#its the one connection i never had confirmed from old internet lore

[opera-gx-official]

What are your thoughts on the colour orange?

It reminds me of philip J. Fry, or 'tord' as he's know in the UK.

[toaarcan]

Sonic X, Sonic Heroes, and IDW, or: How a bad anime from 2004 spoiled a comic from 2019.

Now, I haven’t been following IDW Sonic all that closely. I get regular updates from Nemesis via Discord, and additional info from some of the Tumblrs I follow that are invested in it, but I don’t really have a desire to touch it myself. Here’s why.

There’s a multitude of reasons for this. Starting with the background of Sonic Forces wasn’t really a good place to begin from, and being based on present-day game lore in general was always going to hurt it, mainly because SEGASonic canon is currently a confusing mess of retcons brought on by Iizuka taking the J.K. Rowling approach.

Wait, no, he’s just saying stupid shit that contradicts previous canon, not trying to score woke points and hoping nobody notices the frankly terrible stereotypes and TERF tweets. Iizuka is taking the Greg Farshtey approach.

Added, as anyone that’s had experience with my opinions will tell you, I started falling out of love with Ian Flynn’s writing somewhere around Issue 200, and moved to outright dislike during Mecha Sally, and to make matters worse I started noticing that some of the flaws in the 200-247 era were also present in the 160-199 era, retroactively making those harder to go back to.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I kept up with Archie for the SatAM cast. SatAM reruns back in 2004 were my Sonic, moreso than anything else, and even now I still have way more attachment to those two seasons of animation than I do to most other aspects of the franchise, warts and all. So Archie providing me with additional content for said characters was a major draw for me. I’d generally put up with a lot just to get myself more SatAM content.

That in itself is a large part of why I fell off the Archie train during Mecha Sally. The entirety of the SatAM cast were removed from the regular lineup, just leaving three SEGA characters with their personalities stunted, even if that didn’t make sense in-universe. But that’s a discussion for another day.

So being written by someone whom I no longer enjoyed the writing of, set in a mess of a canon with a thoroughly shite game as the main basis, without the cast I read the previous comics for gave me little reason to invest in IDW Sonic. It wasn’t for me, I’d just keep reading Transformers and move on.

Then MTMTE/LL ended with a heart-twister and Ex-RID ended with a giant Unicron-shaped fart, and the new comic is dull as fucking dishwater and started by killing off one of my favourites, who was also one of the franchise’s confirmed LGBT characters. So now IDW is getting none of my money. Which is good because I’m broke.

Tangents aside, my lack of interest wasn’t something set in stone. If it turned out that the comic was actually really good, then sure, I’d try it. I was up for being proven wrong. But so far, I haven’t felt compelled by the responses from the internet. If anything I’ve been more turned off.

I could talk about how zombies are really fucking boring. I could talk about how SEGA’s recent confusion over what to do with Amy has combined with Ian’s need to include a Sally-esque character to make IDW Amy into Sally Lite. I could talk about how Ian seemingly fundamentally misunderstood everything that was cool about Neo Metal Sonic and somehow managed to reduce him to a boring Eggman minion in an arc where Eggman was out of action due to amnesia… But I won’t.

Instead I’m going to talk about how the comic has done something that would legitimately make me think twice about picking it up even if the FF were to debut tomorrow.

Yeah, I would pass up a SatAM fix because of this, that’s how much this ticks me off.

Now, I presume that if you’re reading this, you have a favourite Sonic character. And you probably feel pretty strongly about how your favourite character is portrayed. If they get a bad run in a game or two then you probably get a little salty about that. Tails and Knuckles fans in particular, as of late, seem to be the ones getting the short end.

Well, my favourite character in the entire franchise is Emerl the Gizoid. I will take Gemerl as a worthy substitute, they’re basically the same character. And the comics have been doing them dirty since the Archie reboot.

(Sidenote: I will be referring to Emerl with male pronouns from this point on. The Maria-soul thing isn’t as widely known as I’d like it to be, so I’m going to compromise for the sake of keeping the focus on the actual point)

However, not everything about this can be laid at the feet of Ian Flynn. Arguably his portrayal of said character is merely a symptom of a long-running issue that has plagued Sonic storytelling for roughly 15-16 years now.

But before we get into that, let’s get into something important: Why Emerl is my favourite Sonic character.

Part 1: Emerl in Sonic Battle, or “How I learned to stop worrying and love the Gizoid”.

This game doesn’t get enough love.

Now, I totally understand why it doesn’t get enough love. There are game design choices, like the grinding and the repetitiveness of the story mode that really drag it down, and because of that, Battle can become a slow-going and tedious experience, and that’s a real shame, because the story that’s hidden in this game is a thing of beauty.

Like most Sonic games from the 2000s, this game introduces a new character to join Sonic’s list of friends. Unlike the games that aren’t SA2 and Sonic Rush, this new character is actually good (This is hyperbole, Omega, Silver, and Shade were fine too).

Emerl enters the story as a mute, barely-functional robot that doesn’t do much of anything for a while, and only seems to come to life when Sonic locates it and attacks it. However, as the robot absorbs more Chaos Emeralds, slowly a personality starts to form, largely pieced together from other characters’ traits.

Emerl, as he is dubbed, is initially childlike and naive, but as he grows he develops a sassy streak, and his speech becomes a lot more developed. Maturity sets in, as Emerl grapples with his own nature, particularly the legacy he carries from the ARK, and Shadow’s ongoing turmoil with regards to the whole “Living Weapon” deal. Ultimately he becomes a hero, following in the footsteps of his mentor, parental figure, and closest friend, Sonic.

That’s right, Sonic, not Cream, is Emerl’s closest friend. We’ll get to that.

But this heart-warming story of Sonic becoming a dad for a robot doesn’t have a happy ending. Despite Shadow and Rouge finding a way to neutralise Emerl’s destructive Gizoid programming, Eggman has a way to reactivate it anyway, driving Emerl into a berserk rampage. This is kind of the one sticking point I have with the game’s plot, Eggman shouldn’t have been able to do this after Shadow and Rouge neutralised Emerl.

Additionally, while Emerl was on the ARK getting Maria’s soul crammed into him, Gerald also added a self-destruct mechanism that would trigger if he ever went Ultimate again.

So with Emerl quite literally exploding with all the power of the Chaos Emeralds, but his destructive programming forcing him to turn Eggman’s latest Death Star knockoff on Mobius/Earth/Sonic’s World, Sonic races up to confront his mecha-child, and things take a turn for the Old Robot Yeller.

In a moment that really deserves more attention, Sonic confronts his own child on the bridge of a space station, while Emerl is running on the power of the Chaos Emeralds and outputting more energy than he can physically take, and they fight. In the space of thirty seconds, they have a ten-round knock-down, drag-out brawl, and at the end, Sonic stands triumphant. Without using a single transformation. Yeah, that’s how powerful this guy is, that’s not travel speed, that’s combat speed. Looking at you, Death Battle.

It’s not really clear whether Sonic outright defeats Ultimate Emerl, or just survives long enough for his opponent to reach his limit and self-destruct, but the end result is the same. Sonic cradles a robot that became his own child over the course of the past few weeks, someone he raised from a baby-like state into a mature and heroic individual, and Emerl looks up at him and asks “Sonic… am I going to die?” And despite Sonic desperately trying to get him to keep it together, Not only does Emerl die, but he’s aware that the end is coming, and bids farewell to all of his friends as Sonic pleads with him to hold on. Shadow is equally distraught, his only friend with a connection to the ARK, someone he can call a brother, someone who carries the soul of his deceased sister within him, is dead.

Emerl: “Sonic I don’t feel so good.”

Like it’s canon that Eggman basically murdered Sonic’s kid.

And goddamnit this ending hits me hard. It frustrates me that Eggman was able to pull a means to drive Emerl into his Ultimate freakout mode out of his arse, but other than that, it’s so gutwrenching, I love it.

Gamma’s story from SA1 gets a lot of praise on the Internet, but for me, this is even better. It’s like Gamma’s story, but if Gamma was actually central to the plot of the game and the characters other than Amy gave a shit about him, and gave a shit about him for longer than a single cutscene, after which they are never mentioned again. Hell, due to Chaos Gamma being a thing, Gamma gets more love from the other characters in Battle than he does in SA1.

But, unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.

Part 2: (Sonic) Anime was a Mistake, or: “Sonic X ruins everything.”

