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robotnik-mun · 8 years ago

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can you elaborate on endgame? when did you realize it was quite bad and how so?

Firstly, my apologies that this took so long, as I had to gather up my thoughts and type them all down.

Now to answer your question, it was during the lawsuit and after I had taken a look at Penders’ twitter and his forums and gotten a good look at what the man himself was really like. While it might sound like that I’m simply being a contrarian out of spite due to that fact, but the truth of it is that upon having my eyes opened, I was able to observe his work with a more objective eye than before, and separated from my personal feelings towards the man, it became clear that a lot of his work was objectively quite terrible. As such, re-reading Endgame with a more critical eye and a better understanding of storytelling, everything began to fall apart?

The reasons for that? Let me count them, though I am sure there are things that slipped my mind.

1) To begin with, the basic premise of the plot, namely Sonic being framed for a crime he didn’t commit? Had been done so many times by that point in the comic that none of the good guys really had much of a reason to believe it to be true. First there was the incident with Pseudo-Sonic, then the times with Evil Sonic and the Anti Freedom Fighters, and then there was the time Sonic got amnesia and was tricked by Robotnik into attacking his friends, and of course not even ten isues ago the whole “Mecha Madness” thing had happened with Sonic being accused of a crime he didn’t commit.

After all the times this has happened, nobody would have a good reason to be so convinced that it was actually Sonic who did the deed. It literally requires everyone involved to forget all the times that something like this has happened and just blithely accept that Sonic has murdered Sally for no discernable reasons. It’s particularly jarring in the case of Antoine, who had previously gotted ahead of himself with accusing Sonic of having deliberately gone to Robotnik in the aftermath of Mecha Madness, only to be proven *thoroughly* wrong. But no, Sonic’s friends and team mates just immediately believe it, despite having gone through all this several times already.

Compounding the matter is that they were aware Robotnik could build Robotniks that perfectly mimic the appearance and mannerisms of people- Tails encountered Fiona, St. John witnessed the Sally duplicate, and Sally herself surely would have told everyone about what had happened during that time, to say nothing of the Substitute Freedom Fighters who had similarly witnessed the same. It’s an incredibly glaring ommission that none of this was brought up by any of Sonic’s friends, with only Chuck acting as his advocate- and even then neglecting to mention any of the prior incidents at all.

In short? The basic plot is kicked off not because of how convincingly the premise is displayed, but because that premise is willed to work and the plot to move on by it due to the fact that the writer wills it.

2) Speaking of the frame job itself, the circumstances around it make less and less sense the more you think about. Drago managed to convince Hershey to put on a Sonic suit and sent her out into Robotropolis to do... something, and thanks to the costume having special lenses that made other people look like Snively, she thought she was killing Snively rather than Sally. This begs the question though of what it was Drago exactly said she would be doing in Robotropolis, and how the hell he managed to get her into the suit. That outfit was so perfect that it fooled everyone into thinking it was Sonic, so try and picture how it might look when not being worn by somebody. This meant that Drago presented Hershey with what essentially looked like a perfect replica of Sonic’s *skin*, and at no point did she see fit to ask questions about where he got it or why she had to wear it.

Similarly, while the deception of the ‘Snively Lens’ would explain how she could wind up killing Sally under a false pretense, it was never established if there was a similar thing going on with the ears- she might have *seen* Snively, but would also be in a position to hear Sally. And thats without getting into how she could have gotten into the position that she did without spotting anybody else in the Freedom Fighter group, despite it being a joint effort between the Knothole Freedom Fighters and the Wolf Pack and as such a lot more people being in Robotropolis than normal. It stresses the suspension of disbelief that she just happened to spot absolutely no one else in that entire time when she was in Robotropolis in the costume.

And getting past all that, it’s just plain *convoluted*. An easier and more believable explanation would have been that Robotnik just used a robot made to look like Sonic (particularly since he earlier managed to replace King Max with precisely that) or used Metal Sonic with a hologram or something like that. But paying off a traitorous Freedom Fighter to get his girlfriend to put on a costume with special lenses to trick her into killing off Sally Acorn? Say it out loud and tell me how that sounds.

3) Also, far too many bits and pieces of the story’s outcome hinge on coincidence and fortuitous happenstance. I firstly mentioned how somehow, nobody at all thought about all the other times Sonic had been framed, but that isn’t the only time when things happen because the writer wills it to happen, and in a lot of cases it is done to the heroes benefit. Firstly you have Sonic being sentenced to be imprisoned at Devil’s Gulag. On the way over though, Robotnik sends his forces to shoot down the aircraft carrying Sonic, which results in him surviving the crash and escaping. Ignoring the question of how the Freedom Fighters are even able to have and maintain a prison, Robotnik’s action makes little sense- Devil’s Gulag is far away and isolated in the middle of the ocean, it’d be a perfect place to keep Sonic away, and if he really HAD to kill Sonic, it’d make more sense to bomb the place when he was secure. Instead though, Robotnik’s actions only give Sonic a means of an escape, because of COURSE he would survive a crash that killed everyone else.

