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Joining the ranks of "not really a Sonic fan"—I never played the games or even saw much of the cartoons of the day (and more Adventures than SatAM at that, to my regret). However, one of my best friends as a kid was into it, and a few of us all had fan characters and played pretend as Freedom Fighters up against the evil forces of Robotnik, so I have a bit of nostalgia for the franchise. It's nice to see someone talking about positive developments in the games with knowledge and passion. {= )

~Neshomeh

https://discord.gg/HpHvxHT

https://discord.gg/HpHvxHT

I understand your points, Thoth. To be honest, I’m not as big a fan of Sonic like my bro or anyone else on the internet, but I agree that people like Christian Whitehead have done an epic job in making Sonic Mania. The levels, the art, the mechanics, the music and the references were spot-on. The first time I played with my bro, I enjoyed every bit, like returning to Green Hill, jamming to Chemical Plant’s second act, getting to see how easy the Puyo Puyo boss was knowing how my bro and I suck at it, seeing the sights in Studiopolis, wooshing throughout Flying Battery, enjoying the beauty of Press Garden, running it back in Stardust Speedway, getting psyched in the Metal Sonic fight, getting that sense of nearing victory in Metallic Madness, bracing myself in Titanic Monarch until the final boss... I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to rock out against the true final boss without my bro’s help. I have to thank him again for that.

Man, that is one anecdote.

But the point I wanted to make is that, indeed, the fans have outdone the original Sonic Team, so kudos to them. Here’s hoping they collaborate in the development of a better Sonic Forces.

Okay so basically a couple days I ended up having a really bad bout of anxiety and kinda went a bit overboard compliment fishing on the discord server. I got called out on it and I ended up leaving. I just wanted to say I'm really sorry for letting my poor mental state cause a ruckus in the writing channel. That was very immature of me and I'll try and make sure that doesn't happen again. Also, thanks to the people who were trying to help me. I'm feeling better after a few days, and even got the Pokémon fic I was panicking about beta'd and posted on AO3.

In my impulsiveness, I forgot that the discord link was invalid for now. I was wondering if someone could invite me again?

Did you know that it's Sega's 60th anniversary? I didn't, until Steam very loudly informed me that was the case with a free copy of Sonic 2 and a sweeping, massive sale on everything that Sega has ever made or published, including cult classics like Jet Set Radio and Yakuza, smash hits like Crazy Taxi, strange historical artifacts like Shenmue, a huge back catalog of first and second-party Genesis games. And of course, the rest of the Sonic games.

I'm not a Sonic "fan" per se, but Sonic was something I played growing up. Until the Wii, we were a strictly Sony household, so I was raised on the PS2 (which remains arguably the greatest game console ever made). But this was right after the death of the Dreamcast, and Sega had gone multi-platform. So long before I ever touched a Mario game, there was Sonic. I owned a copy of Sonic Mega Collection Plus, which had all the classics (as well as a few rubbish games like my childhood favorite, Sonic 3D Blast (oh my god why did I like that game it was terrible)) and played a good amount of games like Sonic Adventure 2 and Heroes. So while Sonic played second fiddle to the Playstation's homegrown heroes (Spyro, Crash, Ratchet & Clank, Jak and Daxter, Sly...) it was certainly a presence. But I never... loved? those games. As a kid, I don't think I ever got past the first level or so of almost any of them, because I was really young at the time. And when I revisited them later, I was pulled up short by many of the more... questionable game design decisions. Everyone says Sonic went to hell when it went 3D, but the warning signs were there from the start: Sega never designed as tightly as Nintendo, and early Sonic had a nasty habit of encouraging speed and then sharply punishing you for daring to go fast that bordered on cruelty. Sure, a Sonic fan will tell you when to go fast and when not to, and can wax poetic about the real design center of Sonic and how best to approach and play it... but I didn't know any of that stuff, I was just some kid. They probably had that hammered into them through communal experience and being repeatedly and capriciously killed. The game should teach you how to play it and make it fun, and if it fails to do so, that is a failure of design. That doesn't mean Sonic is bad, but it's important to recognize that it was never perfect.

