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Was trying to make a joke about TV writing to my friend the other day and had to pause and go "...does the phrase 'surf dracula' mean anything to you?"
image description: tweet by @/topherflorence, reading: back in the day if u did a tv show called surf dracula you'd see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gotta be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale /end description
you dont seem to like archie sonic very much, but you still have tons of fan art made about he fredoom figthers over the years, why is that?
The direct context for this ask is likely the fact I liked a tweet dissing on Archie Sonic and the person who tweeted it, who is apparently fandom-rot-brained, is gloating about having had that like to fight online fights
The wider context for that is the tweet was in response to Udon's Director of Publishing baiting people into complaining about Sega for not allowing reprints of Archie Sonic, after him baiting people a couple years ago into supporting Udon getting the Sonic license instead of IDW, promising he'd reprint Archie Sonic, with no awareness of the actual relation to licensor, and midst the usual quasi-political baiting (it's no coincidence a lot of people that were happily going along with his fantasy of "we're totally gonna get Sega's Sonic license and reprint Archie Sonic" were the sort of fan who complains "IDW is just lesbians and trans". Side note, Udon just announced they're making a Street Fighter x Kamen America crossover comic!)
I think in that context, I'm well enough in my place to roll my eyes at another round of "but Archie Sonic, evil Sega" and therefore throw a like at a tweet that just went "this comic should've never existed".
Gonna ramble a lot more to actually answer you, after a text break, but I wanted this immediate context clear and in the open. The TLDR is "I think the characters and comic are fine on their own, but I hate the place they take on the cultural zeitgeist and their influence in this franchise in specific".
In the 1970s, there was this weird period of Wonder Woman comics where she was redesigned to have no super powers. She was now normal-looking, wearing modern fashion, living in a Chinatown urban setting fighting street criminals with martial arts and the help of a mystical master named I-Ching.
Obviously, most Wonder Woman fans are not particularly kind or warm to this take on the character. However, you don't really see active hate to it. The reason should be clear- it's 50 years ago, it was seen as a failure so it's not influencing modern takes on her, it's overall just a historical curio. So there's a distance there that allows fandom to take it as just that. A historical object to look at and ponder, "hmm, what state was culture in for this to have happened, what does it reflect, etc".
I want you to imagine, though, it somehow instead happened in 2010. And Wonder Woman's comic is trying to move on from it, but there's a series of fans still insisting they want current Wonder Woman to be weird unpowered kung-fu Wonder Woman, and as time moves on there's a whole chunk of other fans who're just young ones, and don't know anything else, and social media keeps showing them images of kung-fu Wonder Woman and they're confused and trying to understand if that's Wonder Woman. And new Wonder Woman comics are still heavily influenced by kung-fu Wonder Woman, the way she's written even in non-comic projects where she's supposed to be her usual self she's suddenly being a big kung-fu fan in stuff where that was never a thing and maybe where in the past she was actively written not liking that.
And now also imagine that somehow, while Wonder Woman's owned by DC, there was still a group up top that called a lot of the shots on her that were actively directly connected to this IP at an artistic and emotional level, not just dispassionate corporate suits. Maybe apprentices of Marston, the guy who created WW. And despite them existing, and their personal relation to this stuff, they're stuck seeing on social media people go "AAAW WHO CARES, DC DO KUNG-FU WONDER WOMAN". And maybe new writers and artists are coming in trying to make new material but there's fans online, 90% of the time from the same country, going "OK BUT ARE YOU DOING KUNG-FU WONDER WOMAN". "Where's I-Ching?" "I don't want to read your work, I want reprints of Kung-Fu Wonder Woman".
I would hope this comparison was as subtle as a truck?
