’s situation from an unknown source and proceeded to unearth him, revive him and hand him command of the Dark Legion, although now Dimitri-Enerjak seems disappointed in modern Legionaries and just wants to take over Mobius in order to shape it however he sees fit, regardless of whether the Dark Legion suffers for it along with everyone else.

[Soundtrack: CrashMega Man Zero OST, guitar cover by “MET]

The Guardians ask Tails -whom they still see as the “Chosen One” there were so many prophecies about- to deal with Enerjak. Tails at first asks the Brotherhood to teach him some new technique, provide him with some special resource or give him some advice to have a better chance of neutralizing this new threat, but the Brotherhood isn’t very collaborative and claims he already has everything he needs. Then Tails goes to the duel against Enerjak on Angel Island, trusting in what he had learned so far and in being able to activate that higher form he had discovered in the tournament even though he still doesn’t understand it very well. But this proves not enough at all: Tails fails to activate that form, and the echidna demigod curb-stomps him nearly to death. A desperate Knuckles shatters the Master Emerald a third time (this being the second time he intentionally does it as a last resort), and then both he and a large contingent of refugees flee the island, heading for Knothole.

Tails barely manages to escape, staying still on the ground and playing dead, and once Enerjak is gone, the fox drops into the sea for the Sea Fox to pick him up.


[Soundtrack: Self ControlRaffaele “Raf” Riefoli, cover by Laura Branigan]

Tails decides to stay missing in order to train and unlock his powers and take Enerjak by surprise, but also to stop the Brotherhood from interfering by forcing him to follow their rules and using him as cannon fodder again. Avoiding all detection, the fox travels in the Sea Fox to Spagonia nonstop, sneaks through the city, and travels through the countryside until arriving at GUN’s HQ inside the Guardian Mountain. Once there, he gets Tower to allow him in and asks for Shadow’s help.

The “Ultimate Lifeform” is already working as a GUN agent alongside Rouge, Hope and Gamma on Team Dark. Like Tails, the black hedgehog has some experience using Chaos Energy without Emeralds, but with the rest of Team Dark’s help and GUN’s resources, he has researched Chaos Energy and any reference to it in historical records from all cultures across Mobius in order to discover new ways to harness it; now the “Ultimate Lifeform” is able to use both the Hero and Dark forms efficiently and with almost no overexertion, fueled by thoughts of justice and revenge respectively. Tails could benefit from Shadow, as his combat and training style is very different from what the fox learned from the Freedom Fighters and will certainly be better than the merely symbolic help from the Guardians.

Tails already knows Hope after working with her for months at their workshop back in Knothole and the two of them have developed a lot of mutual appreciation and a healthy friendship. Meanwhile, the fox and Rouge have only seen each other two or three times so far; however, the jewel thief shows Tails a different side of herself, being honest with him and trying to help him deal in a healthy way with the duties he’s imposing on himself as an Adept-to-Chaos hero.

Also, Tails and Shadow start to get along better due to some experiences they have in common. On the one hand, they both had someone who tried to use them as living weapons, but they’re also doing their best to protect the world by using those same powers others had tried to use for their own interests. On the other hand, Shadow had already gone through a phase where he tried to hide his own emotions and silence his concern for the survival and happiness of the people of Mobius and of those few people with whom he has developed a special bond (Maria in the ARK, Tails & Sonic in the Freedom Fighters, and Rouge, Gamma & Hope in Team Dark).


[Soundtrack: The Dragon Theme (Track 21)Dragon Ball Z, North-American OST, Volume 1]

[Soundtrack: Hell’s Bells (aka “Vegeta’s theme”, Track 18)Dragon Ball Z, North-American OST, Volume 1]

Sonic, deeply hurt and enraged by Tails’s apparent death, turns into a somewhat unstable but still useful and durable wrath-powered Super form by using only five Chaos Emeralds, and heads to Angel Island to deal with Enerjak.

[Soundtrack: Final Flash (aka “Super Saiyan Vegeta’s theme”, Track 20)Dragon Ball Z, North-American OST, Volume 1]

Sonic arrives and attacks Enerjak as soon as he sees him. They're pretty evenly matched for a while, but the battle goes on for too long and Super Sonic’s energy starts to run out. Then Enerjak takes the chance to suddenly dig the fingers of one hand into Sonic's chest, extract the hedgehog’s 人魂 [“hitodama”] (his soul concentrated in an energy sphere, the form in which Tikal’s soul had introduced herself in Sonic Adventure 1) and absorb it into his own body.

[Soundtrack: Haunted Chorus [The World is Healed] (M1023) aka Spill of Light on Earth (Essence of Life Theme)Dragon Ball Z, Japanese OST]

Sonic ends up lying on the floor, motionless, apparently in the same kind of near-death “vegetative state” that Bunnie had ended up in. But in this case, Enerjak also disintegrates Sonic’s “corpse”.

Now the Knothole Freedom Fighters mourn the loss of three outstanding and inspiring members. The entire Resistance sinks into despair as they try to figure out how to defeat this brutally powerful being. Meanwhile, Enerjak remains on Angel Island instead of setting out to conquer the rest of the world, confirming Knuckles’s guess that the demigod needs the Master Emerald.

[Soundtrack: Setup to Super Saiyan (M1118)Dragon Ball Z, Japanese OST]

Back at GUN’s HQ: Tails has trouble sparring with Shadow and unlocking his Chaos powers again. At the precise moment when Sonic’s soul is literally stolen, the fox feels something deep inside himself; when he realizes what it is, he remains still and silent but crying as the pain slowly makes him activate his Chaos powers without controlling them properly; after a while, Tails screams and causes a yellow-coloured burst of Chaos Energy, then keeps crying and yelling as he continuously expels Chaos radiation from his body and opens large cracks in the concrete floor below and around him; this new form resembles his transformation during the anniversary tournament, but it's unmastered like Super Tails “Kyōbō”. He eventually falls back to his base form and is rendered unconscious from exhaustion; Shadow and Rouge decide to stop the fox's training for a few days, let him rest and join him in mourning the loss of his "older brother".

With the news about what is technically Sonic’s death, Tails becomes more and more obsessed with Enerjak being closer and closer to taking over Mobius and killing the rest of his friends while he wastes time practising with Shadow instead of avenging Bunnie and Sonic; so, the fox tries to suppress his emotions in order to be more focused. The “Ultimate Lifeform” notices this, and although Tails is doing a little better in the 道場 [“dōjō”], the hedgehog can see that amazing fighter who had almost defeated him in the tournament is fading in favour of someone who may know how to defend himself, hit and even kill but won’t be a true hero and will even be someone with his feelings and personality atrophied, unable to lead a fulfilling life on a personal level... not unlike the living weapon the Brotherhood of Guardians is longing to get their hands on. Shadow stops combat training, urges Tails to stop suppressing himself and advises him to unleash these emotions instead of holding them back, to allow them to guide him, empower him and unlock his potential as an Adept to Chaos; only after doing so should the fox attempt to control and redirect them in more efficient and fruitful ways.

One day, Hope invites Tails and Shadow to go on vacation for a few days with her, Rouge and Gamma, so the five of them go to a small town in the rural area of Soleanna. During that time, Tails and Shadow chat for a while and the latter admits to missing Sonic a lot.