Of course, since then, Sonic has become many things to many people. Sonic had the longest running single American comicbook series in history, and those comics diverged wildly from the source material and have their own crazy and lore and backstory. Sonic was recently the lead in a hit kids movie that I haven't seen, but I hear people say that it's pretty alright. And Sonic has starred in a series of increasingly disappointing and poorly-received videogames. Some of them were good, sure: Most people liked Generations, I think. The fact is, nowadays, a lack of quality and a team that increasingly seems like it has no idea what it's doing with the character has turned Sonic into a joke in the eyes of the gaming masses, and... not undeservedly so. Between Lost World, Boom, Unleashed, '06, Sonic 4, and other blunders, people have just been burnt so many times by Sonic that the term "The Sonic Cycle" has entered the gaming lexicon: a shorthand for the loop of hype and disappointment that is as synonymous with Sonic as the phrase "gotta go fast!" at this point. A couple of good games aren't going to fix a decade of disappointments, mistakes, and mixed (at best!) receptions.

There are a lot of bad things I can say about Sega, and about their handling of Sonic, but there's one really, really good thing I can also say. And that's that Sega has a proud tradition of supporting their fans. Like most videogame franchises, Sonic has a long, proud history of impressive and talented fans making their own games. But unlike, to pick a random example, Nintendo, Sega invites fangames and won't try to get them taken down. But it gets better, because when they released their old Sega Genesis games on Steam, Sega added mod support. Now, you might be scratching your head. "Modding, for Genesis games? How would that work?" Here's how: ROM hacks. Yes, you read that right, Sega has officially supplied a place for fans to distribute ROM hacks of their games (for the uninitiated, ROM hacks are literally binary patches that are applied to the game data of retro games. It's the oldest form of modding there is). That does not happen. Ever. There is not a single other game company I can name that has done something like that.

So now that I've set the stage, let me introduce to our heroes: Christian "Taxman" Whitehead and Simon "Stealth" Thomley. Taxman and Stealth both have a long history in the Sonic community: these guys are legit. Taxman wrote his own game engine for Sonic-style games in the early 2000s for the Sonic Amateur Game Expo (yes, that's a real thing), and has made his own levels and romhacks besides. Stealth has comparable credentials, and is best known for hacking Knuckles into Sonic 1, as well as for overseeing Sonic Megamix, a very highly-regarded fan campaign for Sonic. If these guys were Nintendo fans, they'd have been DMCAed fifty times over now. But they're not, so when Taxman pitched Sega a rebuilt version of Sonic CD (an oft-forgotten but pretty alright Sonic game of the classic era) running on his custom engine as a mobile port of the game, Sega actually accepted his pitch, and nowadays Taxman's Sonic CD remaster (available on Steam and Mobile) is considered the best way to play the game. It's packed with extras, includes both the Japanese and American game soundtracks (the Japanese one is better), and most importantly of all runs in widescreen at a consistent 60fps. It's hard to explain how big a deal this is unless you experience this both with and and without the change, because it sounds like such a small thing, but because of this, there is absolutely no lag in the game, Sonic feels more responsive than he ever did, and you have enough time to anticipate and avoid obstacles in a way that was that difficult in the Sonics of yore.

Since the Sonic CD port went over so well, Taxman teamed up with Stealth and his company, Headcannon, to give the same treatment to the mobile ports of Sonic 1 and Sonic 2. And like CD's port, these quickly became a fan-preferred way to play the game. As a result of these successes, Taxman, Stealth, and their partners PagodaWest Games (composed of former members of the Sonic 2 HD project), were able to do something that very fans are ever privileged to get the chance to do: They got to pitch their vision for a brand-new, original Sonic game to Sega.

The result, released in 2017, was Sonic Mania. It's a combination of remixed classic levels and all-new levels by Taxman, Stealth, and their team, all built in the style of a Genesis game but without any of that system's technical limitations. It has been universally hailed by Sonic fans and non-Sonic fans as the best new Sonic game in ages. And they're right. Actually, they're more than right, because I'm going to tell that Sonic Mania is the best Sonic game. Ever. Period. Bar none.

