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scruffyplayssonic · 1 year ago

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Are the ArchieSonic comics actually an 80's/90's syndicated cartoon? Episode 53: Henchman joins heroes for one time only

Welcome back to my look at the ArchieSonic comic series, and how it shared a lot of the same story tropes as a typical ‘80s or ‘90s syndicated cartoon! In most cartoons the contrast between the heroes and the main villain is pretty black and white. Good is good, bad is bad, and never shall they be able to find common ground. But what about the lesser villains? The henchmen, the mooks, the hired help? Sometimes those guys are portrayed in shades of grey instead…

Episode 53: Henchman joins heroes for one time only

There could be any number of reasons a henchman might temporarily team up with the good guys. They could be a victim of memory loss or brainwashing, they might have had a disagreement with their boss that drove them into the arms of the heroes before they decide to go back to being a bad guy, they might need the heroes’ help to defeat an even bigger bad that’s usurped their boss, or they might join up with the heroes while claiming to have been reformed but secretly planning to stab them in the back.

So what about in ArchieSonic? The best example we have here is a scheming little weasel of a man (not literally) named Colin Kintobor Jr, but who is better known as Snively Robotnik.

Hoo boy, now here’s a guy whose loyalties seemed to change at the drop of a hat in ArchieSonic. Let’s take a look at this guy’s history, shall we?

During the Great War Snively came to Mobotropolis to join his Uncle Julian, supposedly in service of King Acorn. But they were actually plotting a coup and successfully took over the Kingdom, exiling the King to the Zone of Silence and transforming most of the populace into robotic slaves.

Snively remained in the service of the newly rechristened Dr. Robotnik afterwards as his right hand man, although that role was often seen being fulfilled by the badnik Crabmeat in the early issues before Snively was introduced (and sometimes even afterwards). As the years went by Snively started to become more disillusioned and less trusting of his uncle, as Robotnik suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of the Freedom Fighters and started growing more abusive towards Snively. Snively longed to take control of Robotnik’s empire and prove that he could do better, and took full opportunity to try and do so in Sonic #30 when Robotnik was accidentally trapped in another dimension called the Void.

Robotnik soon returned though and the status quo returned to normal (aside from Uncle Chuck having regained his free will and joined forces with the Freedom Fighters). Snively started scheming about how to once again remove his uncle from power and was finally given the chance in Sonic #50 when Robotnik tried to use his superweapon, the Ultimate Annihilator.

The device was programmed to erase Knothole Village from existence, but Snively sabotaged it so that it instead fired on Robotnik himself. Snively didn’t have long to enjoy his self-promotion to CEO of All Things Evil though, as he was captured just a few days later when the Freedom Fighters came a-knocking at the front door.

Snively was imprisoned in the Devil’s Gulag, which led to the stuff I mentioned in one of the recent previous episodes. First there was the mysteriously engineered prison breakout, after which the other escapees put Snively in charge as they believed he was one who had freed them. Following that came the kidnapping of Nate Morgan, and Snively’s supposed death from a giant squid explosion when Nate’s rescue team barged in to save the day. However what actually happened was that at the last possible second he was teleported away and ended up in the clutches of none other than his supposed murder victim.

Maybe he would have been better off with the squid.

So, here’s the bit where I get to the topic of the day. In Sonic #73 the Freedom Fighters finally figured out someone was using a series of satellites to wreak havoc on the planet - causing meteor showers, earthquakes, prison breaks, the re-enslavement of all the formerly freed Robians, fun stuff like that - and went into orbit to investigate. This led to them discovering that the satellites had now combined to form a large space station, run by none other than the very much not-dead Dr. Robotnik. Except surprise, it was a trick!

After taking an accidental acid bath and melting off his fake skin, the big bad revealed himself to actually be Robo-Robotnik, the alternate dimensional counterpart of Robotnik who had tried to rule over all of reality with the Giant Borg. The Freedom Fighters were captured in an electric prison forcefield, but to their surprise Snively released them.