[Soundtrack: Vegeta Powers Up (Track 19)Dragon Ball Z, North-American OST, Volume 1]

Then they're accosted by a group of four Mobians claiming to work for Enerjak and calling themselves “the Fearsome Foursome”: Sergeant Simon Simian, the former BBA soldier Predator Hawk, the exiled ninja Lightning Lynx, and the serial killer Flying Frog... who then gloats over having killed Bunnie with Lightning’s help.

Gamma starts a sort of contest of strength against Simian until Shadow in his Dark form brutally rips the sergeant’s arm off and then knocks him out with a punch to the temple. Rouge protects Hope and fights Predator in midair until an accurate shot from the bat’s handgun breaks the falcon’s wing. Tails is assaulted by Frog and Lightning at the same time, but then...

[Soundtrack: Gohan Angers 2 (Track 19)Dragon Ball Z, North-American OST, Volume 3]

[Soundtrack: Gohan Angers (Track 20)Dragon Ball Z, North-American OST, Volume 3]

The fox surrounds himself with a yellow, fire-looking aura; it's similar to when he sensed Sonic's death, but now Tails has already started to master this transformation, which looks much more like a simple yellow variant of Tails's higher power form in the tournament. Then he stores Chaos Energy in his tails just like he had done when fighting Shadow in the tournament, but this time, he hits Frog with the tails and makes the serial killer literally explode [like Gohan Super Saiyan 2 when he killed two of Bojack’s henchpeople in the 9th Dragon Ball Z movie, Bojack Unbound]. Lightning flinches, terrified as he has almost never been in his life.

Lightning: [trying to keep his composure] “It’s alright… There’s a lot you still don’t know about my employer. I can tell you, no one else needs to end up like Frog. We only came here to attack you guys now, but we didn’t do anything else before, we can all forget this even happened.”

Tails: [with a high-pitched, squeaky voice but at a very low volume, almost whispering] 「兎美ちゃんのことか?」 [“Umi-chan no koto ka?”, “What about Bunnie?”]

Lightning: “Huh?”

Tails: [increasingly angry and speaking increasingly louder, until he explodes and starts yelling as his aura gets bigger] 「ウミチャンノコトカーーーーッ?!」 [“UMI-CHAN NO KOTO KAAAAH?!”]

The fox repeats the technique from before...

Tails: 「クラエ、キサマ!フカヒーッ・・・コウセイナーッ・・・バツハヤテーーーーッ!」 [「食らえ、貴様!不可避・・・公正な・・・罰疾風!」, “KURAE, KISAMA! FUKAHIH... KŌSEINAH... BATSU HAYATEEEEH!”, “EAT THIS, BASTARD! INESCAPABLE... FAIR... PUNISHMENT WINDGUST!”]

But this time he sweeps the air with his tails and fires two cutting gusts of wind bordering on the speed of sound. Lightning escapes upon realizing he'll not be able to fight alone, but even with his great speed and agility, he’s hit by the wind gusts and cut cleanly into three parts... But only at the legs, though.

Rouge calls GUN agents to arrest the three surviving members of the so-called “Fearsome Foursome”. However, unbeknownst to Tails and Team Dark, they’re being watched by a mysterious person: it’s the same one who had revealed Dimitri-Enerjak’s location to Kragok. This person had “killed” Bunnie and let her hitodama fly away, now they’ve just used the Fearsome Foursome as cannon fodder to test Tails, previously giving those mercenaries precise instructions to claim one or two of them (Frog in particular) had killed Bunnie and the four of them are doing everything on behalf of Enerjak. Before leaving, the mysterious subject promises to meet again with the “Chosen One”.

Meanwhile, deep in a nearby forest, a hooded echidna takes advantage of the Fearsome Foursome’s distraction to take one of the shards of the Master Emerald from the ground, then proceeds to encapsulate it in a cylinder made to partially isolate and disguise the shard’s energy signature.


[Soundtrack: Crash 2Mega Man Zero 2 OST, guitar cover by “MET]

A month and a half later, on Angel Island, Enerjak finally sets his plans for world conquest in motion and heads to the Hidden Palace: the Master Emerald had been restored, the Brotherhood had secretly gathered all the shards to do that and now they’re seemingly letting Enerjak seize the gemstone and its power. Knuckles is retained by the Guardians, whose members claim the demigod won't be able to do anything with the Master Emerald anyway and will at most shatter it again when he sees no use for it, so Knux will only have to rebuild it later in the worst-case scenario. However, Mighty doesn’t trust the Brotherhood at all, isn’t willing to take such risks, and leaps towards the Master Emerald before Enerjak does.

[Soundtrack: Goku’s SSJ Transformation (Track 25)Dragon Ball Z, North-American OST, Volume 2]

Surprisingly for everyone including Mighty himself, he manages to turn into his Super form. His shell becomes diamond-like and takes on a bright turquoise hue; he doesn't emit a blinding light but he does create a "dispersive prism" effect, letting the light through and breaking it down into rainbow-coloured flashes.

The armadillo goes out to fight the demigod, and again both are very even. The armadillo’s fighting style is a slight variation of Sonic’s: keep his distance, stay defensive, accumulate energy and launch a single, overwhelmingly powerful attack whenever Enerjak looks vulnerable. On the other hand, even though Mighty has intuited he shouldn’t overexert his Super form, he’s hardly familiar with Chaos-powered techniques yet, and the only one he had witnessed for himself thus far was Knuckles’s Thunder Arrow during the battle against Mecha Sonic.

During the Super Mighty versus Enerjak fight, Ray remembers the demigod had stolen and absorbed Super Sonic’s hitodama, deduces this could be making Enerjak more powerful, and realizes he could now try to rip out Super Mighty’s hitodama too. Ray also realizes both he and Mighty are Adepts to Chaos just like Sonic and Tails: only that could explain Ray’s abnormally prodigious flight ability, as well as his adoptive brother’s exceptional defences and physical strength. This leads the flying squirrel to jump into the Master Emerald to try to go Super and help Mighty, but this soon proves to be a big mistake.

[Soundtrack: Boss LobbyKirby's Return to Dream Land OST]

Ray is indeed an Adept to Chaos, but he still has a lot of pent-up rage due to his family’s death and his life from then on until Mighty started taking care of him; Ray just bottled up that anger and pain and never handled it properly, unlike Mighty, who also had painful experiences but has been meditating for quite some time. The flying squirrel forces the Super transformation, and the mix of an Adept to Chaos, the Master Emerald’s power, bottled emotional pain and much, much stubbornness creates Super Ray “Kyōbō”: a grotesque lime-green creature, literally boiling like hot water inside, with his muscles overdeveloped and his sanity shattered. Super Ray “Kyōbō” doesn’t distinguish between friend and foe, attacks both Enerjak and Super Mighty alike, wildly unleashes his power against everyone and everything in the Hidden Palace, and the armadillo is forced to fight him to return him to his base form and make him see reason. Enerjak walks away from the fight between the two adoptive brothers, finally fulfilling his goal of seizing the Master Emerald, and this apparently increases his power too, contrary to what the Brotherhood had predicted.

