#I know i'm posting this the same day as my Sonic advance write up but I finished that one yesterday I didn't play sonic today I swear

[runimanio]

2024 Game Clear #28 Sonic Forces Overclocked

I bought Sonic Forces on PC during the sale purely because I wanted to check out this mod and man, this is such an impressive mod. Basically a full overhaul of Forces with an original story that serves as a bit of an epilogue to the original game. Cutscene are told out through comics panel and a pretty solid voice cast!

I do have minor grip is that while boosting with sonic it's sometimes hard for me to see what exactly going on with all the camera panning up and down on slops and sharp 90 turns, idk but these stages are such an improving from base Forces, They're actual levels! With actual set pieces! not just straight lines that last for 40 seconds.

Lastly uh I made an avatar not thinking about the fact the 2D cutscene would obviously just use the default avatar so I'll just force everyone else to look at her. Let's name her... Kotone the Rabbit, she a magical girl that transforms to fight the forces of Eggman armies!

The actual last thing I want to say is it's been a rough week for everyone but with a certain Sonic voice actor shoving his foot in his month on Twitter I want to end off by reminding everyone that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free

[rosavulpes]

OOC : Think I'm gonna turn in for the night so I can get some good sleep in preparation for work tomorrow . Gonna try my best to get some more writing done during the week as next weekend I'm set to go celebrate my friend's birthday .

Last thing I wanna do though is post some shadow head canons I've been thinking about .

Specifically , back when I used to write Sonic , way before these last few weeks ( though I made the decision to drop him now ) I had a head canon for him that he was raised by Vanilla . Since in IDW we don't know who his parents were , I thought it would be sweet that Vanilla is the one that stepped up to take him in .

So while he's not exactly like cream , he still has some manners , and mannerisms that he picked up from Vanilla like she did . Also Vanilla is a great mom , I doubt she would be overly strict with him , and try to change who he is / becomes . He viewed Cream as his little sister .

For Shadow ? That can't apply , but what I can apply to it is that the same relationship Shadow had with Maria where he saw her as a big sister ? Family ? Yeah , he has the same with Cream because she reminds him so much of Maria . Big bro , little sis .

There was a comic I saw on twitter , where Cream is taking Shadow home to meet Vanilla and calls him " Uncle Shadow " that was adorable . Vanilla hugs Shadow and exclaims that she always wanted a brother and overall it's so wholesome . So yeah , Shadow absolutely has that big brother relationship with Cream . Considers Vanilla to be a trusted friend if not sister he can confide in when he's stressed or uncertain .

I just think of those pictures where Maria is reaching / teaching Shadow about the world , space , everything on the Ark and I just picture Shadow doing the same for cream whenever he can .

I've also been thinking about that moment in the IDW Metal Virus Saga comics where Shadow is fighting the infected and just blatantly ignored Sonic's warning about the virus . Yeah , that definitely not how he would handle things .

He'd treat Sonic's warning with a bit of skepticism yeah , because he's always been able to count on his cells adapting to , and neutralizing any illness that enter his system . But when it doesn't happen ? He does run , the point where he goes down in the story and becomes a zombot would have been in protecting Cream for sure .

Getting the emerald and yelling at Gemerl to take them both away . Yeah , he's gonna go down swinging to protect his little sister . Especially after not being able to be there to protect Vanilla from turning .

Lastly , I draw my inspiration for Shadow from many sources . I eventually wanna compile a post containing all of his abilities because I remember seeing so many cool flash sprite animations back in the day like Sonic Advance Z , Super Mario Bros Z , and so much more that I want to reference .

G'night !

[sally-mun]

I was about to ask a different question but then realized it would PROBABLY encroach on Brotherhood Spoilers (was going to ask how Chaos Knuckles would be handled but we'd need to see Dmitri first!), so instead of that, how is Time Travel handled in your setting? Is it all a straight line, or is it the split paths kinda thing where Silver's future and the Present Times aren't 100% guaranteed to be the same timeline, ala Future Trunks from DBZ?

(Honestly the Doctor's description there isn't far off.)

So I briefly touched on this in my post that explains the different kinds of chaos in general (which, if you haven't read that and are interested in how chaos energy functions in my stories, I definitely recommend), but I actually don't have too much more information to offer than what I originally wrote because we haven't utilized time travel so far in my RP. Currently the only times we've used white chaos has been to speed up/slow down/pause time, and Silver isn't a character we've included at this point. Basically what I'm getting at is, everything I'm about to say is more in-theory than actually established, because we've not had a story that forced me to do so.