I’ve made my dislike of this anime quite clear in the past. The characters are flanderized, Sonic is a B-lister in his own damn show, the villains are weaksauce or boring or both, the plot is only remotely close to good when its cribbing from two videogames which told the stories in question better, and for the first two seasons the entire show actually revolves around not Sonic, but the least relatable audience surrogate ever made. The third season would continue to include him, but shove him (And everyone else) to the side in favour of a Pokemon whose only move was “Flashback”, making audiences the world over question why he was even there in the first place.

Oh, and it also near-singlehandedly destroyed the thin shreds of character development that Tails, Knuckles, Amy, and Eggman had received in Sonic Adventure 2.

All four of these characters had been significantly enriched by the then most recent console game. Eggman had been revealed to be motivated by an admiration for his grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, but in the same game learned that Gerald had lost his marbles and programmed the ARK to smash into the planet and kill everyone on it, probably including his surviving family, i.e. little baby Ivo Robotnik. Gerald betrayed Eggman posthumously, and it’s clear from Eggman’s interactions with Tails during the credits of the game that this is giving him a lot to think about.

Knuckles is a weird case because most of his characterisation in SA2 is conveyed via… the lyrics to his rap music. Yes, really. He gets minor growth through the cutscenes, most notably in his decision to shatter the Master Emerald early on. Having already reassembled it once after it was broken in SA1, he’s now confident that he can do it again, so is willing to break it to prevent Eggman or Rouge stealing it. Via the rap lyrics, however (Yes I just wrote that), we also learn that Knuckles is slowly warming up to Sonic, gaining a greater respect for him, that he is more in-touch with his history and ancestors after SA1 (Though fortunately not in a Ken Penders way), and that he’s also struggling with feelings for Rouge, a plot element that went completely out of the window after this game.

Tails and Amy, however, get it the worst, as both went through arcs in SA1 that are followed up on and expanded in SA2. Amy had come to the conclusion that she didn’t need to rely on Sonic for everything, and that she would make him respect her as a hero in her own right. And while Amy is clearly in way over her head throughout the events of SA2, she still makes a significant difference, not only freeing Sonic from his cell on Prison Island, allowing Tails’ invasion to be a distraction and stealing a keycard to facilitate it, but of course, she later saves the world by motivating Shadow to join the fight to stop the ARK drop.

Tails had a similar plot, about learning to believe in himself as a hero, without having to rely on Sonic, and in SA2 he gets to prove it, not only partaking in the same rescue operation as Amy and fighting Eggman on even footing, but effectively taking command of the heroes and becoming their new leader, and for the first time, Sonic defers to him.

And then Sonic X came along and fucked it all up.

Eggman became a clownish antagonist with no semblance of nuance, and he actually got off the easiest.

Knuckles became a loud, dimwitted loner who got tricked by Eggman constantly, which would go on to be his personality for the rest of the franchise, ultimately culminating in the travesty against all sense that was Boom Knuckles.

Tails was reduced to a wimpy taxi driver, incapable of doing anything without his giant mecha plane to sit in. This was largely exacerbated by the presence of Donut Steele, who usurped his role as Sonic’s best friend and sidekick for two seasons, a problem which only got worse in the third season when Donut Steele suddenly became a genius inventor too, encroaching even more into Tails’ territory. Tails did get himself some more focus in S3, but only to make googly eyes at the Pokemon, a role which frankly could’ve gone to literally anyone else and would have made no difference on the plot. I would say that Tails being involved in a romance story at all is weird, but given the comics and Boom the weirdest thing about this latest tragic love story for the kid is that the Pokemon was actually close to his own age, because outside of this it really does seem like Tails goes for older ladies. Though she did turn into an adult at the end so I guess that counts?

But Amy arguably got the worst of it. Not only was her crowning moment in SA2 taken away from her and given to Donut Steele, but the poor girl had her promising character arc cut short and replaced with an obsessive, unhealthy fixation on Sonic, combined with a violent temper and an eagerness to smash anything that displeased her, Sonic included, with a giant hammer. Her admiration and crush on Sonic were warped into her being a possessive, mean-spirited stalker, whom only got away with it because she was an anime girl and therefore it was cute rather than creepy.

I want to take the time at this point to stress that stalking is not okay, under any circumstances. A girl obsessively following an older guy and threatening him and everyone around him with violent assault if they ever so much as imply that he isn’t interested in her is not cute, it means it’s time for a restraining order. Sonamy is not cute.

Now that I’ve swatted that particular hornet’s nest with a cricket bat, let’s move on!

I’ve always found it ironic that, despite being the adaptation with the most oversight from SEGA and Sonic Team, and the most endorsement from them too, Sonic X had easily the worst characterisation of any of the shows at the time. But, for all its faults, I can’t blame everything that went down in the aftermath on it. It had a comrade-in-arms. Mediocrely-written arms.

Part 3: Partner in Crime, or “Sonic Heroes also ruins everything.”

Sonic Heroes has a lot to answer for. And I mean a lot. It was the beginning of the franchise’s obsession with references to the classic games, it codified the really awkward ages for certain characters, and it seemed to be dedicated to completely unpicking everything established in the Adventure duology.

Shadow’s sudden resurrection is one thing, at least they had the graces to include a means to preserve his sacrifice via having him be an android, the blame for that not taking should be laid at the feet of his own game.

But the rest of the cast? Ohhh boy. Sonic’s still fine, he didn’t change much in the Adventure games, but then there’s Tails. Despite all the development he went through in SA1, in this game he needs to turn to Sonic when Eggman returns, and honestly this whole setup could’ve been fixed if Tails sought Sonic out not for the sake of having him lead the charge, but rather simply to recruit him into the counterattack he was already planning. Nevertheless, throughout the rest of the game Tails is almost as wimpy as his X counterpart, not helped by the voicework he’s given. No offense to William Corkery, who was probably like six when he recorded his lines, but this what you get when you choose actors via nepotism, rather than talent. But at least he does something.

How about Knuckles? As the other side of his derailment, Knuckles just turns up in this game, buddy-buddy with the characters he was only just starting to warm up to before, and blatantly not caring about the Master Emerald until Rouge mentions she’s going to steal it at the end. This will combine with his becoming a dumbass in Sonic X and become basically his entire character for… ever. Even in Forces, where he’s supposed to be doing slightly better as the leader of the resistance… but he’s a dumbass, and even Ian Flynn, who kept Knuckles as competent and intelligent in the Archie comics (Making the best version of Knuckles we’ve had in forever), kept this ongoing in the IDW comic. The Forces prequel portrays him as deciding to become leader of the Resistance (To an empire that hasn’t actually formed yet) purely to be a glory hound, and then goes on to establish that he was basically a figurehead while the real work was done by Amy, of all people.

And speaking of Amy…

Yeah, poor Amy is basically her Sonic X counterpart. But worse. I didn’t think that was possible, but at least X’s Amy seems to care about her friends. In Heroes, we’re treated to an equally violent and stalkerish Amy, who ostensibly starts searching out Sonic because he’s implicated in the abduction of Cream and Big’s pets, but when they actually catch up to him, Amy clean forgets why she is looking for him in the first place and tries to force him to marry her. Despite being twelve.

Y’know when Amy said she wanted to marry Sonic in SA2, she was joking, right?

This is why I find the idea of Amy being the real leader of the Resistance frankly absurd: Because the only time she led anything, it was a team that consisted of herself, a small child, and a man less intelligent and aware of reality than said small child, and she completely forgot their actual objective the moment she set her eyes on Sonic. Add in an unfortunate stint of very poor eyesight that got less and less understandable with every instance, and we got Amy’s rough personality for the next decade.

While Knuckles mostly stagnated at the same level of stupidity during that time, Tails got worse and worse, losing all of his badass traits with every game, a factor only increased by the “Sonic only” mentality costing him playable status, until he reached his nadir in Forces, cowering in terror from Chaos 0, and crying out to Sonic to save him, despite knowing full-well that Sonic was captured already.  Amy, meanwhile, limped along at the same level until about 2014, where it seemed someone at SEGA finally realised that A) Having the only female character you regularly use be a pink-coloured gender-bent version of your male hero whose only function is lusting after said hero doesn’t and shouldn’t fly in this day and age, and B) violent stalkers aren’t cute, and dropped this trait. Unfortunately, this has been more of a lateral move than a fix, as, much like Antoine in the comics, they forgot to give her anything substantial or fitting after she lost her negative traits, leaving her a bland and dull character, and when you’ve had a character be consistent for ten years, even if they were consistently bad, then changing it without cause or warning is still going to be jarring and awkward.