I'm not a Sonic fan, but I adore Sonic Mania, for so many reasons. It feels more fluid and responsive than those old Genesis games, of course, but it's also just... so, so good. The old levels have been redesigned to feel better and to be less capricious in places. And the new levels outshine the rest because this team has probably forgotten more about making good Sonic levels than Sega ever knew. It's rife with callbacks and references to the original games, if you've played them, but if you're a filthy casual like me this is a game that grabs you by the wrist and says "this is why Sonic is great, and this is why we, the people who love Sonic, feel the way we do."

The tagline of Sonic Mania is "by the Mania, for the Mania", and that fits that game to a tee. It's a game made by people who unabashedly love Sonic and have paid their dues learning how to make it the best it can be. And it's beautiful. Of course it's beautiful: The artists are just as invested as everyone else. If you leave the game on the title screen without pressing start, instead of jumping into a demo/attract mode like the old game it's inspired by, it will go through a gorgeous animated opening sequence, directed by Tyson Hesse, who's the artist for the IDW Sonic comic, and got his start making dumb Sonic meme comics on the internet (warning, this is NSFW). Tyson would later direct a series of Sonic Mania shorts, which I can't recommend highly enough because they're hilarious. The music is made (or in the case of old levels, remixed) by Tee Lopes, who got his start posting Sonic remixes on youtube nearly a decade ago. And that soundtrack absolutely hits it out of the park, with my single favorite track being the Hard Boiled Heavies Theme, which draws inspiration from, of all things, Cowboy Bebop.

That soundtrack is important, by the way. Having a great soundtrack is a key part of Sonic's identity, and it's something that I always noticed, even as a kid. While Mario tends to lean into "gamey" tracks, or later into full orchestral compositions, Sonic had a clear center from the start, probably in part because Sega had a tradition of pulling musicians from outside of gaming in to do work on their soundtracks. The first two Sonic games were composed by one half of a band called Dreams Come True. From what I can tell, DCT are (or at least were, at the time) a huge deal in Japan: One year after Sonic 1's release, the band released the first Japanese record to sell over three million copies. And the third Sonic game had a soundtrack developed in partial collaboration with Michael Jackson. Sonic's music has thus always leaned heavily pop. Although I confess that when I think of Sonic, none of that comes to mind, because I think of Jun Senoue's years helming Sonic's sound direction, which were marked by guitar-heavy and extremely cheesy rock and roll. Butt Rock, as they call it. Blue skies and upbeat rock music were what Sonic was in the 2000s, and while the game design was frequently shaky, some of those songs will be with me forever. And by "some of those songs", I of course mean Live and Learn, which the kind of song that would sound perfectly at home blasting over the radio while you're on the highway. And I mean that in the best possible way. It's great.

The point is... yeah. Sonic Mania is incredible, and it's incredible because it was made by fans, who genuinely care about Sonic and know how to make it good in a way that no random developer ever could. And that's why this post exists: I wanted to highlight the work of some real, incredible people in a fandom nobody talks about (or at least talks positively about) who have done more to repair the reputation of their favorite series than the company who allegedly own it have ever done. I hope Sega lets these guys make more games. I want to see what else they've got.

Didn't mean to imply I was or am ever in favor of sporking the comic, for the record. Just checking that we have the story straight—myself very much included, since this is the first I've heard of Chris being transgender. I haven't heard much if anything about this in quite a long time. (And that is why someone who is not me should probably compose whatever goes on the wiki.)

~Neshomeh

I actislly got doxxed by those folks (Kiwifarms, who're an outgrowth of the Christina Chandler harassment campaign) (though they didn't get obsessively stalked by them, thankfully) because I was dating someone they were targeting.

I also say that sproking Sonichu would be a bad move given the historical context and implicitly align us with some people who really don't share out community values.

I suggest we go and park the "no Sonichu" rule on the wiki somewhere - it seems like we have consensus for it

Both the mental illness, and the context surrounding even criticizing it.

At this point, there has been so much bullying and abuse hurled at the author that to write something like a spork would just... be in bad taste. It would be aligning yourself with a decades long harassment campaign against the author by some of the worst human beings on the internet. (People who have, might at add, previously doxxed PPC members, if I recall correctly). It's at the point where discussing the work can't really do any good for anybody.

