#the teen timeline is whatever like they're kids i dont care about happens there

[jeniffercheck]

sorry ur sunk cost fallacy post intrigued me and im scrolling through ur blog now and i need to know which yj character ur talking about in the tags bc i feel the exact same way abt miss matthews unfortunately like love the material! don’t love the fanon interpretation!

it was about miss matthews

[planetamarte]

i'm going to be mean and nitpicky to this show. sorry. 2k word wall of text and spoilers incoming

i havent fully rewatched most episodes since they aired i just rewatched like. the first half of season 1 sometime last summer. so my memory is foggy due to this + the gripes i have with the pacing that i will get into. this is not a coherent review or anything im just going off the top of my head. do not take my word as gospel plz form ur own opinions <3 maybe we disagree thats the magic of media analysis

the premise of the show is a fun concept. like. many iterations of sonic have existed forever and ever. a multiverse concept with sonic isnt just jumping onto the multiverse "trend" that spiderverse influenced, sonic as a franchise has its right to use the concept imo. WHICH IS WHY i don't understand why they tried to make this series fit into the mainline game universe instead of being its own thing like sonic boom. like. what? you have not just SONIC living in green hill (overusage of it aside, game sonic has been stated to be houseless and wanders from place to place, and why is it just Green Hill? it's on south island?) but also KNUCKLES, tails, rouge, amy, big, and SHADOW. if this is the game universe, where the hell is the master emerald? why the fuck does knuckles live in green hill? tails is from west side island and has workshops in mystic ruins, central city, etc etc? rouge and amy have been implied to live in central city and station square or whatever? big just goes wherever the fuck as well. i dont think shadow had ever been to green hill in his life before this. where the fuck is omega. when i first watched s1 i still considered myself a casual sonic fan and i was like huh some of this isn't right.

one thing other people have criticized that i disagree on is sonic's characterization. prime sonic fits pretty well at this point in the timeline i'd say (being after advance 3, as ian flynn stated). like if we're gonna go basing characterization on time, sonic at this point is very much still a kid who makes mistakes and is growing. throughout the gameverse timeline he's subtly gone from having high energy and impulsive decision-making to a cool older teen brother type, i think; but this is more due to brand marketing for a mascot character rather than in-universe growth, i'd argue. (also sonic characters don't... age.) i do have gripes with trying to write sonic, a static character, into a big character arc with development just for the sake of conflict. i guess you could make an argument about the target audience of kids seeing themselves in him but i don't care enough to get into this that much, really. (also to me prime sonic is PEAK adhd and shows a lot of non-empathy and i think the hatred for him is rooted in ableism and general hatred for kids but anyway.)

the little sequences with sonic and shadow in the first couple episodes. sonic is collecting rings, cool! something from the games we all recognize. but then in new yoke when he's all distraught and in an unfamiliar place, he goes Wheres my fuckin rings ... and it never comes up again? like it was an odd thing to bring up and then not use within the story, considering the franchise this is. SAME GODDAMN THING with shadow and the chaos emerald. the whole bit where he first shows up and is looking for a chaos emerald and then it gets lost in the void later on made me think it'd be an important plot point. but then we just never see it again until (spoilers) the timeline is reset and shadow chaos controls the paradox prism to fuck knows where. also why does sonic seem surprised at robots having no flickies too?? if this is after advance 3 that just doesnt make any damn sense eggman has done this before

the shatterverses are kinda. insanely boring to me. they're fun concepts! i love the idea of fucked up worlds that happened as a result of sonic not existing, new yoke especially (i still think it should've been written new yolk). nine is a really fun villain and one of the things i consistently liked throughout the show - a version of tails that never met sonic, fell into the doom of it all and closed himself off because of it, and now that he's met him he sees what good there could be and he's so desperate to keep it that he becomes destructive about it. come ON. rusty rose and thorn rose are super cool too! i love the character arcs they go through as fucked up versions of amy. rusty rose being a cyborg serving eggmen and going through the feelings amy goes through when she gets left behind, thorn rose wanting to protect nature SO much that it's to its detriment. and the three roses calling eachother sisters by the end was super cute.

everything else though. like a pirate world and fucked up overgrown jungle are fun in concept, the jungle especially since it's an antithesis to new yoke but still touches upon sonic's environmentalism factor. these worlds are SO. EMPTY though. i know there's like environment budgets and stuff regarding animation, i'll give them that. at least there's other pirates in no place, but there's really nothing else going on in boscage maze? no other people? how fucking big is this jungle? im being nitpicky i feel like cinemasins. i just can't remember anything else about these worlds to really care and give more criticism. a lot of things are so repetitive that theyre forgettable, as happens in this show. some of the character dynamics from the fucked up worlds are pretty cool though i think. like in s3 for example when dread knuckles has a chance to get to the prism but helps black rose instead and declares her captain - that made me sick to my stomach. my god. knuckles and amy acting like siblings in every universe.