Part 4: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right, or “Why the fuck did this happen?”

As I said in Part 2, Sonic X was made under heavy oversight from Sonic Team, and was heavily endorsed by them at the same time. There were promos for the show inserted into Sonic Adventure DX, a few episodes were released on GBA cartridges, and it received a long-running comic from Archie that ran alongside the main book, even after the show had ended. Additionally, characters that debuted in games from 2002-2004 were restricted from appearing in Archie’s main book for years afterwards (Which will become relevant later). The third season was commissioned solely off of the response to the first two, and primarily overseas response, hence why the original sub was never aired in Japan.

Sonic X was huge. And with that in mind, it’s plain to see that the portrayals of the characters in Sonic X were intended by SEGA. Yeah, all that horrible characterisation was intended as the vision for the franchise going forwards, and subsequent games were adjusted to match it.

And unfortunately, not only did this have a serious impact on the main cast of the games, but it had an even worse effect on Emerl.

Part 5: Emerl in Sonic X, or “Emerl vs. ‘Emel’”

Sonic X’s original mission statement was to adapt Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and Sonic Battle. Why they skipped Sonic Heroes, despite Shadow being a major player in Battle’s story, I don’t know.

For whatever reason, the show took a full season to actually get to the first game adaptation, SA1, and instead spent the first 26 episodes on bland episodic “adventures”, in some kind of strange reverse-Isekai series. However, once it got there, the adaptation work was fairly faithful to the source material, which the exception of Donut Steele’s being crammed in to the plot. However, he mostly followed Big around, and since Big was the least involved in the game’s plot, he didn’t disrupt too much.

Sidenote, after 26 episodes of filler, the actual SA1 adaptation only lasted six episodes.

SA2 was likewise only six episodes, but with the exception of Amy’s big scene, it likewise wasn’t too bad. Tails suffered this time around too, which is somewhat surprising since he was mech-dependent in the anime anyway.  

After some more filler, which introduced the Chaotix and then did nothing with them, Emerl finally made an appearance, albeit they got his name wrong.

‘Emel’ looks like Emerl, and somewhat works like Emerl, but might as well be completely  different. ‘Emel’ stays completely mute for the entire time he’s around, never advancing much beyond Emerl’s initial silent, pre-first Emerald persona. He does get better at fighting, but he’s limited to only absorbing a single skill at once (Except for when he isn’t).

Dispensing with Battle’s interesting, rich, and heart-twisting plot, Sonic X instead has ‘Emel’ linger in ensemble for three episodes, before condensing the entire game’s premise into a two episodes of really bland tournament arc, where Sonic himself doesn’t actually fight and we get two rounds of Donut Steele being a dick to his friend and his father.

‘Emel’ wins the tournament, and is given a Chaos Emerald, and just when you think it might kickstart him becoming an actual character, instead it just drives him insane and he immediately becomes a pathetically weak version of Ultimate Emerl. After kicking the crap out of the entire cast, he is defeated by Cream and Cheese, because even though he can take on Sonic, Knuckles, and Rouge at the same time and win, along with Tails, Amy, Donut Steele and everyone else, he… can’t handle two opponents at once.

This is stupid.

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about Sonic’s relationship with ‘Emel’, and that’s because he doesn’t have one. The wonderfully-written parental bond that these two characters share in the games is completely excised, and instead the focus is put on Cream. Bare in mind, Cream is so inconsequential to the actual game that she doesn’t even get mentioned individually in Emerl’s dying speech like Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Shadow do. Instead she’s just grouped in with Amy.

This is also stupid.

And as a result of this, it means that what is arguable base form Sonic’s most impressive feat just doesn’t happen in the anime, instead Emerl dies because he is lightly kicked a bit by Cream. Yeah, unlike the Advance games, Sonic X’s Cream is not an unstoppable engine of destruction, she’s basically just a small child who can sometimes fly.

Instead of Emerl’s tragic speech and Sonic’s desperate attempts to keep his son alive, we get treated to a prolonged scene of Cream crying over the death of her “friend”, something that is probably meant to tug at heartstrings but doesn’t because Cream’s voice sounds like nails on a chalkboard.

And Shadow isn’t even there! He doesn’t come back until a third of the way through Season 3, and never meets ‘Emel.’

This is really stupid. And, for those keeping track, that means of Sonic X’s originally commissioned 52 episodes, and the full series run of 78 episodes, a stunning total of seventeen of them were actually adaptations of the games that the series was supposed to focus on, leaving us with 61 episodes of what might as well be filler.

And, unfortunately, that franchise-wide initiative had damning consequences for Emerl.

Part 6: Gemerl and Sonic Advance 3, or: “An incomplete resurrection.”

So, Gemerl. I know his name is apparently G-Merl now but fuck that I’m calling him Gemerl. If the comics can do it then so will I.

Gemerl is the worst thing Eggman has ever done to Sonic. Like, there is no contest. Some of his other schemes might be more destructive and generally evil, but in terms of personal pain inflicted, nothing has topped this.

Eggman salvaged Emerl’s corpse, and brought him back to life as a mindless murderbot under his control. So not only did he kill Sonic’s robo-son, but he also brought him back as a weapon.

Come the conclusion of the game, Gemerl predictably betrays Eggman, steals the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic, and goes on another rampage. I have… headcanons about this fight, but that’s something to worry about later. What’s important is that, once again, Sonic is victorious, and Gemerl’s defeated body plunges into the atmosphere.

Fortunately, Tails is able to bring Emerl back properly this time, presumably using the Chaos shard that was left over at the end of Battle’s finale. So, it’s all a happy ending, right? Sonic has his child back, Shadow has his connection to his history restored, and Emerl is alive and well, right?

Wrong.

See, the vile spectre of Sonic X rears its ugly head once more, and sabotages this conclusion. Gemerl doesn’t return to Sonic, in fact we never see him reunite with his father. Instead, Sonic X’s version has enough clout now to take precedence, so Gemerl is now Cream’s playmate.

Bear in mind that Emerl’s idea of a fun game is all-out combat against his friends, and Cream doesn’t like fighting (Even if she’s really good at it in Advance 2 and 3).

And then he never shows up again. Even when Cream is part of the game’s plot, like in Rush or Generations, he’s not there, and most egregiously, in Sonic Chronicles, where Cream is not only an active player in the plot, but so are Gizoids, the creators of said Gizoids are the main antagonists, and Emerl himself is mentioned… Gemerl is not there.

But he did make it into the comics, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

Part 7: Embargos, knock-offs, and misused tropes, or: “Ian Flynn dun goofed.”

For a long while, Emerl/Gemerl was barred from the Archie comics, due to the Sonic X embargo, and when it was lifted, he didn’t appear until the reboot. We did, however, get a suspiciously similar substitute in the form of Shard.

Shard was the original Metal Sonic, but when he was brought back and rebuilt for the Secret Freedom arc, he was given a colour scheme ostensibly derived from Metal Sonic 3.0, but one shared with Gemerl, and a personality that was a lot like a watered-down version of Emerl’s own.

On some level I can understand Ian’s decision to bring back Metal Sonic v2.5, rather than use the character that seems to have been an inspiration for this new incarnation in some way. He’d need a fully-formed Emerl, necessitating a skip over the whole story, since there wasn’t room for an adaptation during the Mecha Sally arc that the Secret Freedom story was framed within. Heck, for all we know, the similarities between them may simply be a pretty sizeable coincidence.

But then the reboot happened and Gemerl finally joined the comic cast. And to say it was underwhelming would be an understatement.

You’ll notice that I said “Gemerl” rather than “Emerl”, because his entire story was indeed skipped. The events of Sonic Battle and Sonic Advance 3 had both happened already. This wasn’t Ian’s decision, as far as we know, his intention was for the comic to start over from the beginning. However, due to the interference of Paul Kaminski, who wanted a softer reboot, Ian was forced to fill the characters’ active histories with a large chunk of the games’ stories. Battle and Advance 3 were among those that had already happened, so Emerl made cameos in both incarnations via flashback… which unfortunately led to a plot hole.

See, Advance 3 and Sonic Unleashed are rather difficult to keep in the same continuity, because both share a common plot element: The world breaking into seven pieces.

For a long while, it was generally assumed that the handheld games and console titles were only semi-canon to each other. This avoided the awkward question of “If the Gaias were already there, why didn’t they emerge when Eggman broke the planet in Advance 3?”

