#Ian playing it cool

[pointless-letters]

55th anniversary of the biggest event in human history….and the moon landing, of course!

One of the best letters I’ve ever seen just popped up on my Facebook memories. Still makes me laugh.

[thiinka]

Hi I posted some of these elsewhere but you guys get my 3DS photos AND my regular phone photos yayyyyyy. Straight from BLIB (6:30 o clock show):

[starry-nights-17]

Feeling inspired by this weeks prompt "Secret santa". Admittedly I love Christmas as it is, but festive Gallavich is the icing on the cake! Drabble no. 3. @look-i-love-u @galladrabbles ❤

----

Mickey looked forward to Christmas, mostly 'cos Terry was too drunk to inflict any beatings.

School sucked a little less too, the teachers clearly excited for their upcoming vacation.

He stopped at his locker, not that there was anything school related inside, just smokes and knives.

Something stood out, a crudely wrapped package, a snickers and tin of pringles inside. A note too, that made the corners of his lips curl up.

"Meet me at our spot"

Mickey's heart jumped at the sight of him, red hair, green eyes, bright smile.

"You're late"

"Whatever, didn't come here to chat, Gallagher".

[m4ndysk4nkovich]

i have no real explanation for this but i just know that ian gallagher has the worst digital footprint

[depressedstressedlemonzest]

He's waiting, absolutely waiting for belle.

He's freeze there forever waiting let's be honest.

It looks awfully dark so I wouldn't blame him if he thought she wasn't coming.

Wait he sees her!!!

That little smile! The hope and joy is back in his galaxy eyes.

Oh shit gotta run and act like I wasn't aching and waiting like I was dying without her here.

Gotta hurry and get back there before belle sees the glimpse of you waiting and watching for her.

*gets there .2 seconds before belle does*

*panting and wheezing*

"Oh? You're back? Hmm time was just FLYYYING without you here. I barely noticed your absence except for my straw dwindling down"

Rumple "play what cool" stiltskin.

He knows he isn't playing this cool.

She knows you're full of shit rumpy boy.

Cmon admit it! Admit it admit it admit it!

Also the way she's teasing him!!!

She KNOWS that he Knows that she knows he's full of shit. But instead of calling him out she's just teasing him.

I love his little grimace grin here.

Like he's trying SO HARD to hold back.

[iansolko]

Birthday presents for Ian!! These would have been given on the day itself lo siento for the ooc delayyyy. Italics and block quote denote it's a note from the character; otherwise it's just me describing things:

From Mari: 2 size-adjustable hoodies. The sleeves can also be detached, because why not? No pictures since unfortunately most people don't seem to need/make hoodies that can adjust so much in size. Who would have guessed?

Hi!!!! SO, I was thinking about what to get you for your birthday, and I thought, wouldn't it be neat if you could be comfy in something that fits like, all the time?? So I made you these hoodies!!! They're both adjustable so that they'll work with a bunch of different sizes - but both of them were made to go with the shape you are now! The red one you can adjust to make it smaller, and then the blue one with the stars you can adjust to make it bigger, hehe. I think between the two of them you should have at least one thing that fits for any size you decide to be that's between, like… a little smaller than laikalla, all the way up to a little bit bigger than when you were really tall! At first I was gonna try to make that all one hoodie, but that turned out to be a little harder than I thought. But now you get two hoodies that are good for the size you are now, hehe :)

Happy Birthday!!!

From Daniel: chocolate chip marshmallow cookies, guitar pick bracelet

Happy Birthday, Ian! If the cookies aren't to your taste, just let me know - I'm happy to adjust the recipe a little and make more :)

From Skylar: Pod mods - he would have offered to install (or upgrade) speakers in Ian's pod (and some soundproofing to go with that - neutral / not any specific reason beyond the upgraded sound system), and while he was at it offered to put some cat-friendly shelves for Beverly into an upper wall of the pod, in an area where Ian's not likely to run into it. (After so many years living out of these pods, and his entire life being mildly accident prone, Sky has a pretty good idea of where those unused empty spaces are that can be filled without causing problems).

.

[yoohyeon]

Alex’s song of the day 💖 !

