While I Know That The Sonic Boom Cartoon Show Hype Is Probably Super Dead, The Way Sonic And Eggman Interact

I headcanon that it'd be very annoying to be Shadow the hedgehog.

You go to the DMV and get your driver's license thanks to technically being 50 years old

Then you go to the bank and they refuse to do anything "without a legal guardian present" because technically you're only like 4 years old

For this Disability Pride Month, I saw a post that was shittybad and it made me angry. So have this

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that if Shadow is the only person Silver's around (and Shadow's probably protective but you didn't hear it from me) then it could still produce that naïve-ness that we see in the games, not socializing properly can jack you up in all sorts of ways. It's important to learn how to talk to strangers and new friends and learn how boundaries work, and you can't get that from a parent. And if Silver didn't know Blaze for a good while (like until he was nine) then I think it's plausible.

But tbh, you're not really talking about funny hedgehogs so much as you are talking about child psychology. (Nerd time from someone barely qualified!)

The real question is Nature V.S. Nurture™ and it's like the trolley problem of child psychology. It's the question of what makes a person the way they are. Are they naturally naïve, or is it directly their upbringing. If someone was raised by a murderer does that automatically mean the kid will become one too? It's pretty complicated, but if you want to grasp the concept better then go and watch Megamind again. I'm serious.

The point is, if you're someone who's fond of the idea of souls (as a loose concept not like in a fanfic way) a "that soul is a naïve one and if they weren't then it's not their soul anymore" idea, then you might be more inclined to Nature, whereas if you're more of a science, brain neurology, "our experiences make us who we are" kind of person, then you'd be more camp Nurture.

I'll give you a hint: it's both, but how much of each is debatable.

You're absolutely right in the fact that being raised by Shadow would make him less like how he is in the games, though. Which I commend you for. Though a Shadow raised him thing is more common, I change Dadow flavors once a week, so I'd love to see other scenarios implemented more in fanfiction <3

(I don't mean this to be "um actually" or anything, I just thought it was cool to think about. I hope I didn't come off as aggressive)

Silver would be a very different person if he was raised by Shadow. Silver is naive precisely because he wasn't raised by anybody.

yeh you right!

i think the way i imagine dadow is different from how most other people imagine it; where silver still grew up on his own and it was only after he first went back in time he meets shadow in the future n he becomes his dad, basically to explain why the first time silver came across shadow in the past he wasn’t immediately like “dad?”

so i imagine silver comes across old man shadow at fourteen and is like “shadow??? wtf???” and from there the father-son relationship begins, so silver’s naïveté would still make sense ‘cus he wasn’t raised by shadow from day one

THE PROMPTS FOR THIS YEARS SHADAMYTOBER!

I will like to add that “cute spooky” counts as “spooky”. It doesn’t have to be a complete horror theme. It just means the idea should stay close to the idea of the Halloween spirit.

Thank you to @suna1suna1 and @killingthecringe for helping with this.

Sunai made the prompt list graphic by the way!

Also check out @silvamytober if you are a fan of Silvamy! They also have an event going on!

What's currently happening:

I'm home. I'm so freaking tired

I posted a oneshot of Sonic and Eggman (the boom versions) and how they met, currently making another

I wanted to reblog more stuff, but I don't want this blog to get all cluttered so a have another Tumblr for reblogs specifically:

I also posted chapter 4 of Psychic and Empathetic! Pls check it out! <3

I'll keep you updated if anything changes

It is extremely important for people to understand how their chosen media works. There are tons and tons and TONS of people who slave away for what are seemingly simple projects. Dozens of animators for just one pilot, tons of people with headaches all in the writers' room trying to figure out how to tackle continuity issues, a plethora of geniuses debugging for hours, several sleep deprived musicians determined to find the exact wrong pitch that would make the scene come together.

If you want to try and wrap your head around this, go listen to the Gravity Falls behind the scenes podcast. Even if you're not a huge fan of the show, watch one episode, and then Alex Hirsch's explanations for the scenes in it. I listened to it because I was curious about the writing, and I fell down a rabbit hole much deeper than I thought. I could make a bingo card of all the times he talked about someone else bringing it home and making his dreams come true.

"I was worried about this scene, but producer ____ figured it out."

"If it weren't for the music ____ composed this sequence would've dragged"

"if it weren't for my friend ___ telling me to rewrite that scene, this episode wouldn't exist"

"if it weren't for these brilliant storyboards by ___"

"if it weren't for ____'s costume designs"

"if it weren't for my friend being masochistically willing to stay up all night with me, this show would suck"

I have a huge amount of respect for every piece of inspired media that was worked on by actual humans, because there's more work put in than you could possibly imagine. It's unfair to blame any success or failure in a franchise on one person. Everyone deserves credit for the good and bad they did for something, and with something with as much heart and soul as Sonic, there's clearly much more good being done.