Archie Sonic, in a vacuum, as a historical object, with distance to it, is interesting. I even like it at times. I find the early cheesy corny material charming enough in its way as a representative of a style of 80s Americana humour- and side note, if you like that stuff, you should read Marvel's ALF comics or DC's Captain Carrot, both of which by a lot of either literally the same people or at least people in that circle and with similar tastes and influences. I find the turn it takes into serious silver age nostalgia Chris Claremont-influenced storytelling interesting enough, I find the way it parallels Archie TMNT definitely interesting in how it paints the zeitgeist of things. The evolution to sharp attempts at anime-pandering, etc. The way it grows more insular into itself, what the 2006-onwards run lets us see and know of the fandom of the time, the weird ways despite that in which it connected to the zeitgeist (you know they did the Secret Freedom Fighters as a response to the Secret Avengers?). Particularly with Ian loving to do references, it becomes a map of "what's the milieu of nerd spaces at this time" based on what got referenced- youtube poops, forum memes, dialogue lifted from Pirates of the Caribbean.
And, seen in a vacuum, one can also attach to elements of it, rather than just study them. Characters, for instance, are rarely foul entirely by themselves- you might dislike them in a story, but it's clear that if the story was written differently, you might like them. This design might not be to your liking, but you can imagine how if changed like this or like that, it might.
Archie Sonic, in a vacuum, could be comparable to something like Sonic Underground or Sonic the Comic. Something to look back on, to study, look at, learn from, even enjoy on its own terms.
Archie Sonic is also not in a vacuum.
That distance from 70s Kung-Fu Wonder Woman that affords it the detachment required to take it just by itself as opposed to a bad idea to address the influence of? It doesn't exist for Archie Sonic. No one is out here demanding Sonic the Comic elements in the games- but Archie Sonic elements are somehow actually appearing in the games. Sonic's not calling Tails a pixel brain, but he sure is saying Let's Do It To It.
That distance doesn't exist, so it must be made. Normally, the simple passage of time would ensure that- but we're what, 8 years to Archie Sonic dying, and it's barely existing? The fact that a lot of its creators then moved to the next comic, the fact the internet allows an easy flattening and reading of Archie Sonic as if it's current, with easy piracy or youtubers or tiktokers talking about it. That generation shift where a new generation is able to see it as an element of the past isn't quite happening, as it's still too relevant.
It also ties itself to wider discourses. The fact there was access to a podcast of the head writer for years means a lot of behind the scene information that then got circulated around in the fandom in a game of telephone distorting, evolving, changing. Thinking of the way Danny couldn't write a page where Mecha Sonic cries through Sonic, a fun twist and way to depict a sad robot character, without people going "OMG THE MANDATES??? HE TRICKED EVIL DUMB SEGA INTO ALLOWING SONIC TO CRY????". No, there's no mandate about family, there's a rule about a random licensed comic introducing family, which is obviously different from the head production team making the main stories of the franchise making that choice. People do not understand this, nor do they understand that despite the fact it's a corporate franchise, there still actually are people up top who have a specific intent and who aren't random suits but people who put their lives into creating this thing. If the guy who created Metal Sonic all the way back in 1992 is still there and doesn't want Metal Sonic portrayed a specific way, I think whinging about it is a bit absurd, as is absurd the general whinging of not wanting other characters depicted like X Y Z. Would you do that about someone wanting to control how their OC here is depicted?
(maybe you would, of course- vide the way fandoms have reacted to cases such as Gooseworx)
And let's not even get into how it ties to wider "SoA vs SoJ" resentment discourses and how you get people going "um actually without Archie Sonic, the franchise would've died" ignoring all the markets where Sonic was a hit without this comic existing in.
Taking all that together, I hope it makes sense and you can see why I can enjoy stuff about this comic but still feel that, at the end of the day, seeing the headaches it causes, one can't but wish it hadn't existed. The alternative is people accepting it's dead and only taking it as a historical object, but sadly, the fandom at large refuses to. Just got to see how many cling and despair to each new Sonic Blitz update just because there's mentions of something like Antoine in its code, completely ignoring the wider context of the fact even characters like HawkHawk (a totally irrelevant Marvel parody with two issues) were there, that the game devs erroneously created "Modern Bark" despite there being no such thing, and Rovio being a known AI using company, making it clear what happened was just they went "hey ChatGPT list me Sonic characters" and it just went and lifted at random from the Sonic wiki.