[canthandlethishit]

i usually dont care for the olympics but this years im obsessed with US gymnastics (women) team and the Norwegian muffin man

[i-want-to-do-things]

theres this rhythm doctor custom level called yesman and its really interesting please watch it

I did see it and it was amazing! Thank you for sharing :]

[stocious]

“too late”

oooh 😭

[infiniteglitterfall]

Honestly, what does "hasn't been born yet" even mean for a time traveler. That they haven't been born yet in whatever time they're visiting? Or that Susan herself had been born in his personal future and went off traveling with his first(??) self? The latter is more interesting, at least.

In that case, it could mean he had been a father before, but not to Susan's parent, and was still going to be again.

Or yeah they could just mess up. Moffat was extremely big on just saying and doing whatever was most interesting at the moment, and abandoning it the moment it became inconvenient to him personally. But that's not the norm anymore - I hope.

People who have seen under 20 years of Doctor Who: Aw I can't believe they teased the Doctor's family but we didn't learn anything

People who have seen Too Much Doctor Who: THEY CONFIRMED SUSAN'S PARENT HASN'T BEEN BORN YET?? FINALLY A SIGNIFICANT UPDATE!! WE ARE MAKING REAL PROGRESS!!

[turnip-o-lantern]

No spoilers dont worry

I havent entirely finished shadows campaign in sonic x shadow generations but oh my fucking god

We are so FUCKING BAAAAACK

Once i get back from my errands imma finish this game and imma cry tears of joy (again)

[m4ndysk4nkovich]

ian gallagher’s so real. i also never have a clue what’s going on and say stupid cringe things (including puns) at the wrong time.

[depressedstressedlemonzest]

AU Generator tag game

tagged by multiple people but this one is for the tag from this one was from @ian-galagher WILLOWWWW

rules (more or less): use this au generator to assign you an au, this fan fiction trope generator to give you a trope/situation/sometimes another au, feel free to keep clicking until you get something that inspires you.

then try to come up with the title, plot, vibe, and details of a fic including whatever the generators gave you. you don’t actually have to write it, just put the concept into the world! this is basically just a thought experiment.

au generator gave me: school AU

fic trope generator gave me: Take a stab at a soulmark AU where you have the first thing your soulmates says to you like a birthmark on your body. (i fuckin LOVE IT)

title: Do You Know How Much A Polar Bear Weighs? Enough To Break The Ice

let's plot: fuck yeah this is cute and adorable.

It's the first day of school of Ian's freshmen year, it's science class and there's a few older students that were held back, Mickey is one of them.

The teacher has everyone fill out a "Classmate Bingo" card as a way to introduce the kids to one another and keep them occupied.

Mickey starts off not wanting to do shit but the teacher mentions whoever finishes in the top three gets a prize of some kind. He's up for it because if it's food it means he won't go hungry til the free school breakfast tomorrow. If it's extra credit he'll need all he can get to pass the class this year.

Ian is nervous and excited at the same time about starting a new school and a new class, he nervously goes around asking people questions correlating to the bingo card, "Can you do a cartwheel?" "Can you speak more than two languages?" until all of his squares are filled.

Mickey is falling behind already and it's pissing him off until he hears "Someone with a tattoo? is the teacher playing?" he turns to where he heard the voice and grins, the redhead hasn't been one to get crossed off his list and he beelines it to Ian.

"Fuck You Up Red. " He says showing his knuckle tattoos to Ian.

Ian grins and holds out his bingo card where Mickey can sign his name, when he starts to feel a tingling sensation on his ribs, almost like someone was tickling him.

He giggled a little as he looked at the bingo card Mickey thrusts at him.

He catches Mickey's eye as he crosses off "can touch tongue to nose" and at Mickey's bewildered look he said "That's not the only thing I can do with my tongue." before breaking into a deep scarlet blush not realizing the innuendo he just said.

Mickey feels a tingling on his ribs and curious he cocks an eyebrow, "What the fuck do you mean Red?"

Ian stammers out, "I mean I can roll it into a clover shape."

Mickey rolls his eyes with a laugh, "Made it sound like you were sucking dick or something red."

Ian is still blazing crimson when as a way of escape he slaps the bingo paper on the teachers desk and grabs the bathroom pass.

He practically runs out of the classroom and goes to the bathroom trying to keep the flames from blazing down the rest of his skin.

While he's hanging in a stall he texts Fiona about the tingling on his ribs and she asks if he got bit by something.

