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ToaArcan

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Everything posted by ToaArcan

  1. Been waiting to go out all day, for the rain to stop. Rain stops, I go out, heavens open. FML.

    1. Ishapar

      Ishapar

      My region could actually use some rain.  The corn and soybean crops are pretty small for this time of the year.

  2. I don't think you're going to get many responses on that one, Mike.
  3. ToaArcan

    2

    Welcome to the site, glad to have more people here. Also great to see another artist.
  4. Akessel raises a good point, but I think F07E knocks it out of the park in how they come across. A villain doesn't always do what they do out of malice. A great many villains do what they do for "the greater good (The greater good)" and are ultimately in the right, but end up opposing the heroes and causing misery because of it. The problem is that it was handled without a lot of nuance. Hamlin champions the cause to have Sally court-martialed, and in the very same issue was confirmed to be pursuing his own agenda. Now, if this had been kept off the table for a little while, until the characters began to question just why it was that it was always Hamlin who started things against them, then it would've been interesting, but that's not what we got. There was also the problem that the Council were very much focused on the opinions of the public, rather than the safety of the public. If the people of Mobotropolis wanted something intensely stupid (Like, say, Naugus as king, or Nicole to be exiled), then the Council give it to them. As a result of this, there was no-one monitoring the city's systems, because none of them thought about who would actually do Nicole's job once she was gone, and Eggman was able to destroy the city's shield generator with an infiltration bot, and the city was nearly destroyed twice over, with Naugus completely failing to deliver on all of his promises to keep it safe. Also, note that it's "The people of Mobotropolis". Not the Acorn Republic. The council had a huge habit of making decisions that would affect the whole nation based entirely on the desires of the populace of it's capital city. Nobody outside of Mobotropolis' border supported Naugus, but he was still given power over the whole nation. Despite them supposedly all being fairly smart, all that was ever needed to convince them to do something stupid or antagonistic was say "But the people like it!" and suddenly everyone except Rotor and Elias was applauding the idea. The only people who actually had to justify themselves were the Freedom Fighters, whom the council trusted less than anyone else. And hey, it's not like they ever paid attention to due process. A crowd cheered when Geoffrey put the crown on Naugus' head? I guess he's king now, with no actual explanations for why he'd be a good king. The people want Nicole out? Let's not give anyone a chance to explain why she's needed, just exile her straight away. The Naugus thing really is a massive hole in the council's credibility. There are so many things wrong with his accession that it forms the single greatest display of incompetence by any leadership in the comic. And this is the same universe where Maximillian Acorn and Eggman are/were world leaders. 1) Naugus is an escaped convict who has not completed his sentence. He is thus a criminal, and should've immediately been arrested. 2) Naugus's claim to the throne is highly dubious for a variety of reasons: -A) Nobody saw Max's promise. -B) Max's sanity is highly debatable. -C) It was strongly implied that he had coerced Max. -D) Naugus has mind control powers, and thus could've brainwashed Max. However, since he doesn't try to use them on the council until the Secret Freedom arc, this point does not absolve the Council of their stupidity. "Naugus hypnotized them" isn't a valid explanation. -E) A monarch may update the line of succession multiple times, something that Max clearly did- He made Elias the heir when he found out he was still alive, made Sally the heir again when Elias ran away, named Antoine his successor by way of marriage to Sally in the 150s, and then Elias took the throne after that, with Sally being the heir because Alexis is his stepchild, not by blood. Naugus' claim was outdated from the moment Max first changed it. -F) All of the above is barely relevant because Max promised him the throne of the Kingdom of Acorn, a nation which was dissolved in issue 179 and replaced by the Republic of Acorn, which uses an entirely different system of government. -G) The Republic's genesis was the Prowers' desire to avoid the mistakes of Maximillian, one of which was trusting Naugus. The council proceeded to make Naugus king. 3) The Sword of Light burns him when he touches it. This is an enormous indicator that he's evil. 4) He has tried to kill everyone in the room except Elias and Rosemary at least once. 5) His having mind control powers and the people of the city suddenly loving him would've been a huge red flag for anyone capable of joined-up thinking. However, this was an Ian Flynn story, so protagonists are only capable of that when the plot allows it.
  5. It's broken again. Cursor is now jumping back to earlier text and deleting/typing over it.
  6. I saw a suggestion that he'd just be a multiplayer/co-op character.
  7. Because SEGA aren't doing what you wanted, they're making a smaller Classic game (Good!) and releasing it alongside a bigger Modern game (Good!) and shoehorning Classic-style gameplay into the Modern game to please the Mega Drive whiners (Bad!).
