#pontac

[philoursmars]

Au Louvre-Lens, une expo : "Exils" (aussi bien réels qu'intérieurs, les mythes que les trajectoires personnelles de certains artistes)

Victor Hugo - "Marine Terrace"

Pablo Picasso - "La Suppliante"

Victor Hugo - "Exil", frontispice du tome II de "Contemplations" de Paul Meurice

Charles Hugo - "Victor Hugo, la Grève de Pontac, près de Saint-Clément"

Marc Chagall - "Souvenir"

Javier Vilatò (neveu de Picasso) - Tête"

[agentblackdog]

https://twitter.com/sonicstadium/status/1747028873676525745

[molinaskies]

An interesting “side effect” of the canonization of the “classic era” meaning “younger era” is that the classic era now reads as “cute fun times” before the core cast became teenagers/tweens and things got super, super complicated.

Because the characters are “younger,” there’s an air of “little rascal innocence” to everything they do now. The new releases like Mania and Superstars now feel like little throwbacks to the young heroes just learning how to work together and make a difference in the world.

I don’t think this is a bad thing at all.

[thesonicstadium]

Warren Graff revealed that he & fellow 2010s Sonic game writer Ken Pontac had little control over their scripts, and what they wrote was heavily dictated by notes from Sonic Team. #SonicNews #SonicTheHedgehog

[blazehedgehog]

I may not like Maekawa’s writing style for how overly convoluted it is, but I will give credit where credit is due and say that at the very least the characterization was somewhat consistent and there were some high stakes to appreciate. Games like Adventure 2, Heroes and even Black Knight feel like stories with actual heart and identity, which is something I can respect. Something that Pontac and Graff’s writing was surely lacking in and I could not vibe with it.

Over time I've been feeling more sympathy for Pontac and Graff as more information comes out to suggest they really were just localizers, not writers. They were there to punch up the translation but were not there to craft story beats or anything like that.

And which is easier to believe? That Sega brought in new guys that ruined the story for those games, or that somebody at Sega wrote yet another clumsy Sonic plot?

Baldy Nosehair was pretty bad in retrospect, but Sonic Lost World not making any sense wasn't their fault, I don't think. And in places where they have been given more control over writing (Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice, Team Sonic Racing) their output is actually fine.

I was talking it over with my Discord recently, but I personally really enjoyed the writing in Team Sonic Racing. It didn't have a lot of depth, but it was breezy and cute. I likened it to one of the Dragon Ball Z movies: kind of inconsequential, but not without some fun to be had as long as you don't take it too seriously. And it's just a spin-off game anyway.

I think we as a community did those two dudes dirty and they deserve some kind of an apology.

[fear-tear]

"Ken Pontac knows nothing about Sonic, he's a fraud!" ...and the guy who interviewed him utterly lies about the plot of Sonic Lost World, so?

[hostilemuppet]

Idk a lot about happy tree friends but it always makes me happy to see you enjoying it so I hope you’re right and it comes back soon

PLEASE. GOD. THE FANS WANT MORE. THE CREATORS WANT TO MAKE MORE. THE PROBLEM IS ANIMATION IS SOOOO EXPENSIVE AND ITS CHEAPER FOR MONDO TO MAKE Daddy And The Big Boy #13. and i get it! its a real tough time for animation, especially internet animation, and mondo arent as big as they used to be! but personally. instead of churning out 50 cheap-to-produce series that very few people like. i think itd be more cost affective to put the majority of your money into something that people will actually watch? just look at these view differences

and like. i wouldnt bring up the view difference if mondo didnt have a history of "stopping funding their most popular shows so they have to crowdfund a finale"

[frenchcarssince1946]

1955 De Pontac Barquette

My tumblr-blogs: germancarssince1946 & frenchcarssince1946

[thegirlfromstationsquare]

I am the last person to say this but yall have got to stop treat ian flynn as this boogeyman out to ruin sonic on purpose, he just cant write good.

[rabbithaver]

When I see sonic stuff I think of you bc we’ve been mutuals for so long, so I come to you with this: I have never been into sonic but I Want to buy a game to see how I like it. Do you have any recommendations? Also I bought a sonic lego keychain on impulse… he is my frend :)

SONIC FRONTIERS. SONIC FRONTIERS IS SO GOOD AND VERY ACCESSIBLE IN TERMS OF GAMEPLAY. AND THE MUSIC WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND I MEAN THAT

[tomboymikayla]

[notray1995]

Lmao

[lesbianusahana]

Watching Skylanders Academy so far has proven to be an admittedly fruitless endeavor because What Did They Do To Snap Shot.

[kinopioa]

It's funny how these are technically 3 different chars

But due to sheer publicity of the latter 2 and bias, no one cares!