He raises his shirt to inspect the area and sees "Fuck You Up Red" in black script along his ribs.

his eyes widen in shock and he goes back to class, not sure whether to bombard Mickey or give him space.

He finally decides to go and sit next to Mickey after he gets back, moving desk groups to Mickey's where he is the only one.

"The fuck you want Red?" Mickey asks when Ian comes to sit by him.

Ian's blush is back, or it never faded, "I uh figured you helped me finish the bingo card, is it okay if I sit here?"

Mickey shrugs and rubs his ribs absentmindedly.

Ian's eyes widen and he says, "Did you get a mosquito bite there too? Strange I got one earlier, have a big mark now."

"I fucking hate mosquitoes." Mickey mutters moving to lift his shirt.

"NO!" Ian shouts, shocking Mickey enough to drop his shirt, and the rest of the class enough to have all twenty pairs of eyes on him.

As his blush burns he stammers, "Sorry, thought I saw a spider."

The rest of the class goes back to what they were doing and Ian turns to Mickey, who is studying him with peaked brows.

"Um, You might want to do that in the bathroom, when I saw mine it was very um surprising, I couldn't believe it." Ian stammered.

Mickey rolled his eyes but got up and grabbed the bathroom pass, going to the bathroom.

When he gets there he raises his shirt and looks at it in the mirror.

And feels like he is going to pass out at the words engraved there.

anyone who hasn't been tagged feel free!

[softichill]

Good day/ night! I'm excited for the third. It's been a good few days in this week for me. Love of the s*n updating was VERY unexpected. A short film I was excited for uploaded too! I'm assuming that a cool thing happened somewhere I don't know about as well. You already got confirmation that Sonic X Shadow so that's cool. Hopefully I get one of my ships too. But I'm just glad things happen. Do you plan to play any of the upcoming Sonic games? I hear being a sonic fan is suffering and post Genesis I agree. sans the adventure games. Sad that pizza tower was made by who it was and accurately managed to capture the feeling of go-fastness that the series lacks. Sonic and elder scrolls got that jank life feel though. Bluegrass Dreamer by Finn Makoja (secret song woooooo!)

Yea!!! Lotsa cool stuff. I'm still a little shocked they named that game Sonic X Shadow Generations. I know for a fact that at least a few team members know what the community is like, especially since Sonic Team prides itself on trying to listen to fans.

I actually quite like a lot of the games!! As little time as Sega gives these poor ambitious creators to make a game they at least often nail it in the gameplay department. 2D go-fast is also different than 3D go-fast (highlighted mainly in Sonic Generations, which is also very fun to play) so that's a big factor too. But it also stumbles just as much as it succeeds and the story department is a rollercoaster that usually ends in "good ideas but absolutely no time to execute them". Honestly it's admirable that the series has been able to continue as it has with so many lower-budget games. And yeah sometimes the jank is part of the fun

Speaking of Sonic, Cool Edge - Day from Sonic Unleashed!

[thankskenpenders]

Thoughts on two specific areas of the writing in Sonic X Shadow Generations

The best new 3D Sonic game in over a decade (or even two, depending on who you ask) dropped late last year. And I didn't write anything about it! Sometimes life happens. Well, I've finally sat down to finish Shadow Generations, and by now everyone has already been singing its praises for three months. This is the rare instance where the entire Sonic fandom, and even mainstream reviewers, are in agreement on something. The level design is the best it's been in a long, long time and the cool factor is off the charts, embracing Sonic's peak cringe era in an incredibly confident way. It's great. If you're even reading this post, you probably don't need me to tell you that. So I won't!

No, what I'm really interested in here is the writing. Because this is me we're talking about. But I actually don't want to talk about the main narrative of Shadow Generations, which is really solid little story about Black Doom trying to mold Shadow into his perfect soldier. No, I'd like to zero in on two other aspects of the writing here: the revisions made to Sonic Generations, and Gerald Robotnik's unlockable journal.

The updated Sonic Generations script

The new package mostly presents Sonic Generations how you remember it. There are some tweaks, but it's not a major overhaul. Graphically, I don't think the game has been touched much, if at all. I certainly can't notice any difference without a side-by-side comparison, despite playing it on a PS5. The most notable update is that the game's script has been rewritten by Ian Flynn.