He explained that he needed their help to escape, as Robo-Robotnik intended to roboticise him too. The Freedom Fighters weren’t exactly keen on teaming up with Snively, but they let him escape with them before blowing Robotnik’s space station up and heading back to the surface. Once back on the ground, Snively pointed out that their plan to evacuate back to Knothole Village was doomed to failure, as Robo-Robotnik would have escaped the explosion by downloading his memory into a new body back in Robotropolis (giving birth to his modern Eggman design) and would have a file telling him Knothole’s exact location.

In exchange for keeping him safe from Robotnik’s shadowbots, Snively reluctantly agreed to join Sally and Sonic to sabotage Robotnik’s database and infect him with a virus (literally).

After that Snively disappeared for awhile, going out on his own and not reappearing until after the Sonic Adventure arc. Robotnik’s army recaptured Snively in Sonic #94, and he agreed to go back to working for Robotnik when he was offered the chance to deal with his previously unmentioned daddy issues.

Having gotten that out of his system - and again, I mean that literally, as Snively willingly let himself be robotocised until the Bem intervened and deroboticised him - Snively stayed in his uncle’s employ until the Xorda invasion of the planet in Sonic #124, during which he mysteriously vanished. For awhile it was believed that Snively had been roboticised again, but this turned out to just be a duplicate that Eggman built for… some reason?

He got bored of it pretty quickly though and had the “Silver Snively” project scrapped. The real Snively resurfaced in Sonic #152 though, when Sonic and his “Angels” (ew) were investigating a city made of nanites that had popped up overnight and was rapidly spreading across the land.

Snively had developed some EMP detonators to halt the nanites, and after he explained himself to Sonic he worked with them to try and end the threat. Surprisingly, after this incident he actually joined the Knothole “Brain Trust” and continued his work on nanite experiments with them for a time.

But he soon wondered what he was doing there and felt that it really didn’t suit him that well. So it was no surprise that when Eggman came sniffing around Knothole and offered Snively his old job back that he accepted the offer.

But what was surprising was that this opportunistic, back-stabbing, power-hungry little man actually did have a moment of hesitation, because he was concerned for the well-being of his “step”sister Hope, who had been living in Knothole as a refugee ever since Eggman had roboticised her father and grandmother.

Snively actually caring about anyone other than himself was something that hadn’t really been seen in the series before, but here he was trying to convince her to leave Knothole so that she didn’t get wiped out with everyone else when Eggman attacked, although of course he didn’t tell her that was the reason. After ensuring Hope’s survival Snively returned to the Eggman Empire, and this time he got a spiffy new uniform to go along with his new position.

Snively stayed on the side of evil all the way through the rest of the pre-reboot era of the series, and ended up paying the price for that when he tried to break from the Eggman Empire and begin his own evil regime.

Following the reboot Snively eventually showed up again, now sporting a beard (possibly to prove he could at least grow hair on his face? LOL) and working as a scientist for GUN.

Commander Tower was rightfully suspicious of his motives, as Snively and Eggman had both previously worked for GUN as a step to creating the Eggman Empire and overthrowing King Acorn while trying to prevoke a war between the Kingdom of Acorn and the United Federation. In this timeline Snively left Dr. Eggman’s service much earlier than in pre-reboot. In fact, he returned to GUN right after the events of Sonic and Knuckles, claiming he’d been forced into working for Eggman and that he had in fact been spying on him the entire time and looking for an opportunity to escape.

Commander Tower let him come back to work for them, expecting that he was planning something shifty and that he would try to stab them in the back, but hoping to catch him in the act. Sure enough, Snively did have some sort of evil plan in the works.

Unfortunately the series was cancelled before we got to see exactly what he had cooking.

