can i just say that ppl are really showing their gender essentialism when they refer to ships involving the male-voiced crewmates as “yaoi” and the female-actor-voiced crewmates as “yuri” and the cross-ones as “het.” all the crewmates are nonbinary. all the characters are the same gender. and an amab they/them person is the same gender as an afab they/them person regardless of their voices.
with most fictional dude-crushes i have i'm like "i could fix him" but with wyll ravengard i'm like "HE could fix ME and also i could put a blanket around his shoulders and tell him it's okay to be upset about everything that happened and sometimes he'd bridal carry me and we would smooch. la la la *twirls hair*"
this post will be an extremely negative review of sonic 3. if you liked the movie, i'm glad! i'm always happy to see people enjoying sonic media. however, you may not enjoy this post, and i encourage "don't like, don't read" in this case.
i watched it with a few friends who don't have strong opinions about sonic, and i went in expecting that i would dislike it for what it does to the lore, but it would still be a competent movie that the others would enjoy. i expected a rational plot and enjoyable characters, just not a movie that i would like. like, when i saw sonic 2, i thought it was fun, it just irked me as a sonic fan, but i could admit that the movie was fun. me and my brother had a good time in the theater with that, you know? i expected the same out of sonic 3.
…
and boy was i WRONG about that! dear god wtf were they thinking. both of the people i watched it with hated it too, so it wasn't just me as a sonic fan…
i'm going to name the things i did like about it first, though. mild bit of positivity.
tails is cute and helpful, collen o'shaughnessy did a great job.
eggman actually does have serious sexual tension with agent stone (?????) and that's not even my ex-fujo brain talking, everyone noticed it. at one point, eggman rips stone's shirt open and he's just… got his tits out for a while. wtf guys. they have a shaving scene where they get REALLY close, like, mouth next to mouth. i'll admit this was fun.
jim carrey did a great job with playing a character, if not eggman or gerald. he went beyond just Jim Carrey The Actor which was good.
idris elba as knuckles was fun. i don't like "stupid knuckles" but elba did a good job with the material he was given.
knuckles as a character was quite charming… mostly. (more on that later)
some of the jokes were solid
the animation was (mostly) good
though i hated the changes they made to maria, she's charming in this. the montage where she's hanging out with shadow is sweet.
the final battle was awesome. if i had liked this movie in general, i would have loved that battle. unfortunately i didn't.
okay. allow me to go through my various Hater Reasons one by one. i'll start with the ones that could apply to any viewer, then i'll get into what ticked me off as a sonic fan specifically.
general haterism
first: the plot holes and contrivances. a couple examples:
when they have to break into the GUN base, eggman and gerald robotnik have to do a whole stealth sequence to get in. the heroes are also set up to have to do the same. but then sonic just runs in because, uh… idk. he just does.
the Evil GUN Lady (i don't even remember her name. she was pale with dark hair and big eyes, if that rings a bell, but she was not distinctive enough for me to remember her) pulls out the key to the eclipse cannon for… reasons. to show it off, i guess. to the people who came to steal it. like, she takes it out of its safety chamber and holds it up and then the bad guys manage to steal it. good job, idiot.
second: the movie continually invalidates its own stakes for cheap jokes, which leaves the experience confused about whether it is an action-comedy or a comedy with some action. examples:
as i said, knuckles is generally a decent character IF you accept the "stupid knuckles" characterization. he's got this fun "dumb muscle guy" persona, but when he's pushed he reveals that he is extremely devoted to protecting the master emerald, and he takes his promises very seriously. and that's great! i love that. it adds conflict between him and sonic because sonic wants to use the emerald, and it makes me want to respect knuckles. except… apparently the Super Secret Place that he was hiding the master emerald. is. some random guy's place. and said random guy is playing hockey with it alone. it's framed as a joke, but it just makes knuckles look like an incompetent moron and ruins his character. i realize that this is probably addressed in the knuckles series that i haven't watched, but in the context of this movie, it is played as a joke and it is obvious that the master emerald is not safe with that guy because sonic manages to steal it with 0 effort. this just makes knuckles look completely incompetent.
giant climactic scene interrupted by jim carrey (gerald) spanking jim carrey (eggman). okay.
third: sonic's human parents were pretty flat. they dispense 1 line of wisdom to sonic, then they're brought back for the stealth mission i mentioned earlier, which culminates in them breaking into the GUN base by… using an Angry Black Woman persona to intimidate the guards, which… works on the guard for some reason. it was definitely supposed to be funny but my entire group thought it was extremely uncomfortable to watch. other than that, most scenes with them felt kind of useless. i'm still not sure why this series has a portal hop world rather than just taking place on sonic's world, but whatever...