Help me out here: Why is there so much Ian Flynn hate going around lately? I thought everyone loved that he was contributing to the games. Now suddenly they aren't. I guess that's par for the course for this series but I don't get it. He isn't perfect but I like what he's done. Am I a weirdo?

Ian Flynn has always had a lot of fans, but any creator putting their work out there is going to have detractors as well. That's just the nature of being an artist. To some extent, it's no big deal. He's not a perfect writer. Nobody is! I consider myself a fan of his work, but I've criticized plenty of individual writing decisions from him on here.

But Ian doesn't just have critics. He has his own obsessive hatedom. And the specific nature of Ian's hatedom is... interesting.

A decade ago, Ian was only the guy writing for Archie Sonic, meaning any debates over his work were quarantined within that tiny niche of the larger Sonic fandom. Only people who kept up with the comics month to month had any real reason to have an opinion on the guy, which means we're talking about merely thousands of fans as opposed to millions.

Within that group, he had some haters. You had the people who were mad about story changes made during his run, particularly things like ancillary characters getting killed off (although over the years we've learned that most of those were editorial mandates from Mike Pellerito). You had the people mad that Ian didn't push their favorite ship, with feuding SonAmy and Sonally fans claiming that he was CLEARLY biased towards one or the other. You had the people who just really, really liked one of the previous writers way more - usually Penders, as hard as that may be to believe today. That sort of thing. Pretty normal comic fandom type stuff. Again, it comes with the territory.

Unfortunately, many of those haters only got worse over time, morphing into reactionaries who constantly try to incite Comicsgate type culture war bullshit.

There are people still mad at Ian for making Sally bi and pairing her with Nicole instead of Sonic in the later Archie comics. There have been elaborate MS Paint red string conspiracy boards explaining how people like Ian and Jon Gray have apparently been destroying the franchise from the inside for years by Making Sonic Woke. (Jon gets dragged into this because people are still mad about him drawing The Slap 20 years later. Yes, really!!) There was an unhinged change.org petition trying to get Ian fired, specifically from people who were mad that the Freedom Fighters aren't in the IDW comics. There was even a very sad little fan campaign from these people trying to get Sega to move the Sonic comic license away from IDW and over to Udon, because they thought Udon would bring Sally and Bunnie back and also make them sexy again. There's a lot of this.

(Unfortunately, Penders has also exacerbated this by gossiping about Ian on Twitter and giving these fans ammo, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

The thing is, for years, people who only played the games or watched the cartoons had no reason to pay attention to any of this. Now, though, Ian isn't just writing for some weird spinoff comics that only the super nerds read. Now he's writing comics that are canon to the games, and ALSO some of the games themselves, and ALSO consulting on other tie-in media like Sonic Prime, and ALSO writing the official Sonic encyclopedia, and ALSO serving as part of the new Sonic Lore Team at Sega. And on top of all this, he's got an increasingly popular podcast where he fields questions about his work on all of these things, which serves as one of the fandom's main windows into creative decisions being made behind the scenes.

As a fan of Ian's work, it's been really cool to see him rise in prominence. But the dark side of this is that his obsessive haters from the Archie days now have WAY more of a potential audience of their own. Now, every Sonic fan has to have an opinion on Ian. What this frequently means is that you'll have the Comicsgate types taking things Ian writes or says out of context, attempting to get more of the general fandom to yell at the guy.

Unfortunately, there are a wide variety of Sonic fans who take the bait:

You've got hardcore fans who disliked basically any recent piece of Sonic media and are looking for someone to blame.

You've got the people who are concerned about the sanctity of Sonic's canon, who shoot the messenger any time Ian mentions a new retcon from Sonic Team on the podcast - or any time he even mentions the THOUGHT of changing anything about the canon, as we saw recently with the Sol Dimension nonsense.

You've got people who romanticize some sort of mythical artistic vision that Sega of Japan supposedly has (or had) for the franchise. To many of these fans, American contributors like Ian just don't "get" the heart of the series and are trying to turn Sonic into something different. (This "heart of the series" tends to be some mix of Japanese instruction manual lore, the cinematics from Sonic CD, the OVA, and/or the games written by Shiro Maekawa, depending on what Sonic media the fan in question grew up with.)

You've got fans of specific characters or ships who pin the blame for how their faves are depicted entirely on Ian - most vocally fans of Shadow, even though the root problem is that Sonic Team hasn't known what to do with Shadow since 2006. At best this stops at regular old criticism, but at its worst this devolves into claims that Ian has an agenda against certain characters.

