#kte 24

[fyeahsonicthehedgehog]

[thankskenpenders]

Oh my god this piece of fanart with Knuckles in Carnival Night Zone is really good and has more content from the games than all 32 issues of Penders’ Knuckles series combined

[fyeahsonicthehedgehog]

[fyeahsonicthehedgehog]

[thankskenpenders]

So yes, the election is already happening, and the Dark Legion is gonna hack the votes to make Benedict win

This is an unintentionally poignant display of Penders’ own views, actually. In this story, fascism isn’t something that came from within Echidnaopolis as a society. You know, even though the “good” echidnas have demonstrably been super fucking racist. Even though the echidnas are colonizers who look down upon everyone else. Even though there’s economic and racial inequality in the city. Instead, the hatred is framed as a radical outside force that creeps its way in, cheating the system and rigging an election to corrupt society. Sound familiar?

Today, Penders is the (all too common) kind of liberal who obsesses over the possibility of Trump colluding with Russia and rigging the election. This fixation distracts from the real problems that people like Trump represent. It frames fascism and bigotry as an invasive force. People like this believe that if we can just get some authority figure to prove they cheated and kick them out, then everything will apparently be fine. To them, this isn’t proof that our system is bullshit, but rather that some outsider is tampering with our precious system. The problem isn’t the rampant bigotry and systemic inequality that’s been a part of our country from the very start. No! The bad guys must have come from Somewhere Else

And likewise, the citizens of Echidnaopolis in this comic don’t have to address how easy it is for their society to devolve into fascism. We don’t have to address how a single speech was all it took for Benedict to get a bunch of random echidnas to do Nazi salutes. Because the fascists are only outsiders and they rigged an election

Yes, I realize that I am saying all this about a comic where everyone is Knuckles

[thankskenpenders]

So after rephrasing a poem about the Holocaust to be about Robotnik, and paraphrasing a bit of Nazi propaganda to be about echidnas, how does Penders close out this little trilogy of stupidity? By having Spectre (one of the grandpas--the one with the helmet) quote FDR’s first inaugural address. All the bad guys are Nazis, and Grandpa Gang has FDR on their team. This one isn’t even rephrased to be about Sonic!! It’s literally just the quote

Yeah, if you thought that Knuckles was gonna come to learn that his ancestors were fucked up and generally in the wrong, it’s not looking good

[thankskenpenders]

So everyone’s fighting at the base and Knuckles is discharging a bunch of Chaos Emerald energy and making everything go haywire and Benedict’s skin just melts off and we find out he’s a robot

Why is it necessary for him to be a robot

Why did they need to replace the brainwashed high councilor if they were just gonna replace him with a literal robot

[thankskenpenders]

Fun fact- that 'secret' that Benedict mentioned regarding Remington? Was gonna be that Remington was in fact Kragok's son. Penders revealed it on a fan message board some time ago, but by this point has completely forgotten that it was ever a plot point he came up with.

Oh yeah I knew that Remington was Kragok’s son, I just wasn’t sure if they ever actually said it out loud in the comic. I kind of avoided bringing attention to it thinking we’d talk about it later when the truth was revealed, but I guess not!!

So yeah, Remington the Cop is the son of Kragok, the Dark Legion guy with the robot arm Knuckles beat up in jail. This is his dark secret. And yes, this now means that Remington is a distant relative of Knuckles, because apparently every goddamn echidna in the world has to be a part of that family