Ian shoved them blatantly into the same continuity, and gave no attempt to explain what was different about the Advance 3 world-break compared to the Gaia incident, which served as the backbone to the reboot’s three year long Shattered World Arc. Why didn't the Gaias wake up during Advance 3? Because that's now a question we have to ask of the comics' world.

When Gemerl finally showed up doing something other than yard work for Vanilla (Despite allegedly being Cream’s friend, Cream spends all her time with the rest of the cast, and Gemerl is basically Vanilla’s maid), it was to get effortlessly dispatched by a brainwashed Mega Man with a terrible name in the extremely lacklustre Worlds Unite event.

This one was more than a little bit of a slap in the face, considering that Emerl and Mega Man are very similar in concept- robots that can copy the abilities of other characters- but Emerl is demonstrably more powerful. Now, if Ian had established that Gemerl had been nerfed when he was rebuilt, either by Eggman or by Tails, that would be fine. But he didn’t. In fact, Gemerl is given the title bubble “Super Gizoid”, implying that he’s stronger than a regular Gizoid.

Worlds Unite is generally pretty bad for having its corrupted heroes easily curbstomp every other character around, to the point that the only thing that can stop them is each other, but in Gemerl’s case it really serves no purpose.

This is the only thing that he actually does in Worlds Unite. He shows up to get beaten up and make Mega Man look stronger. That’s it.

This is something that TV Tropes refers to as “The Worf Effect”, a trope wherein an established powerful character is defeated easily by a new character, in order to demonstrate the latter’s power. Now, there’s nothing wrong with using this trope, but please note that I said establishedpowerful character, which Gemerl wasn’t.

At the point that this comic released, Gemerl’s last appearance in any Sonic media was over ten years prior. None of the comic’s intended target audience would remember him, and they wouldn’t know why defeating him was impressive. And this was, in addition, a terrible way to introduce him to new fans. Though the worst part is easily that this was unnecessary. Mega Man had already defeated everyone else, and had established his power pretty well just on them, and he was about to get removed from play permanently in the next issue. There was really no reason to throw Gemerl under the bus for this.

He made one more appearance in the event, getting controlled by the Zeti along with every other robot, and after that he got bopped on the head and just flew away.

Later, he’d make another appearance in the Panic in the Sky arc, and while his portrayal was far from the worst thing about Panic in the Sky, it only adds to the issues caused by the previous showing.

Gemerl makes one appearance, and promptly gets pinned down by the Witchcarters and Team Hooligan. Bear in that one of those groups are the joke villains who nobody takes seriously, and the other are a gang that was defeated by Tails before he met Sonic.

Archie Gemerl was a character who only existed to lose to villains in a vain attempt to make them look better, and that’s legitimately all Ian ever did with him, which makes me wonder whether he disliked the character. And it didn’t even make the villains look good, when you think about it. For anybody that was actually the intended audience for this book, Gemerl had no significance. He was just a robot that got beat up all the time. But for anyone like me, who does remember the games he appeared in, it stands out, not as good writing, but as a blatant narrative device and misused trope.

In this situation, I would simply rather Gemerl never appeared in Archie. At all. If Ian wasn’t going to give him time to shine, or at the very least be an adequate member of the supporting cast, he shouldn’t have used him at all.

Part 8: A Fresh False Start, or: “Wait, how did this get worse?!”

And now we arrive at IDW.

The one nice thing I can say about Archie Gemerl is that at least his personality was mostly on point. He read like a generally accurate take on the character that Emerl was at the end of Battle, which is what he’s supposed to be.

The same cannot be said for IDW.

In the pages of IDW, Gemerl acts like the most generic robot. He speaks in emotionless, stilted sentences with little in the way of actual grammar, leaving him to read like a poor man’s Soundwave, or Soundwave in one of those comics where the writer can’t decide whether they want him to speak normally or adopt his speech pattern from the G1 cartoon, so they just sort of do both.

Emerl pretty much never talked like this, as far as I can recall. His speech development is much more reminiscent of a child learning words, and the only time when he did adopt a more robotic speech pattern, it was a clue that he was slipping back into his destructive programming. He only spoke like a generic robot when he was in mindless destroyer mode.

He gets thrown for a loop by a simple logic flaw, unable to reconcile “Protect Cream and Vanilla” with “Don’t kill the zombots”, and has to be talked out of killing everything around him, when the entire point of Gerald’s modifications to the Gizoid was to make him a bringer of hope rather than destruction, and give him a compassionate heart.

The part of Battle’s story where Cream imparts a pacifistic mindset doesn’t frame her as being right. In that part of the game, they are cornered and under attack by hostile but ultimately mindless drones, and when she convinces Emerl to stop fighting, he almost dies. It’s Cream that learns the lesson there, that sometimes fighting is okay.

This character is already compassionate, he shouldn’t need to be talked into not killing the zombots by a small child, nor should he need her to point out that they’re innocent people who have been made this way by Eggman, because he was made into a killing machine by Eggman twice, and the first time he did die because of it. The character that lay dying in Sonic’s arms, scared and bidding his last goodbyes to his loved ones shouldn’t be the one experiencing this struggle when Omega is also in this arc.

That’s it, really. He’s not Gemerl. He’s a second, less goofy Omega. And it boggles my mind that, despite getting Gemerl’s character, if not his combat abilities, down almost perfectly in Archie, Ian is now subjecting us to this travesty.  

Like with the Archie example above, therein lies the crux of why the steady decline of Emerl/Gemerl that began with Sonic X is pushing me away from IDW: I don’t want to read Ian’s take on this character, because, to me, No Gemerl is better than Badly-Written Gemerl,

This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, either.  Way back in 2016, when I complained about Ian’s portrayal of Gemerl in Panic in the Sky, I said that the way he handled characters that I liked tended to make them the least likeable parts of the stories he wrote. As well as stating my dislike for his handling of Gemerl, I also stated that I used to really like Fiona Fox, moreso in concept than in execution, but under Ian’s pen she was largely an insufferable antagonist, little more than a trophy to make his pet recolour look better, and almost every story she was in only added to the “List of reasons she needs to stop lying to herself and just start the redemption arc already”. Additionally, I said that I didn’t want to see him bring back Neo Metal Sonic or Mephiles in any context, and we got the former, and it was exactly as bad as I thought it would be.

So, that’s basically why I don’t want to read IDW. That’s why, even if the aspect that was a big sticking point for me back when the comic launched was to be undone soon, I still probably wouldn’t pick it up. Because I don’t want to see my favourite Sonic character continue to be written badly by a guy that should know better, and has done better in the past.

If he were simply screwing up Gemerl’s personality the first time he wrote him, I would file it away under the same category as “Emel”, but the fact that he’s done better before, in a book where he had greater restrictions on what he could do with the characters, really settles this as an interest-killer for me.

Well done, Mr. Flynn. I legitimately didn’t think you could make me actually miss SEGA’s tighter control, but you somehow managed it. I would be impressed if it weren’t so sad.

[prodigal-ezreal]

Nach Little Box of Hopes And Fears: Ezreal rework edition.

Let’s open this Pandora box, okay?

So, The Ezreal rework is probably hitting live somewhere at the end of the year after Worlds and the PBE during them, which gives us two months to sit, twiddle our thumbs and think. And Oh Boi! Have I thought! More under the cut because this Got Long.

This is all VERY subjective. Please take it with a grain of sea salt.

Let’s start from the beginning, as all organized matters should: What has Riot been doing with their reworks and Lore updates lately?

In my opinion, is give everyone and everything a place in the world, connecting characters and things that might have not been connected previously and retconning a few things along the way— With various degrees of success. The Darkin in Shurima are probably one of the biggest offenders here. While it gave them a place in Runaterra other than ‘Maybe aliens from another dimension/Old As Hell Demons’, Aatrox’s rework, Varus’s music video and Rhaast’s release never tied their designs or origins to anything Shuriman, from there the whiplash I got at least.

But that’s beside the point I’m trying to make. What’s Ezreal’s current state in the Lore?

Well, Ezreal has always been kind of in a weird spot post-institute, he’s from Piltover but has never had any strong affiliations or associations with the City State other than the place in which he spent his childhood, and now with the Piltover/Zaun and his own lore update, he has little ties in design as well! Back in the day, belts were all the rage in Piltover, now it’s more of an Art Deco thing —which I love— but Mr ‘I could probably go a week eating only the leather in my outfit’s belts and I still wouldn’t go hungry’ doesn’t fit anymore aesthetically. Shurima is still important to his character, since that’s where he got his gauntlet from, but as we can see from Elixir of Uloa, he’s not limited to exploring the desert, and to be honest? he never was.