[Soundtrack: Bad Blood (M513)Dragon Ball original series’ OST]

The ceiling of the cavern where the Hidden Palace is located has partially collapsed, letting the midday sunlight fall on the shrine of the Master Emerald. The Brotherhood had secretly gathered the Chaos Emeralds, but Rouge steals them and brings them to Knuckles, who harshly rebukes the Guardians but then walks away with the Emeralds, deciding he has more pressing matters to attend to at the moment. Knux goes Super and tries to stop Enerjak, but the demigod has just achieved full control over the Master Emerald and neutralizes the Chaos Emeralds, thus “turning off” Knux’s Super form and leaving him with only ordinary Chaos powers that don’t compare to Enerjak’s; Mighty and Ray go back to their base forms too.

When Enerjak is about to kill Knuckles, Shadow arrives on Angel Island, saves Knux and takes his place to fight the demigod.

[Soundtrack: Snake Man’s themeMega Man 3 OST, arranged by “Synthescissor”]

The “Ultimate Lifeform” doesn’t really look desperate, nor does he seem to be fighting only to die knowing that he did what he could; quite the contrary, he looks a bit confident and occasionally prophesies Enerjak will soon be defeated forever. Shadow cannot become his Super form in any way, but the powers he already has in his base form, along with his Hero and Dark forms, are enough to keep Enerjak at bay as he also keeps making remarks about the demigod; the hedgehog also whispers to Sonic, as if he was still alive and right there.

Enerjak gets eventually fed up with fighting Shadow, not only because the battle is at a standstill but also because the hedgehog’s comments are getting on his nerves. The echidna tries to rip the hitodama from the Ultimate Lifeform, but he quickly removes the inhibitor rings and uses all of his power to unleash a 「混沌爆破」 [“Konton Bakuha”, “Chaos Blast”]; Enerjak manages to resist although he also receives some superficial burns, and Shadow is lying on the floor, exhausted. The echidna prepares to kill him, thinking the hedgehog has run out of Chaos Energy and is no longer useful to him, but suddenly someone stands between them.

It’s Tails, who had arrived together with Shadow but had remained hidden near the site of the battle, watching Enerjak’s movements in his fight against the hedgehog.

[Soundtrack: Menace Unfamiliar (Track 8)Dragon Ball Z, Japanese new OST by Kenji Yamamoto, Volume 2]

Tails challenges Enerjak to a rematch. The demigod doesn’t mock the fox but does question his motives for fighting since the first combat between them had only happened because the Brotherhood of Guardians had sent the fox as cannon fodder to make a prophecy about a “Chosen One” come true. Tails replies that’s irrelevant and he only fights to save the people of Mobius and do the right thing, not because the Brotherhood ordered him to kill their enemies or because there’s a prophecy to fulfil. Both remain still, in a combat pose, each in front of and at some distance from the other...

Until Enerjak throws the first punch.

[Soundtrack: Spark Man’s themeMega Man 3 OST, “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate style” remix by “31 Horas Music”]

Then Tails generates a blue aura, blocks the fist approaching him, firmly grabs Enerjak’s arm, his aura turns red, and he throws the echidna into a wall.


By combining, on the one hand, combat to exercise his body and also to get to know it better, and on the other hand, meditation to better connect with his own soul and mind, be more focused and exploit his own feelings and emotions during a fight, Tails had managed to entirely awaken his latent Chaos powers and take total control of them. Using the Chaos energy within his own body and no Chaos Emeralds (although also adding 50 Power Rings, just in case), the fox can access a sort of attenuated Super form, which has less raw power than the traditional Super form and doesn’t retain its invincibility but nonetheless greatly enhances all of his physical attributes and senses, is more stable, virtually lasts infinitely, and unlike a Super form generated by Chaos Emeralds, is 100% under the user’s control; this is ideal when combined with a fighting style developed jointly by Shadow, Rouge and Tails, largely based on being “sharp like a sniper” and concentrating either physical force or Chaos Energy on specific parts of oneself’s body, quite the opposite of Knuckles’s fighting style, which also uses Chaos powers and special techniques like the Thunder Arrow but relies much more on using brute force, dealing damage over a wide area and “overwhelming” the opponent. Tails calls this form 「魔少年」 [“Mashōnen”, “Devil Boy”], and when it’s activated, he emits an aura of a different colour depending on the emotions he focuses on to use his power; it’s based on Shadow’s Hero & Dark forms, but adapted by the fox to draw power from any kind of feeling, thought and emotion.

[The “Devil Boy” form is based upon three things: firstly, a variant of Super Saiyan 1 called “Super Saiyan Full Power”, reached by Goku and Gohan when they left the Hyperbolic Time Chamber before the final battle against Perfect Cell in Dragon Ball Z; secondly, a Sonic 3 exclusive glitch -fixed in Sonic 3 & Knuckles- where, in the major boss battle on Hydrocity, if Super Sonic gets caught between the Egg-Mobile’s propeller and the waterspout generated by it, he falls back to something in between his base form and his Super form, where he can only run as fast and jump as high as in his base form but is still yellow and invincible and can stay that way without spending a single ring; lastly… well, Shadow’s Hero & Dark forms, of course. The aura varying in colour according to the emotions is based on the 7 chakras (more exactly, the 6 original ones) and the colours and emotions associated with each of them, something Akira Toriyama probably also used since the beginning of Dragon Ball Z onwards, when designing the 「界王拳」 (“Kaiō-Ken”) and the many variants of the Super Saiyan form.]


The outfit Tails features here is largely based on that of Sally, his mother figure, leader and first mentor: he wears a blue vest similar to Sally’s but with a design based on that of the 「稽古着」 [“keiko-gi”], the uniform for martial arts training, with a quite open V-shaped neckline revealing the chest’s centre and collarbones and letting the fluffy white fur of Tails’s chest protrude, two buttons replacing the zipper, and a black belt; on the back, the vest is sewn with two white kanji characters, 臙 y 影, which translate as “rouge” and “shadow”, a homage from the young fox to his new mentors. The vest is complemented by blue pants like those that usually accompany the “keiko-gi”, blue motorcycle gloves, white socks and black kung-fu shoes.

[Here’s a drawing of the design I made for Tails, albeit here his vest has only one of two kanji characters for “shadow” sewn on the back:]

[https://www.deviantart.com/coyam99/art/Devil-Boy-Tails-862441967]

[https://mashounen2003.tumblr.com/post/636148046814642176/%E9%AD%94%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4%E3%83%86%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB%E3%82%B9-mash%C5%8Dnen-teirusu-devil-boy-tails]


[Soundtrack: Battle Spirit – Mega Man Battle Network 2 OST, remixed by “KokiRemix” (version 1)]

[Soundtrack: Cut Man’s themeMega Man 1 OST, arranged by “Synthescissor” (version 2)]

The battle goes on for several minutes. Tails manages to use Chaos Control to teleport several times in a row but in stretches of only about five meters, circling around Enerjak, escaping the echidna’s attacks and launching attacks of his own either from behind, from above or from the sides. For a moment, the demigod takes some advantage, but Tails stops one of his kicks and breaks his knee; Enerjak loses his balance as he uses his powers to heal the injury, but the fox doesn’t give him time and throws a flurry of punches directly to his stomach’s pit. Although Tails might be able to block Enerjak’s blows, he only does this very occasionally. When Enerjak loses his cool (again) and throws a flurry of punches, the fox -now surrounded by a purple aura- doesn’t block them but predicts and dodges all of them until he finds an opening, his aura suddenly turns orange and he elbows the echidna under the chin.

