Lately, I had many problems to keep writing: I lacked time, I had real-life things to focus on, my ideas were running out, I was no longer as motivated as when I had started with this... So I decided to not post my next fanfics but only a list of ideas I had for them. I'll just leave that list of ideas here, waiting for someone within a long time to find them and feel inspired to turn those loose elements into a somewhat decent story.
Alright, before starting with the summary of the ideas I had for future stories, I'd like to start by talking about some things I did in my work, some of which I'm proud of, and some of which I regret having done...
Initially, the purpose of my fanfics was almost only to think of a possible continuation of the events of the TV series Sonic SatAM, adapting things from the Archie-Sonic comics (and taking some licenses in the process), and trying to better write Antoine's transition from his self in the cartoon to his self in the comics, give more importance to Tails and better portray his parents, Amadeus and Rosemary. But then I realized how abysmal the differences between the two versions of Antoine were, while it was also harder for me to think of a way to write Rosemary coherently.
In Antoine's case, lately, I came up with an alternative to make him develop and stop being what he was in the TV series:
Immediately after the original Robotnik has been defeated, Antoine leaves his team behind. He actually doesn't know how to fight, but he still has good marksmanship, so he becomes a hitman. However, he's eventually convinced to leave behind that life without honour, begins to train in real fighting skills and becomes a genuine Freedom Fighter once and for all. In any case, he develops an opinion of "the end justifies the means" and continues thinking it for the rest of the story, being critical of his former team; this, along with his lasting grudge against Sonic and Sally, leads him to fight against the Monarchy in the events of "Civil War".
As for Rosemary... I don't like to say it this way, but she was a total b**** in the comics. I came up with a way to show her in a better light, but in no way could it have worked with the comics' Rosemary as she was. I'll talk about it when I write my list of ideas for future fanfics.
I also addressed Politics in that fictional universe, trying to avoid the way this was done in the comics: there, Ian Flynn created the Council of Acorn and portrayed it as a bunch of stereotyped inoperative politicians obsessed with controlling the heroes and barely concerned with their country's security, and I think Flynn didn't do it to actually enrich the comics' universe or to add depth to the story or to communicate certain political ideas, but only to give readers someone to blame.
In the stories I wrote so far, I didn't go deep into what happened with my fictional universe's Council of Acorn after its creation; however, I did address its origin, and in doing so, I didn't make the Bems involved. Look... In the comics, Tails's parents were inspired by the Bems to try to establish a Democracy in Acorn, and this entails some inconvenience:
The Bems are terrible people. They roboticized Sonic and Tails to make them fight Robotnik and Snively, in order to verify the robots were better than flesh-and-blood beings (if things had happened differently, perhaps Mobius's Robians wouldn't have been de-roboticized); their society is entirely made of clones and almost lacks variety, not only in terms of the physical but also in terms of people's ideas; their judicial system is quite f***ed up (at least according to our standards), and... they're just the worst. These traits of the Bems were developed when Karl Bollers wrote the comics, but that material is still valid, no matter if there's a change of writers, so Flynn should have considered it before making Tails's parents claim to have been inspired by those aliens.
Even if we cling to Moral Relativism with all our strength, claiming the Bems are just "different" and have different behaviour, mindset, psychology and culture, this keeps making things complicated: applying something in one society, solely because it succeeded in another, ain't exactly something smart to do.
And the craziest of all is that it could have been easily avoided: Flynn could simply have said there were previous failed attempts to establish a Democracy in other countries of Mobius and Amadeus & Rosemary had always wanted a change in the government system, had learned about those historical events and knew how to get it right this time (or at least they believe they knew). Moreover, Flynn could have said the decade spent by Tails's parents with the Bems gave them a clue about what they should not do when finally returning to their homeworld.
