ARGUMENT
Used to see these in books, and wondered at how a published author always managed to put you on hold before you read the story and ramble on about this or that, and somehow tie it into the story. Well, now that I find myself sitting here, doing the same about a bloody Sonic fanfic, I'm thinking different about it.
Odd.
Anyhow, the argument. It's been many a long year since I considered myself much more than a peripheral Sonic fan, and I'm getting back into the fandom much the same way I got into it in the first place; reading fanfic, and finding myself wanting to write fanfic. But thankfully, for both you and me, I've learned how to write; thus you shall be spared anything like the steaming pile that was my first attempt at a fanfic. No self-inserts, for the gods' sake no songfics, and actually following the rules of readable writing. What a joy.
But it seems to me that any, any fanfic you'll find has at least one original charcter, usually set as the star and nine times out of ten, upstaging the Freedom Fighters. Well... that's going to be a tricky subject here, and let me tell you why.
In my fanfic readings, I found my mind wandering back to the beast that started most of the fanfic you'll find here. The old SatAM show. And the intro to that show featured a pretty truncated version of a standard mission the Freedom Fighters would carry out. Heroes go in, Sally hacks the system with NICOLE's help, something blows up, Robitnik goes postal, and everyone cheers back in Knothole. Standard fare, yep? But looking back onthat intro, something grabbed my mind's eye. There's this raccoon standing just a bit apart from everything else, cheering just like everyone else. Just one of the villagers. But in my mind, I froze the screen on him, and a question started forming.
What about the rest of them?
You ask who lives in Knothole these days, and you'll get a laundry list of Freedom Fighters. Sonic, Amy Rose, Mina, Sally, Rotor, Antoine, Bunnie, Tails, Dulcy... And many more that I'm not remembering at the time. But what about the people that don't do the fighting?
It occurred to me that Knothole, being hidden in the Great Forest, on the front lines of the war against Robotnik, has to be a pretty paranoid place. The people who live there must constantly be on guard, because one single person could spell the utter ruination of everybody. And so, I imagine guard duty to be one of the most important posts in the life of the average Knothole citizen. One that everyone has to take, no matter who you are.
Well, I don't know about you, but standing in a small tower, staring into the darkness and waiting for something to happen with the likely possibility that nothing will doesn't sound like my idea of a party. And I have trouble imagining a society where no matter who you are, you do your guard duty all eager and happy to be 'protecting the city.'
So, back to that lone raccoon. He will be the focus of this story, and in fact you're likely to hear very little out of the Core Freedom Fighters in the run of this story, because my focus will be on life around the Freedom Fighters. The other people that keep the home fires burning, and make sure that at the end of the day, there's still a home to come back to. He's not really upstaging the others more like... telling the other side of the story.
Make no mistake, it's still going to be a semi-epic fanfic, but it'll be far, far different than most of the epic Freedom Fighter sagas you come across. An epic slice-of-life fanfic about the people in the background. The NPCs, for you gamers.
What can I say? I just like the idea.