fourth: lack of women. i'll get into this more in the next part, but for now, i'll just say that this film removes most of sonic adventure 2's important female characters and fails to add interesting new ones. i'm not even sure that two women INTERACT for one minute without a man being involved. that is genuinely shameful. there was no reason to make the story THIS focused on the male characters at the expense of female characters. more on that later.
fifth: shadow's model/animation looks… weird. he looks weirdly plastic at times, more than the other characters, and i'm not sure why. his mouth in particular did some strange things that were hard to look at.
sixth: the acting is hit or miss. keanu was… not good as shadow 😭 i like him as an actor but he has 1 persona he can put on as a voice actor, and that persona is not shadow. every time he spoke i just pictured johnny silverhand. my friend said he was just hearing john wick…
seventh: sonic is really annoying. the script doesn't help, but i think it's a voice acting issue, and it REALLY makes it hard to root for him. he sounds way too pleased by the sound of his own voice. combine that with the fact that he keeps screwing up in the narrative for reasons that seem pretty stupid, and you've got a recipe for one annoying hedgehog. this is not the kind of movie where i'd want to be annoyed by the main protagonist, which doesn't help.
eighth: in terms of being a sequel, this just kind of sucks. it makes sense that they don't re-establish characters that we already know, but this movie doesn't give much reason for us to care about what happens to these characters in the context of this story. there were a few characters i did enjoy: the jim carreys were fun (if unfaithful to the originals), stone was okay, knuckles was okay until the aforementioned master emerald thing, and tails was endearing solely because of his voice acting and the fact that he was often the ONLY character making logical decisions. everyone else ranged from bland to annoying. as per my friend: she kind of hated the protagonists, the bad guys were much more enjoyable to watch all the time. which... sucks.
ninth: you know how i mentioned that stone's dynamic with eggman was surprisingly gay and quite fun to watch? yeah, stone just gets sidelined later in the movie because eggman fires him. which, i mean, in universe it makes sense, but that was also one of the only things i was enjoying about the movie, lmao.
sonic-fan-specific haterism
first: shadow's backstory is, uh, stupider now. this is going to take a while, bear with me. let me explain his original backstory first:
gerald robotnik is a scientist with a granddaughter who has NIDS (clear parallel to AIDS). said granddaughter can't survive on earth because her immune system is too weak, so they go to the space colony ARK when she's a baby and she grows up there. (there have been some retcons in recent times that make her know what earth is like, but in older media, she is strongly implied, if not explicitly stated, to want to know what earth is like.)
gerald wants to heal her, so he experiments with creating an "ultimate lifeform". after some attempts, he manages to get dna from the alien race known as the black arms, and that ends up succeeding. he creates shadow to progress in researching the cure for maria.
shadow spends an unspecified amount of time on the ARK with maria. she dreams of seeing earth because she doesn't remember it, he's never been there. they want to go there together.
GUN (the guardian units of nations) finds out about shadow and his massive potential as a weapon, especially because of his connection to chaos energy, and decides to shut the operation down by force. they send in soldiers to storm the ARK.
shadow and maria run to an escape pod, and shadow gets in, but maria is shot by a soldier. in maria's dying moments, she begs him to help humanity, sends the pod to earth, and dies.
GUN apprehends gerald. shadow is locked in a cryogenic chamber by GUN.
at some point, gerald is able to tamper with shadow's memories. (how he did this is unclear, seems GUN allowed him to interact for some reason.) so now shadow thinks that maria wanted him to destroy humanity, not help it.
gerald is executed. in his last moments, he curses humanity.
50 years later, shadow is awoken by eggman, who was seeking out GUN's weapon and found him there.
now let's look at his backstory in the movie!
shadow is an alien who landed on earth and gerald is going to study him. immediately, this completely deletes his "living weapon" and "created for another person's benefit" psychological threads, which already wrecks much of what makes shadow interesting. they don't explore the alien thing in much detail either btw :^)
the research takes place on earth. which removes the angst-factor of maria being stuck in space and unable to see earth.
maria is not sick, she's just here because she's gerald's granddaughter and… i guess he wanted her around… for some reason… which they don't explain.