You've got fans annoyed by a perceived over-emphasis on comic-original characters in the IDW comics, ignoring the obvious facts that these characters exist because the game cast is so tightly controlled by Sega, and also, you know, that people just like the IDW characters and want more stories about them.

You've got a LOT of discourse over IDW's Sonic being a hero who tries to give his enemies second chances, as if half of Sonic's closest friends aren't already former villains and rivals. Honestly this is very transparently just reheated Steven Universe discourse lmao

You'll also see people who just think they could do Ian's job better. They can't believe that THIS GUY is the American fan working on all these Sonic projects, when clearly THEY understand the characters and lore and themes SO much better than this charlatan.

All it takes is for someone in one of these categories to be unhappy about some recent piece of Sonic media, and for them to come across an out of context quote or comic panel that rubs them the wrong way, and suddenly the leftist Zoomer Sonic fans will join the latest dogpile on Ian alongside the reactionary Comicsgate types who are mad at him for Making Sonic Woke.

In general, when fandoms get upset, they tend to want a scapegoat. A person or two to point a finger at and go "THAT's who ruined the thing I love!" This tends to be based less on reality and more on which contributors are the most visible online. You'll sometimes see teenage and adult fans of children's cartoons single out a storyboarder who's particularly vocal on Twitter, blame them for every story decision they don't like, and harass them off the platform out of a sense of retribution for their favorite ship or whatever. Failing that, fans might choose to blame every nitpick, down to individual lines of dialogue and frames of animation, on a showrunner, just because that's the name they associate with the show. And unfortunately, when it comes to Sonic, Ian is now arguably the most prolific and outspoken contributor on the English speaking internet, and therefore a common scapegoat.

Some of the things I've seen Ian blamed for are truly wild. A lot of people have claimed for YEARS that he's just lying about the existence of creative guidelines and restrictions from Sega - or, as fans call them, The Mandates - even though they're just an inherent aspect of working on a licensed property. Others claim that The Mandates are real, but somehow Ian's fault. A vocal minority of fans have convinced themselves that Ian is the sole reason the Freedom Fighters don't exist in the IDW comics, even though Ian says he's been pushing to bring them back since day one.

Sometimes you'll see people say he ruined shit he didn't even work on. A few weeks ago on Twitter I saw someone claim that Ian had written a rejected script for Sonic Forces in which Tails died. I could not find a source for this for the life of me. As far as I can tell, the rumor seems to have been born from an alleged leaked script for Forces with margin notes from Aaron Webber that criticized the way Tails was written, and also an old tweet where Aaron joked that Tails would die in an upcoming episode of Sonic Mania Adventures. These merged into "Aaron Webber criticized a draft of the Forces script in which Tails died." How'd Ian get dragged into this? Who fucking knows!

It's all just a big game of telephone. All it takes is some asshole to make something up about Ian on Twitter or YouTube or a DeviantArt journal or some forum, and at least a couple people will believe it, and then it gets repeated as fact. Again, this used to be contained by the niche nature of the Archie Sonic fandom, but now there are WAY more people who are receptive to this shit.

It's just sad to me that Ian tries to be so open and honest about his work, to try to explain the rationale for certain things, to keep fans looped in on the direction the franchise is headed, and this just gives the Flynnspiracy types more quotes to take out of context and try to paint him as the devil. If it sounds like I'm being overly defensive and dismissing his critics, man... some of the things I've seen people say directly to him are just unbelievable. People will send paragraphs-long angry screeds in to his podcast that completely tear him apart, and he has to sit there and be like "Well, that's your opinion, and you're entitled to it." People literally pay for special guest interview episodes where they just rapid fire complaints about his writing at him directly to his face. I don't know how he does it. I would snap.

All of this over Sonic the fucking Hedgehog of all things.

I don't know how to wrap this up. Engaging with fandoms online is very tiring, which is why I tend not to do it. Things like this are too common. I guess, just... remember that making art collaboratively is a complicated thing. The people involved are generally trying their best given the circumstances, but they're only human. They make mistakes. But please treat them like humans. Criticism and dogpiling are not the same thing.

Happy belated B-day, Sonic 06

You're my favorite travesty, and the fact that this abomination of a video game happened barely six months after I was born is honestly kind of hilarious to me. I always know exactly how old my favorite Sonic game is.

I know I called you an abomination, 06, and that's cuz you are, but you might be one of my favorite games of all time, ironically and unironically. It being a buggy mess is hilarious, Project 06 being awesome is the best, and honestly if you're willing to sift through all the garbage writing execution, you can find some real treasures. Shadow's written so well that I think that's where all the budget went, Silver is a character so charming he survived to reach other, significantly better games, Crisis City is honestly such a cool and distinct concept for a fictional space, I mean, I wouldn't be writing Psychic and Empathetic if I didn't think so.

