It baffles me how Pender's diehard fans (not saying this is true of all of them) criticize Flynn for killing off Sally (Even though that's only half true), and yet they praise Endgame for doing the EXACT same thing...
And that they maintain this criticism in the face of Penders making it abundantly clear that he not only intended to kill Sally off for a deeply petty reason (cramping Sonic’s style) and that he tried his damndest to make it stick. This, in addition to his horrible writing gradually stripping Sally of all the things that made her compelling as a character, his repeated inability to actually grasp her as a character, AND his comments regarding her and Geoffrey. In addition to what seems like a pretty healthy amount of contempt despite his attempts to appear otherwise.
It’s a pretty extreme degree of cognitive dissonance going on, and its the end result of Nostalgia overtaking everything else. They don’t bother to see or remember the more horrible parts of Penders time on the book, they can only see him as the guy who wrote what they liked back when the fandom was the way they liked it- with SEGA at arm’s length and SatAM being a big influence on the book and the western fandom in general. It doesn’t help that Penders has repeatedly pandered to them by presenting himself as the champion of SonAlly in the book... despite literally everything he has ACTUALLY done with her character.
It’s all just... childish, to an utterly insane extent..