After receiving another flurry of blows to the face...

[Soundtrack: The Dead Zone Is Summoned Up (M816)Dragon Ball original series’ OST]

Enerjak walks away and begins to extract energy from the Master Emerald remotely, fires a Chaos Blast and apparently kills Tails. But after a long suspense-filled while, he suddenly comes out of the bottom of the crater left by the echidna and charges a Chaos attack of his own invention, something between the 「混沌槍」 [“Konton Yari”, “Chaos Spear”] and the Chaos Blast, powerful but accurate and far less exhausting than the latter. Enerjak protects himself just as he had against Shadow’s last attack, and Tails fires the energy blast, but then the fox makes it turn around at the last minute and hit the demigod on the back.

Tails assures this attack, the 「混沌追尾波」 [“Konton Tsuibi-Ha”, “Chaos Homing Wave”], was just a warning shot, and the fight continues.

[Soundtrack: Powerful Enemy – Mega Man Battle Network 5 OST, remixed by “KokiRemix” (version 2)]

[Soundtrack: Boss Battle – Kirby's Return to Dream Land OST]

Enerjak’s increased power allows him to move faster and land more hits, but Tails also manages to recover more quickly from those hits and to counter-attack. En one of these counter-attacks, the “Devil Boy” launches a flurry of 「混沌針」 [“Konton Hari”, “Chaos Needles”]: he summons miniature Chaos Spears, stores them in his fingertips and claws instead of firing them, and then throws a flurry of blows with his fingers stretched out together, making Enerjak bleed profusely and piercing his golden armour, eyes, skin and muscles on his face and his entire torso’s front side; Tails completes the attack with another 「不可避公正な罰疾風」 [“Fukahi Kōseina Batsu Hayate”, “Inescapable Fair Punishment Windgust”], storing a Chaos Spear’s energy in each tail and using them to slice the demigod’s throat. Dealing so much direct damage to Enerjak is already quite a feat, even if the echidna has a very accelerated healing factor and is able to survive the throat-slicing.

At the end of this stage of the battle, they both start to look visibly tired but Tails had managed to stay on his feet the entire time.

[Soundtrack: Surge of Power – Mega Man Battle Network 6 OST, remixed by “KokiRemix” (version 2)]

[Soundtrack: DepartureMega Man Zero 2 OST, guitar cover by “MET”]

Once they both catch their breath, the battle resumes... with Tails throwing Enerjak into another wall. The demigod resorts to dirty fighting, throwing debris at the fox’s face and exploiting the distraction to fire lasers from the eyes; one of the shots breaks Tails’s knee and the other shot rebounds and breaks one of his tails; it’s also revealed that the “Devil Boy” form alone, with no Chaos Emeralds, still doesn’t grant Tails a healing factor as fast as Enerjak’s. The demigod lunges at a vulnerable Tails, and then the fox pulls out a sheathed katana that was strapped to his back, activates an aura that varies between two or three colours -signalling he’s drawing power from several emotions at the same time-, uses the samples of his own blood grafted onto the blade to infuse his katana with that energy, uses a battō-jutsu technique to quickly unsheathe & attack, and the katana cutting the air unleashes a wide slashing gust of wind and Chaos Energy that, when hitting Enerjak, cleanly cuts him in half vertically.

It takes Enerjak some time to put the two halves of his body back together. Then he starts to power up again, but it doesn’t seem to be the same process by which he had drawn energy from the Master Emerald, so he’s probably drawing it from elsewhere. Tails starts suspecting, as he uses his katana -sheathed again- as a walking stick and waits for at least one of his two injured limbs to become functional again. Then the echidna surrounds himself with an emerald green aura, concentrates his power in his fingers and begins to fire Chaos Spears from them. The “Devil Boy” barely manages to dodge the first Spear and responds by firing a Chaos Homing Wave, Enerjak repels it and shoots Spears from all his fingers at once, Tails dodges some shots but is forced to briefly summon a shield to deflect the others, another Spear of the echidna snatches the katana from Tails’s hands, the next Spear deflects and blows up half of one of the fox’s tails, another shot grazes his injured leg and disables it again, and Enerjak ends his attack by firing at the fox a 「混沌爆弾」 [“Konton Bakudan”, “Chaos Bomb”]: a sphere of pure Chaos Energy that destroys everything within a half kilometre radius.

Tails is saved by Knuckles, who has just recovered from his fight with Enerjak and uses his gliding ability to lift Tails up, lowering him again once the Chaos Bomb has exploded. As soon as Tails is safe on the ground, Knuckles collapses again. Enerjak has started to get tired again, but the “Devil Boy” is also struggling to move due to his two injuries on one leg, in addition to not being able to fly anymore due to the lack of part of one tail. The demigod once again draws energy from some unknown place, just like the previous time, and uses all of his power for another Chaos Blast, which Tails fails to dodge.

[Soundtrack: Ultimate Decision (M518)Dragon Ball original series’ OST]

The fox is lying in a deep crater, but still alive and conscious. He calls T-Pup -the robot dog he had used in the Tails Adventure adaptation- to pick him up and, when exiting the crater, shows he's just a little more injured than before, whereas Enerjak is exhausted again. Then Tails reveals everything he had discovered in all the time since Shadow started fighting Enerjak:

Sonic -or rather, his soul in the form of a hitodama- had been resisting the echidna demigod and sabotaging his efforts from within, stealing some of his power and damaging Enerjak's link with the Master Emerald; the gemstone had always been at least a bit sentient and seemed to be helping Sonic until the link between Enerjak and the Master Emerald eventually broke, though the echidna pretended to stay in control. 「御影先生」 [“O-Kage-Sensei”, “Master Shadow”] had deduced that (having also commented to Tails that nothing less could be expected of who had been the hero of the Resistance against Robotnik until a few months ago); the “Ultimate Lifeform” had been talking to Sonic throughout the entire battle against Enerjak, knowing the blue hedgehog was still there. That mysterious place from where Enerjak had been drawing energy the last two times during the fight against Tails was Sonic’s hitodama: the hedgehog couldn’t stop Enerjak from taking the energy out of him, but he did manage to keep resisting by injuring and wearing down the inside of Enerjak’s body each time the demigod made attacks powered by energy stolen from Sonic. The demigod is much weaker than he looks like, he has been for a long time, and this has just been proven by how little damage the last Chaos Blast has done to Tails.

The “Devil Boy” claims this is the moment when the battle will finally end and one of them will die, but then...

[Soundtrack: The Devil Itself (M1120A)Dragon Ball Z, Japanese OST]

Risking running out of power, Enerjak teleports to Knuckles's side; his move is successful, and then he firmly grabs the Guardian by his head, threatening to kill him. Tails stands still, and the demigod starts torturing the fox, using a Chaos Spear to amputate one of his arms and a second Chaos Spear to amputate his still-healthy leg. The fox is left lying on the ground, unable to attack, looking apathetic and crying silently, while Enerjak sentences that mortals are weak against him because they let their feelings dominate them and still retain their altruism, concern for others and compassion.