ANYWAY, according to my current model, time travel can both be used in a linear, single timeline sense and (supposedly) a parallel/alternate timeline sense. The "singular timeline" would be how time travel functions in Sonic '06, wherein there is a single path to the past and a single path to the future and there are no splinters along the way, you either move forward or backwards, the end. However, I'm not confident it's that simple, either. Basically I'm a fan of both Back to the Future and The Infinity Saga and they each have arguments for how time travel works and both sound very logical to me and it's a lot for my tiny little mortal brain to handle.

This is probably among the reasons why I've never planned a storyline that actually uses it (minus a very silly little AU i used to intermittently engage in), because a story of this nature would require a LOT of pre-planning and you can only do that so much in a story that has open variables (aka an RP). Anyway the point I'm laboring towards is, I'm not sure if going into the past to change things will affect the future as the time traveler knows it; my days of DBZ and LoZ:OoT fandom train me to believe it moreso splits the timeline rather than necessarily rewriting it a la BttF, but even if that's the case I don't really know what determines WHICH future the time traveler then returns to or why. All I can say is that white chaos is a bitch and I haven't even approached having fully explored everything it can and can't do.

One other thing I mentioned in passing in the original chaos types post was that particular expertise with white chaos can allow the user to jump between timelines, but now that I'm neck-deep in this rabbit hole I'm wondering if I still mean what I originally meant back then. I think when I first wrote it I was thinking of "alternate timelines" the way Rick & Morty addresses it, but upon further reflection, the Sonicverse would translate that more as alternate zones. Maybe traveling "between timelines," then, is moreso the ability to aim for a specific branch of a zone's single timeline. I'M SORRY THIS IS PROBABLY GETTING CONFUSING BECAUSE I'M FIGURING THIS OUT AS I WRITE IT. Just bear with me here for a minute.

Okay, so here's the skinny: Typical usage of white chaos affects the pace at which time flows forward, aka the ability to speed up/slow down/pause, which is what we already see in canon and how it gets used in the RP presently. Advanced usage of white chaos is what allows for not only massive jumps forward in time, but also the ability to jump backwards as well. However, this can be very risky because it also requires you to be able to STEER. Think of time the way we think of the "tree of life" where every variation is simply another branch, and some of them will be small splinters aside with minor differences and some will be major deviations hosting a whole subset of changes of its own. So being ABLE to travel through time isn't enough; you also have to know where you're going, particularly if you're moving forward. Going backwards is easy because it'll necessarily drive you toward points in time that directly lead to the present you know, but trying to go forward again? There might be a whole mess of alternate futures that AREN'T the world you came from, so if you can't steer, you're going to get hella lost. Navigating forward properly, I imagine, requires an unfathomable level of precision and skill, with HUGE consequences if you fail.

This is most likely the reason why even well-learned chaos practitioners, even on the scale of characters like Mogul or the Ancient Walkers, DON'T fuck around with time travel. In the vast majority of situations, it's just simply not at all worth the risks. You don't really see people attempting a stunt like that unless the situation is as dire as Silver's, aka where the present is SO bad that pretty much ANY alternative would surely be better. But then, that's probably the real irony here: I don't think for a second that Silver was fully educated on how white chaos works before he started using it (I'm sure because there's nothing for him to learn FROM), because now that I've worked this out in more detail, the idea of trying to "change the past" sounds silly to me. You don't want to change the past so much as you want to navigate to an alternate future. No matter what you do in the past, your present is still going to exist as a branch on the time tree. The real trick would be to travel backwards in time, then forwards again using a different route. In that sense, I guess the Rick & Morty comparison from earlier still works; you can still get some vast differences within a single zone by viewing different outcomes of constantly branching time.

Of course, that then begs the question of what timeline you end up in anytime you do hop between zones, BUT that's another completely different rabbit hole and I am not at all prepared to fuck around with that today. I TOLD YOU WHITE CHAOS IS A BITCH. At this point I'm pretty much starting to talk myself into circles anyway, so it's probably more important that I stop. I hope that this, at some point, managed to answer your question, considering that I didn't really go back and edit this as my ideas kept changing. I mean yeah I could have, but eh, I figure maybe people will think it's interesting to see how I ended up here. If not... too late, you already read it, haha I win.