"Set in the early 2000's after the events of SA 1 and 2, Sonic and his friends take a year off from saving the world, or at least they try to. With more time to themselves, their deepest feelings and worries start to stir, creating quite the interesting vacation."
ive been working on this au for a little while now and id thought id share its premise and main character designs! it was mostly inspired by an old sonadow fic i never published and i figured that i might repurpose it and try to turn it into its own little au :3c
people on a tiktok comment section are saying sorry for your loss is boring and i was just like, WHAT !?
and it got me thinking and I think that I was so completely into it while watching because i related/relate to it so much and it gives me a special type of comfort that not everyone gets from it, and the show itself actually means so much to me !!
Ok, this is going to be a little challenging, because I love Linda Goodman. Her books on astrology have been essential to my life and helped me to better understand the people around me, and as a result have made me a more tolerant person. It's not easy to make a Scorpio tolerant, as many will tell you. Speaking of my sign, reading the chapter she wrote on the Scorpio woman marked the first moment in my life when I felt completely understood. Her words came at a time when I needed the most to hear that it's ok and normal to be the way I am - thus healing the emotional wounds inflicted by my typically Aries mother. How fitting, that an Aries woman would fix what another had broken. This massive poem is Linda Goodman's Happiness Poem, which is half autobiographical, half esoteric belief manifesto. And while it starts off well enough, it gets very problematic by the end.
In a way, this is the perfect Aries book, encompassing both the qualities and the flaws of this sign. The first half, focusing on her childhood and her first marriage, is fantastic. Full of innocence, brightness, vivacity and stunning images conjured by a wonderful imagination. The second half is, and I'm going to be kind here, self-indulgent and outdated. Once her alcoholic ex-husband dies, the main character spends hundreds of pages mourning. Hundreds of pages, by the end of which I found myself fatigued and wishing she would move on already. Then it somehow gets even worse, as she meets a young man with whom she has a passionate love affair which lasts for one year, before her intense jealousy and her angry outbursts make him leave her for good. She then spends another good chunk of the book mourning him endlessly for years and years, refusing to move on, obsessed with the idea that he was her twin soul and that her dead ex-husband's soul was living inside his body. The seemingly neverending "why did you leave me, I can't believe you left me" becomes grating after several hundreds of pages, especially since she never seems to really reflect on why he left, on the role which her jealousy and angry outbursts played in making it difficult for him to stay with her. She was, for example, very jealous of a former liaison of this young man, a cool, sure Scorpio woman, and she would go with him to the post office every morning to make sure that he didn't receive any letters from her. She would also break things in her anger, including an antique doll which she received as a gift from him. Both her ex-husband and her ex-lovers cheated on her, and their explanation was the same - that they found her emasculating and wanted to prove to themselves that they were still men. Terrible thing of course, and it does explain her paranoid behavior the second time around, but one does wonder if things wouldn't have been better if she had looked over her flaws and tried to work on them instead of doing the typical, wounded Aries dash towards the brick wall.
The dubious crowing of this esoteric manifesto about spiritual enlightenment, reincarnation and souls comprises of several very unfortunate statements, uttered during a trance-like conversation with a paper-mache lion given to her by her young ex-lover. Among them, the idea that murder victims have done something in a past life to deserve being murdered, that trans individuals can avoid the urge to change their gender by becoming enlightened, outright stating that what makes them different is actually a spiritual imbalance of soul pieces. Add to that a weird mention of how some children younger than 12 can regenerate a lost finger thanks to their still-open third eye and you can get a fairly good image of the dated theories presented in the book.
What's really annoying and a surprising contrast to her deep understanding of the signs, is that she has the self-indulgence of many esoteric afficionados - she wants to find a sign so she looks for signs until she finds something which she can interpret to mean what she wants it to mean. Or at least that was my impression. She did write the book in 1970, so provisions must be made for the popular ideas of the time. Ultimately, her book is about hope and love, and there is a positive message for many people - if they happen to be heterosexual, cisgender and monogamous. I am all three of these things and I still can't help but feel that a cosmic vision which does not allow for diversity cannot be that enlightened to begin with. Linda decried the promiscuity and loosening of morals brought by the Aquarian age, and for someone who considered herself enlightened, it is rather jarring that she would be so unaware of the fact that the world has always been as diverse as it is now, from the gender and sexuality perspective - it's just the norms which have changed.
It was a difficult book to finish, but it is a book of its time and I reiterate, the first half is delightful. The way the lines are placed on the page and the usage of images, postcards and drawings are creative and add richness and warmth to the narrative.
I do love this woman for her work, and I really wanted to extend that love her book, as it was her favorite. Alas.
I am resigned to an avalanche of hate mail from Linda Goodman fans.
Episode 2 of The Gooberz is out and ready for enjoyment!!! All kinds of Awesome Cameos plus the usually cast of Players 'n Hustlers! Scoooop! GOOBERZ.TV