Naturally, this caught my attention. Generations always had a nothingburger story, so with Ian rewriting Pontac and Graff's lame dialogue there was nowhere to go but up. (I don't like to pin the blame for those games' stories entirely on them, as a ton of it was dictated to them by Sonic Team, but, well, I don't think they're very good dialogue writers.) But it's less a complete rewrite and more like Ian was brought on as a script doctor for some minor touch ups here and there. Many lines of dialogue are completely identical to how they were originally written in 2011, and many others only have slight wording changes. Ian was clearly not allowed to request additional scenes or extend the ones that already existed. He has to match the original beat for beat so that they can reuse 99% of the cutscene animations. Don't expect it to be a whole new experience compared to the original.

Still, I think the new script is an improvement, albeit a minor one. Various things have been tweaked to maintain characterization consistency. Cream calls Sonic "Mr. Sonic" instead of just "Sonic." Instead of calling Sonic "buddy," Rouge uses the pet name "Blue," like she tends to do in things like the IDW comics. Espio doesn't have to remind you in the dialogue that he's a ninja, and he no longer has a line making it sound like he has some kind of soul reading power. I also like that Modern Sonic now actually has responses to what his friends say when he rescues them, rather than being silent like Classic Sonic. They won't blow you away, but they make Sonic feel a little more engaged with everything.

In general, the altered dialogue just seems tighter to me, and some of the more childish or trite wording of Pontac and Graff's script has been altered. Here, let's actually make a direct comparison, just because this stuff is interesting to me as a writer. Here's a couple lines from after the Egg Dragoon fight late in the game, in the original script:

Modern Eggman: Ooooh... I can't believe this! I was supposed to beat you this time. Modern Sonic: Aw, I'm sorry! I didn't get that memo. I beat you every time! [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat this guy every time. It's like it's our job or something!

This is a simple exchange. Eggman is mad that he lost. Sonic is unflappably confident because he always beats Eggman, and he explains this to his younger self. But the wording here isn't particularly good. Eggman's simple and direct wording makes him come off like a little kid who's mad because his older brother beat him at Mario Kart, rather than a mad scientist who just had his plans foiled. It's making light of the situation.

And I've never liked Sonic saying "It's like it's our job or something!" That doesn't feel like a thing Sonic would say, it feels like a thing an outside observer would say about Sonic. This is a frequent problem with so-called "MCU dialogue," where quips meant to echo the commentary of a casual, somewhat disinterested audience are inserted into the story itself so that the writers can be like "See? We get it. We're genre-savvy, too!" It also just reminds me of bad Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric lines like "Rings! It's like they're made for me!"

And then here's Ian's rewrite:

Modern Eggman: I recalibrated everything! This was supposed to be my time! Modern Sonic: Oh, please, keep dreamin', Egg-head. I beat you every time. [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat him every time. Our score card's flawless.

Eggman's still mad about his defeat, but the line "I recalibrated everything!" makes it more specific. He put all this work into the engineering side of his latest scheme and got tunnel vision, thinking if he got his creations just right there'd be no way he could lose. "This was supposed to be my time!" also turns it into a time travel pun, which is a bonus. He's still pitching a fit over losing, but it feels more like Eggman pitching a fit, rather than sounding childish.

And then instead of saying that beating Eggman is "like his job or something," Sonic says he's got a flawless score card against Eggman. He doesn't take Eggman seriously as a threat—at least, not to his face. He acts like it's all a game. But he conveys this in a way that feels truer to the character, rather than feeling like the words of a real world observer poking fun at the tropes of the Sonic series.

Is this amazing, A+ dialogue that blows me away? No. Again, it's not a completely different scene from the one we already had. Ian had to fit the beats of what was already there. He couldn't go all out and write an all new story confirming his longstanding headcanon that the Time Eater is a remnant of Solaris or whatever. But the wording here makes the existing story land a little better and feel truer to the characters in subtle ways.

But to me, the main change is that the Sonics and Tailses seem to have a more solid understanding of what's going on with the timeline and the Time Eater, compared to how idiotic they sometimes seemed in the original game. Which is good! No more standing outside Green Hill and wondering why it seems so familiar. Thank god. As part of this, yes, there are a few more references to past games in the dialogue, like Sonic briefly being confused about the fact that they're time traveling without the Time Stones, or South Island and Westside Island being acknowledged as the normal locations of Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Yes, ha ha, insert joke about how Ian loves references here. Look, it's Sonic fucking Generations. It's a game built entirely out of nostalgic references. Just own it! And, again, in this instance Sonic and Tails come off as less stupid when they make it clear that they do, in fact, remember their adventures from presumably less than a year ago in-universe.