  8. I'll be honest, the trailer looked awesome... right up until Classic Sonic appeared. His appearance tells me that this game is going to involve "Because time travels" and I'm going to spend half my 3D game in 2D even though they're making a 2D game and could've just kept them separate. I brought this up in the SKype chat, but how long do you think it'll be before desperate fanboys take the grimmer setting and the tagline "Join the resistance" as absolute proof that the FF are definitely going to be in the game?
  9. At first I wanted to argue that the Council weren't exactly villains, but then I looked at the lineup: Rotor: Did the right thing every time but always got outvoted. Chuck: Basically lost his spine and just went along with the rest of the council, and maybe went behind their backs to do the opposite, but didn't have the guts to publicly oppose them. Dylan: Did nothing and agreed with the others. Penelope: DId nothing and agreed with the others. Rosemary: Seemed to be trying to screw the FF over for some reason, probably jealous that Nature vs. Nuture went the way of the latter and Tails is much more SOnic and Sally's child than he is her's. Hamlin: Was openly trying to screw Sally over because she snubbed him from being a real FF. Yeah, they're pretty much a problem for the FF that can't be solved by fighting.
  10. Not sure how unpopular this one is, but hey, I'm testing the waters: Sonic 3&K is the best classic game, and it bothers me to no end that, outside of one level in Generations, it's been pretty much ignored by SEGA's nostalgia pandering, though the Sonic Mania teaser seems to take a cue from it.
  11. That would probably look really cool if SEGA hadn't been pulling the "IT'S STILL 1992, RIGHT GUYS!?" card since 2010. At least Tails and Knuckles are back, I guess? I mean, we've had no gameplay footage of them, but still? Also not liking the amount of reused assets. If they're intent on doing a rehash, at least give it a fresh coat of paint and make some new character art. I'm pretty sure that's the only image of classic Knuckles that they've got.
  12. For an update, the bug persists even when the tab is closed and a new one is opened. Why a comment box autosaves in the first place, I don't know.
  13. Double-header here. Trying to respond to a comment, unfortunately, after adding a quote, I couldn't type outside the quote box. I tried to refresh to take a different approach, only to see that either the old problem of the comment box autosaving and keeping the same problem is back, or it was never fixed in the first place.
  14. Green Hill has probably overstayed its welcome because SEGA keep cloning it.
  15. TO be fair, it was a prospering society of total jerks that decided they knew best for everyone else in the galaxy, and in doing so, accidentally caused at least one complete extinction of an alien race. THey also kept her and her husband imprisoned for eleven years for no reason. While the Bem were thriving, they were completely amoral. While it might not have been derailment for her to join the council, or suggest its formation, she wasn't qualified to rule a people that she had been apart from for over a decade. Also that cosmic golden pool of pee was a supposedly-omniscient god. And Rosemary helped make that same wizard the king just because Geoffrey stole the crown from Elias and some people cheered. I... don't think we're supposed to agree with her, or sympathize with her. We're supposed to understand why she does what she does, and admit that she can have a point, but ultimately, she's a hindrance to the protagonists and she doesn't know what she's talking about most of the time.
  16. Antoine's difficult. He was the joke character for the most part, his whole thing was that he didn't really grow, because he was the loser that was kinda there to make Sonic look better. Atthe same time, we've seen Archie develop him, but eventually they ran out of stuff to do with him and he got a little boring. One of the tings I like about the reboot is that they actually brought back some semblance of a rivalry with Sonic, not over Sally's affections, but just picking a SOnic's almighty ego. Maybe start up the Bunnie/Antoine thing- I'm pretty fond of having the whole "Powerful girl, sensitive guy" stereotype reversal, it's something I aim for with Tails/Fiona in my own writing, but it's sort of undermined by Tails being an unlikely badass with Chaos powers and all manner of crazy technological weapons, topped off with an unbreakable spirit, and Fiona being a normal with a host of vulnerabilities and weaknesses that have dominated her life. She might be tough on the exterior, and Tails more quiet and reserved, but when the chips are down, Tails is going to be theone that solves the problem, and Fiona's going to be the one needing help. Thus, I prefer Bunnie and Antoine in this respect, and I liked what they were doing with that in the comics until Ian completely mangled their rekindling of their relationship Of course, getting it up and running involves moving Antoine past his fixation on Sally, probably with having to accept that Sonic and Sally are just going to be a thing. That said, when it comes to continuing SatAM stuff, I'm looking at this with the idea of the world actually progressing and not pulling a Sea3on and smashing the Status Quo button with a gravity hammer.
  17. ToaArcan

