Buckle up. I have a lot to say.
I don't really think Tangle was that hyped?
Maybe not so much in the book, but in a 2018 interview with Game Informer regarding his thought process for Tangle's creation, Flynn essentially disparaged the female games cast to imply that Tangle fulfilled a role none of them did:
I hope I don't need to explain what's wrong with the statement "there aren't a ton of female roles within the Sonic franchise" when it has a larger number of girl characters than most other franchises. Moreover, most of them can keep up with the boys.
Note how he downplays the game characters. Amy is not the take-charge leader of Team Rose, but "somewhat active." Rouge's profession as a freelance spy is boiled down to mere "competence," which is somehow negated by her sex appeal. Cream is dismissed as a child, despite the fact that he doesn't downplay Tails as a child when listing the male characters he considers when thinking of the series' most prominent characters.
Amy's tackled Eggman numerous times, as have Cream and Rouge. Cream helped destroy Egg Utopia in her debut game, and Rouge canonically called herself "pretty strong" after defeating Flying Dog.
Blaze is not the only "kick-butt" female character in the cast. Furthermore, implying that a female character's only worth or cool factor lies in their combat ability is sexist.
There isn't really a problem about a character being "fawned over" or just respected by other ones.
Except when that fawning doesn't make sense, the character hasn't earned it, or the fawning comes at the expense of a games character. Silver morphed from the naive stoic he is in the games into a gushing fanboy just to infodump about Whisper's role in the war:
The shilling is not limited to just Whisper or Lanolin, either; the comic can't resist hyping up any of its original characters, no matter how small their role.
Amy gleefully dumps any and all responsibilities onto Jewel, to the point of pretty much declaring her the leader of the response in the forest fire arc.
Tails oohs and ahhs at... the fact that Belle is made out of wood.
Clutch, formerly a nothingburger of a villain, is framed as such a chessmaster that someone felt compelled to write an article about how he's surpassed Eggman's threat level:
By contrast, aside from maybe Tangle's initial starry-eyed impression of Blaze and Starline's early adoration of Eggman, you hardly ever see this process in reverse. How often have the comic characters shilled the game characters?
Heck, when Sonic learns Starline went Stardead he gave the infamous "big oof" line, and he wasn't saying that as a joke, he just didn't give a fuck about that guy.
Which just proves that Sonic is a hypocrite and didn't mean a single word of what he told Surge when he said he was willing to give even Starline and Eggman a second chance. Someone who truly cared about seeing villains turn over a new leaf wouldn't go "lol Fs in the chat, get dunked on, asshole🤪" upon hearing one of them died and now will never get the chance to become a better person. That just renders his Sermon on the Rock a bunch of hot air in retrospect.
I'm not necessarily saying he should have eulogized Starline, but silence would have gone a long way to establish some kind of internal consistency with this uber-moral Sonic. Because as it stands, it comes across as though he lied to Surge in order to morally browbeat her.
He might have had his Sermon on the Rock in issue 50, but "big oof" inadvertently shows us IDW!Sonic's true colors. He only cares about appearing merciful and compassionate instead of actually being merciful and compassionate.
Again, Silver kind of is a child, but I digress.
...Really? Silver is the same age as Blaze and equally as powerful, yet nobody would argue Blaze is "kind of a child."
The infantilization of Silver does not exist in the games; it was fabricated by the comic.
The Lanolin moment™ was widely criticized by nearly everyone that reads the IDW comics. But one, we haven't seen her for much, and what we've seen of her, she is likely very traumatized from everything that happened to her.
1.) "But one, we haven't seen her for much" - Irrelevant.
This would also be difficult to measure by any objective standard; how many appearances count as "we haven't seen much of her," especially given how much screentime the comic tends to give the OCs? She featured heavily in several issues and had at least one scene dedicated to her insecurities as a leader. Does she need a miniseries in order to count?