I tried, in my work, to use this idea of Amadeus & Rosemary wanting to establish a Democracy in an attempt to succeed in what others in other parts of Mobius had failed throughout the History. It was based upon what happened in the French Revolution (more precisely, the Jacobin period), the years immediately after the Russian Revolution, and mainly the First English Revolution: in 1648, the Monarchy was overthrown in England; the change was violent and chaotic, the government that took the place of the King ended up being also a despotic tyranny, and the final result was just the return of a King to power in 1660 (although, anyway, the Glorious Revolution established in 1688 the British parliamentary system as we know it); Thomas Hobbes, while watching those events unfold, wrote his book Leviathan, where he justified the need for an Absolute Monarchy by arguing humans were violent, selfish, chaotic and brutal by nature, so they had signed a symbolic pact where they ceded all their rights and their power to a single person in charge of ruling with an iron fist, in order to prevent humanity from destroying itself. In my fanfics' universe, it was mentioned those attempts at democratization in Mobius led to civil wars, ended with those same peoples clinging to ideas similar to those of Hobbes, quickly restoring the Monarchy and promising themselves not to try and establish a Democracy ever again.
I also mentioned the recurring conflicts between the Acorn Kings and the Southern Barons in the comics, as well as the connection between the Kings and the infamous Source of All, among other things. I also had Amadeus do what he should have done in the comics when he explained why he wanted there to be Democracy: to present historical events, such as those conflicts, the Kings' cult of the Source of All and the technological and cultural backwardness to which the people were subjected by them, as concrete examples that the Monarchy had never worked well.
There are several Sonic fans, including ToaArcan and the Tumblr user robotnik-mun, who argue Politics shouldn't have been addressed at all in Sonic stories. Also, the vast majority of Sonic fans claim each and every one of the attempts to make this series more serious were some of the worst things that could have happened, even the addition of more characters was nothing but a cancer, and everything should have remained "simple" or the Sonic franchise shouldn't have gone beyond what it was at the time of the classic Genesis games. I praise the stories written by ToaArcan, and I agree with many of the opinions of both him and robotnik-mun, but with all due respect, I totally disagree on this particular point.
I've always believed that, if it's done right, any topic should be able to be addressed in any kind of fiction, and Politics is no exception; more exactly, I think an author has two options when writing a work aimed at children and young people: to write something super light and soft where no serious topic is addressed, or to "go all-in" and address all serious topics, leaving nothing out; this includes not only Politics, but also tragedies, the complexities of love, toxic interpersonal relationships (whether abusive or otherwise), bullying, mental illness, trauma (for example, that caused by war), societal issues, and so on. That's one of the many whys of my love for RWBY: there's nothing that web-series doesn't talk about. As for the proper and respectful LGBTQ+ representation, rather than a serious topic reserved for serious fictional works, it's a requirement every fictional work should meet, whether serious or not, especially in the middle of the 21st century (this is something I think my work didn't meet satisfactorily).
With Sonic SatAM and the comics, it looked like the second option could also have worked in the Sonic franchise, and the TV series did it right to some extent. Unfortunately, Archie-Sonic's writers almost never did things right in regards to relationships between characters: Ken Penders's work, in particular, is an example of how relationships should never be, and Flynn's attempt to talk about Politics was a complete disaster, not much better than Penders's heinous handling of political stuff, more similar to a very low-quality North-American political satire, even when the conflict portrayed wasn't of the "Right versus Left" kind but of the "Monarchy versus Republic" kind, which should have been much easier to do without ruining everything. The only ones who didn't fall into those same mistakes were Michael Gallagher and Angelo DeCesare, the comics' first writers, but only because they chose the first option: to write stories that weren't serious at all… with the notable exception of "Growing Pains", the B-story of issues #28 and #29, a typical Shakespearean tragedy where Gallagher presented us Auto-Fiona, a robot replica of who would later be one of the most controversial characters in the comics.
This, coupled with the resounding failure of Sonic 2006, is the only reason why now almost everyone in the Sonic fandom prefers stories without anything serious and/or a return to Sonic's classic era, with very underdeveloped characters who are turned into mere plot devices and are only a shadow of their former self or of what they could have been.
I have to admit it: I didn't pay due attention to the characters' development, especially in the case of women: I thought to avoid making them passive stereotyped housewives, along with to create a team of Freedom Fighters where men and women are present in equal amounts and both fulfil equally important roles in their missions, would be enough. At least, this was better than what Penders did in the comics. However, Fiona had so much potential to explore her turbulent past and the physical and psychological abuse she suffered at the hands of Scourge, and also to later show her relationship with Tails from her own point of view... and I've spoiled that potential (a little clarification: I support TailsXFiona, and that relationship between them didn't happen in the official material but it did in my fanfics). I tried to focus occasionally on Bunnie too, but I failed to do as much as I could and should have done.