[Soundtrack: Demon Broly (M1522)Dragon Ball Z, Japanese OST]

Enerjak releases Knuckles, takes flight, claims victory, and dashes towards Tails to kill him off. But then Tails surprisingly yells at him, defiantly and with a fierce expression on his face, that he missed one arm. The fox generates an aura with all the colours of the spectrum -showing he’s using all his emotions at the same time to gain power-, gathers all his energies in his one hand and shoots a Chaos Homing Wave towards the ground, being launched straight at Enerjak. The demigod tries to protect himself, and Tails points his clenched fist at the villain’s chest as he asks for help from Sonic and the rest of his friends; then Tails’s multi-coloured aura becomes bigger and brighter, and Enerjak sees behind the “Devil Boy” a huge feral fox with white hair, red facial markings and blue eyes. Tails’s attack makes him pierce through Enerjak’s body, blasting a large hole in his chest.

Tails drops into the sea, satisfied that he saved the world, avenged Sonic and Bunnie, made Shadow and Rouge proud… and said “go f*** yourselves” to the Brotherhood of Guardians in the meantime.


Dimitri’s body, centuries-old and mutilated, is no longer able to host Enerjak’s essence, who starts slowly fading away. This allows the Dark Legion’s founder to regain his sanity and original personality, and then meditate a bit about what has just happened...

Both before and during the time Dimitri had been possessed by Enerjak, he was convinced that he was doing Mobius good with his actions, by supposedly fighting only against the ultra-conservative government of Echidnaopolis, the theocracy and, after being revived, the Brotherhood of Guardians; he also regretted most of the leaders of the Dark Legion have turned to world domination plans and infighting. Enerjak hadn’t actually “possessed” him in the strict sense of the word, but had influenced him so that his ideas started becoming more and more twisted and ended up being almost unrecognizable without Dimitri himself ever noticing.

Dimitri-Enerjak fought against a Tails unprepared but as determined as ever; a Super Sonic unimaginably enraged and quite capable of defeating him; a Super Mighty calm and quite different from the typical Adept to Chaos in their Super form; a Super Ray born out of Ray’s concern for Mighty and his willingness to even risk his own sanity; a Knuckles fed up with the Brotherhood of Guardians; a Shadow that had originally been created partly to be used as a living weapon, and lastly, a well-trained Tails who eventually defeated him once and for all. They all fought out of genuine heroism, willing to sacrifice their own lives, to save the world they love rather than to reign over it or to carry out any other hidden agenda; this surprised Dimitri and was truly eye-opening to him, as he used to think until then that self-proclaimed “heroes” always turn out to be self-righteous manipulative hypocrites like the rulers of Echidnaopolis and -more recently- the Brotherhood, or mere executioners of such people at best. To top it off, Enerjak had claimed feelings and altruism are what make mortals weak, and immediately after that, Tails defeated him with an immense power generated literally by his very feelings and desire to save his loved ones and the entire world.

In his final moments, Dimitri expresses his praise for Tails, and not only admits his defeat in the fight itself but also admits the fox was correct. Dimitri begs Tails to remain the same kind of person and hero that defeated Enerjak, stating that this way the fox won’t only have a fulfilling life but also defeat the Brotherhood of Guardians, avoiding making Dimitri’s mistakes and succeeding where the old echidna had failed.

Immediately afterwards, when Enerjak’s influence is completely gone from Dimitri’s body, he begins to writhe and finally explodes.


編:最後の戦い:結局のところ、神性の本当の意味は何ですか?

Hen: Saigo no Tatakai: kekkyoku no tokoro, Shinsei no Hontō no Imi wa nani desu ka?

Saga: The Ultimate Battle: after all, what even is the True Meaning of Divinity?

[Opening theme for this saga: “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis”, the opening theme for the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series (either the original Japanese version by Yōko Takahashi et al., the Italian cover by “ohitsjuno”, the French TV-size cover by “AMVF Studio”, the German TV-size cover by “LadyofChocolate”, or the Italian cover by “Midelle Channel”)]

[Ending theme for this saga: “Fly Me to the Moon” by Bart Howard (cover for the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series’ ending by Claire Littley)]

After Tails’s final battle against Enerjak, Mammoth Mogul captures the maimed fox while he’s still passed out and worn out. Mogul initially lets the young Freedom Fighter’s Chaos powers slowly regenerate his lost limbs, but then the mage temporarily extracts the two-tailed fox’s hitodama and combines the energy emanated by it with his own powers to create a clone of Tails, made of pure energy and with the same memories and personality as the original, then leaving Tails’s friends to find this clone at the site of the battle against Enerjak.

When this Tails awakens in Knothole and is reunited with the other Freedom Fighters, he kneels before Sally and declares to have finally avenged their friends; Sally just hugs him and silently cries, as the rest of the team join them; Fiona is the first to hug Tails and the former princess: she had become one of Bunnie’s best friends along with Sally herself, had developed genuine admiration for Sonic as a hero and teammate, and was surprisingly more scarred than almost everyone else (except Sally, of course) by Tails’s apparent death, indirectly the fault of the Brotherhood’s plots. Shadow promises the Freedom Fighters to do his best to be a worthy replacement for Sonic, making sure that Tails at least lives the rest of his adolescence in relative peace and doesn’t ever need to fight directly or be the new Hero of Mobius again; since the “Ultimate Lifeform” still has his job at GUN, Mighty agrees to help him, learning to use his Chaos powers in the meantime.

For a few days, Mogul’s ruse seems to work, so the sorcerer continues with the true plan that he had had all this time: to extract the Chaos power from the real Tails once he was vulnerable, in order to become omnipotent.


It’s been a week. The Knothole Freedom Fighters keep a physically healed but still vegetative Bunnie in stasis and are making arrangements for Sonic’s funeral. They have yet to decide how they’ll get on without the blue hedgehog; however, the team decides to just save that for later, say goodbye to their hero, field leader and friend, and thank that at least Tails came out of this whole debacle alive.

The night before the funeral, Sally dreams of Sonic and Bunnie trying to warn her about something. During the day, just before the event, the former princess is writing her speech when she hears Sonic and Bunnie arguing as if they were right there, in the same room as Sally, on the same plane of existence; then she looks in the mirror… and she sees her dead boyfriend and her comatose best friend, but they’re both totally fine and are each standing on either side of her [and in a deleted scene, Sonic is twerking]. Of course, Sally reacts as any rational person would: throwing her chair to the mirror and yelling insults so loud she scares the birds away.

When everyone gathers in Knothole’s central square to listen to Sally, Knuckles notices something is off about the life signal he’s receiving from the former princess: it feels like there’s someone else in the same place as her.