I would also like to give a brief shoutout to Bean and Bark for this segment. It’s true that they weren’t part of the Eggman Empire, but they did take on jobs for Eggy as mercenaries for hire - in fact, they were working for him for almost the entirety of the post-reboot series. But there were a couple of times where they briefly joined forces with the heroes too. In Sonic #187 Mammoth Mogul put out a bounty on Sonic, and pretty much every scruffy ne'er do well Sonic had ever fought joined forces to try and take him out.

During this battle Sally offered Bean and Bark double whatever they were being paid to take out Sonic if they helped her fight back against the other mercenaries instead. They quickly agreed and started attacking their former allies, but when the mercs managed to capture Sonic Bean and Bark decided to cut their losses and quickly switched sides again, figuring they might as well get paid by someone. Bean and Bark later also briefly joined forces with Blaze, Marine, Amy and Cream in the Sol dimension to take on the dreaded Captain Metal. Having been sent to the Sol dimension during the second Genesis wave that came with the comics’ reboot, Bean and Bark had initially joined forces with Captain Metal.

But after they stole Captain Metal’s Sol Emerald they came into conflict with both his pirate crew and that of Captain Whisker, and so they ended up working with Blaze’s team against their common enemies.

Are there any other instances of henchmen briefly joining forces with the good guys in ArchieSonic that I missed? Let me know in the comments! Next time I’ll be looking at - what is it again? Let me see here… “Random child rescues hero. The episode’s all about him now.” Hmmm, that’s another tricky one. I’ll have to think hard on that one and see what I can come up with.

#archiesonic syndicated

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unlackeyed · 3 years ago

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For new followers: Snively’s entire backstory explained, so it’s as compatible with games canon as possible! \o

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THE PROFILE:

Snively, born Colin Kintobor, Jr, is a prominent antagonist-turned-antihero in the Sonic the Hedgehog SatAM and Pre-Wave Archie Sonic Comics franchises. I write him as a canon-divergent portrayal that mingles cartoon, comic, and games canon, a morally gray character who joined and remained on the side of the Freedom Fighters (or, in games canon, the Resistance/ Restoration). He is a computer and mechanical engineering genius and a logistical whiz kid, but perilously bad at things like being extraverted and social, or a charismatic leader.

Bottom line: He’s a human, an ex-aristocrat, and an ex-evil geek.

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THE PAST:

Snively is the only son of a prominent magistrate in the human government of earth circa 2200: an earth that had become an apocalyptic wasteland far past sparing from an oncoming mass-extinction event. His mother died in his childbirth, earning him undeserved contempt from his father, Colin Sr., and sending him on a trajectory to become a social outcast and apprentice to Colin’s unconventional younger brother, scientist Julian Kintobor.

Colin Sr. and Julian were forever at odds; Julian’s intelligence rendered him the favored son, despite his repeated illegal experiments on citizens using proto-roboticization technology, allegedly intended to help the elderly and disabled cope better with earth’s toxic environment. By the time Snively was an adolescent, Colin Sr. machinated Julian’s exile, by sending him on a hopeless mission into space with a team of unconventional scientists, to locate a habitable planet elsewhere in the galaxy. Julian–Snively’s sole advocate in the family, who was truly grooming him to be a loyal lackey–courted his nephew to join him in his exile. Snively went willingly.

Julian schemed to overthrow the space station for his own ends. His coup, and the larger mission, failed, and he and Snively were the sole mission survivors, who escaped before the station and all other ships exploded. However, when they returned to earth, calculations remiss, they discovered that they had traveled through time to an earth of the 3200s, now called “Mobius.“ Mobius, they learned, was populated by intelligent bipedal animals called "Mobians." The only humans remaining, called "Overlanders” by the Mobians, were governed by a sinister organization known as “G.U.N.” Unbekownst (as of yet) to them, their own relatives, a Dr. Gerald and Maria Robotnik had once been members, before tragedy befell Maria.