Then of course, Bunnie and Antoine are captured and rather than being taken to Robotropolis to be Roboticized, where we learn that Croc-Bot is a traitor who has planted an explosive upon one of his Combot guards and intends to use it to assassinate Robotnik. So naturally, Bunnie and Antoine are able to escape, make off with the explosive and later use it to destroy the Ultimate Annihilator. By tremendous coincidence their dire situation turns out to actually ultimately be for the best as they are gift wrapped important information and a means to deal with the problem.

Similarly there is the scene where Knuckles and Sonic start fighting due to Knuckles being informed of Sonic’s crime and, in his grief, not believing him and attacking him, only for Dulcy to declare that Sonic is telling the truth, and since dragons ‘cannot lie’, everyone just immediately accepts what she says. These details have never, ever come up before and are never references again- it is literally conjured into being for the sake of the story and in the name of making everyone magically trust Sonic despite being previously hellbent on capturing him. And you know, if that was the case, then why didn’t Dulcy say anything back in Knothole? Oh wait, that’s the logic talking, silly me.

Similarly, Snively’s sabotage is oddly limited- he sabotages the Ultimate Annihilator to kill Robotnik, true, but he himself hates the Freedom Fighters and would want them dead as much as he would want Robotnik dead. Why would he reprogram the thing to target only Robotnik and not take the chance to eliminate ALL of his enemies by simply leaving it unchanged save for including Robotnik and excluding himself? It’s a blatantly stupid move by the guy, one that is only made because the story demands that Knothole and everyone in it survives, along with Sonic.

4) Key plot details are badly, badly foreshadowed and explained, if at all. To begin with, Drago is only introduced a mere issues earlier, and his betrayal lacks impact because everything about him screams ‘Bad Guy!’ to begin with, and similarly, Hershey is only introduced in this arc, and as such we can not really be convinced of the significance of what is happening because we have little prior investment to help us actually feel the betrayal. Also, it is never made clear how Robotnik was able to capture Dr. Quack’s family without anybody noticing- again, this is this is the first time we ever see or have mention of them, but that aside, they live in Knothole, as does the doctor. It’s hard to believe that nobody would notice would notice that they were absent, especially given that its implied to have happened over the course of several days before Endgame commences. Then there is the matter of Snively- everything he has done is revealed AFTER everything has happened, and even in the ‘Director’s Cut’ there is only a single page to build up Snively’s actions.

Almost all the details pertaining to why Endgame happened and how it was resolved are explained via exposition near the very end of the series. It’s bad storytelling and incredibly lazy to boot.

5) Glaringly, this story takes a lot of beats from the Harrison Ford movie ‘The Fugitive’, enough that it becomes distracting. Sonic is falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit, he’s being transported to a prison in a vehicle until that vehicle is waylaid and he manages to escape with his life intact, he’s forced to go on the run while being pursued by somebody who refuses to believe that he is innocent (with even less of a reason than in that film, ironically), and there is even a scene where Sonic evades capture by diving down a *waterfall*. I mean come on- there’s referencing, and then there’s just stealing shit.

6) On a more personal note, knowing Penders motivations for this story and his attempt to permanently kill off Sally even after SEGA told him no has severely soured my ability to appreciate even what it was trying to do, particularly since Sally’s death was done purely for the sake of motivating Sonic to ‘cut loose’... it’s a really textbook example of ‘Stuffing Women In Fridges’, even though that term gets overused a lot of the time, but it’s true- by his original statements, a major female character and love interest had to die purely so that it would motivate the hero and, as such, doesn’t get to play a real role in what was built up as the series finale. The fact that Penders has given several OTHER excuses for why she had to die only makes it all the more worse.

7) And finally.... everything that the heroes do in this story ultimately doesn’t really do anything to influence the results of how it turned out. Snively’s behind the scenes scheming ensured that Knothole was never, ever in any real danger to begin with, and Crocbot was already on the way to killing Robotnik. If Sonic had just stayed put in Devil’s Gulag, or if Bunnie and Antoine had never managed to escape when they did? The outcome would still be the same- Knothole would get zapped, but it wouldn’t actually be destroyed, and Crocbot’s explosive would have gone off anyway and Robotnik would STILL be dead, and Sally would still be alive in suspension. Every major event of the book is out of the heroes hands and, ultimately, the heroes just weren’t really needed. All that happenstance and coincidence has meant that the people we’re supposed to care about, are the least relevant factor in any of it.

In short? This story, which was meant to be the one where Sonic is pushed to his brink, is ultimately resolved not because of anything he did, but because of things that OTHER people did, and things ultimately still would have resolved themselves if Sonic had just sit down and done nothing at all. The Big Finale for the book, and Sonic has the least impact on anything. It’s pathetic.

So yeah, what else can I really say? The story is a mess. The plot points are contrived and forced, the characters act stupid in order to let things happen, the heroes are able to succeed more by coincidence and storytelling convenience than anything genuine, the writing is just plain bad and heavily derivative of an outside source, and in the end, none of it really mattered because nothing the heroes did really mattered when everything is looked at from a distance. There are a few moments that are genuinely cool, and the fight scene between Sonic and Robotnik is still my favorite fight, bar none. But that isn’t enough to salvage it. That isn’t enough to forgive all the horrible, glaring problems with the story, pacing and execution of this thing.

Hope that explains it.

#Anonymous

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