2.) "...she is likely very traumatized from everything that happened to her." - Okay, but you would need to apply that standard to everyone.
According to that logic, Whisper would have had no reason to apologize to Tangle for being triggered by Tangle calling their team the "Diamond Cutters." Which... she really shouldn't have felt the need to to begin with, but the comic certainly felt Tangle was owed a lengthy apology, so.
Two, nobody really knew who Duo was, and she wasn't the only one against Silver there! In fact, Silver is constantly shown to be suspicious about Duo, and the only one noticing he isn't what he seems.
Wasn't Whisper cottoning onto Duo's schtick too, but was dismissed by the others as being oversensitive due to trauma?
FUCK, WHISPER of all people sided with Lanolin!
Probably because Lanolin did this when Whisper merely grabbed her arm:
Of course she would. Lanolin is unhinged.
And no, before you ask, I'm not taking the scene out of context: Tangle was merely looking at her paddle before Lanolin smacked it away.
Cream is a child, she was helping her mom with the food and was left to finish the rest on her own. Two big meanies shows up and ruins everything she worked really hard to do.
Okay, so Cream is a child. Really think about this. Would you leave a child to watch a boiling pan of hot oil unattended? Vanilla could have helped her finish the food, sent her out to buy ingredients, or at least postponed cooking without risking a house fire.
Such are IDW's contrivances: plot comes at the expense of character and common sense.
Finally, she's infamously gone a lot™ in the Zombot arc, including having lost her best friend and her mother.
I don't know why people insist that Cream has this long-lasting trauma from the zombot arc when A.) everyone not named Eggman should still be shellshocked, not just uniquely Cream because "she's a child," and B.) the book missed its window of opportunity to show us the effects of that trauma. I don't see any evidence for it. She was back to cheerily baking cookies by the Chao racing arc.
Besides, I very much doubt there was anything in that story to imply zombot-related trauma. IDW is not particularly subtle, so if her tears were indeed the result of zombot trauma, I'm sure there would have been an entire blubbering speech from Cream about how the mean bad guys reminded her of her mom dying, and Vanilla would have comforted her.
Besides, why would the house being on fire and two burglars entering her home remind her of zombots? She wasn't there when Rough and Tumble got turned into zombots.
Also not to shill my own work, but crying is not the only way trauma manifests itself. I used nightmares, sleepiness and a clinginess to her mother to imply Cream was processing the trauma of Eggman kidnapping Vanilla in one of my fics.
She's a child under a lot of stress, and I don't blame her for crying, I would've cried too and I'm way older than her.
The problem does not inherently lie with the concept of Cream crying in a stressful situation; it lies in the exaggerated and inaccurate degree. Like the heat that was left on way too high, so too was Cream's occasional habit of crying cranked all the way up.
While Cream has been known to cry sometimes in the games, doesn't do much more than sniffle. She also gets over it fairly quickly.
This is toddler behavior. It's infantilizing, in addition to inaccurate.
Cream began to cry a little when she and Emerl were kidnapped by Eggman's Phi robots and taken to Gimme Shelter in Sonic Battle.
But, bear in mind, that was after watching Emerl fight waves upon waves of enemies, with guilt over being unwilling to fight and being a bystander to Emerl getting hurt (he had to assure her he was having "fun" instead ;A;) adding onto the stress of abduction. You could also argue she didn't want to fight after being forced to help Amy boxercise to the point of exhaustion.
The circumstances are not the same---here she's in her own home, Rough and Tumble are just bullies, and she has Gemerl and Cheese and Chocola to help her.
Rough and Tumble are consistently written as dumb asshole losers as well, so them being the ones to haven finally broken the straw on the rabbit's back shows a bit more about Cream than them.
You do realize you're implying that Cream is easily overwhelmed by these F-tier assholes, yes? Cream, the goddess of destruction who tore through Eggman's bases in order to rescue her mother in her debut game? Okay.
