#all this being said I'm glad st never really pulled the 'I'm pathetic' card with shadow

[skaruresonic]

I'm not Infinite's biggest fan by any means. I still find "I'm not weak" to be laughable. While I dislike him for reasons ST probably intended, such as his sadism, I also consider him overrated and cliche. He's not that deep, he's just a bully on a power trip.

That being said, all this has got me to thinking about narrative payoff.

I guess I just don't vibe with the idea of pathetic characters in general because it's a difficult concept to pull off without veering too far into "he was beaten when he was a baby boy, blah blah" territory.

Bad writing tends to teeter-totter with the way we're supposed to perceive such characters.

It happened with Scourge. The book spent all this time hyping him up as a badass capable of going toe-to-toe with Sonic and Shadow... only to have him consistently flee any fight he was not guaranteed to win, thus depriving us of the opportunity to see whether his bluster held true. To see him get his comeuppance via a simple tongue-lashing by Sonic's dad doesn't feel cathartic, it feels frustrating. And the worst part is the author makes you feel like a fool for being invested in the first place by saying "What did you expect? He's a nobody, a joke. His story was never going to matter in the long run." Because YOU told me he was IMPORTANT. That's why I made the mistake of caring. This isn't to say anticlimaxes are inherently bad, but it goes without saying that if you spend a large amount of time hammering in a certain point, the audience is going to assume your character must have a purpose in the narrative---otherwise, why are you wasting our time?

Surge waxed poetic for ages about how she was going to destroy Sonic and Eggman and burn down the whole rotten system. Fine. She can be deluded in her beliefs. She can be wrong about them and learn that lesson the painful way, even. But can you, you know, at least show that dissonance in a coherent character arc instead of flipflopping between badass and woobie whenever it's convenient and pretending that counts as a character arc?

She spends ages nattering on about how she's going to destroy Sonic and Eggman... and ultimately winds up pulls the exact same shit as Scourge. At one point, her enemies are conveniently gathered in one place, and what does she do? Lash out at them, teeth bared, gives them a fight to the death? Nah. She flees. Has a panic attack. So very dramatique. Oh the tension. I'm on the edge of my seat.

Same concept applies to Starline, to a lesser extent. Flynn says in 2018 that they "don't need some other major villain," winds up writing Bad Guys where the entire point is that Starline will only be dragged down by trying to emulate Eggman, then kills the guy after having him get curbstomped just to prove some spurious Captain Obvious point that Eggman is the series' antagonist. And it's not even established onscreen that Eggman heard anything about the Hypnoglove, much less enough to be able to take preventative measures against it. The flashback in Imposters 3 just shows us a random nonsequitur about Eggman's love of theme parks. It's not thematically (heh) relevant, it doesn't show Eggman and Starline having a single conversation about the Hypnoglove. (Also, in hindsight: why would Eggman listen to Starline about his inventions anyway?) In retrospect, his entire "arc," if you can call it, is pointless. It makes you believe it's leading up to something, but ultimately leads to nothing.

I mean Infinite is also a joke and wasted potential, don't get me wrong, much cooler then Surge, he has such a sick design, nice background story and cool voice. And Forces wasted it and he's just dead like that. That made me more pissed of as I wanted to see more of Infinite.

Infinite was entertaining to watch though. The game makes it pretty clear that he’s a ginormous loser overcompensating for his inferiority complex by hiding his own face, seeking power and overall being nothing but an artificially-enhanced bully in order to not feel weak. His final defeat was anticlimactic, not only to reflect that he (Presumably) died a complete loser but to make it abundantly clear who wears the pants as far as domination and main villainy goes - The one and only Dr Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik.

Surge is just a shitty character, a blatant rip off of another shitty character. A creators pet who only gets one over on game characters by ignoring canon facts about them I.e Metal Sonic being both water and shock-proof or to make her look cool I.e Making Dr Eggman scared. Who canonically has huge cojones and wouldn’t be the least bit cowed by this fucking puke-coloured upstart.

Ironically, despite the evident regard Stanley and Flynn hold her in, she repeatedly is subject to indignities you’d see in Home Alone. She is only ever even remotely a threat by being artificially enhanced and/or stealing Dr Eggman’s tech. None of her “achievements” are accomplished by her alone or believably.

Flynn and Stanley and Fonsesca by extension seem to think they’ve portrayed the hottest shit ever as far as Sonic villains go, Fonsesca portraying her as beating seven shades out of the franchise’s main protagonist in CA and Stanley being egoistic enough to honestly believe that if Forces was “graced” with the presence of this shitty canon foreigner, it’d be vastly better.

Fucking awful character that has her horn tooted in the most obnoxious and transparent ways by a pair of hacks.