GUN raids the research facility, but the GUN soldiers hesitate before killing maria, and they don't even shoot her, they cause an explosion that kills her (but leaves gerald - who is standing right there - unharmed, somehow). she does NOT tell shadow to help humanity! she just dies. she loses what little agency she had. where her lack of agency in the original backstory is a tragedy, because she wants shadow to fulfil her own dreams because she can't. in this movie, she just. dies. nothing else. bam. dead. also, her death being less intentional - caused by an explosion rather than being outright shot - downplays the brutality of GUN and weakens the narrative. isn't shadow a stronger character if he DOES have reason to believe that humanity is cold and heartless, that it would do such a thing to a child?
shadow is locked away. 50 years later, gerald (when he's 110 i believe, which is not justified in-universe) wakes shadow up to enact vengeance on humanity for maria's death.
about gerald being alive: word of god says that licking shadow's quills gives him immortality, but that is ONLY word of god and it is a bullshit excuse. why would the writers remove the brutality of GUN executing him? did they want GUN to look less evil? did they just want more jim carrey? it's bizarre and it takes away from time that could be spent on, say, the female characters, or shadow's story, or… anything else??
second: they removed the most prominent female characters. so, in the original, there were two VERY prominent girl anthro characters: amy and rouge. amy busts sonic out of prison (he doesn't go to prison in this movie, which. was a choice.), and she talks shadow out of destroying humanity by reminding him of maria's promise. (this isn't the strongest plot point in SA2 imo but it is important.) rouge is working for the government and investigating project shadow, but she grows to care about shadow as time goes on. at one point, he rescues her from certain death, which shocks both of them and sparks character and relationship development for them both. like… that's just gone now. and who did they replace them with? GERALD! who is dead in the original! no rouge to be found! no amy! the girls are gone because fuck you, i guess. It's Sexist. i know there's a couple women in this movie, but they're all either dead or boring.
third: the fact that they completely removed maria's illness, especially when it was referencing an illness that is SO widely stigmatized… it puts a bad taste in my mouth. she's a character whose tragedy is built around the circumstances that her illness put her in, who almost got a chance to live through shadow and then died anyway. to strip that away from her feels downright offensive. she is one of the few chronically ill characters in this series and it just sucks to remove that from her. like, it's removing the identity of a disabled character. okay.
(not to mention that, as i mentioned earlier, shadow was quite literally made for her, which also adds spice to his cocktail of psychological shenanigans, so stripping that away makes him a less interesting character too.)
like i've Been looking forward to the among us tv show. i love among us. the little amongi make me ridiculously happy. but the thing is that i wasn't expecting it to be GOOD. i. what. apparently it was directed by the infinity train director. and then the end credits rolled and the screenwriters turned out to be karen han and brian david glibert. ????? what HAPPENED HERE
i strongly recommend it. it was incredibly fun. i thought i was going to get slop aimed at elementary schoolers and instead i got a legit funny comedy. everyone i watched it with was equally baffled. solid 7/10 VERY GOOD.
before the story started, himeno's arc mirrored what aki does later on.
she joined public safety - and there's only a few reasons to join public safety instead of going private - but as she started to care for aki, and worry for his wellbeing, she decided to prioritize him over whatever reason drove her to public safety in the first place.
then she died. and aki started care for power and denji, and worry about their wellbeing, and he decided to prioritize them over the reasons that drove him to public safety in the first place.
the divergence point: shadow and maria lock themselves in a room instead of maria sending shadow to earth. they stay there until the GUN raid comes to find them
maria has time to hide, she's presumed dead. GUN won't leave until shadow's dealt with, he's forced to kill the invading GUN soldiers
he's never killed anyone before. this traumatizes him greatly.
he and maria are left as the last two alive on the ARK
maria still wants to believe in humanity, but- shadow is suffering. his quills are matted with blood and he's looking at her and asking what he just did because he can barely make sense of it himself.
that's shadow. her shadow. her baby brother. he didn't have a choice, and- GUN killed everyone, everyone she knew- this had to be the right thing to do. it had to be. maria tells him that. "you did the right thing. don't regret it."
they pick through the carnage and find that no one else survived. GUN failed to extract gerald, since shadow killed the GUN soldiers before they could take him back to earth.
maria is still sick. shadow is still here to be her cure. she's got the classic robotnik-brain and he's rather intelligent himself - maybe they can figure something out...
they stay on the ARK. she can't survive on earth, after all. and they work.
shadow ends up bitter towards humanity in the same way he is in canon. maria starts slipping into misanthropy too. after all, shadow didn't have a choice. GUN tried to kill everyone. almost succeeded, too. she sees the blood of her grandfather and all the scientists, she sees the way shadow is still tormented over his actions even though the GUN soldiers didn't even have a word to spare for the people they were gunning down, and she wonders what kind of world would allow this. what kind of humanity would do such a thing.