Talking about design, it’s not that his design is horrendously bad, even if a bit ridiculous for his job (leather is not a breathable fabric), it just grew old. And it could have grown older! But the disparity between League’s current aesthetic/lore direction and Ezreal’s would have grown way too large for a champion so played. That’s why I reason they chose him, and not fiddlesticks or Udyr, for a VU/VO right now.

And here is where the box gets opened: let’s go first through the fears to have hope be sitting nice and pretty still inside at the end, okay?

I think everyone that follows me knows that, while I eat up any and all canon Ezreal content, I really don’t like the most recent approach Riot has had with his art: That Cutesy, Pixie Boy aesthetic that gets in my nerves and is present both in Star Guardian and the most recent World Championship skins. (Not to mention, they have gotten really lazy painting/modeling his face? I’d argue Ace of Spades has a prettier face than SG/SSG). Were his rework to take that direction for the sake of the good old ‘Ez is a girl’ joke, I’m going to be really sad about it. And Mad. Smad.

Not because I have a probelm with Ezreal not being your traditional hypermasculine fantasy male character, I quite enjoy that he isn’t, and if they were to tilt the scales in that direction to overfix the same joke, I’d still feel weird about it.

I think its easy to understand the fear of my favorite character being changed into the joke that has plagued him for years because of the homophobic fanbase that birthed it. My beef of course isn’t with male aligned people who don’t fit into the expectations of the gender, and it’s not my intention to imply that if you like the joke/ship, that you are contributing to your own oppression by reclaiming something they named as shameful— of course not. My beef is with the fact they claimed it shameful and that Riot is Not Woke Enough to pretend like it was their intention all along and they aren’t playing into the vices and prejuices of its fanbase. Let me explain.

Tar/ez or Eztar!c exists only because of the powerduo they used to be all the way back in Season 2, and persisted as an intracommunity joke because people just loved making fun of characters that didn’t quite fit with the usual Male Archetype(tm), Ezreal with his assumed ‘pretty boy’ looks (assumed because tbh no one was pretty back then) and lithe physique, and Taric with his ‘affeminate’ liking of gems. This joke, rooted in homophobia, turned both of their characters into jokes that Riot despite its best efforts because I mostly liked Taric’s rework, shut up, still l can’t completely overcome to this day, when the usage of ‘lol that’s so gay’ is not as negative as the beggining of the decade. It’s not like I think that it’s going to go away, I just fear it’s gonna get worse.

Not to mention! The wildly original, very alive horse that is the ‘Ez is a girl’ joke, comes from people forcing heterosexual roles into same gender relationships which, ew! That and his “Pretty anime boy” archetype, since those are also popular in yao! media (double ew). AND from the misogony that any male aligned person, or in less serious cases like this one, character, that doesn’t fall into line with the expectative of its gender, it’s marked as lesser. You might see this issues and think ‘I barely see that anymore’, which, fair. It has been in decline in the general Internet Population since the second half of the decade, but all of these problems stem from early 2010’s gamer culture so— Yeah. That’s another can of worms I am NOT opening.

TLDR: I feel like the the recent art direction comes from toxic places and I’m fearful Riot is gonna play into that instead of ignoring it.

It may be something else behind those decisions, but this is what my confirmation bias looks like.

Enough of unfounded fears I have now struck into your hearts because if I’m going to hell worrying about this, I’m gonna bring you all with me. Let’s think about hope.

My highest hopes for the update is that Riot plays into Ezreal’s lack of strong links— Not only do I think that it makes sense for a explorer to never truly belong in one place, it’s just easier and doesn’t force anything too alien to his character. I’d really like if they went for a ‘citizen of the world’ kind of deal. Make his design something based on Piltover but obviously worn and foreign, pepper his language with words from Shurima, Freljord, Ionia! Hell, with how big Noxus is, he’d have to learn to speak the language if he wanted to cross through it. I feel like he’s a wonderful opportunity to represent how diverse, yet interconnected Runnaterra is. I also feel like it plays into his fantasy of being a dashing —pun intended—young man who gets in and out of trouble, from adventure to adventure a la Indana Jones.

But going back to Riot’s Lore direction, we still need to tie him with somewhere, or at the very least, something.

Enter the world rune.

‘But Nach’ I hear you wail as I use either 50’s sellsman tactics or early 2000’s fanfic writer interrumptions to catch your attention, ‘World Runes are Ryze’s thing!’

Which, Fair. They are. I’m not saying Ezreal is gonna ‘prove himself to be able to let go of a World Rune’ since that is Ryze’s exclusive thing (even if the thought of that happening and Ez outright rejecting it cos Adventure sounds very appealing to me) I just want him to be tied to the missing World Rune because it makes sense for League’s token explorer to accidentaly stumble into the World Magic Battery.

Also because of the promo, but who knows. Maybe he wasn’t in the Ryze short precisely for that, maybe because since it had been so many years on the making, Ez wasn’t even in the Update Radar then and they just didn’t include him/made reference to him. It doesn’t matter, we don’t know. Time will tell.

Plus, him being tied to the World Rune would make Zoe’s fixation —as creepy as it is— make a bit more sense. If the Aspect Of Change that damned The Darkin is the same one we have today, It’d make her have more secretive, ulterior motives and connect her happy go lucky and childish personality to that mischeveous, manipulative persona we got to see in the Darkin story. If it turns out they are different, it still makes sense with Zoe’s Color story and IG characterization since she can’t seem to get serious about/remember what precisely she was supposed to omen.

TLDR Hopes: Just tie him to the world rune, it’d be cool. Also make him a fucking tutti fruti of cultures.

To tie it all up, I know there’s not much I can do but wait, since I am not active in the forums or the reddit community— but If I could feel in my heart Zoe was gonna have a crush on Ezreal when we got her ig teaser, then I do dare hope.

[nothingnothingaaa]

Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Lost Notebook

Adapted from Facebook: the Inside Story (book) by Steven Levy (Feb, 2020)

In the early days of Facebook, Zuck kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals. He destroyed them. But a few revealing pages survived. Steven Levy

I first met Mark Zuckerberg in March 2006. At the time, I was the lead tech writer at Newsweek and was working on a story about what we were calling Web 2.0—the notion that the next stage of the internet would be a joyful, participatory creation of individuals. I'd heard about a social networking startup that was spreading like kudzu on college campuses. I wanted to learn more about it, perhaps give it a name-check in the story. Luckily, Zuckerberg, its cofounder and CEO, was scheduled to appear that month at PC Forum, a conference I regularly attended, at a resort in Carlsbad, California.

We agreed to meet at the lunch hour on the conference grounds. We sat side by side at one of the big, crowded, round tables set up on a lawn under the bright sun. He was accompanied by Matt Cohler, who had left LinkedIn to join Facebook. Cohler, unable to nab a seat next to us, sat across the table, barely within ear range.

I took it in stride that Zuckerberg looked even younger than his 21 years. I'd been covering hackers and tech companies for long enough to have met other peach-fuzz magnates. But what did shake me was his affect. I asked him a few softball questions about what the company was up to, and he just stared at me. He said nothing. He didn't seem angry or preoccupied. Just blank. If my questions had been shot from a water pistol at the rock face of a high cliff they would have had more impact.

I was flummoxed. This guy is the CEO, isn't he? Is he having some sort of episode? Was there something I'd written that made him hate me? Time seemed to freeze as the silence continued.

I looked over to Cohler for guidance. He smiled pleasantly. No lifeline. Stumbling for a way out of the awkwardness, I asked Zuckerberg if he knew anything about PC Forum. He said no, and so, as a resident Methuselah, I explained its roots as the key industry gathering in the personal computer era, where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would go at each other with smiles on their faces and shivs in their fists. After taking in that bit of lore, he seemed to thaw, and for the rest of the lunch he was able to talk, albeit sketchily, about the company he started in a dorm room and which had grown to 7 million users.

Though I was unaware at the time, I had joined the club of those stunned by Mark Zuckerberg's trancelike silences. Facebook VP Andrew Bosworth once called this stare “Sauron's gaze.”

Zuckerberg and Facebook got four sentences in my cover story, “The New Wisdom of the Web.” If I'd known the things that Zuckerberg hadn't shared with me that afternoon at the La Costa Resort and Spa, I might have devoted more space.