Julian and Snively shortly found themselves at the mercy of King Maxmillian Acorn, father of Sally Acorn, who took mercy on them and used Julian’s inside knowledge of the Overlands to win the ongoing war with the Overlanders. The king knighted Julian and nominated him the new Minister of Science, only to be thanked with a coup, the roboticization of 90% of the population of Mobius (including Sonic’s uncle, Sir Charles “Chuck” Hedgehog), and the king’s exile to an empty dimensional pocket called “The Void” (Sonic SatAM canon). Snively, ambivalent but cowardly and without options, assisted Julian in his coup.

Not a month passed before Snively realized he had been duped and betrayed by his uncle, who renamed himself Ivo Robotnik. Though granted the title of Second-in-Command of Robotropolis, and soon feared by the robot “Badniks” and remaining Mobians for his own far more diligent style of terror, Snively realized he was little more than the lackey Robotnik had always planned him to become. He suffered the brunt of Robotnik’s legendary temper and deranged egomania more than once, both physically and psychologically. He was made to shave his head (his hair had been first lost in a freak encounter with Sonic, but the act of keeping it buzzed short soon became a way to keep him ridiculed and submissive), wear a uniform with Robotnik’s military insignia, and keep 24-hour surveillance of the “Robotropolis” mainframe system. Within years, Snively was a passive slave to his uncle, though by the time he was nearing thirty, that complacency turned into resentment: and resentment into hatred. And hatred into something that was less and less whiny and passive-aggressive. And at last, into revenge.

Snively bided his time and stepped out of the way on Doomsday (referred to, alternately, in Archie comics pre-wave canon, as the “Endgame,”) when Sonic and Sally used the legendary Power Stones to send Robotnik to the Void alongside Robotnik’s former ally, the sorcerer Ixis Naugus. Briefly, drunk on his sudden newfound power, Snively tried to run Robotropolis himself, but was quickly defeated, accidentally freeing Robotnik, Naugus, and the long-exiled King Acorn, instead. Naugus, a force to be reckoned with, became Robotnik’s master, and cast Snively out of Robotropolis. From there, Snively wandered the Great Forest and threw himself at Princess Sally’s mercy.

Surprisingly, despite having a sardonic and abrasive personality, he soon proved himself an excellent double-agent, strategist, and tech wizard, frequently collaborating with Chuck and Rotor.

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THE PRESENT:

Naugus was defeated, but during the final battle, the Void was again opened, and Snively was one of its victims. He was transported to a parallel dimension, in which some of his old frienemies exist, and some don't. G.U.N. remains, there is a version of the Freedom Fighters called “The Resistance,” and of course, Sonic remains.

Snively meets the Sonic of this universe: just as blue, brash, and heroic. He learns that the Robotnik of this universe has rechristened himself “Dr. Eggman." Back to square one, but Snively is good at surviving.

Snively travels to do IT and mechanical engineering work for several resistance cells of Mobians, including Team Dark, Team Rose, Team Chaotix, Team Sonic, and The Resistance (all games canon). He goes by the name of Snively Kintobor, but occasionally finds himself called by his long forgotten birthname (Colin) due to the unremitting kindness of his new friends.

He feels guilty, because many of these friends don’t know the terrible things he did to them in a parallel life and universe. It’s hard to forgive himself, he’s finding, and permit himself to break his own patterns of caution, self-isolation, and loneliness. Twice now he’s been torn from the home he knows and forced to begin again. Will it turn out better this time?

Frankly, he’ll do anything anyone asks if it means getting a crack at giving Uncle Eggman his just-desserts.

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This is the continuity of my mainverse and all duplicate verses unless otherwise specified <3 This blog is AU. This blog DOES NOT contain the Archie plot arc that leads to Snively’s romance with Regina Ferrum or his defeat and incarceration by Dr. Eggman.

I use SatAM screenshots and a faceclaim (Freddy Carter) interchangeably.

#reference #ooc #Snively Robotnik #Sonic the Hedgehog #long post cw #Sonic SatAM #Archie Sonic #Colin Kintobor jr #Snively Kintobor

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