i hate that rouge was the only character (besides big but he does even less in this series) to not be the "main" one of a shatterspace. rebel rouge is kinda just girlbossy to get the story going, prim rouge COULDVE been good since boscage maze's theme of selfishness couldve put an interesting twist to that element of rouge but All Of Them are selfish and not just her, and i still dont remember much of what happens in no place to have anything to say about batten rouge. just the fact that the one obsessed with beautiful jewels is dread instead of rouge.

i also cannot STAND. the fucking horde of eggmen. these are the worst villains in the sonic franchise right next to the deadly six. how do you have nine and the fucking chaos council in the same show. i don't even remember their goddamn names but these arent even characters theyre just Archetypes. the main mister doctor eggman is whatever he's kinda just eggman but then we have the Old Man, the grown ass samurai weeb man, the edgy teenager with videogames, and the fucking baby. abort that thang. and theyre focused on for SO. LONG. throughout season 2. by the finale of the show i was so fucking glad to just see normal eggman again even if it was 5 seconds like i'm so sorry they slandered your image like this doctor.

another continuity criticism - why does sonic seem surprised at the idea of having a robot copy of himself? you can't just tell me this series is canon to the games, make chaos sonic, and then pretend metal sonic (edit: and all of eggman's other robot sonics) never existed?? hello?? also the fact he just existed for one episode is sad to me. like what the

the fight scenes are fun i guess. this is a show to sell action figure toys. the choreography is cool and i did enjoy the references to the unleashed intro and shadow's brawl render n shit, i do love the animation of the show overall and i wish the games used more squash n stretch and were as expressive as this. but MY GOD do the fight scenes drag on. i remember watching one episode in s2 when it aired and having to run it back a couple times cause i didn't process what the fuck just happened. so much of the fight scenes feel like they were just there to fluff up the episodes. maybe cause i just watched it but s3 is especially bad with this i feel. like we're standing in this fucking battlefield discussing a plan for the 5th time. oh they're winning the battle. oh they're losing. oh they're winning again. ARE WE DONE. WHERE IS SHADOW

(this show is paced like it was supposed to have weekly episode airings, in fact! what the fuck is up with that! why is there so much repetition about plot shit i already know, i don't think kids are that dumb! why are there huge-seeming cliffhangers to the episodes that i can keep watching and see the resolution to in less than 5 seconds! i hate what the emphasis on bingewatching has done to tv shows. i had so much fun with the weekly fandom discussion and theorizing that happened when fionna and cake was airing, and it couldve been SO COOL to have that with this series for what it's worth and we did get Some between seasons, but instead we got a situation where i could open twitter in the morning and see a clip of s2's ending right when i woke up on the day it aired. like okay.)

speaking of shadow. i love him so much in this show. i cannot emphasize this enough he's one of the best parts about this show right next to nine and rusty rose. ian hanlin is right up there as one of my favorite shadow voices with david humphrey. i could go on and on about shadow's characterization forever but i love him here. he has Reasons to be angry (and he's right to be fair, it IS sonic's fault) and has his own ways of dealing with things that he Explains so people get why he does it, but then he understands when he's wrong and overall has a pretty calm demeanor. he's not just trying to one-up sonic, he's protecting the world!!! as he vowed he would!!!! but it also feels like they wanted to have him in this show Really Bad and at the same time wrote him out as much as possible?? which has been something a lot of sonic writers have done with him due to all the infamous locks on him as a character, to be fair. but half the time he'd just Disappear and i found myself thinking more often than not WHERE IS SHADOW. it feels like metal virus in idw, in a sense, where he's just conveniently written out cause if he were there a lot of plot shit would be over a lot quicker. another iteration of shadow beating tails' (nine's) ass wouldve happened in record time if shadow could go in the shatterspaces, i'm sure of it.

(also what the hell was that thing when he tried to enter one of the portals and was pushed back and the slowmo sequence focused on him with the glitch effects made it seem like there was gonna be different shatterverse shadows but nothing came from it? hello?? i'm telling you the amount of theories we had from moments that amounted to nothing is so disappointing)

(edit like 5 minutes after i posted: that "so retro" sequence with sunset green hill from advance 3 made me fucking sick WHY WAS GEMERL STILL IN THE EGGMAN SPRITE. WHY WAS IT A CLASSIC SONIC SPRITE WITH GREEN EYES. WHAT GOES ON!!!)

that's all i have to say i think. i did have fun watching this show!! don't get me wrong!! it just frustrated me the more it went on. as i said i wish i liked it as much as i did in the beginning lmao. it would've been a lot better as 1) its own thing rather than trying to fit into the gameverse and contradicting that a shit ton and 2) executing the multiverse thing a lot better. which is kinda just the whole show. well thats it from me

i wish i liked sonic prime as much as i did when it started but wow this show kinda sucks LMFAOOOOOOO