🫵PHOTON TRIVIA
o7 YOU GOT IT BOSS!!
as much as i love making robots who Think Like Robots there's none of that here! photon is the ghost of someone real shoved into a metal body and just as unpredictable and irrational as any meat brain is. too obviously mechanical to be a person, too painfully human [mobian. whatever] to be a robot. [and don't you worry, i've definitely thought about how this in-between existence would collide with other robots in the series. give me a minute to stop crying every time i think about mecha sonic mkii and then i'm sending his ass to scrapnik island]
he derisively calls sonic 'meat sonic'. at first it was in response to being called 'metal sonic,' but now that he has his own name it's just this bizarre orphaned punchline kept alive by some mix of complacency and spite. for what it's worth meat sonic thinks it's funny as fuck that photon calls him that
photon can't cry, at least not at first. just doesn't have the physical functionality built into him. he tells himself that it's no loss, he/sonic hated crying anyway, but it's definitely not good for him that such a deeply psychologically necessary function is gone!
of course my autistic ass has thought about the jules and photon dynamic. it's weird, and awkward, and steeped in a thousand layers of feelings that neither of them know how to articulate, but i reckon they do like each other and they are good for each other. jury's still out on whether they can claim to be family, but it's hard not to at least be SOMETHING with the probable only other person on the entire planet who understands at least a little bit of what you're going through, y'know
out of all the things he can't do anymore, photon REALLY misses eating. leftovers from his organic-by-design brain keep telling him that it's been way too long since he ate and he'd feel better if he slammed back a chili dog. he can usually laugh off being asked a fundamentally robot-proof question like when he last slept or if he needs a shower and genuinely not be hurt [much] by it, but he gets real quiet if someone accidentally asks him if he wants anything to eat
because he struggles to conceptualise his body as His Body, he's really bad at treating the possibility of hurting himself with the appropriate gravity. as a result, he's prone to letting himself get injured if it means he gets more done in a fight, or ignoring minor damage until it compounds enough that he's falling apart, or pushing himself until his systems short out. thanks to this reckless approach to personal safety, he's been fully ship of theseus'd at least once since his original neo metal sonic body, which i'm sure is great for that aforementioned difficulty connecting himself with the body he's in
most of photon's interaction with sonic canon post-heroes is vague and messy and not something i've come up with an answer i like to, but i'm pretty confident in how he fits into the idw chunk of the timeline! he never 'officially' joins the restoration, and he's still just as prone to fucking off halfway across the planet as meat sonic, but he starts to be a pretty common sight around their hq. fighting eggman isn't really fun for photon anymore the way it is for sonic, having your entire identity irreversibly ripped away from you by someone makes any future victory against them feel hollow, but he's still got that burning drive to help others - the restoration gives him ways to fight indirectly enough that he can actually feel good about it again. he's one of the few who can meaningfully defend the metal virus survivors, and you BET he's so pissed at sonic for letting it happen he can hardly think straight. lanolin and tangle probably try to get him in the neo diamond cutters, but i don't think he'd take them up on the offer, given that he doesn't respond well to being told what to do. like i mentioned, i want to send his ass to scrapnik island and see how he plays off of another robot sonic turned terrifyingly real and separate person. then of course there's the dynamic between him and belle, which honestly could be a whole post by itself. after a couple years with only a tiny handful of non-grief-inducing friends and some unsustainably destructive coping mechanisms to his name, the point that idw picks up from is where photon finally goes from just enduring the horrors to genuinely feeling happier again :]