    Sisters

    "First" is a tricky one. This story was written over a year before Rise and Fall. However, I posted that one first because I thought it would be less controversial. I think the difference in liking the characters is that, in this story, the two leads we're dealing with are both intentionally sympathetic takes on the characters. It adds a layer that I felt was appropriate to both Nic herself, and her relationship with Fiona. With Rise and Fall, it was very much an evil-vs-evil situation- a demented AI with absolutely no morals against a psychopathic manchild, minus the SEGA-bran plot armour that stops him losing in the comic universe. As for the official sources, well, it's supposed to be set in the official universe.
  18. Regarding number 31 there, I think, judging by the fact that AMy's pursuit of Sonic is considered annoying at worst, and nobody had a problem with Tails having feelings for Fiona, bigger age gaps are somewhat more acceptable on Mobius. Not to mention that the latter is one of the only times someone's age has mattered in the entire franchise (There are four instances), and it makes the ages look entirely arbitrary. This is why I eventually threw up my hands and said "Screw it, let's get rid of comic book time and make them all adults!" That said, Sonic and Amy are still a creepy pair. Why? Invert the genders. Make Sonic an uninterested girl, and Amy a possessive, aggressive guy. And suddenly the latter looks pretty... rape-y, for lack of a better term.
  19. This is a thread dedicated to the expression of opinions that might be considered unpopular by the fandom at large. Maybe you really liked Sonic Underground. Maybe Chris Thorndyke was your favourite character. Maybe you think Sonic 06 is underrated? Here, it's all fair game. Of course, since this is all about posting things you like, that other people don't, let's try our best to be civil. Let's not freak out and tell someone that their opinion is wrong, because that's kinda, well, jerkish. I'll start us off: I like Nic the Weasel a lot more than Nack. Her design may be "Nack with boobs", but she's not a bad joke that Ian wants us to consider a proper villain occasionally, and she plays a major role in the backstory of Fiona Fox, a character that I like writing a lot, and in playing around with interactions between the two, she became a much more worthwhile character. Coming up with a better design helped, I suppose.
  20. Well, this is a bit of an interesting topic. Age is a fairly important thing in writing, as it plays a big role in a character's identity. The way someone acts will be influenced by how odl they are, as well their level of experience and in some cases, their intelligence. That said, Sonic material tends to use it very, very badly. For a cast who are mostly in their teens, most of the characters act like they're in their mid-twenties. Amy, Cream, and Charmy manage to pull off their ages reasonably well, but that's about it. This is likely because the ages were stated by SEGA of Japan, to fit in with the standard animesque teen heroes/free-range children. In the comics, this makes a bit more sense, as the characters were forced to grow up fast, but it's so rarely a plot-point that the most use it has seen is girls telling Tails he's not old enough to date them. Seriously. There are a lot of characters that have a screwed-up age that could be discussed. I could talk about what a mess the continuities have made of Tails' age, I could explain how I think Eggman should be in his fifties, etc. However, because she's the topic of the day in the Reworking Characters thread, and I said I'd cover her issues in this regard there... I'm talking about Fiona Fox first. The issue here is quite simple once you give it a bit of thought: Fiona is a bit of a chronological impossibility. And why is that? Because of Auto-Fiona. Auto's origin reveals a lot more about Fiona's age than you might think. We can see from her appearances that Auto was identical to FIona herself as a child. This means that Fiona would have to be the same age at the time of construction. THe robot looks about ten, but depending on whether she is tall or short for her age, she could be eightish or twelve-ish. But for simplicity's sake, we'll say ten. I've seen people say that she was older when the robot was built, but the robot was built by a factory machine, not personally designed, and is far too close to Fiona's actual form to be coincidental. Here's where things get confusing: Auto was built for a single purpose: To lure Tails into a roboticizer. This means that she could only have been built once Tails became an active Freedom Fighter and a notable target for Robotnik, and considering that he was ten at the start of the series, this would logically make them the same age. You could attempt to explain that she was built earlier, but if there's one weakness that Robotnik definitely has, it's a lack of foresight. He would likely not have put any value on Tails until he was already a member of the FF, moreover, he likely would not have even noticed Tails until that point. You could also say that he built her to capture other young Freedom Fighters, but then there's the detail of where Auto-Fiona's parts came from: Auto-Sally. Because Mike Gallagher, who wrote the "Growing Pains" two-parter, initially had no plans for there to be real Fiona, he stated that the robot was built largely from parts salvaged from Auto-Sally, the main antagonist of the Princess Sally miniseries, who was shoved into a roboticizer in Issue 3 and destroyed by an energy overload. This would set Auto's construction after Auto-Sally's destruction, and no earlier. This means that Fiona has to be about the same age as Tails... But then Ken Penders and his wanton disregard for continuity happened and he decided she was older, closer to Sonic's age. So, at best, she'd be three years older than Tails, and two years younger than Sonic, setting her at a believable 14 by the time of her regular appearance in the main comic. Until Ian decided she was a generic sixteen, of course. This is an interesting case, where the character's origin story, and the origin story of another character, explicitly contradict material later in the series. You can call it a retcon (I prefer to call it writers not caring), but then the backstories need some hefty rewrites, and that leads to even more continuity being edited, along with completely removing one of Robotnik's most important weaknesses. So, can we make this story work? Yes. Fiona's history gives us two possible explanations for the discrepancy between her given age and the age that her backstory would imply. 