"Yes, Woolie, you can win any argument if you just change what words mean."
Apologies for bringing up an old debate, but I feel the need to clarify my stance on this topic. Twitter character limits will not allow the space needed for explanation.
There's a reason I mentioned the Erazor Djinn and not Shahra. It's because, unlike the Erazor Djinn, Shahra has done nothing wrong. Sonic helps her because he wants to, not because she's earned it by performing regret to a "sufficient" degree.
"The concept of freedom and redemption is neutral."
No, it isn't. That's a culturally Christian view. Some cultures emphasize rehabilitation instead, which differs from redemption.
Not to mention that morality is, to some extent, culturally defined and will vary on that basis.
"Some people deserve it and some people don't."
Yeah, no, I have Problems(tm) with this mindset.
The reason the idea that anyone particularly "deserves" anything - in this case, punishment for crime - doesn't sit right with me is because some external force must define the crime and impose the punishment. I take umbrage with the very idea that we must relent the onus of our problem-solving to an authority, which is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
In other words, at some point you must defer complex moral decisions to an authority. Historically, these punitive frameworks rarely serve justice and usually leverage their power to target the oppressed.
At best, the "criminals deserve to be punished for hurting people" mindset assumes the just world fallacy is true. Good people ought to be rewarded, but more importantly, bad people ought to be punished. On top of other potential pitfalls and opportunities for abuse, this fallacy assumes victims can never exploit their own hurt, real or fabricated, to facilitate oppression.
What this results in, more often than not, is a culture of anxiety that stunts one's moral growth. People become afraid to speak out, make the normal range of mistakes expected of being human, and sometimes even do the right thing upon pain of being branded a Criminal(tm) onto whom punishment is justified and equally little grace afforded. And since "bad people" and "criminals" are categories upon which cruelty for catharsis' sake is considered more justified than rehabilitation or justice for victims, this system can, has been, and will be exploited.
This is why humans rights exist and are called human rights, not "fuck up hard enough and get your humanity revoked" rights.
At worst, it can feed into an authoritarian mindset that paves the way for fascism: dominant cultures enforcing their bigotry through institutionalized violence. "Undeserving" is a severely loaded term especially given this context and this risk.
The wording of "But the fact [Shahra] wishes to make things right for herself and ultimately regretted her mistakes shows that she is more deserving of redemption and freedom than Erazor" implicitly frames her as someone who, under Sonic's supposed moral authority, must be screened or vetted. It risks lumping abuse victim with abuser. If she did nothing wrong, only suffered being a victim of circumstance, why must she "earn" Sonic's grace where the Erazor Djinn does not?
What did she do that would require punishment otherwise if Sonic had found her regret wanting? Lie out of necessity? How could he deign to exercise the authority to punish her for such a thing?
Add the fact that she defers to Sonic as the master of the ring, and this whole power dynamic becomes horribly problematic incredibly fast. That Sonic insists on seeing Shahra as not only an equal but a friend is the whole point the game was attempting to make about their dynamic. It would have been beyond fucked for him to have exploited his power over her in such a manner, and I'm glad the game explicitly avoided that implication right out of the gate. Shut that shit down before it even had a chance to start.
Ironically enough, we see this framework fail when IDW!Sonic is confronted with an abuse victim in the form of Surge. He callously treats her with the same flippant disdain as with other irredeemable villains (barring Eggman, but we'll get to that in a second) even though Surge makes it clear that she's suffering.
The fact that his solution is not to listen to her, but to instead preach his values and say "I'll just kick your ass until you magically start Acting Right(tm)," as if hurting people who are already in pain ever taught them a lesson other than "never trust anyone," means IDW!Sonic is less interested in harm reduction than in appearing "good" and merciful. He winds up reinforcing his status as the moral authority of this world, which is ironic for a character who supposedly values freedom for all.
Freedom includes the freedom to fuck up, yes. And what I'm certain IDW!Sonic meant to add was the caveat "...but not freedom from consequences." However, his selective hypocrisy in who deserves what and when is so obvious that it winds up warping the message into "Do what Sonic tells you or suffer the consequences he decides are fit."
Again, this loops back around to my original assertion that the "what you deserve" mindset is authoritarian. Who is Sonic to establish himself as the arbiter of freedom?
At least in SatSR, when he condemns the Erazor Djinn to the lamp, it's for pragmatic reasons as much as it is for moral considerations---perhaps the former even more so than the latter.
Sonic knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that letting the Djinn go free will result in the events of the game happening again. Shahra has told him that the Djinn abused his power once before, and he's seen the evidence for abusing it a second time throughout the course of the game. To say nothing of how the Erazor Djinn basically hammered the nail in his own coffin through his callous disregard of Shahra.
The Djinn's actions determine his fate. If we left it at "he's just a scumbag," that reduces him to an identity that may or may not be permanent and shifts focus away from his choices.
Likewise, Shahra is not a good person simply because she regrets her mistakes hard enough, but rather, Sonic knows her hand was forced because she winds up doing the right thing in the end, even at a high personal cost.
Hence Sonic takes concrete steps, such as tossing the lamp down a furnace where no one would be inclined to look for it or even accidentally stumble upon it again, to diminish the threat the Erazor Djinn presents.
It must be emphasized that he also makes an equal effort to comfort a grieving Shahra. Not because she's a good person who "deserves" comfort after all she's been through, but because it is a good thing to alleviate suffering. Also because Shahra is his friend, and Sonic doesn't need a reason to want to help out a friend.
What concrete steps has IDW!Sonic taken to reduce the harm his villains present?
1.) Convinced Shadow to step down from killing Mr. Tinker by leveraging Shadow's traumatic past against him, rather than argue that Mr. Tinker should be given a chance to live as his own person.
2.) Made a promise to check up on Mr. Tinker to make sure things continued to go smoothly, only to later break that promise by assuming Eggman will remain Mr. Tinker forever with no real evidence.
3.) Decided to let Metal Sonic go regardless of Tails' warnings, on the reasoning that Metal was his own person whose autonomy needed to be respected (despite Metal admitting that he essentially had no free will in a previous issue, and despite Tails later pointing out that Metal remained dangerous as he still had his jet engine and claws). Eggman even calls Sonic out on this, explaining that Metal is programmed to obey his master. Yet Sonic still gets chuffed at Metal for having "chosen wrongly."
4.) On top of exacerbating the metal virus and nearly destroying the world for personal gain, Zavok killed people in the Zeti hunt arc and very graphically threatened to flay Sonic alive while storming Restoration HQ. Yet he's shuttled back to the Lost Hex without any real guarantee that he won't do it again.
5.) Nothing against Starline, except to eulogize his death as "big oof," despite having told Surge that he (Sonic) was willing to give even him (Starline) a second chance.
6.) Eulogized Surge with "That's the real problem with freedom: you can't stop people from making the wrong choice."
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