Then someone suddenly shows up there: a grey-haired adult Mobian fox dressed in a hooded robe, calling himself “Merlin” and claiming to be a mage working for Aurora, an Echidna woman who had ascended to a higher plane of existence and would later begin to be worshipped as the deity of Echidnaopolis’s religion. According to Merlin, Sonic’s and Bunnie’s hitodamas were left wandering Mobius until they ended up in Sally’s body, presenting themselves in her mind; when Sally tries to bring Bunnie out of the vegetative state by letting the cyborg rabbit’s hitodama return to her original body, she manages to do so simply by holding Bunnie’s hand; on the other hand, Sonic’s original body had been destroyed by Enerjak, so his hitodama has to stay in Sally’s body for the time being.

Sally: [deadpan] *sigh* “Great…”

Sonic: “Don’t worry, Sally, I’ll make sure to at least make you have some fun until I get my body back.”


Deleted scene:

They finally bring Sally a new, bigger mirror so she can see what’s going on with Sonic. Sally’s reaction to looking in the mirror is just a facepalm: based on what she’s seeing, Sonic is twerking again but in front of Shadow.


As Merlin explains what’s happening, Tails has a feeling about the old sorcerer fox, who also seems vaguely familiar to Leónidas. However, whenever either of the two tries to talk to Merlin, there's conveniently a reason why the old mage can't attend to them at the moment.

Sonic asks Sally from inside his mind to bring Bunnie over to speak to her privately. Once Bunnie and Sally (plus Sonic) are gathered, the cyborg -deducing Sonic had organized this meeting- tells Sally what they were trying to tell her in her dreams: something is wrong with Tails, he might not actually be who he seems to be, even though his mind is Tails’s and he’s not trying to hide anything; Bunnie and Sonic had noticed it a couple of days after the final battle against Enerjak, while they were both still in their hitodama form.

Sonic also proposes an “experiment” to Sally: trying to use the Chaos matter within the chipmunk (even if it’s not enough to make her an Adept to Chaos) to give her a power-up. Sonic would supervise this test: he has some experience -albeit rather intuitive- in the use of Chaos Energy, and being in Sally’s mind, he can watch her progress from a vantage point. Sally is no stranger to using these “higher power states”: she and Sonic had achieved something similar by using the Deep Power Stones to destroy the super-weapon “Doomsday” and put an end to the war against Robotnik.


Two weeks later, during a mission to disrupt one of Snively’s operations, Tails fails to activate the “Mashōnen” form at all. Sally ends up saving Tails from a Super-Badnik, though not by picking up Tails and running away, but by cutting off the robot’s arms with two naginatas, throwing herself at the monstrous machine and driving both naginatas deep into the machine’s visor. Sally herself, along with her weapons, are surrounded by an orange-yellow aura similar to fire: her training with Sonic’s help is beginning to pay off, although seeing Tails vulnerable and in danger was probably what prompted the chipmunk to activate her latent Chaos powers for the first time, and using those Chaos powers is still tremendously exhausting and even gradually damages Sally’s body due to her not being an Adept to Chaos.

Tails having been unable to use his powers worries Merlin, who then checks Tails’s mind and confirms the suspicions Sonic and Bunnie had: this is not the real Tails, it’s a being made of pure energy and created by magic. The fox also has a sudden vision of a cave where someone is suffering horribly but stubbornly refuses to ask for help. His description of the cave leads Nicole to identify it as a location in one of the many islands in Southeast Yurashia, not far from the region where the human city-state of Adabat is located; Angel Island was floating above that same area when Tails defeated Enerjak and probably was later replaced by a clone, that clone being the Tails found by his friends and brought back to Knothole.

Sally (with Sonic), Bunnie, Athair and the clone Tails go to that cave, where they find the real Tails trapped in a magic bubble: his body is fully regenerated just like his clone's, but he’s also really weak and looks like he's slowly dying. Then Mogul appears before them and reveals his plans, thinking those plans have already progressed enough to be unstoppable. An irate Sally -along with Sonic from inside her mind- activates her powers again, ignoring any possible self-harm, surrounding herself with a red aura this time; Bunnie immediately joins the battle; Merlin hesitates for a short while, but Bunnie prompts him to intervene.

With the energy stolen from Tails, Mogul manages to keep everyone at bay, even though Sally surprisingly manages to quickly recover from her self-inflicted damage and fight again. The mammoth sorcerer, with the help of the fact that he’s technically the clone Tails’s creator, starts manipulating the existential crisis the fox boy is having and was trying to hide from his teammates. On the other hand, Sally lets Sonic take control of her body so that he can speak to the fox directly: the hedgehog encourages him to be his own person, to ignore Mogul, to rebel against his creator. Then the clone Tails regains his ability to use his Chaos powers, and having already had the necessary knowledge beforehand, he goes “Mashōnen” as easily as the original Tails did; however, since the clone Tails is made of energy, his own “Mashōnen” form is much more powerful and he overwhelmingly defeats Mogul, leaving the sorcerer badly injured and temporarily incapacitated.

Mogul escapes by teleporting; the real Tails is freed from his prison and his link with Mogul is broken, so the mammoth can no longer steal energy from him. But the clone suddenly feels really weak and soon after his body begins to fade. Sally (along with Sonic through her) tries to stop him from leaving, despite Merlin and the fox boy himself reminding her the real Tails is alive and well; the clone Tails also claims to be able to see Sonic as someone with a body of his own standing next to Sally, which is actually a sign that he’s about to die. The clone thanks them: not only did they keep accepting, respecting, caring and loving him as much as the real Tails until the end despite all the revelations about him, but they also convinced him to recognize himself as another person, which officially confirmed him as someone with a soul of his own and gave him the access he lacked to his Chaos powers. When the clone Tails only has a few seconds left, he whispers something to Sonic’s spirit only: he’s in love with Fiona, the real Tails feels the same, and the clone begs the blue hedgehog to take care of the red vixen, to let Tails find the best way to deal with those feelings on his own, and to allow her and Tails build a healthy relationship, no matter if it ultimately becomes a romance or remains something platonic or strictly a friendship.

Once the clone has completely vanished, the real Tails wakes up. Sonic is glad his “little brother” is still alive, but still remains a little disturbed by the disappearance of Tails’s clone: he had proven to be a person too, aware of himself and with feelings of his own.


Mogul’s defeat against the Freedom Fighters and one of his own creations turns out to be merely a minor setback in the progress of the wizard’s plans: he manages to become a Super form of his own, “Master Mogul”, and combining the typical Chaos powers with his magic, he seizes the Chaos Emeralds with a mere snap of the fingers; Knuckles attempts to turn off the Chaos Emeralds by using the Master Emerald and Tikal’s Prayer again, but for some reason, this no longer has any effect. Mogul is about to become fully omnipotent; the mammoth teleports near Knothole and challenges any Adept to Chaos among the Freedom Fighters to fight him, threatening to destroy the village and the entire forest.

The Brotherhood of Guardians tries to make Tails and his friends follow their directions, including a possible interpretation of the prophecies about the Chosen One: Tails would have to merge with his counterparts in each of the infinite parallel universes. However, the fox boy, the entire Resistance and their other allies no longer trust them at all; Merlin shares that feeling too.