Zuckerberg was entering one of the most productive periods in his life. A few weeks after I met him, he would lay out a ludicrously ambitious vision for Facebook. In a journal with unlined 8-by-10 paper, he sketched his mission and product design and explored how a tiny company might become a vital utility for the world. In detail, he described features called Open Registration and Feed, two products that would supercharge his company.

Zuckerberg found focus in that notebook and others. In his jottings are the seeds of what would come—all the greatness and the failings of Facebook. Over the next 10 years, Zucker­berg would execute the plans he drew up there.

Facebook would transform itself from a college student hangout to the dominant social media service, with a population bigger than that of any country in the world, and was on its way to having more members than any religion. Zuckerberg's gospel insisted that more and more sharing was an inherent good. In addition to bringing people together, Facebook became a source of news, entertainment, and even life-saving information. The company monetised its user base with ads, and Zuckerberg became one of the richest people in the world, his name hoisted into the pantheon of PC Forum legends. And then came the 2016 election. Suddenly, simmering complaints about the service boiled over into anger. Facebook's most cherished accomplishments became liabilities. The enormous numbers of people who connected, “We Are the World”-style, on the service now became alarming evidence of its excessive power. A platform that allowed the voiceless to be heard also allowed trolls to broadcast bilious provocation at ear-splitting decibel levels. It was a tool for deadly oppressors and liberation movements alike. And above all, it was an egregious privacy offender: Facebook's long-held ethic of sharing was now viewed as a honey trap to snare user data. And that data—information provided wittingly and unwittingly by all of us—was the substance on which Facebook grew fat and prospered.

Since 2006 I've been watching Zuck­erberg and, over the past three years, have been writing a history of his company. I've spoken to him nine times and observed as he's adapted—and, in some ways, refused to adapt—to the most challenging circumstances. The shift in public attitudes toward Facebook mirrors the reputational fall of the tech sector itself. But Facebook's unique circumstances emanate largely from its founder's personality, vision, and approach to management. To understand Facebook, you have to understand Zuckerberg.

That isn't the easiest task. Even he admits that there's a robotic coolness to his public persona. After many conversations, he got relatively candid with me, but there was always a measure of reserve. He never forgot that I'm a reporter and was understandably protective of himself and the company he built. But I did find one venue where Zuckerberg was utterly frank and unfiltered about his plans and dreams for Facebook, providing vital clues about the man running the world's most powerful companies. It was in the notebook he kept in the spring of 2006.

As a kid growing up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a bedroom community north of New York City, Mark Zuckerberg loved playing games. One was a PC-based strategy game called Civilisation, with the tagline “Build an empire to stand the test of time.” Game-playing stoked a desire to learn programming. His parents, a dentist and a psychiatrist, hired a coding tutor.

Zuckerberg quickly surpassed his local public school's computer science offerings, enrolling in a graduate course in eighth grade. After his second year of high school, he asked to attend a private school with more AP and computer courses. His parents wanted him to go to nearby Horace Mann, a highly selective preparatory school, but Zuckerberg, once described by his father as “strong-willed and relentless,” preferred the more rarefied Phillips Exeter Academy. Exeter it was.

Zuckerberg thrived at the exclusive New Hampshire prep school, seemingly unintimidated that classes there might include a Rockefeller, a Forbes, and a Firestone. Besides establishing himself as a computer whiz, he was the captain of the fencing team. He was an avid Latin student, developing a fanboy affinity for the emperor Augustus Caesar, an empathetic ruler who also had an unseemly lust for power and conquest. Zuckerberg still indulged in games; his favourite was a successor to Civilisation set in outer space called Alpha Centauri, in which players chose to lead one of seven “human factions” to control the galaxy. Zuckerberg always took the role of the quasi-UN “Peacekeeping Forces.” The spiritual leader of the peacekeepers was a commissioner named Pravin Lal, who opined that “the free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.” Zuckerberg would later use a Lal quote as the signature on his Facebook profile: “Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”

Zuckerberg entered Harvard University in 2002 and immediately ignored the things you were supposed to do at Harvard University. He spent a lot of time at a cheap wooden desk in the common room of Suite H33 in Kirkland House creating software products. He cared about these more than his grades or his classes, which he attended only occasionally.

And then came FaceMash, the “Hot or Not”-like program that encouraged students to rate each others' looks. To populate the picture database, he'd hacked into various protected university housing websites, which led to his investigation by Harvard's Administration Board. He was reportedly one decision away from suspension. People close to him confirm that he was oddly unperturbed by the threat. (At a festive “Goodbye, Mark” party, 19-year-old Zuckerberg met his future wife, Priscilla Chan. The potential suspendee was wearing party glasses with a message that made a coding pun about beer consumption.)

“He had this real self-confidence,” says his classmate Joe Green. Once, while Green was walking to dinner with Zuckerberg and Chan, Zuckerberg impulsively darted into a busy street. “Watch out!” Chan said.

“Don't worry,” Green told her. “His confidence force field will protect him.” Zuckerberg avoided suspension. It wouldn't be the last time he managed to skate away from the consequences of his actions. In February 2004, he cofounded TheFacebook. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, fellow students who had hired him to help build a social network website, eventually sued. The twins and their partner had been brainstorming for over a year, with apparently ­little urgency, and charged that Zuckerberg had plundered what would otherwise have been a successful idea. They had probably overestimated their own product, but it is indisputable that Zuckerberg dragged his feet on the project, stalling for around two months while brainstorming his own competing product. (Even now, despite the evidence of his own digital trail, Zuckerberg denies intentional deception: “I think I may have been conflict-­avoidant,” he told me.) Facebook eventually had to pay $65 million in cash and stock to settle the case. But that wasn't until 2008, and by then the settlement was a pittance compared with the company's multibillion-dollar valuation.

Facebook seemed charmed. Though Zuckerberg knew little about fundraising or running a business, the pieces fell into place. By the end of 2005, Zuckerberg had somehow pulled off millions in financing—his early mentor Sean Parker got things rolling with an introduction to Facebook's first big investor, Peter Thiel. He gathered a team of experienced advisers. “Whether it's Peter Thiel or Sean Parker, these people thought they were manipulating Mark,” surmises one early Facebook employee. “I remember in hindsight thinking how genius it was that Mark convinced Sean Parker to raise all the money for him … Mark saw Sean as a useful tool to do the job that sucks the most,” that is, fundraising.

The year I first met Zuckerberg, he was living in a one-­bedroom apartment a short walk from the Facebook offices, which were spread among a few buildings in downtown Palo Alto. Always with him was one of his notebooks. Those who visited his apartment, with its mattress on the floor and barely used kitchen, might spot a stack of completed journals. But most of his time was spent in the crowded, chaotic Facebook offices, where he could be seen, head down, scrawling in his crabbed, compact script. He sketched out product ideas, diagrammed coding approaches, and slipped in bits of his philosophy. Page after page were filled with straight lines of text, bullet-pointed feature lists, flow charts.

Zuckerberg was no longer doing much coding; he was focused mostly on the big picture. The notebooks allowed him to work out his vision in detail. When Facebook engineers and designers rolled in to the office, they would sometimes find a few photocopied pages from the notebooks at their workstations. The pages might contain a design for a front end or a list of signals for a ranking algorithm. He was still finding his way as a communicator, and the pages often opened up a conversation between the recipients and their boss. They also imbued Zucker­berg's thoughts with a kind of inevitability. The printed page can't be deleted or altered, or forwarded in infinitely duplicable digital form.

The notebooks have now mostly disappeared, destroyed by Zuckerberg himself.

He says he did it for privacy reasons. This is in keeping with sentiments he expressed to me about the pain of having many of his early IMs and emails exposed in the aftermath of legal proceedings. “Would you want every joke that you made to someone being printed and taken out of context later?” he asks, adding that the exposure of his juvenile jottings is a factor in his current push to build encryption and ephemerality into Facebook's products. But I discovered that those early writings aren't totally lost. Snippets, presumably those he copied and shared, present a revealing window into his thinking at the time. I got ahold of a 17-page chunk from what might be the most significant of his journals in terms of Facebook's evolution. He named it “Book of Change.”

Dated May 28, 2006, the first page has his address and phone number, with a promise to pay a $1,000 reward for return of the book if lost. He even scrawled an epigram, a message to himself: “Be the change you want to see in this world.” Mahatma Gandhi.

