March 21, 2020

Commentary for March 21, 2020:

As I was writing the script for these two scenes, it occurred to me that there was some delightful juxtaposition going on between them. On the one hand, you have Sally being comforted by Nicole, who recognises that her friend is depressed and is doing her best to help her; and Sally appreciates it, which is why she responds with respect and openness, the fact that Nicole is an advanced computer program notwithstanding. On the other hand, when Orbot expresses similar concerns over Doctor Eggman’s current mood, Eggman responds with insults and aggression, denigrating his minion as nothing more than a worthless machine. Now, I daresay Nicole is a lot smarter than Orbot (and she’s definitely smarter than Cubot), but Orbot is reasonably intelligent and Eggman knows this, because he created him. Eggman is just a tyrant and a bully, who delights in putting down others. He has a lot in common with Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty, or perhaps more accurately, the fans of the show who admire Rick, who think that being mean to everyone around them is a sign of intelligence. It’s a running theme with Eon’s World (and with most official Sonic media, I think) that, while Doctor Eggman is very intelligent, he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. And I think I’m starting to realise, through writing him, that, like admirers of Rick Sanchez, he may actually be deeply insecure about how intelligent others perceive him to be. He’s a very interesting character to write, in any case.

Anyway, I did mention yesterday that I had some things to say about Sally in this chapter. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t be drawing attention to it, but if you’ve been reading Eon’s World Vol. 1 long enough to have seen Sally when she last appeared, you may be wondering what happened to her tail.

A little history first. Nineteen years ago, I reimagined and redesigned Sally Acorn for ‘Rise of the Empire’, a fanfic I wrote that became the precursor to Eon’s Comic (and finally became the first four chapters of Eon’s World Vol. 1 almost a year ago). In my redesign, I decided to make her a combination of the characters from the SatAM cartoon and Archie comics as well as the ones in the UK novels and the Fleetway comics. At the time, SatAM/Archie Sally’s species had been kind of ambiguous; she was somewhere between a squirrel and a chipmunk, often called a “ground squirrel” by some fans; so I decided to just make her unambiguously a squirrel, given that she was based on the Ricky, a squirrel, one of the small animal creatures that are released from destroyed Badniks in the early Sonic games. Indeed, those animals are where all the early supporting cast for Sonic came from (apart from Tails). This idea of Sally didn’t carry over into Eon’s Comic and when Sally did appear, she was meant to be the SatAM version, accidentally dimension hopping. During my 2018 attempt to remaster Eon’s Comic, however, I took out the SatAM crossover, replacing it with a Blaze the Cat story, giving me the opportunity to make the Archie/Fleetway Freedom Fighters part of the recurring cast of characters, and that included Sally. So I took the opportunity to recycle the idea I’d had all those years ago and brought in Sally with a design based on what I came up with in 2001.

But while writing this chapter, I had a change of heart, and I decided to retcon Sally to be unambiguously a chipmunk, like she was in Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog Vol. 2. The reason for this is because, while she is not meant to be the exact same character (she’s not a princess, for one), she is very much based on Archie’s Sally Acorn, and I want her appearance to be a strong visual cue of that. So, that means the big, floofy squirrel tail has been replaced with a much shorter chipmunk tail, not only from here on, but at every previous appearance Sally has made in this series so far. The one place I haven’t made that change yet (and may never, because it will be a lot of hassle) is in Chapter 9 of Eon’s World Vol. 2. The art style of Vol. 2 doesn’t lend itself to such easy editing, after all. But hey, I’m planning on redesigning most of the characters for the next chapter of Vol. 2 anyway, so I don’t think it’s a big deal. Once again, it’s like complaining about how the Enterprise looked different in Star Trek Discovery to how it looked in The Original Series.

And, yes, of course Nicole can also be carried around on a palmtop computer, like she was in SatAM and the Archie comics. I rarely bothered with Nicole in Eon’s Comic because, at the time, she was a less interesting character, who was just a palmtop computer in SatAM and the Archie comics (at least until after I’d given up reading them for the time being). She did appear a couple of times in Eon’s Comic, but being a tiny mobile device made it very difficult to really have her in a sprite format, and zooming in on certain shots just hadn’t occurred to me. But zooming in makes shots like those on this and the previous page not only possible, but very useful for things like this.

Eon's World is a fan comic created by Bethany Turner. All characters are copyright © to their respective creators. The contents of this site are not public domain material and should not be edited, distributed, or otherwise used without first obtaining permission from Bethany Turner.

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