But also a lot of Sonichu veers hard into RPF; Chris herself is a major protagonist, and many side characters/villains are either straight up people she knows or are clearly parodies of them. Not to mention the plots usually just being stuff that's occurred to her, et al et al. Sporking it would be more like sporking someones like journal or whatever than it would be sporking a piece of fiction.

All around it just really isn't worth our attention. Like, a whole ironic fanbase formed around this with the sole person of bullying and harassing its author. It all just feels gross; I feel like the further we keep away from it the better.

I was under the impression Sonichu's author was known to have a severe mental illness, and that was the reason the comic was off-limits. Is that impression not correct?

Thing is, I think most writers identify strongly with their creations, especially writers of self-inserts. But, by and large, if we're considered old enough to post stuff on the Internet without a parent's oversight (i.e. at least 13), we're expected to be mature enough to learn how to distance ourselves from our work in order to respond to criticism, positive or negative, with objectivity. (Or, let's be real, how to get the excited squealing and ego-stroking or the wailing and gnashing of teeth out of our systems, then to have a think, then to respond with objectivity.) If over-identification were the only reason Sonichu got a pass, it wouldn't exactly be fair to, er, pretty much everyone whose stories we've sporked? Or even properly reviewed negatively?

~Neshomeh

First, I haven't greeted you yet, so welcome! Popping in to ask questions occasionally is great.

This is an interesting one. Personally, I think I'd place it in the same category as "don't like, don't read" and ignore it if the fic was bad enough to spork. Our general stance is that, if you're going to post your work where the entire Internet can see it, you're implicitly accepting that your work is eligible for review/critique, just like everyone else's, and that not every response will necessarily be positive. If you don't want your work to be subject to the opinions of all and sundry, the thing to do is post it to a private community. It's not reasonable to both ask for the same amount of attention as other works in full view and try to pick and choose what kind of attention you get.

But, that's just my crotchety oldbie opinion. Others may think differently!

For reference, the main things we typically give a pass, even if they're on public platforms, are gift-fics/prompt fics that are done specifically to please someone else, and fics that heavily feature religious themes. We may choose not to spork fics for reasons of individual discretion, too.

ETA: Also, I think it goes without saying that people don't want their writing sporked (at least until they've gotten some distance from it). The thing is, the best way to avoid a sporking from us is simply to put in the bare minimum of effort to check your spelling and your facts before you post. PPC missions are ideally funny, so fics that don't have that element of "so bad it's funny" or WTF, which tends to result from carelessness, don't tend to get missioned. Unless they're downright offensive. See: most if not all Legendary Badfics, most of which are also trollfic. So, y'know, try not to be downright offensive, and don't be a troll. That's always a good plan. {= )

~Neshomeh

Thank you all for answering my first post in such a nice way, I was kinda intimidated by the board and I was just like "oh no am i gonna get blasted for this wild idea?", but I'm glad that's not the case.

Though I have another question to ask, more about a certain type of disclaimer I've seen pop up around some fanfiction 'verses:

Do you people spork fics with "Do Not Spork" disclaimers, as rare as they are?

I've seen a few fanfiction 'verses recently use these and I wonder if y'all abide by them or not?

(One of my guilty pleasure read fanfiction 'verses uses one of these (not gonna name it as the creator of the 'verse isn't that fond of the PPC and sporking in general) so I am just curious to see what your thoughts are on these types of disclaimers are!)

I've kinda had a few Weeks, to be fair, so I didn't get around to replying to my post on the board. Thank you, though. You're all very kind!

Okay, so I wanted to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey the other night because it was a cult classic and I thought I would like it, so I rented it. And... uh...

Well, to summarize, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick that starts with a bunch of apes on the African plains that get driven off their water-hole by another clan. After hiding in a cave, they get sent the iconic black monolith that... uh... sings? And then they touch it... and that teaches them to use bones as tools? And then they drive off the other clan with their powerful bones.

Cut to 2001, where humanity has finally perfected space travel such that going to the Moon is no more of a hassle than air travel, where some business guy goes to the moon base Clavius in an extremely long-drawn-out commercial flight sequence to investigate... dun dun dun! The mysterious monolith! Which is now on the moon for some reason! And was... intentionally buried? By whom?

Now, at this point I'm liking the movie. Who are these aliens that did this? What do they want? Are they just good samaritans who wanted to teach us the Way of the Bone? Or do they have ulterior motives?

