Staff Recruitment

Greetings! This is a post regarding staff recruitment for Concept: “Mobius”, as you probably surmised. Vertekins and I always looking to add to the ranks and make the site as detailed, informative, and cool as it can be. If you’re interested in joining, great! Let’s find you a spot! Incidentally, you may be able to fill multiple roles, but first things first. You need to run before you can Spin Attack, after all.

Concept: “Mobius” is a Sonic the Hedgehog site dedicated to information about the games within the franchise and the worlds, characters, and events within. While there are multiple wikis and whatnot that serve this purpose, we’re trying to do things differently. We want to enrich the world of the Blue Blur and hopefully make it more cohesive, less muddled, and more fun. Obviously, this is too big a job for a few people, hence the slow trickle of updates over the years.

So, we need a team to tackle this endeavor, and we have many branches for all skill sets. You'll also be asked to help out here, as well, but more on that at another time.

Who We Are NOT Looking For:

If you fall under any of those categories, this isn't the team for you.

~Ryan

Yo I’ve got a BA in Creative Writing and am obviously a big Sonic fan.

Okay, then.

For your test, review your least favorite Sonic game. It has to be canon and directly part of the main Sonic franchise.

Follow the guidelines of our Game Relations reviews, but not the template. Just make sure you're fair, concise, and honest. No bias, no spite, no nonconstructive criticism.

You've got until the end of the month. Good luck.

~Ryan

He doesn't care about deliberately being a hero. Never has, never will. He just wants to do his own thing because he can. We're just darn lucky that he's a good person. If he weren't, we'd be boned.

~Ryan

Staff Recruitment

Greetings! This is a post regarding staff recruitment for Concept: “Mobius”, as you probably surmised. Vertekins and I always looking to add to the ranks and make the site as detailed, informative, and cool as it can be. If you’re interested in joining, great! Let’s find you a spot! Incidentally, you may be able to fill multiple roles, but first things first. You need to run before you can Spin Attack, after all.

Concept: “Mobius” is a Sonic the Hedgehog site dedicated to information about the games within the franchise and the worlds, characters, and events within. While there are multiple wikis and whatnot that serve this purpose, we’re trying to do things differently. We want to enrich the world of the Blue Blur and hopefully make it more cohesive, less muddled, and more fun. Obviously, this is too big a job for a few people, hence the slow trickle of updates over the years.

So, we need a team to tackle this endeavor, and we have many branches for all skill sets. You'll also be asked to help out here, as well, but more on that at another time.

Who We Are NOT Looking For:

If you fall under any of those categories, this isn't the team for you.

~Ryan

On your mark, get set...PLAY! Get ready to race in the all-new Sonic Rumble, a speedy, 32-person mobile royale set in a cheery toy world created by Dr. Eggman! Follow @Sonic_Rumble on Twitter or Facebook for info and details on a US playtest!

Couple things to note:

~Ryan

Alright, since I'm at that episode, I'm gonna elaborate on my actual problem with Dark Sonic:

To be honest, I don't think there's anything really wrong with Sonic during the episode. He's angry his friends have been hurt by a villain, so he harnesses the power of the fake Emeralds (which he has a physical negative reaction to) and smashes said villain's testing robots to pieces.

I never really considered this a problem. Sonic can get angry, be antagonized, the SA2 Shadow fight in Green Forest springs to mind.

Plus, Secret Rings has Darkspine Sonic, which is about as close to Dark Sonic as it gets. Sharha just died, trading her life for his, he absorbs the Rage, Sadness and Hatred Rings and transforms.

Even after he leaves the transformation, he still seems pretty pissed at Erazor Djinn, with killing Sharha at the top of the list.

So, yeah. It's not 1:1 and I'm not claiming these are the same, X is obviously more exaggerated, but I don't really have a problem with the concept. We can talk about how Eggman comes in, tells Sonic he needs to be better and not let his emotions overwhelm him, but frankly I think that's more of an X!Eggman issue than the transformation itself.

No, my real problem is, and always has been, how the fandom interpreted it. That's it. I've read so many fics, seen so many posts about Sonic just "turning dark" when angry, as if any transformations have ever been purely emotion without an external power-source. (Super requires the Chaos Emeralds, Hyper the Super Emeralds, Darkspine was 3 of the World Rings, Werehog was Dark Gaia energy, Excalibur Sonic was the sacred swords, Wisp transformations needed the Wisps, Super Sonic 2 was Chaos Emeralds + Cyber energy....you get it.)