Maybe 15 years from now we'll be able to talk more normally about this comic as just a weird historical quirk. Maybe one day I'll get to write the comic pitch I actually have of introducing a canon version of these characters, similarly to how Dragonball Super Broly made a new canon version of Broly.
For now though? I'll keep just being tired whenever I see it, hoping it hadn't happened, and when in a better mood and for my own whims, pretending it IS a world where it's not a constant cloud looming over what I do professionally and thus allow myself to fanart for fun.
Final note- if you actively like Archie Sonic as a comic (which I think is fine enough even if I feel that Sonic the Comic is a better comic when taken just for the being a comic, ignoring the Sonic), read Usagi Yojimbo. It does a lot of things similarly, but just much better.
Or just read Don Rosa's Disney work, which basically commits all the sins and annoyances Ken Penders does, but gets away with it with a mix of Rosa being more humble, and just being leagues better, causing a sort of reaction of "man this stuff should be cringe but by gum he made it work".
Yes, this is the bitter truth that the world's media are trying to hide from you: Gaza is a genocide. Gaza has been annihilated, unfortunately. The world has witnessed a genocide that was filmed, documented, and broadcast live in full view of everyone.
The explosives dropped on the people of the Gaza Strip are equivalent to 20 nuclear bombs like those dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Does anyone still doubt that Israel committed and continues to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against us here in the Gaza Strip?
We have been through so much, and we are still alive thanks to your help and donations. Without them, we would have perished long ago. The campaign has not received any donations in the last seven days, and the last donation was 7 days ago. Thanks to your donations, we can buy food and medicine and pay for the surgery for his daughter Iman, who was injured in her legs during the war. Iman is a child who needs care; she has already suffered enough during the first three of her eight years. Please don't hesitate to donate now. Please donate now.
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the notion of a "babbling brook" is interesting. it's usually understood as a poetic image for the sound of flowing water over a pebble bed, but it can also be taken to describe the impression of literal voices murmuring something in the water, especially if hearing it muffled from some distance in the forest. it hits the right frequencies and your brain fills in the gaps. i've had a similar phenomenon happen when i take a shower sometimes; the sound waves reverberate against the tiled walls in a certain way and it's almost like someone talking indistinctly right next to me. my noise-cancelling headphones have this thing where they try to isolate outside speech and let it through while suppressing other sounds - sometimes they mess up and accentuate something like a fan, or the wind or rain against my house, and i almost hear words murmured again. increasingly this happens without the headphones. i live alone somewhere out of the way, and only very rarely has there been someone speaking here that wasn't me; i suppose my brain has got a lot of gaps to fill
The 'ingredients you can pronounce means it's healthy' line implies a world in which the kind of nutrition a person requires scales with their biology education and grasp of phonics. Which isn't true, of course, but sure would imply some interesting worldbuilding if it were
"Potassium cyanide. Arsenic trioxide. Polonium 210. Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin," I say, smugly and with full confidence, before downing the glass of wine my political rival insisted on pouring for me. Seconds later, she watches with a smirk as I collapse writhing to the ground, in the knowledge that I never could hit that "R" in "pinot noir" quite right
So I've been learning French for a while and 'faire' is actually an incredible word. Like what a fucking breakthrough in economy of language.
Faire is a verb that is usually translated into English as "to do/to make," but it covers way more actions than that, which is very confusing for new speakers. because (I have realized) that's not really what faire means.
Faire is actually a word that just gestures vaguely in the direction of the object of the sentence and goes "you know." "Je fais du velo." "Je fais du courses." "Je fais mes valises." I'm biking. I go grocery shopping. I'm packing my bags. You're just sort of pointing at a bike and going "you know, the obvious thing you'd do with it."
English: "You mean RIDE it??"
French: "Sure whatever."
Like idk I just really enjoy the concept of a catch-all verb that you can just slap onto almost anything because who fucking gives a shit, you get the idea. There's a bike. what do you think I'm going to do with it.
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