Eggman, too, seems to have a better understanding of the powers he's toying with. Where in the original vesion his focus was simply on going back in time to undo his previous defeats and he seemed kind of oblivious to how much the Time Eater was actually fucking up the universe, here Eggman says he wants to use the Time Eater to give himself complete control over the entire timeline. Eggman also makes way fewer references to his own failures and shortcomings. Of course he won't admit that Sonic has defeated him time and time again. To him, he's never truly lost—Sonic just keeps delaying the inevitable total victory for the Eggman Empire.

So, yes. The new Sonic Generations script is better. It won't blow anyone away, but it's better than it was. It's been elevated from "kinda lame" to "fine." No, if you really wanna see Ian flex his ability to breathe new life into old Sonic stories, look no further than...

Gerald Robotnik's Journal

Hoo boy.

The story of what happened aboard the ARK has always been... a bit confusing, to say the least. Fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the script for every route of Shadow '05 may disagree, but it's the truth. We've had all the pieces to understand the story for a long time now, but that info was given to us out of order by a pair of unreliable narrators—Gerald, who became a vengeful lunatic shortly before his death, and Shadow, who was subjected to multiple rounds of amnesia and altered memories. Some of the ambiguity left by Sonic Adventure 2 was cleared up in Shadow '05, but that game also retconned in a bunch of new elements to Shadow's backstory (aliens!) that lead to further confusion. Not to mention the fact that that game had multiple routes and only revealed the truth about Shadow if you sat on the ultimate final boss battle for WAY longer than the fight would normally last. Or the fact that Sonic X made its own tweaks in its telling of the story. Or the fact that none of these things ever had the best English translations. I can't blame anyone who hasn't played those games in two decades for not remembering the truth about these characters and getting some details mixed up.

What we needed was something to piece together all of the info we have into one coherent backstory, told in chronological order. And thanks to Shadow Generations, we have that, in the form of an official journal tying together what we knew from Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow '05, and Sonic Battle into the tragic tale of Gerald's rise and fall.

Ian Flynn was the perfect man for the job here as the guy who started his career by tidying up the mess that was the first 159 issues if Archie Sonic. This is what he excels at: taking disparate bits of weird Sonic lore from multiple different sources, boiling them down to their most interesting elements, and connecting it together in a way that will make the audience see the dramatic potential he's always known was there. Rather than feeling like a cynical exercise in franchise building, going back and explaining things that never needed explaining so that people can add more bullet points to the wiki, he puts a new spin on things that retroactively enriches those past stories. The story here means something to the characters involved and gives us a better understanding of them as people, rather than as plot devices to motivate Shadow.

(And, of course, Ian didn't do this journal alone. He wrote the story, but I also have to give a huge shout out to Evan Stanley, who made the final product. All of her handwritten journal entries, sketches, and "photos" included throughout. The physical damage done to the journal over the course of 50 tumultuous years, passing from Gerald to Eggman to a certain special someone at GUN. The way Gerald's handwriting gets less and less legible as his mental state declines. So much love was put into what could have been a mere text dump in a menu, and it really elevates it to the next level. Congrats on officially getting hired by Sega, Evan, you've sure as hell earned it!)

The main idea the journal conveys is that Gerald was under a lot of pressure from a lot of different parties—GUN, the President, his colleagues aboard the ARK, Black Doom, even his own family—and boy did it get to him. The known incidents aboard the ARK mentioned in previous games are put together here to form a story where everything slowly spirals out of control as Gerald keeps compromising his morals to further his research, thinking he'll eventually find some way out of all this because he's a genius. I won't recap that whole story here (if you haven't already played the game and read the journal entries, I would highly recommend at least reading it on the Sonic wiki), but I'd like to highlight my favorite elements of the story, as Ian tells it here.