1) Experimentation Auto's existence alone means that Fiona was used for at least one of Robotnik's experiments, in this case, the Auto-Automaton program. It is possible she was a semi-regular lab-rat for him. One of his experiments may have been a device designed to modify the age of the subject, since the existence of the prison camps alone means that Robotnik considered children not worth Roboticizing. Perhaps he wanted to use this machine to increase the age of the prisoners, clearing them for Roboticization. FOr extra irony, he could've been inspired to do this by the riot that Fiona played a part in starting, realising that he couldn't keep the children locked up. "Experiments" could also be used to explain her unnatural strength and agility that she displayed post-heel turn. 2) Magic stuff Fiona spent her youth as a treasure hunter, working with Nic the Weasel. Given how many ancient artefacts have rare, mystical properties, something that Fiona was exposed to during this period could've caused her to grow at an accelerated rate momentarily. I prefer the first explanation, of course, but in any case, these are just my ways to line up the two contradictory stories and make them work. In this case, like Amy, Fiona would be similar in age to Tails, with an older body granted by other means. So, what other errors can you find in the ages of the Sonic cast, how would you change them, or what would you suggest for it? DO you have your own explanations for the mess explained above? Maybe you think there's a clearer fix, or a detail I've missed?
  21. I like that idea, it makes Sonic's dislike of ANtoine less "Sonic picks on the wimpy kid" and more "Sonic is pissed that he gave up Fiona to save this useless guy who has a constant ego-trip about his non-existent worth", something that later comes to the fore when Tails tells the others about his solo adventure with his Fiona, which sparks an even bigger argument that ultimately reveals that Antoine has been wracked with guilt too. However, I'm not sure about having her abandon someone herself. Hypocrisy is one of the big problems with Ian's version, and if we want to make her legit, then she should probably not make her stoop that straight away. It can happen later as partof showing her losing her grip, but not right at the start. I think Penders made Fiona because he saw Auto-Fiona and decided that she needed to have a template, though Gallagher's backstory for the robot said she was built from leftovers from Auto-Sally with a tail bolted on. Bollers added her to the FF because he wanted to get rid of Sally and needed a "Smart girl love-interest" replacement, without really considering her character. This went on to colour the way Penders and Flynn used her. Penders actually decided to make the "Knockoff Sally" thing a plotpoint, having Sonic date her because he thought she would be similar, and he was still on the rebound from breaking up with her. However, he was supposed to learn that she wasn't like Sally at all, and break up with her and either try to find a spark with someone else or finally go back to Sally. This also would've brought her to the forefront for a while and developed her character a bit. However, he was fired for sucking at basically everything before this got to play out, so Ian got a comic where, to his knowledge, she was just a knockoff Sally, and he then turned her into an evil Sally who generally danced around being the complete opposite of what we know about Fiona already. For what it's worth, Ian doesn't think too highly of 172, and has called it a screwup. However, I don't know whether he means the idea, or the execution. Nicole's story generally unfolds when Robotnik is still considered trustworthy, as opposed to at a point when the others were in danger. By the time any of them need saving, Nicole lives in Sally's pocket. Fiona's capture could also be something that explains why this Sonic isn't the permanently laid-back heroic hobo from the games too. Unlike SEGA Sonic, this Sonic knows that his actions could have consequences. WHile he knows there's nothing he could do to save Chuck, he could've saved Fiona, and didn't, and that's why, below all the jokes and cheese, he's serious about this. FOr Sally's failure, I'd suggest the incident in which Bunnie is roboticized. In your first post, you suggested that Auto-FIona should be removed and have Tails' encounter be with Fiona herself. I've done something like that myself (With Fiona being a Robian with an artificial skin), but it's pretty old and meh, so I probably won't repost it here. However, I want to know how you'd have her serving Robotnik. DId he condition her to serve him while she was imprisoned, just straight up hypnotize her, is it an exploding leash situation, or did he twist her worldview and convince her to lash out against Sonic and his friends in revenge? By the same token, how does Tails escape? In the original story, Tails survives because Auto-Fiona's body is flawed and leaky, and she rusts from the inside when immersed in water. How would he get away here? Would he find a way to save her, or does that become a long-term goal for him?
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