Many of the failures of my work were due to one of these two things: my tendency to "hurry up" when telling stories, and my ideas about how to genuinely achieve gender equity and to show healthy relationships in my work. My huge ignorance regarding the latter began to be evident to me in the last months, after watching RWBY's sixth season and re-watching its previous five seasons.
Coming back to this journal's topic: I know I made many characters "derail", especially in the "Civil War" events. I also realize maybe I shouldn't have been so faithful to the official material, which led me to include a less-than-stellar version of Sally and that egocentric, womanizer version of Sonic from the comics written by Penders. Towards the end of "Diplomatic Mission", I explained all this was Max-Naugus's magic's fault, but I didn't insinuate it enough in previous chapters, and what I did in that story's Epilogue was just telling it when... Well, y'all already know that famous quote attributed to Antón Chékhov: "show, don't tell" (well, it's a literary work, it's impossible to "show" something in it, but... I'm sure you got the point).
At least I can be proud that, while Ken Penders and Ian Flynn never made King Max and Scourge look bad for being the bastards they were, I did try to exploit Max's potential as a villain and to show Scourge was a horrible person even by the standards of the "bad guys".
Regarding King Max: the whole cast's behaviour during Penders's career was... Let's say it was questionable, and also confusing, usually "out of character" and -not infrequently- just plain stupid. It'd not be far-fetched to claim they weren't being themselves at all and everything happened in that period was the result of the "mental magic" of Naugus, who had already influenced King Max to make terrible decisions before Robotnik's coup d'etat, then possessed him and used this cover to try to "break" the Freedom Fighters by having them fight each other for relatively stupid reasons (for example, jealousy) and psychologically abusing Sally.
As I said before, the characters' behaviour during Penders's era made no f***ing sense: Sonic being indistinguishable from Scourge, Sally becoming someone passive and letting King Max influence her life, Max himself being something totally opposite to what had been suggested about him in Sonic SatAM and in his first mentions in the comic, abusive characters (Scourge, Max, Knuckles's dad) going unpunished, the victims of that abuse (Sally. especially) being portrayed as if they were the cause of their own suffering or they owed something to their abusers... It'd probably have been much better if I had directly skipped it all and pretended it never happened. However, when I started writing my stories, I wanted to challenge myself, trying to make sense of those events and at the same time tell a moreorless coherent story that doesn't ruin the characters in the same way Penders's writing did.
This didn't only give rise to the idea of Naugus posing as King Max and carrying out an emotional magical manipulation. For example, I planned to portray Sonic as someone who, after the victory against the original Robotnik, falls at a low point in regard to his attitude (like what he was when Penders was writing), but later realizes each one of his mistakes -although sometimes he has to do it the hard way- and slowly becomes someone better, someone as noble and selfless as he used to be during the war (similar to what he was in Sonic SatAM). This was supposed to be evident in the second story arc of AFF2, but that never came to fruition.
The way I portrayed Sonic in some parts of my stories (that is, someone who sees the war against Robotnik/Eggman as a game and didn't appreciate his teammates' efforts due to the fact that he had superpowers, someone with an ego too big for his own good and that of others) unfortunately resembles how he was at Penders's era. I planned to make Sonic learn from his mistakes and become better (Penders didn't seem to be planning such a thing); on the other hand, this misperception of Sonic by me dated from before I even knew the Archie-Sonic comics existed.
Already when I first saw Sonic SatAM (when I was about 11 or 12 years old), I could identify the nice, admirable traits of Sonic as a character, just as I could also notice the chemistry between him and Sally, but I also felt like he was being terribly conceited, too little serious despite the situations in which he got into, and very little appreciative of the work of anyone who didn't have superpowers just like him.
To be honest, for a long time I had trouble trying to imagine an improved version of the TV series' Sonic. Even after reading fanfics whose authors succeeded in this same task, I still have some doubts about how to achieve it.
I guess that's it for now. Someday I'll put together a timeline of what happened in the stories I did publish, and after that, I'll start with the list of ideas for their remaster and the later stories.