The writing reveals an author with focus and discipline. He dated nearly every page. Some of the entries seem to have been created in a single burst of energy. They cover three or four pages of detailed road maps with neat sketches of sample screens. Nothing is crossed out. This is the work of someone in a maximum state of flow.

The Book of Change outlines the two projects that would transform Facebook from college-and-high-school network into internet colossus. On May 29, he began a page called Open Registration. Up until that point, Facebook had been limited to students, a gated community where only classmates could browse your profile. Zuckerberg's plan was to open Facebook to every­one. He diagrammed how someone could create an account. People would be asked whether they were in college, high school, or “in the world.” He mused about privacy. Could you see profiles of “second-­degree” friends in your geographical region? Or anywhere? “Maybe this should be anywhere, as opposed to just your geo,” he wrote. “That would really make the site open but probably not a good idea just yet.”

Whiteboards appeared in every Facebook office, and employees couldn't survive without excellent dry-eraser skills. But a Zuck notebook carried the sanctity of a papal decree.

He wanted Facebook to be wide open eventually, but on the pages of the notebook, you could see him grappling with the implications. What distinguished Facebook from other social networks was the assumed privacy provided by its gated setup. Open Reg would throw open those gates to the masses. But would people then no longer see Facebook as a safe space? In designing Open Reg, he posted one final question to himself.

“What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?” He seemed at least as concerned about the perception of privacy as with privacy itself.

The tension between expanding the boundaries of Facebook and maintaining an appearance of privacy preoccupied Zuckerberg's mind and filled his notebook in other ways. He took three pages to lay out a vision for something he called “Dark Profiles.” These would be Facebook pages for people who, whether by omission or intention, had not signed up for Facebook. The idea was to allow users to create these profiles for their friends—or really just about anyone who didn't have a Facebook account—with nothing more than a name and email address. Once the profile existed, anyone would be able to add information to it, like biographical details or interests.

As presented in the Book of Change, the dark profiles would serve as a tool to motivate stragglers to sign up, perhaps through email alerts about what people were posting about them on Facebook. Zuckerberg was aware that allowing the creation of profiles for people who had no desire to be on Facebook might stir up privacy concerns. He spent some time pondering how this could avoid being “creepy.” Maybe, he mused, dark accounts might not be included in search engines.

(It's not clear how much of this came to pass. In her 2012 memoir, Katherine Losse, a former Facebook employee, wrote that in 2006 she worked on a project that “created hidden profiles for people who were not yet Facebook users but whose photographs had been tagged on the site.” She told me recently that “it was kind of peer-to-peer marketing at Facebook, directed at ­people who had friends on the site but hadn't signed up yet.” Another early Facebook employee confirms this, also saying that Facebook brainstormed Zuckerberg's idea of allowing people to create and edit dark profiles of friends, Wikipedia-style, but it was not executed.)

Back in 2006, when Zuckerberg ticked off the potential virtues of implementing dark profiles in the Book of Change, he mentioned user recruitment, the addition of more data to Facebook's directory, and his sense that “it's fun and kind of crazy.” Twelve years later, Zuckerberg would be questioned in Congress about whether Facebook kept tabs on people who had not signed up for the service. He punted the question, but Facebook later clarified. The company said it keeps certain data on nonusers for security purposes and to show outside developers how many people are using their app or website. But, it asserted, “we do not create profiles for non-­Facebook users.”

Zuckerberg's other preoccupation in the Book of Change was a product he called Feed. (Trademark issues meant it would ultimately be branded News Feed.) Feed was a dramatic rethinking of the entire Facebook experiment. In 2006, to browse Facebook profiles, you'd have to jump from one to another to see if your friends had posted updates. News Feed would bring those updates to you in a stream and become Facebook's new front page.

In his notebook, Zuckerberg thought hard about what would appear on the News Feed. His priority was to make it easier for people to see what was important among the friends they had consciously connected to on Facebook. One word stood out as a yardstick for inclusion in the Feed: “interesting-ness.” It sounded innocent. “Stories need context,” he wrote. “A story isn't just an interesting piece of information. It's an interesting piece of information plus other interesting things about it AND why it's interesting.”

Zuckerberg envisioned a three-tier hierarchy of what made stories compelling, imagining that people are driven chiefly by a blend of curiosity and narcissism. His top tier was “stories about you.” The second involved stories “cantered around your social circle.” In the notebook, he provided examples of the kinds of things this might include: changes in your friends' relationships, life events, “friendship trends (people moving in and out of social circles),” and “people you've forgotten about resurfacing.”

The least important tier on the hierarchy was a category he called “stories about things you care about and other interesting things.” Those might include “events that might be interesting,” “external content,” “paid content,” and “bubbled up content.” Here is where Zuckerberg sketched out his vision of News Feed as a kind of personalised newspaper. (The idea that Facebook might one day disrupt the news industry itself was apparently not part of his contemplations.)

Zuckerberg was only getting started with this notebook. Over the next few days he feverishly outlined ideas about privacy and how Facebook would expand beyond colleges and high schools to everybody, old and young. He described the design of a “mini-feed” on the profile page that would track the activities of users—essentially a stalker's paradise. (“The idea is to produce a log of a person's life but hopefully not in a creepy way,” he wrote, suggesting that people should be able to add or delete items from their mini-feeds, “but they shouldn't be able to turn it off.”)

At one point, his pen seems to have run out of ink, and he switched writing implements. “Sweet, this pencil works better,” he wrote, and two pages later he was sketching out what he called The Information Engine, along with what seems to be a grand vision for Facebook.

Using Facebook needs to feel like you're using a futuristic government-style interface to access a database full of information linked to every person. The user needs to be able to look at information at any depth … The user experience needs to feel “full.” That is, when you click on a person in a governmental database, there is always information about them. This makes it worth going to their page or searching for them. We must make it so every search is worth doing and every link is worth clicking on. Then the experience will be beautiful.

Designing Facebook for the future seemed to be pure pleasure for Zuckerberg. But that year he also faced his greatest agony. Yahoo, then an internet giant with considerable power, had offered to buy Facebook for a reported $1 billion. This was a huge sum—one many founders would have leapt at with little hesitation. Not Zuckerberg. Ever since TheFacebook had exploded at Harvard, Zuckerberg had been decisive, opportunistic, and ambitious. This decision, though, left him reeling in doubt. He was, after all, still in his early twenties, with little life experience and less understanding of high finance. He didn't want to sell, but how could he be sure things would really work out? Who was he to do this? Almost all his investors and employees thought it was insane to turn down that money. Making things worse was the fact that, with the spread to colleges and high schools pretty much reaching its limits, Facebook's growth had slowed. To investors and his executive team, that was another sign that selling was the obvious path.

“I definitely had this impostor syndrome,” he told me in 2018, reflecting on the Yahoo bid. “I'd surrounded myself with people who I respected as executives, and I felt like they understood some things about building a company. They basically convinced me that I needed to entertain the offer.” He did verbally accept the offer, but then Yahoo CEO Terry Semel made a tactical error, asking to renegotiate terms because his company's stock had taken a downturn. Zuckerberg used that as an opportunity to end the talks. He believed that the two products he wrote about in the Book of Change would make Facebook more valuable.

The executives who had urged him to sell would either quit or be fired. “It was just too broken a relationship,” Zuckerberg says.

After Zuckerberg rejected Yahoo, he turned to the launch of the key products he had outlined in the Book of Change. After almost eight months of intense preparation, News Feed launched in September 2006. The rollout was a disaster, and the flash point was privacy.

News Feed hit your social groups like a stack of tabloid newspapers crashing on the sidewalk. Every one of your “friends” now knew instantly if you made an ass of yourself at a party or your girlfriend dumped you. All because Facebook was shoving the information in their faces! Over 100,000 people joined just one of many Facebook groups urging the product's retraction. There was a demonstration outside headquarters.

Inside Facebook there were calls to pull the product, but when employees analysed the data, they discovered something amazing. Even as hundreds of thousands of users expressed their disapproval of News Feed, their behaviour indicated the opposite. People were spending more time on Facebook. Even the anger against News Feed was being fueled by News Feed, as the groups organising against it went viral because Facebook told you when your friends joined the uprising.

Zuckerberg did not panic. Instead, at 10:45 pm on September 5, he acknowledged their complaints, albeit in a condescendingly titled blog post: “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” For the next few days the News Feed team worked all-nighters to gin up the protections that should have been in the product to begin with, including a privacy “mixer” that let users control who would see an item about them. The rage was quelled, and in a breathtakingly short period of time, people got used to the new Facebook. News Feed turned out to be crucial to Facebook's continued rise.