Let's elaborate

Rise of Lyric

RoL Shadow is a dick. However his main reason for fighting Sonic is entirely due to him fucking up in releasing Lyric. Unfortunately this is poorly explained, and most only saw the boss fight, so many assume he was just a bully for no reason

Post Final boss however

The teamwork dissing is important, I'll explain

In John Melchior's draft, the game was apparently meant to be more serious, but late dev Sonic Boom's brand was suddenly meant to be a comedy, so another writer took over to insert comedic elements along with prioritizing the *teamwork* gimmick. Whether Shadow was initially planned or not is debateable, but his dissing on it seems to have been the aftermath of this gameplay focus. It's also important to note that Shadow's origin is straight up not mentioned, and he's treated as a familiar

Shattered Crystal was made likely after this shift, hence

Shattered Crystal

So taking place in its own continuity, Shattered Crystal features Lyric wanting to use Amy's archeological knowledge to access ancient tech. Shadow is captured off screen and used as a pawn

When freed, he's confused and aggravated, especially upon finding that he was mind controlled. He however has no true hostility to Sonic unlike RoL, though mad dashes off to find the snake. Lyric in the end after the boss fight is taken out by him, then we get Stixk's crack teamwork speech

Again, Shadow specifies he's a loner, and weirdly states he's superior, but just leaves harmlessly

Meh attitude, though better than RoL in execution. This was written by Warren Graff, Ken Pontac, Tin Guerrero, interesting as it means they were aware of the brand distinction given differences to mainline

Meanwhile the TV Show

TV

Everyone knows of his infamous S1 finale apparence with him coming in on Eggman's villain council, calling them shit and leaving, then aggressively targeting Sonic and beating him up, says the fucking "shame to hedgehogkind" after breaking an IKEA cabinet entirely cuz...

He's evil

Why??? I really don't know

Season 2 is even dumber, you straight up have him want to nuke the entire universe. Again, villainous for no fucking reason

Even for Boom standards this is beyond stupid. He's an anti hero in SC, and nowhere purposefully destructive in RoL

People learned later about mandates from Sega, though it's important to note 2 things

-Shadow being an edgelord is entirely the writer's idea

-Sega barely wanted to use him in general for Boom TV

I can't stress this, for as much as fans pushed the "Sega wants bootleg Vegeta" narrative, nowhere do either writers say they were forced to. It was just them taking cynical piss at the "no jokes" mandate that clearly wasn't hard pressed given what happened, and did the surface level comparison that was common in the early 2000s. For as limiting as he was, they clearly did whatever the fuck they wanted given how much this contrasts with both Boom games

Ffs, they could've just had him petty at Sonic for taking the last burger at meh burger as a concept, there's a better way to have him be a dick

I'm honestly curious if his backstory would've ever been revealed in a later Boom game (hence the show being explicitly barred from making their own), but as we know, Boom was discontinued around 2016 game wise, and the show ended 2017

[blazehedgehog]

What would be your ranking of the best writers to have worked for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise?

I don't know if I like the idea of doing this. One, because I don't feel entirely comfortable taking on this task, given I don't feel knowledgeable enough about the issue to speak intelligently on who is better than who, because it's a complex web of who actually wrote what. Sonic games, especially in the last ten years, often have multiple writers because different people in different regions contribute to a single game.

But also because like...

As much as story matters to Sonic (and it does, I have weighed doing a whole video about it), I feel like a lot of writers for this franchise have just been, like, clumsy? And innocently clumsy, a lot of the time. Clumsy like a teenager dipping their toes in to publishing on AO3.

And on the surface there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, yes, there is, this is a professional product being sold for cash money in a franchise that is getting old enough to develop its own mid-life crisis (and we're already there).

But, man, I dunno, the more I think about the people who actually wrote these stories, the actual individual humans and not the blanket "Sega" mothership, the more I feel bad ripping into them mercilessly like some fans tend to.

Is their work bad? Yeah. Most of it's bad. Most of them are game developers where their primary talent is probably something that wasn't writing a story, but they were the ones on the team that were the least bad at it, which then got filtered through early 2000's Sega localization and equally clumsily translated in to English, and then a voice director who only spoke English as a second language gave actors a list of lines to say without any context or scene description. So now their lines are all screwed up and sound weird, the script is all screwed up and is written weird, and down and down it goes.

And that's just what I can personally think of. There are a lot of writers for TV shows (SatAM, Sonic X, Sonic Prime) I'd have to familiarize myself with more names-wise, there's stuff I haven't touched in a long time (or never touched at all, like Fleetway UK Sonic). There's so much to consider.

And I don't feel like I personally have enough of a handle on all of that to really say one way or the other outside of "I think Ian Flynn did a good job on Sonic Frontiers but it's clear the constraints of video game development did not always play nice with his strengths as a writer."

What you're asking feels like a very tall order for this kind of blog. And this is coming from me, somebody who writes more than necessary on the reg.

[xlbingo10]

anyone who thinks that ian flynn is worse than pontac and graff is fucking insane