The way I've always saw it, is yes, Sonic is upset, but he also is being affected by the fake Emeralds.

This is the Discotek translation, I don't know enough Japanese to say how accurate it is, all I know know is "warui" means bad/sick depending on the sentence. An older translation (and the English dub) points to him feeling physically sick around them.

Far as I can tell, he's already reacting bad to these Emeralds on top of being antagonized, so he uses power that's at his disposal does what the villain wants: fuck up his shit.

If the fake Emeralds didn't exist, this transformation wouldn't have happened. Additionally, since X ended and the only fake Emerald in the games was blown up in SA2, it can't happen again. (Unless you write scenario where someone makes fake Emeralds, but that requires writing for the form instead of just slapping it in à la characters in IDW.)

Perhaps I'm being too hard on a lot of kids that never really interacted with the source material and just wanted to write Sonic fanfics. I've read so many that made it quite obvious that the author didn't know anything about Sonic besides he's fast and I'm not really out here trying to say Sonic shouldn't inspire people to create. Never said I hated reading those fics, I got a good deal of entertainment out of them. It's simply this misconception has stretched so far, it's like the original context has been entirely erased.

And that's the part of Dark Sonic that bothers me.

I've seen plenty of arguments for why the transformation was a poor choice and I don't entirely disagree with them. For me, I could take it or leave it. It was a one-off short transformation in an anime where Sonic pretends to be Star Trek for a season, it just exists to me.

Although, it's been awhile since I last saw discussion of Dark Sonic, as a whole it seemed to be a bigger thing in the early 2010s. Possibly because now we have more recent Sonic shows and movies, it's not just X being the latest thing anymore. I certainly don't read fics like I used to, so I'd be surprised if it is still as heavily used as it used to be. Maybe if I get some time, I'll look up some fics and find out.

Personally, I think Dark Sonic could work as a utilization of the negative energy of the Chaos Emeralds. He wouldn't behave the way he did in Sonic X, however.

I think his behavior as Darkspine Sonic would be a more fitting personality; mad as hell, ready to deliver pain, and unwilling to compromise, but still retaining a semblance of control, similar to Goku's first transformation against Frieza. He was LIVID, and close to beating the hell out of his own son, but still had the self-control not to.

As for why everyone is so fixated on the concept, I think it's because people want to see more sides of Sonic. He's either chill, cocky, or heroic (accidentally or otherwise). They want to see what he's like at his absolute lowest and how he'd not only deal with it but overcome it.

Part of it is a fixation on angst, yes, but I think another part of it is just a genuine need to flesh him out more. Everyone has a dark side, after all, and Sonic the Hedgehog is no different. I, for one, want to know more about him, too, and yeah, that includes his negative moments.

~Ryan

How was it regarded, exactly?

It’s reception was a massive blow to the company and behind closed doors, the tone was that Sonic was as much a joke to them as it was the “professional” critics. Don’t languish under the belief that all SEGA staff respect their company mascot, hold it in high regard after ‘06. Because that doesn’t match the actual reality.

Sad but no doubt true. Heck, I was very disappointed when I heard it. I always liked to think that this franchise was at least held in some regard by some of the people behind it.

Why am I not surprised by this?

I try to have some level of skepticism to leaks or reveals of what goes on in the bowels of SEGA but my informant is 100% trustworthy.

Actually, I knew about Chip’s existence before Mana_Ita revealed her drawing of him (The one with the bell around his neck that dates to early ‘08 way before Chip was ever officially revealed). I knew about the big twist in Black Knight (Though informant refused to tell me it was Merlina to keep it a surprise lol) and I was actually responsible for setting-straight a factual error in Chronicles regarding a piece of armor Omega can equip. BTW, Bioware didn’t take into account the Q+A tester’s bug reports, so that’s another thing to condemn them over the game for rofl.

Informant person leaps at being assigned to playtesting Sonic games because no one else tended to want to. That’s how lowly Sonic titles are/were regarded there.

This...explains a lot. Sonic's 15th anniversary never should have gotten a game at all, especially one that did so much damage.

It's gonna take something DRASTICALLY awesome for people in and out of the video game industry to forgive Sonic Team for Sonic Next, but I don't see that happening soon, despite Frontiers' success.

What do y'all think needs to happen?

~Ryan

...And after everything he returned to the Ark...

...And all he was greeted by was silence...

Shadow is the way he is for a reason. Never forget that or dismiss it.

~Ryan