Zuckerberg seemed to take a lesson from his first public crisis, possibly the wrong one. He had pushed out a product with serious privacy issues—issues his own people had identified. Yes, a crisis did erupt, but quick action and a dry-eyed apology defused the situation. People wound up loving the product.  “It was a microcosm of him and the company,” says Matt Cohler, who left Facebook in 2008 but is still close to Zuckerberg. “The intent was good, there were misfires along the way, we acknowledged the misfires, we fixed it, and we moved on. And that's basically the way the company operates.”

Zuckerberg became comfortable as the ultimate decider on all things Facebook. Sam Lessin, a Harvard classmate who later worked as a Facebook executive, says that multiple times he was in a room where Zuckerberg made a decision that conflicted with everyone else's opinion. His view would prevail, and he would be right. After a while, people came to accept that a Zuck decision would turn out to be the wise one.

Zuckerberg wanted growth. As he had outlined in his notebook, Facebook grew when people shared their information, and he believed that, as happened with News Feed, people would come to see the value of that sharing. Facebook did offer privacy controls, but as with all software, default settings rule: Providing privacy controls is not the same as providing privacy. “What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?”

At many of those decision points, there were heated internal discussions, with some of Zuckerberg's top lieutenants raising objections. In 2007, Facebook introduced a feature called Beacon, which stealthily tracked people as they bought things on the web and then—by default—circulated the news of their private purchases. His team begged him to make the feature opt-in, but “Mark basically just overruled everyone,” an executive at the time told me. Beacon was predictably a debacle. After that, he hired Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer. Zuckerberg would be the lord of engineering—what Facebook built—and Sandberg would be in charge of everything Zuckerberg wasn't interested in, including sales, policy, legal, content moderation, and, eventually, much of security. “It was very easy,” Sandberg told me. “He took product, and I took the rest.”

But Zuckerberg was still the final decision ­maker. In 2009, Facebook changed the default settings for its new users from “friends” to “everyone,” and recommended that its existing 350 million users do the same. In 2010, it introduced Instant Personalisation, a privacy-­busting feature that gave more personal information to outside app developers. Time and again, over internal objections, Zuckerberg chose growth and competitive advantage over caution and privacy-­consciousness. The result was a series of hasty apologies, not to mention charges and a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission.

“It's within every leader's right to make edicts,” says someone who was in the room for many Zuckerberg decisions. But “leaders fail when they convince themselves that everyone disagreeing with them is a signal for them being right.”

In his notebook, Zuckerberg described the Facebook he was building as “the information engine.”

In late summer of 2016, I traveled to Nigeria with Zuckerberg. He showed up at a cantre for tech startups in Lagos and greeted folks there as if he had just popped in from around the corner. “Hi, I'm Mark!” he chirped. He charmed everyone: a local businesswoman selling Facebook-supported Wi-Fi access, Nigerian entertainment stars, even President Muhammadu Buhari, who was particularly impressed that Zuckerberg took a run on the city's public thoroughfares. Zuckerberg was instantly a national hero.

In retrospect, it was peak Facebook. Two months later, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Over the course of the next few years, it would become clear that Facebook had committed a number of sins: It had been the vessel of a Russian misinformation campaign; it had broken privacy promises to users, whose information was harvested without their consent; it had circulated false information in Myanmar that led to a riot where two ­people were killed; it had helped destroy the business model supporting independent journalism.

Zuckerberg's initial reaction to criticism was most often defensive. But when misinformation could not be denied and Congress came calling, he clicked back into apologise-and-move-on mode.

At least in public. Inside the company, he was taking a different tack. In July 2018, Facebook's “M Team,” which consists of about 40 of its top leaders, held one of its periodic meetings on the company's Classic Campus, former offices of Sun Microsystems. It started out as usual. In M Team meetings, executives do a brief check-in, sharing what's on their minds, both in business and in life. It can get pretty emotional: My kid's sick … my marriage ended … Zuckerberg always speaks last, and when his turn came, he made a startling announcement.

He had recently read a blog post by venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, in which the author defined two kinds of CEOs: wartime and peacetime. Wartime CEOs are fending off existential threats and must be ruthless in confronting them. This made a big impression on Zuckerberg. Since the election, his company had been attacked by critics, regulators, and the press. In this climate, he told the group, consider him a wartime CEO.

He emphasised one shift in particular. Horowitz put this way: “Peacetime CEO works to minimise conflict … Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements.” Zuckerberg told his management team that as a wartime CEO he was going to have to tell people what to do.

True, Zuckerberg always had made the final call. But now he seemed to be saying that he would act more expeditiously, even if it meant forgoing the lively conversation, in person and on email threads, that had preceded his decisions. Some in the room thought he was saying that they should shut up and obey his directives. Zuckerberg resists that characterisation. “I basically said to people, this is the mode that I think we're in,” he told me of the declaration. “We have to move quickly to make decisions without the process of bringing everyone along as much as you would typically expect or like. I believe that this is how it needs to be to make the progress that we need right now.”

I wondered whether he found the role of wartime CEO more stressful or more fun? A Zuck silence. Sauron's gaze. “You've known me for a long time,” he finally said. “I don't optimise for fun.”

Not long before the July 4 holiday in 2019, I met with Zuckerberg at his home. The person who sat across from me on the couch couldn't have been more different from the 21-year-old I'd met 13 years before. He had sat with presidents and autocrats, been ripped apart by legislators, amassed a multibillion-­dollar fortune, started a family, and was financing, through an enterprise led by his wife, an effort to cure all diseases by the end of the century. His company had done the unprecedented: bound almost a third of humanity in a single network. Now he was trying to mitigate the damage.

In another sense, though, he felt an urgency to maintain the optimism and creativity he had in 2006, when things fell easily to him and he could change the world by leaving photocopies of journal pages next to the computers of his developers and designers. He was determined not to let Facebook's attempts to fix itself hamper its ambitions for even greater power.

We'd had several conversations over the course of the year. When I asked him about the company's errors, he was candid about his personal failings. Maybe it was a mistake to distance himself from the policy issues that would cause Facebook so much trouble. Maybe in his competitive zeal to crush Twitter, he made the News Feed too susceptible to viral garbage. Maybe he didn't pay enough attention to the things in Sandberg's domain. The split of their duties made sense originally, as he sees it, but now he is determined to devote more energy to things like content moderation and policy.

But a worse sin, he believes, would have been timidity.

“I just think I take more chances, and that means I get more things wrong,” he told me. “So in retrospect, yeah, we have certainly made a bunch of mistakes in strategy, in execution. If you're not making mistakes, you're probably not living up to your potential, right? That's how you grow.”

When we spoke in July, he conceded that some of those mistakes have had terrible consequences but insisted that you had to look beyond the present. “Some of the bad stuff is very bad, and people are understandably very upset about it—if you have nations trying to interfere in elections, if you have the Burmese military trying to spread hate to aid their genocide, how can this be a positive thing? But just as in the previous industrial revolution or other major changes in society that were very disruptive, it's difficult to internalise that, as painful as some of these things are, the positive over the long term can still dramatically outweigh the negative. You handle the negative as well as you can.”

He added: “Through this whole thing I haven't lost faith in that. I believe we are one part of the internet that's part of a broader arc of history. But we do definitely have a responsibility to make sure we address these negative uses that we probably didn't focus on enough until recently.”

He still believes that Facebook is doing good. “I couldn't run this company and not do things that I thought were going to help push the world forward,” says the man who some think has done as much destruction to that world as anyone in business. Facebook may have to change, but Zuckerberg thinks it's on the right path.

When it was time for me to leave, Zuckerberg walked me to the door. Earlier, I'd told him I had pages from the Book of Change he wrote in 2006, and standing on the top of the steps outside his house, he said it would be cool to see it now. I had a scan of it on my phone, and I opened the file and handed it to him.

Zuckerberg gazed at the cover page—with his name and address and the promise of a $1,000 reward to anyone locating it—and his face lit up. Yes, that's my handwriting!

As he swiped through the pages, a rhapsodic smile spread across his face. He had been united with his younger self: the boy founder, unacquainted with regulators, haters, and bodyguards, blissfully relating his visions to a team that would alchemise them into software, and then change the world in the very best way. It was a treasure that seemed irretrievably lost.

He seemed almost reluctant to break the trance and hand me back the phone, but he did, and turned back to his house.