Then Sonic (speaking through Sally) recalls the battle he and Tails had fought against Perfect Chaos: both of them had managed to go Super by recharging the Chaos Emeralds shortly after Chaos had depleted them, and this, in turn, had been possible thanks to the encouragement of his friends and all the people of Station Square, which is estimated at around one or two million people. The blue hedgehog wonders what would happen if all the people on the planet did the same as the population of Station Square back then, but the Chaos energy generated by them went straight to an Adept to Chaos or a group of them instead of charging the Emeralds. Merlin responds to this that Sonic may have found out what being a god truly means: many people, both Humans and Mobians, throughout the planet’s history had made meditations on this subject, sometimes in the context of studying an already existing religion of which each was a follower, and had been considering the possibility that a single omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient superior being could exist as an expression of the collective spirit, conscience and will of all simple mortals, something abstract and more similar to an idea with its own physical form, something that doesn’t have specific identifiable traits but at the same time has all the traits of all living beings; something very different from a more powerful being that has particular physical and mental traits, comes from a different plane of existence, dimension or universe, lives since before everyone else and everything else, has created the universe with its inhabitants, watches their evolution and presents themself to people as a deity.

[Soundtrack: A Sigh of Hope (M1020)Dragon Ball Z, Japanese OST]

The impromptu ritual would require several people with any kind of sensitivity to Chaos Energy to begin acting as living Chaos Emeralds, receiving and channelling the thoughts of the world’s population and turning them into power. Through an inspiring speech, Sally (with some input from Sonic, which turns out to be surprisingly helpful) calls upon all the people of Mobius to repeat on a global scale what the inhabitants of Station Square had done to help Sonic in the battle against Perfect Chaos.

[Soundtrack: The Birth of a God (Track 30)Dragon Ball Super OST, Volume 1, Disc 1]

Then Tails, Sally (plus Sonic), Bunnie and Merlin return to Knothole and pick up Knuckles, Athair, Shadow, Mighty and Ray along the way for help. Sally, Knuckles, Shadow, Mighty and Ray each rest a hand on Tails’s shoulders and arms, Bunnie does it too just in case, Merlin and Athair monitor the progress of the ritual and give instructions from outside, Sonic’s hitodama passes from Sally’s body to Tails’s, and someone else unexpectedly joins in their hitodama form: they don’t identify themself, but the Mobians participating in the ritual deduce it’s Tails’s clone created by Mogul.

Eventually, the ritual succeeds: the 混沌の達人神 [“Konton no Tatsujin-Shin”; “Chaos-Adept God”] is born.

Tails, covered in crimson red light, slowly ascends into the air, and when that layer of light is shed, it reveals the fox boy has hardly gotten more muscular and his body has hardly changed in any other way, except that he now has nine tails a little shorter than the two he usually has, his black fur parts are bright orange-red, his fur on the chest, shoulders and upper back is fluffier and forms a collar like the faux fur lining in a coat, his eyes’ iris is bright crimson red but the eyes’ shape remains the same as usual otherwise. He’s a bit reluctant to use these new powers or accept them as his own because he only managed to obtain them with others’ help, and he seems to be mentally and emotionally more balanced than in his base form, but other than that, he’s still the same old Tails.

The fox boy introduces himself to Master Mogul rather modestly. The ultra-powerful sorcerer is puzzled by this: he had hoped the Chosen One would show up with more flair, or at least to be enraged because Mogul had mortally attacked him in Station Square and most recently caused Enerjak’s return and everything related to it, including the murders of two members of the fox’s adoptive family. Mogul also disparages Tails’s so-called “godly” powers, specifically because of their origin.

Shortly after, when Tails begins to beat him up, the sorcerer regrets having said that.

[Soundtrack: Final BossSpark the Electric Jester 1 OST]

Mogul manages to defend himself and counterattack, but the Chaos Adept God knows all the combat techniques, both with weapons and without weapons, existing in Mobius; Tails has even taken machine scraps to create a weapon of his own: a double spear/staff with a double-edged, rhombic-shaped blade/arrowhead at each end, with samples of his own blood grafted onto those blades just like on the katana he had used when fighting Enerjak [like the staff used by both Super Spark and Super Fark in Spark the Electric Jester 1]. The battle between Tails and Mogul begins to be fought in places all around the world, in the middle of cities, in the air, even underwater; however, not very long after the battle begins, when they’re both in a wide cavern carved out by an underground river, Tails’s God form apparently turns off, although the fox doesn’t realize it and even manages to keep the mammoth at bay.

Later, the battle is taken to outer space, just above Mobius’s atmosphere. Mogul points out to Tails he’s no longer in his God form; the sorcerer praises Tails for continuing to have access to that power, this being a sign the two-tailed fox is indeed the much prophesied Chosen One, but he also mocks Tails for having believed not only that the thoughts of the world’s inhabitants would be enough to win, but also that the people wouldn’t abandon him or stop willingly giving him power in the middle of the fight. Then Mogul summons a Chaos attack similar to Enerjak’s Chaos Bomb, but in reverse: a hollow sphere of destructive energy forms around Mobius, slowly shrinking and getting closer and closer to destroying all life on the surface. Tails goes “Mashōnen”, uses again the power of all its “modes” at once and tries to form a shield around the planet, but this “world shield” breaks at multiple points and the fox faints, falling back to the surface followed by the inescapable, decimating energy blast.

But when Mogul’s final attack is about to touch the atmosphere and ignite it...

[Soundtrack: Ultimate Final BossSpark the Electric Jester 1 OST]

Tails becomes an Adept God again, shatters the radiation prison, pulls it away from Mobius and inverts it, causing it instead to enclose Mogul himself and begin to shrink around him. Tails proclaims that the inhabitants of Mobius and the entire universe will no longer allow mere individuals with too much power to pose as deities, demand reverence from others or exterminate their dissenters; that people no longer need deities or fear or guidance from any higher being in order to grow; that mere mortals will have as their own god the collective soul of all living beings, and every time they ask him, he will carry out their designs, as the giftee of their power but especially as a Freedom Fighter who loves the world and has sworn to defend and protect that world and its inhabitants from day one.

[Soundtrack: ShenLong is Summoned (M1002)Dragon Ball Z, Japanese OST]

The spherical energy prison finishes closing around Mogul: His body is atomized, with no possibility of regeneration; the seven Chaos Emeralds are totally disintegrated; as the energy sphere becomes a single point, all that is left in place is Mogul’s hitodama, white and intensely luminous on the outside but totally hollow on the inside. Tails grabs the hitodama and smashes it, shattering it like glass and causing the very being of Mogul to be erased from existence.

The fox’s body writhes until nine objects come out of it: a new set of seven Chaos Emeralds, Sonic’s hitodama and the clone Tails’s hitodama. The latter simply flies away, while the blue hedgehog’s spirit gets surrounded by the Emeralds; Tails uses all the power of both himself and the gems to create Sonic’s body around his hitodama. Once this is done, an exhausted Tails returns to his base form, loses consciousness and free-falls to the surface, but Sonic briefly goes Super, picks up Tails and gently lands on Mobius taking his adoptive brother and the new Emeralds with him. During the descent, Sonic congratulates Tails, states “It's all over” and assures him he will no longer have anything to worry about.


After this succession of battles and Sonic’s miraculous return to life, of course the festivities are long and on a large scale. The blue hedgehog decides to take this chance to live his life to the fullest, enjoying as much as possible the company of his friends, his family, Sally… and Shadow.