To say that Starline was hyped and "superior" to Eggman is... kind of a straight up lie.
On his first appearance, he is instantly regarded as "just Eggman's obsessive fanboy that might be a bit gay" and while his hypnotic powers are genuinely dangerous (mainly due to the fact that it affects psyche, not physique), he is also kind of a pathetic loser? He overworks his ass off, he is given advice almost akin to dating advice by Zavok (who probably had second intentions himself), he throws a temper tantrum when Eggman "fires" him, he records all his plans (the last thing a villain should do) and everytime he's pitted against Eggman, he gets his ass completely whopped.
You remember when Bad Guys treated "if you emulate Eggman, it will doom you to failure because you'll only be repeating his mistakes" like it was a huge turning point in Starline's character? Only for it to lead nowhere because oops, it turned out Starline "didn't think his plan all the way through"?
Bad Guys did not have the other villains call Eggman's methods "sloppy" and scatterbrained six or seven times - yes, I counted - just for Eggman to pull a victory out of his ass from literally nowhere. That's such a copout.
What was the point of having us follow Starline for 40-something issues only to establish the point that he is small beans compared to Eggman? Something we already knew due to A.) knowing who Eggman is and B.) knowing that Starline stole 90% of Eggman's shit?
There is none. It was all just a huge waste of time.
She has a sympathetic backstory, her focal point being how psychologically damaged she is (and to an extent, Kit as well), and her entire existence being a nightmare, "created" to be haunted by a non-existent past, a dead creator and someone her life was entirely made around hating.
>>she has a sympathetic backstory
>>"created" to be haunted by a non-existent past
Pick one. Her backstory cannot be "sympathetic" if it doesn't exist. We don't have any frame of reference for what she lost, and so we lack the proper context to feel sympathy for her.
Take Shadow as a contrast. We may not have the deepest portrait of Maria, but what the games do provide are enough for us to tell that she must have meant a lot to him. If the games gave us no idea who Maria was, Shadow's motives would not be nearly as compelling.
I literally cannot tell what it is about Surge's past that merits this kind of sympathy unless you plug in the gaps yourself. Surge even questions her own past a few times, wondering if she and Kit were unwanted or criminals. But because the book refuses to elaborate, we're stuck with playing multiple choice.
It's difficult to take Surge seriously either as a woobie (for the reasons I just mentioned) or as an ultra-badass new rival to Sonic when she flipflops between having panic attacks, Looney-Tunes style hijinks and being handed victories on a silver platter.
Not to mention the hype she receives from the creators---apparently Stanley thinks the events of Forces would have been 10x more difficult on the heroes if Surge were in it. Sure, Jan.
I get how some people may be frustrated about certain characters not showing up more, but we have to be aware that characters created for a comic are gonna appear in the comic, this isn't really a Ken Penders situation where the characters show up to save the main guys and never let them act.
1.) The book is entitled "Sonic the Hedgehog," yet for its fiftieth issue, Sonic was nowhere to be seen on the cover. Much Sonic, many wow.
2.) It's not unreasonable to expect a comic book based on a video game to focus on the video game characters. That's why we're reading the book in the first place.
3.) The real reason the book doesn't focus on the video game cast is because the writers feel stunted by writing the games characters. They find it difficult because they can't "develop" them (ie changing them), hence the heavy focus on comic-exclusive characters.
The worst part is, they can't even keep their own characters consistent, either, so it's not a "Sega mandates" issue nearly as much as it is a skill issue. They're not doing any better in developing the comic characters because half the time they flanderize them for the sake of plot anyway. Belle is afraid of her own shadow under Stanley's pen but screams at Starline under Flynn's; Surge flipflops between being a cool badass and a woobie we're supposed to be rooting for depending on whatever reaction the writer wants to wring out of us at the time; Starline was touted as more thorough and meticulous than Eggman, yet lost because he "didn't think [his plan] all the way through." And I swear Tangle loses IQ points with every issue.