...except we never find out, because the monolith decides to just kill the business guy and everyone else who was near it at the time.

Smash cut to 18 months later, to the most interesting part of the movie, where two mission commanders, three cryosleeping scientists, and the HAL 9000 supercomputer go on a mission to Jupiter to find the other monolith, which... exists? (Also, they don't find out their true goal until later in the movie, because it's Top Secret, which is understandable.) Now, this is the most interesting part of the movie for a reason: HAL 9000, who is constantly known as a supercomputer from a series that doesn't make mistakes ever, makes a mistake. Naturally, this leads to the crew talking about unplugging him from the ship because they can't trust him to run things anymore. So, after tricking the still-alive commander into going outside the ship in a pod, out of no malice to humanity, no grand ideology about how imperfect humans are and blah blah blah, not even a "maximize X" directive gone wrong, he kills the cryosleeping scientists and one of the two commanders out of simple self-preservation. This is great, because I haven't seen anyone do this before. HAL isn't some grand villain with ideology: He's just a human trying to keep himself alive.

Now, I like this part as it is, but it still could have been a lot better. For one, it's too short in relation to the rest of the movie (which I will get to later). Two, the part where the remaining crewmate disconnects HAL's AI had about as much emotional resonance as unplugging my computer until HAL started talking about unrelated things like he was going senile, because HAL's voice cannot convey emotion and the crewmate's actor did not convey emotion.

Still, I was already too deep in to finish. And guess what happened?

No, seriously, take a few minutes to guess what happened before I tell you that your guess is as good as mine.

So, the last crewmate finds the other monolith, and then he hears the magical chanting, and then... he goes into the portal to the Digimon world? And stays there for like 50 billion years? I dunno, it seemed a lot more like just flexin' my special FX than anything actually relevant. And then he wakes up in this fancy house where he sees himself... as an older person? And then he disappears, but his older self remains to see... his even older self? And disappears, but his still older self remains to see... his yet older (and dying) self lying in bed? And then dying self is reaching out to the monolith, which wasn't there before... and now he's a giant CGI fetus in a magic energy sphere. Seriously. And now he's looking down on the Earth...

Okay, look, 2001. I know you wanted to be all profound and convey beautiful messages about humanity and stuff through an artsy way. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to state your themes outright. But there's a line between not spoonfeeding things to the reader, and being so arcane that the movie becomes unenjoyable, and 2001 definitely ends up on the wrong side of that line. I don't even know why it has 4 and a half stars on the services I checked for it. In my opinion, it deserves three for special effects. Boring plot, no information about what this monolith is or what it does or who sent it or even what's going on, just a bunch of faux-profound special-effectsy stuff with absolutely none of the "deep exploration of human nature" the movie seems to be going for. Not only that, but it's just so slow. You'd think since it's a two-and-a-halfer, it'd actually bother to develop the three plotlines it introduces, but nope, all we get is a bunch of "profound" stuff that isn't actually profound because I don't know what it's saying. It's actually an hour and a half movie at most with an extra hour of padding that adds nothing. And I thought I was bad at time management...

4/10. The special effects are really good, and the HAL stuff is interesting, but the pacing and the lack of real meaning kill it. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go off and meditate for a few more years so I can comprehend how in the world this movie still has a 92% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Trolling sucks. The only time it's OK is when it's not actually trolling and the victim did something horrible to deserve it - in the PPC's case, it isn't.

We have a troll who keeps trying to rejoin the community under various usernames, and the Discord invite was disabled because of her.

I can send you an invite. What's your handle?

...in this post.

Just letting you guys know the Discord link is down on the PPC Lounge article, and I want in.

Thanks in advance.

...see, I'm doing something kind of unconventional for my first mission. I have a penchant for writing really long and rambly character introductions, and that resulted in my mission taking seven whole pages to get to the BEEP. So to cut length, I split the intro and the mission into two separate stories, with the finished intro being published first.

What I'm trying to say is, I need betas for this introduction. In addition, since it uses two characters other than the ones I used for my Permission Attempt, one of those betas should probably be a Permission Giver.

Just putting that out there. No canon knowledge required, story is 1,651 words.