Deleted scene:

[Soundtrack: U Got That - “Halogen”, remix by “Produced By Melv”]

Tails: [to Sonic, trying to look deadpan but laughing out loud internally]O-Kage-Sensei is not interested in you, 兄貴 [“Aniki”, “big brother”]. Stop twerking in front of his face and get off the table, you 馬鹿 [“baka”, “dolt”].”

Sonic: [speaking from somewhere else, in a voice suspiciously similar to Zarbon’s on the "DevilArtemis” videos] “Oh, my~ OOOOOHHHHH!!!!!

Sally: [facepalms]


On the other hand, in a more private conversation between the Knothole Freedom Fighters, Knuckles, Shadow, a few other allies closest to the team, and Merlin, Tails claims he didn’t actually attain divinity: he has barely scratched the surface, the only being capable of truly becoming a god would be a uniform amalgam of the minds and souls of all the people of the universe -with the implicit danger of taking everyone’s individuality away, therefore it’s discarded-, and he had only received that power as a gift and for him to use against a threat to Mobius.

Later, Tails meets with Merlin alone and reveals that thanks to Leónidas, he has already learnt his true identity: Merlin Prower, Amadeus Prower’s younger brother, Tails’s uncle. A rather indignant Tails asks Merlin why he didn’t use his huge magic power to stop Robotnik in the first place or to save Amadeus & Rosemary or at least to instruct his nephew on his Chaos powers and how to handle them properly. Merlin mentions rules including non-intervention in “earthly” affairs, rules he must abide by at all costs no matter how much it hurts, because noblesse oblige: he has access to a higher plane of existence -the one Aurora had accessed before- and abilities related to it. Tails accuses him of doing the same things Mammoth Mogul and the Brotherhood of Guardians tried to do: let those they judge “inferior” or “unimportant” suffer, command them just because they’re in an allegedly “higher” position. Merlin replies these rules’ purpose is the complete opposite: not to pose as gods, not to do the same as Mogul and/or the Brotherhood do. Tails finally orders him to tell Aurora that, if she’s not careful, he’s fully willing to use the godly power bestowed by the people of Mobius to make her and her followers end up just like Mogul.

When Tails is about to leave, his uncle reveals his parents are alive and well, albeit lost in space. The fox boy simply asks him to keep an eye on them and make sure they’re still safe: he’s interested in meeting them one day, he was told they were great role models, but because he was separated from them when he was a newborn, he never really developed a bond strong enough to actually miss them or have dreams about them or desperately want to be reunited with them, whereas Sonic, Sally and the other Freedom Fighters are the only family he truly ever met; honestly, Tails is in no rush to meet his parents and is more interested in other things.

The saga ends with Tails and Fiona working together on one of their science projects in Knothole’s workshop until late at night.

[Ending theme for this group of sagas: “Romantikku Ageru Yo”, the ending theme of the original Dragon Ball TV series (either the original Japanese version by Ushio Hashimoto et al. or the English TV-size cover for the Funimation dub by Daphne Gere et al.)]


[Group photo for the closure of the group of sagas: Tails is at the centre in the middle row, in his Chaos-Adept God form, dressed in the outfit he used in his final battle against Enerjak, wearing the Rhythm Badge (from Sonic Adventure 1), smiling broadly with his eyes closed, and making a V with his hand; Fiona is on the left in the middle row, wearing Tha Shades and the electric jester hat invented for the Sonic After the Sequel adaptation, with her back to Tails but very close to his side and making the “ah ha ha” gesture Cell usually does in the “DevilArtemis” videos; Shadow is on the right in the middle row, looking serious as usual and wearing the Flame Ring (from Sonic Adventure 2); Sonic is at the centre in the top row, wearing the Crystal Ring (from Sonic Adventure 1), the Bounce Bracelet (from Sonic Adventure 2), and his own Flame Ring, intently looking at Shadow out of the corner of his eye; Sally is on the left in the top row, smiling confidently, with her arms folded and holding Nicole in her handheld form; Nicole’s holographic form is emerging from said handheld, in miniature, waving happily; Amy is on the right in the top row, leaning on the Long Hammer and wearing the Warrior Feather (both from Sonic Adventure 1); Knuckles is behind Sonic and Amy, angry, trying to look over them, resting his hands on their heads, trying to rise above them so he can appear in the photo, and wearing the Sunglasses, the Air Necklace (both from Sonic Adventure 2) and a pair of gloves that combine the Fighting Gloves (from Sonic Adventure 1), the Shovel Claws (from the entire Adventure saga) and the Hammer Gloves (from Sonic Adventure 2); Rouge is at the centre in the bottom row, carrying the Treasure Scope (from Sonic Adventure 2) and looking at Tails, who’s sitting on her shoulders; Mighty & Ray are on the left in the bottom row, both calmly wrapping their fists in white ribbons; Bunnie is on the right in the bottom row, with her hair very long and wavy, wearing a brown leather jacket and cowboy hat, striking a pose to show off her organic right arm’s muscles]


間奏。

Kansō.

Interlude.

Amy moves back to her native Mercia, after Sally has trained her for months not only to fight but also to lead a team of her own. Leónidas Proción also leaves the Knothole team to seek adventures around the world, help wherever they need it, and hopefully meet with the “Guardian Angel of the Resistance” again. Lara-Le finally abandons Locke and his comrades in the Brotherhood, joins her son Knuckles and Team Chaotix as a "diplomatic adviser" of sorts, and skillfully improves the relationship between the dingoes and those echidnas who have defected from the Dark Legion or renounced their allegiance to the Brotherhood.


[For a while, I planned not to include Tommy Turtle at all, but then I came up with this...]

Snively introduces a Mobian hitman & spy, Tommy Turtle, in Knothole: he pretends to be a humble villager, very contemplative (perhaps too much for a Freedom Fighter), a little clueless and with very few real skills, but apparently nice and loyal at the same time. Tommy gains the team’s trust and carries out a plan to send tons of info about the whole Resistance to Snively, and even murder Sonic if possible.

One day, he chats with Tails about technology to distract him while Bunnie, Fiona and Rotor fall into a trap that electrocutes them, and later he goes to kill Sonic in his sleep while the main team members are out of combat. However, this totally backfires: after Bunnie, Fiona and Rotor have miraculously survived, them falling into that trap triggers Tails’s wrath, and while the turtle is walking to Sonic’s room in the Freedom HQ, the two-tailed fox attacks him by surprise in the corridors and beats him brutally and savagely, breaking some of his ribs and even breaching his shell, before threatening the turtle to kill him unless he leaves the Freedom Fighters immediately.

Tails thinks Tommy did all that only because of an extreme degree of incompetence (although his own feelings for Fiona, along with Bunnie's very recent death and resurrection, may also have contributed to him reacting like this), but the turtle genuinely thinks the fox blew his cover, so he aborts his mission and leaves. Shortly after, in the Great Forest, he runs into the “Guardian Angel of the Resistance” and Antoine, who do know Tommy was an infiltrator the whole time; it’s revealed the turtle’s body carries some nanites that increase his physical attributes and heal his wounds at an amazing speed, but the two Resistance independent agents finally kill him anyway.


To be continued...