1) The Eclipse Cannon

Here's something that never quite made sense in Sonic Adventure 2: why does the ARK have a laser that can blow up the Earth built into it? It was supposed to be a peaceful research colony. Sure, Gerald went crazy and swore revenge on the Earth, but, like... when did he have an opportunity to go back up to the ARK and modify it? Did he have someone else do it? How? The ARK was raided by GUN and shut down! And then they arrested him, held him in prison for an unclear period of time, and executed him by firing squad when he was no longer useful! It doesn't add up. Shadow 'the Hedgehog '05 would give its own answer by introducing the Black Arms and saying that the Eclipse Cannon was always supposed to be a secret trump card against the Black Comet. But, like... we know that's kind of a bullshit answer, right? You don't need enough power to blow up a whole planet just to destroy a comet.

Well, the new journal retains what we already knew, but it paints a much more complete picture.

See, long before Gerald ever made a Faustian bargain with Black Doom, he had already made one with an even greater evil: the military. GUN gave Gerald much of the funding for the ARK, Gerald's personal utopian research station in space, but it didn't take long for GUN to start pressuring him to design them weapons. Gerald tried to get GUN off his back by personally contacting the President of the United Federation, and the President gave him an alternative: how about, instead, you just use your genius brain to figure out the secret to immortality for us, so our soldiers can be immortal? Gerald was initially sickened by the notion and found it completely absurd, like chasing a shadow... but given no other option, the sarcastically named Project Shadow soon began in earnest. (Maria would later put a more positive spin on the name after Shadow's awakening, pointing out that a Shadow can show us the direction of the light, like she says in the game itself.)

Of course, this search for the ultimate life form didn't go very well, and without any results on that front GUN kept hounding him for weapons. Gerald would throw them a bone here and there to get them off his back. His research on Chaos resulted in the Artifical Chaos prototypes, which he worried would be used for warfare but could at least theoretically be used for search and rescue missions in floods, in his mind. But that wasn't enough. So he gave them Chaos Drives to power their mechs. And that still wasn't enough. He's got Emerl. He'll give them Emerl. They're not impressed by Emerl. They'll shut the whole ARK down if Gerald doesn't give them something big.

Fine! GUN wants something big? Gerald builds a huge fucking laser cannon into the ARK. However, as a middle finger to GUN, Gerald makes it so powerful that it would destroy the Earth if it was ever fired at any target on its surface. In other words, GUN now has their ultimate weapon of mass destruction, fulfilling his contract, but they can never actually use it. Oh, the delicious irony. (And also Shadow will blow up the Black Comet with it in 50 years yada yada yada.) Is this perhaps extremely shortsighted and naive of Gerald, to believe that such a weapon would never actually be used just because of the risk? Of course. But hey, that's Gerald for you. And I love this as an answer.

(Also, this, uh, kinda echoes something from real life! Remember the bit in Oppenheimer where he says all nuclear war will become unthinkable, and Edward Teller responds "until somebody builds a bigger bomb"? Yeah, Teller went on to conceptualize a superweapon codenamed Project Sundial that would have been able to kill all life on the planet, as the ultimate deterrent for war. This was never made for obvious reasons, but hey, there's a basis for this sort of thinking outside of heightened sci-fi! There's a whole Kurzgesagt video about this if you're interested.)

2) The Biolizard

The Biolizard is, of course, brought up as the initial failed prototype of the ultimate life form, from before Gerald met Black Doom. We don't really learn all that much about it that we didn't already know, but I just love the way it's framed in the story.

As you can see above, we actually get to see a picture of Maria holding up the cute little salamander that would end up mutating into the Biolizard through Gerald's experiments. (Researchers want to figure out how to replicate salamanders' regenerative abilities for humans in real life, too, so this was a natural starting point for the project.) And then, after it grows to a monstrous size and goes out of control, Gerald has to lock it away in an unused sector of the ARK. He needs to keep the poor thing alive for his research into harnessing Chaos Energy, building life support systems directly into it, but he doesn't have the heart to tell Maria what happened. So it just becomes this first dark secret weighing on his conscience. The Biolizard becomes Gerald's Tell-Tale Heart beating beneath the floorboards of the ARK. I love that.

3) Lost Impact was the breaking point for the ARK

Remember the level Lost Impact in Shadow '05? The flashback level on the hero path where Shadow is running around fighting Artificial Chaos enemies on the ARK 50 years ago? Yeah, that wasn't just a random incident. That was important, as we now know due to its placement on the timeline.

