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April 29, 2019 |
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Commentary for April 29, 2019: So, echidnas. Officially, in the Sonic the Hedgehog games, Knuckles is the last echidna. There are no others still alive today. But every single other version of Sonic so far has eventually featured other echidnas if they featured any at all. The only exceptions are the two cartoons that pre-dated Knuckles’s debut, the 1996 anime (which was only an hour long), and the current comic by IDW (which seems to be on a much tighter leash than prior licensed fiction). But Fleetway had Zachary, pre-reboot Archie had multitudes of echidnas, including an entire army of Knuckles’s forefathers (and even post-reboot they had ghost Tikal and Naugus posing as an echidna for a couple of issues), Sonic Underground borrowed Knuckles’s great grandfather Athair from Archie for a couple of episodes, too, and Sonic X, of course, had all the ancient echidnas who appeared in Sonic Adventure (though, given they appeared in flashbacks and visions of the ancient past, I suppose they don’t really count). Really, for the last echidna alive, Knuckles often seems to be the one character whose ancestry or family tree is the most explored. I mean, when do we ever see other foxes besides Tails in the games? And that’s what I found as a teen, first going online and discovering the wondrous world of Sonic fanart. There were plenty of folks who’d created fanart of the extended cast of the Archie Knuckles spinoff series or had made their own echidna fan characters. Now, I hadn’t even read the Archie Sonic comic (to say nothing of Knuckles) yet, but I quickly picked up on the hyphenated names that echidna women tended to have, which is why my first echidna OC, Sora-Ya has a name in that style. (Really I just took the real-world name Soraya and put a hyphen in there between the A and the Y -- but it’s still pronounced “sor-RAY-ah”.) I wasn’t too familiar with the names of echidna men at the time, though, so I decided to be pretentious and name most of them after characters from Shakespeare, like Horatio here. It wasn’t until I first read Archie Sonic properly in early 2014 that I realised just how on-brand it was for echidna men to have seriously pretentious names. But I digress. When I first started writing the original Eon’s Comic, it never occurred to me that Knuckles was meant to be the last echidna. Sure, Fleetway Sonic (which I was most familiar with back then) said that, but it also contradicted it, and I knew that other versions of Sonic disregarded it entirely. I saw no reason to not have other echidnas; and, oh boy, did Eon’s Comic (and subsequently, Eon's World Vol. 2) ever have echidnas. But, canonically to Eon’s World, echidnas are rare, for reasons that will be explored in the coming chapters. |
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Eon's World is a fan comic created by Bethany Turner. All characters are copyright
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to their respective creators. The contents of this site are not
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