I’ve been dying to ask about bash extravaganza. I desperately need to know how the most authority avoidant hedgehog in existence ended up with not one, not even two, but FOUR adoptive parents.
(No I’m not asking in hopes of curing my writer’s block why do you ask)
okay so (cracks knuckles)
the biggest difference between Bash and Beyond is that in Bash, the most recent game on the timeline was Forces. this seems small but it is actually incredibly extensive because forces is the game where the developers just casually dropped hey, Sonic has been prisoner for six months, and Eggman has been torturing him for fun!
when we actually see him, sonic is seemingly unaffected by his captivity. he breaks himself out of his cell in style (in front of cages just like his, which are packed with hundreds if not thousands of other people, who he was presumably caged alongside for the entire six months) and when he reunites with the resistance, they ship him out to battle immediately after they confirm he's with them and alive. he barely gets five minutes to breathe
so, a lot of this is simply forces's bad writing. bashwise, I figured that if he was that nonchalant during his escape and willing to go into active combat so soon, he must have been holding down all that frustration and pain for the entirety of his tenure. there were other people there, after all, people who needed him. if he broke, they'd lose what little hope they had left.
forces is the game that teaches sonic, accidentally or otherwise, that his friends need him to be alright. he loses one fight, and they lose the whole world.
(I have extensive thoughts on how Sonic's loss and capture affected each one of his friends, but you asked about Sonic so I'm focusing on Sonic because otherwise we'll be here all day)
bash extravaganza also has the smash bros timeline to contend with, and as I've said in a previous post, World of Light happened almost immediately after Forces. for Sonic, the Bash Extravaganza tournament has traditionally been a break for him. it's on a completely different planet, and all of his friends there aren't from his home. they know him for his heroics, yes, but all of them are known for heroics (or villainy, as it were), so it cancels out. after Forces, he accepts his invitation to the tournament to get away from it all, just for a while.
and then World of Light happens.
but OKAY, its FINE, he can HANDLE world of light its FINE (don't look at the Robotnik and Infinite spirits. don't think about him having to contend with those two and team up with them so soon after they tried to ruin his life. don't LOOK AT IT.)
AND THEN, the year after WoL, the campaign starts.
The thing about Bash Extravaganza year 1 is that, well. This is a d&d campaign. it needs a BBEG. so, naturally, on the tournament's opening day, it gets attacked by an unknown enemy, Kiatro (this enemy is original to the campaign, i would ask our dm, @aviaviator for information on them if you're curious, but it's not wholly relevant to this rant). while we're dealing with Kiatro, though, people start running their own events with their own smaller overarching villains; monokuma (Danganronpa) teams up with Alina Gray (Magia Record) and it's a whole thing. Alina starts dating Junko, it's exactly as fucked as it sounds. there are a shitload of other people attacking the tournament as well, but this was almost five years ago in real life by now so i don't remember all of them. but, basically, it's a lot.
this clusterfuck is happening a year after World of Light, which in turn happened a few weeks after Forces. Sonic went from one war, into another, into another.
and throughout all of this, he's carried the one lesson that forces beat into him for six months: you have to be able to handle it. You have to be able to handle it. You cannot lose. You are not allowed to lose, not even once.
(if this seems out of character, it's because it... Honestly kind of is; sonic isn't acting like himself, and that's exactly why it sunk in so recently on the timeline, exactly why he's now making an active effort to peel it away, and exactly why these are the single worst days of his life.)
but, of course, not even he can carry that perfectly. eventually people start catching on.
the main reason sonic gets adopted by mario and peach is because he's actually known them since he was very young (another difference between Bash and Beyond. think around the transition between the Classic and Adventure eras) and they've had time to wear him down. he doesn't consider them his parents until the events of the campaign, but they're his friends, he knows them, on some level he trusts them. they're long-time veterans in the heroic field. if anyone understands the weight he carries, it's them.
he meets layton and jodariel during the campaign year 1 tournament itself. layton, mystery game protagonist that he is, starts picking up on Sonic's emotional repression like. two weeks in, and he starts working to establish rapport and trust to urge him to. y'know. get help for allat. layton is, ultimately, someone that he can't lie to.
jodariel adopts him and Tails like the day after they meet. she just doesn't tell him about it. sonic is endeared to her slowly, admittedly, after the other three have already opened him up, but the fact that she is incredibly eager to threaten eggman at spear-point on his behalf does help. she's someone who can handle things that have traditionally been his job and his job alone
the keystone in all of this is that none of them are people he actually views as authority. none of them try to put themselves above him. his parents were all his friends first and foremost, and even to this day he doesn't really see them as authority, but they're people that have never made him feel like he has to pretend around them. they not only protect him, but they encourage him to be himself, and in the wake of Forces that's the one thing that's slowly been taken away from him.
it's important to recognize that Sonic didn't know what the fuck to make of this at first. like, it's not something he's ever had before! what the fuck does he do with it? huh??? huh????? it's like bringing a feral dog or cat inside. it knows on some level that this is better than where it was before but also what the fuck. WHAT the fuck. who are you what are you doing to me. like. this campaign has been going on for five years and he STILL doesn't really know what to make of it all.
but the main reason he trusts them is because they're the people who have never tried to make him act like something he's not, or something he can't be. they're people who are there in situations where he would've otherwise been alone in a crowd. they don't ask anything of him, they're just there for him if he needs them, and no one has been there for him before.
because, like, he's come to terms about a lot of the fucked up shit that happened to him, but there are still things where he went "hm. hey this was kinda fucked up. this was a fucked up thing that happened to me/that someone did to me." and there was no one who he could grieve that with except for these four so he just kept it to himself. (if you want an example besides Forces, i would look into Sonic Battle if you haven't already. im not sure if you've played it, and what I'm referring to is pretty major spoilers, but if you have seen it let me know and i'll elaborate on it). they don't make him feel like he has to feel terrible about anything, but if he did and he wasn't able to express that to anyone before, he is now.
i guess what I'm getting at is that Sonic's parents are his friends first and foremost, they're just friends who have slowly been able to teach him that he can collapse in front of them without the world ending. i suppose he's less like their child in the traditional sense and more like the street cat who knows that if he needs food, shelter, affection, or help, he goes to their house. they let him be free, they let him go where he wants and do as he pleases, but they're there if he needs them.
so the answer to your question is that the authority avoidant hedgehog got four parents because his parents have never given him any reason to see them as authority. they're people he cares about, and people who he knows care about him. it took time (this campaign has been going on for five years and there are still things he hasn't told them), and he still doesn't live with any of them permanently (and likely never will), but they let him be himself, even when "himself" is someone no one has ever known how to handle, not even Sonic.
(and to address something that came up in Beyond, yes, sonic is technically a Prince in Bash, but he has the freedom to completely ignore that title. he's also the King of Camelot, but half of the citizens there hate him anyway (see: Worst of knights, slayer of kings) and it's not like they could ever make him do anything he doesn't want to do. he just Left. he's still technically king, but it's not something he really cares about. people give him weird nicknames all the time, it doesn't mean he has to answer to them.
he has the confidence to assert that his place in the world is exactly where he wants it to be, not where they say it is. prince and king are just words to him, they don't mean shit and they can't make it mean shit. even if the paperwork says he has a given title, he's the sort of person to pick and choose what he wants and discard everything else, regardless of what the "right" way of doing things is. he says "im not a prince" and that's the end of the conversation, why would he let a sheet of paper tell him what to do? sonic, i feel, is the sort of person who never feels like he has to defend himself to people very much. they're free to think of him as whatever, but it doesn't change who he is, it just makes them wrong, and why should he care if they're wrong?)