(I say "writing" as if it isn't just brainstorming I keep forgetting to put in my notes app, and flesh out into chapters that I then never remember to upload cuz my brain would rather write an entire fic and then post it instead of the usual fanfic, post chapter when it's done thing...)

Anyway, ily '06 you freak of video game nature!

Sonic 06 fanfic I was referring to btw, it's still happening, I promise! Dadow will return!

Shadamy week - Day 2: Sick Day

This one is really short. I'm probably going to make it longer at some point, but I'm good with its length for now. I also don't enjoy working things that I feel like everyone else has written well already, so I played with the trope. Enjoy!

The first day was the scariest. He might've been more scared than she was. She was still sleepy from it all in the passenger seat, while he was desperately trying not to break the steering wheel from how hard he clenched it.

Once they were home he gently picked her up-again, trying not to hold her tighter than he needed to-and brought her into their house.

"It's... funny..." she muttered. "I think... I think you're more scared of this whole... surgery thing than I am."

"That's... not innacurate," he admitted. He was more then scared. He was petrified. After all those years of watching test after test after test for Maria, and none of them ever seemed to help. Sometimes they tested normal. How did that make any sense!? If she's in pain then clearly something wasn't normal!

"Silly Shadow," Amy muttered, bringing him back to reality. "I'm absolutely...ly fine."

"You don't sound it," he said with a small smile. "Not when you talk like that." He didn't waste any more time, he set her on the couch. "How do you feel?"

She hesitated. "Sleepy... tired... less nausous. Half my stomach hurts."

"That is the part they worked on." She nodded. "Do you want to go back to sleep?"

"...Yeah, but I don't want you to move me again."

"Okay."

"But I want you to stay here."

"With you?"

"Mmm. Sleep here. With... me."

He glanced at the cough next to her. "Doesn't seem too comfortable."

"I don't care. If you donnn't be here, with me. You'll go inta your room and, and, and..."

"'And' what?"

"Shut up, I'm finding the word." She was quiet for a moment. "Catastrophize."

"... You know me well." She grinned.

"It's my girlish intuition."

It was the best sleep he had the entire week.

Yeah, teeny tiny. But there you go. It's based on the gall bladder removal surgery I got a while back.

Okay as someone with severe comment anxiety this is an absolutely perfect basis for the way I receive comments too. You'll have to do something truly special to piss me off and all I want is to know I made people feel good :)

(I know the difference between "wary" and "weary" but my subconscious and phone don't seem to know and my brain never catches it ever when spell-checking and I live in fear)

not to be controversial bc I know this is like…not in line with shifting opinions on fanfic comment culture but if there’s a glaring typo in my work I will NOT be offended by pointing it out. if ao3 fucks up the formatting…I will also not be offended by having this pointed out…

‘looking forward to the next update’ and ‘I hope you update soon!’ are different vibes than a demand, and should be read in good faith because a reader is finding their way to tell you how much they love it. I will not be mad at this.

‘I don’t usually like this ship but this fic made me feel something’ is also incredibly high praise. I’m not going to get mad at this.

even ‘I love this fic but I’m curious about why you made [x] choice’ is just another way a reader is engaging in and putting thought into your work.

I just feel like a lot of authors take any comment that’s not perfectly articulated glowing praise in the exact manner they’re hoping to receive it in bad faith.

fic engagement has been dropping across the board over the last several years, and yes it’s frustrating but it isn’t as though I can’t see how it happens. comment anxiety can be a real thing. the last thing anyone wants to do is offend an author they love, and that means sometimes people default to silence.

idk where I’m going with this I guess aside from saying unless a comment is outright attacking me I’m never going to get mad at it, and I think a lot of authors should feel the same way. ESPECIALLY TYPOS PLZ GOD POINT OUT MY TYPOS.

today for disability pride month, i’d like to discuss something not many able-bodied people know about: ambulatory wheelchair users!

first, “what is an ambulatory wheelchair user?”

it’s a term used to describe people who use wheelchairs that can stand and or walk in some capacity. the amount a person can walk can vary greatly between ambulatory wheelchair users, some may need their wheelchair 60% of the time, some may need theirs 90% of the time.

“why would someone use a wheelchair if they can walk?”

there are tons of reasons someone who can walk might use a wheelchair, such as fatigue, balance, heart problems, pain, fainting, and many, many more. it could be dangerous for them to walk.

“isn’t that being lazy?”

nope! take shoes, for example. you *could* walk without them, but it would be painful, and could give you cuts or blisters. would you consider wearing shoes to be lazy? also, many disabilities and conditions are progressive, using a wheelchair can help slow progression and damage to your body.

so next time you see a wheelchair user move their leg, remember that ambulatory wheelchair users exist!