no amount of praise to sonic 06 will excuse how 06 ruined blaze’s character going from a princess grasping with messy emotions which she learns to get better with power of bonds to practically nothing character that’s just there to die to get rid of a loose end in the case of iblis at 06
you know a character is done bad when people find it more believable that said character is a figment of another character’s imagination since blaze in 06 is just such a non entity
Not gonna lie. When I was a kid I got convinced that she was Silver's imaginary friend. Not as in "this is a theory that makes sense." As in "This is the only thing that makes sense so I'll assume it's canon."
06 Blaze is the literal definition of "woman in a fridge." She's just there to die. And she died for nothing because Mephiles won anyways. She never even looks at another character that isn't Silver. It's IMPLIED that she knows who Sonic is, so it's implied that Rush happened first, but she still has not s single issue with Silver killing Sonic because she's such a non character in that game, she isn't allowed to have any impact on the story beyond "the girl that dies"
Hell. At least Maria's sacrifice was worth SOMETHING. At least her dying was relevant to the story. Blaze just gets NOTHING in 06.
And dare I say, her being there makes the story worse? The whole thing of "Silver is alone in a desolate future and is so desperate he'll trust a sketchy stranger because he has never known any better because all his life has been surviving alone" falls apart the moment you realize that he's, in fact, NOT alone, and not only that, he's constantly accompanied by a character we know is smart enough to call on Mephiles bullshit. But she doesn't. She does NOTHING and is just there to die for NOTHING.
I know their idea was that, since Silver's character was about him thinking "the means justify the ends" and tried to kill someone innocent without a basis, the way to finish his arc was to force him in a situation where someone has to die to get a happy ending, and he realizes that it was, in fact, not worth it. But it all falls apart the moment he tried to sacrifice himself at first and failed. And then Blaze takes that decision for him.
He's not sacrificing anything. Blaze is just killing herself. He's learning nothing because that wasn't a choice for him to make. If this had been done the opposite way, and Blaze tried to sacrifice herself, but Silver stopped her because he realized that it wasn't worth it at the cost of her life, THAT would've worked at least half better.
Hell, rewrite idea. Silver finds out before hand that someone needed to be sacrificed in order for Iblis to be captured and vanished. You see him battling mentally for a while, considering who to sacrifice. Every time he meets someone he thinks mentally "is this the one that I should sacrifice" and considering WHO to bring to his future in order to vanish Iblis.
But at the end, he returns to his future alone, because he realizes that it's not up to him to choose who's life is worth less to use as a sacrifice. He can only make that decision about someone: himself. Then, he seals Iblis inside of him. (and of course, he ends up reviving regardless because of Mephiles bullshit, but the point is that the lesson was learned)
And you want to know the best part? Blaze wasn't needed there. Because Blaze had no business being in Sonic 06 and her presence there ruined without repair her character and made the entire story of the game worse. She got reduced to a Misogynistic trope of "woman in the fridge" and made her entire lore afterwards needlessly complicated and convoluted, not to mention ruin the entire time line forever. The only good thing to come out of her in 06 is that her 3D model was pretty good.