See, Emerl's rampage aboard the ARK that was chronicled in Sonic Battle and Dark Beginnings set off a domino effect. Emerl riled up the Artificial Chaos, causing Gerald to lose control of them. They became violent, and so Shadow had to stop them, as depicted in Lost Impact. The thing is, that incident sent an SOS signal to GUN telling them that shit was going down on the ARK. Gerald didsn't fully understand the trouble he was in and assumed that he'd simply be reprimanded by the higher ups, or maybe face legal action. But, well... the next time he heard from GUN, armed troopers were raiding the ARK.

So Lost Impact was the straw that broke the camel's back. I just really like that detail.

4) Maria

And, of course, there's Maria herself. Maria has often been more of a symbol than a character, this perfect embodiment of everything that's good and pure in this world who gets killed to motivate Shadow and Gerald's revenge plots. But I really like the wrinkles this journal adds to her and Gerald's story, and their relationship. This is the most fleshed out they've ever felt.

For one, the journal leans into the idea of Maria's intellectual potential. The rest of the Robotnik family is all geniuses, after all, and she was proving to be a really bright kid. She excelled in her studies on the ARK, and she even helped design Shadow's jet skates and inhibitor rings. When Maria died, the world didn't just lose a symbolic personification of purity. She genuinely could have been a hugely influential scientist who did so much good for the world. That's what Gerald wanted for her. But we'll never know, because GUN killed her.

Speaking of her family, their presence isn't just mentioned for the sake of fleshing out the Robotnik family tree. It's mentioned that as Gerald struggled to find a cure for Maria's illness through his genetic research, he faced mounting pressure from his family. They didn't want Maria to be up on the ARK forever. They wanted Gerald to hurry up and find a damn cure, or otherwise just send her back home to Earth so she could be with her family again. She'd been up on the ARK for so long that Gerald's coworkers started thinking that she had been born up there. Eventually she gains a baby sister on Earth who she's never met. A rift forms between Gerald's two sons, and he's unable to really deal with it because he's so consumed by his work. There's this sense that the family is falling apart, and that everyone is dreading the possibility that Gerald will never find a cure and that Maria will just spend her final years up in space and die far away from her family, because Gerald just couldn't let go. If that happens, it'll break the whole family. But he can't stop now. So he just keeps working. Curing Maria is the only way to win his family back, in his eyes. It can't all be for nothing.

But my favorite detail regarding Maria is this one paragraph:

Maria is growing into a lovely young woman. It breaks my heart that someone as bright and energetic as her is diminished by disease. There are no visible effects, and I've caught my fellow researchers muttering to each other, doubting her illness. It is infuriating. I find all my reason and restraint vanishes when she's slighted.

This is SUCH a great addition to the story! It's always been true that Maria doesn't really seem all that ill, just looking at her in cutscenes. With this one little comment, Ian flips that issue on its head and turns it into a story about invisible disability. She doesn't act like she's in chronic pain, so she must not be, everyone thinks. And this really, really gets to Gerald, as does the pressure from his family. He's dedicating his whole LIFE to saving her, and they think she's faking it?! It's such a small addition, never referenced elsewhere in the journal, but it adds so much flavor to the story, as does the implied family drama. It grounds Gerald and Maria and makes them feel more like real human beings, rather than being pure archetypes. It's just enough info to let my imagination run wild filling in the blanks.

You also get the feeling that Maria being such a walking ray of sunshine was the only real source of joy Gerald had left in his life before Shadow was awakened, and the only thing keeping him from snapping under pressure sooner. All this stuff just keeps piling on, everything's spiraling out of control, but at least Maria is keeping her chin up, right? It makes so much sense that losing her would make him go off the deep end when it's framed like this.

It's just... man, I never thought I'd care so much about Gerald and Maria. But that's the Ian Flynn touch. After years of less than stellar Sonic writing that seemed to be embarrassed of itself, I'm so happy to have new games coming out that fully embrace the history of the series like this, making its world feel so rich and real instead of just serving as an excuse for a string of platforming levels. I don't even like Shadow '05, but I'll be damned if Ian and the rest of Sonic Team didn't make something amazing by "yes, and"-ing Shadow's cringe past here. Sonic has truly reached levels of "we're so back" never thought possible.