And ice cream! I said "Let them eat cake and ice cream!"
— The Far Side, Marie-Antoinette's last-ditch effort to save her head.
Ah, here, let me translate that statement for people who don't speak Marvel Comics..."We're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry!"
"So Sonic Frontiers… decides to tackle Tails' mishandling… very directly. And, ah, you know, many people really like this; many people really appreciate the… formal acknowledgement. I understand. I get it. But lemme tell ya anyway… why I don’t… like it.
"To paraphrase what’s going on here, the game is, in essence, saying, 'Yes, Tails was an asshat in these games– special mention to Forces– and yes, his writing has been… wildly inconsistent! But if you just think about it like everyone having their bad days, uhhhh… it’s… it can be like, character growth! There. Boom. Patched that right up. All better now!'
"Except, I don’t think it is. In fact, I think you’re just making it worse, and I really wish you would just leave it alone. Look, I’m all for embracing the past; I don’t like it when media franchises pretend that shitty things don’t exist. Believe it or not, I would ideally want Sonic Forces to be contextually relevant, because it’s supposed to be a major historical event. But when the character study of Tails in your atmospheric “open-zone” experience is literally defined by… him being a bad character, does that really convey the message you’re intending? Are we really supposed to like Tails if all we have to say on him is whether or not he sucks?
"Instead of telling a new story with Tails that could be remembered for years to come, we’ve opted to extend his terrible reputation into one more game! Tails could just be written really well, and it would naturally convey that he’s moved on from being a bitch-baby; like, you don’t need to canonize— to explaaaaain everything. I think the audience is perfectly capable of filling in the gaps here, just as they tried to be when it came time to make headcanons for… the previous depiction. You could claim it’s being transformative with a concept that didn’t work, but what actually is the arc here? Tails learns that he has to become a hero in his own right, deciding that he’ll go it alone in a future endeavor? Well, that sounds nice, it really reminds me of— Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure 2. Shadow the Hedgehog. 'If I just follow you, I will never see the light!' It’s back to square one, disguised as some coming-of-age story!
"(…) And that really is all we’ve got for Tails here, by the way. It’s not like this is some background element, it’s not like there’s layers to this; the game truly can only offer commentary on his sidekick status."
— JebZone
explaining a way this trope can backfire, "The Cyber-Corruption of Sonic Stories"
explaining a way this trope can backfire, "The Cyber-Corruption of Sonic Stories""Well, I assumed because of the strong start that it would eventually stop focusing so much on addressing criticisms of ASM, and start finding its own voice and identity. I was expecting it to start progressing the character forward again in new ways. But the unfortunate reality is that Spencer's Spider-Man books never made it past his first phase of going back to old storylines and trying to put a Band-Aid on their various blemishes or unpopular choices. I thought Spencer was only disavowing more recent decisions with the character, but he was just starting there and working his way back. Slott's run wasn't the only thing he wanted to go back and tinker with; it was… well, a little bit of everything. ASM in this time period had an unhealthy obsession with 'correcting mistakes of the past' rather than bringing anything new to the table. The book's frustratingly slow pacing was always building towards another storyline attempting to dive back into a previous book and retcon or rewrite a previous writer's contribution.
"Okay, let's take a look at one of the bigger examples. A huge portion of the book was devoted to revisiting Kraven the Hunter and trying to undo his… unfortunate resurrection in Grim Hunt that stole some of the impact of Kraven's Last Hunt. J. M. DeMatteis' Kraven's Last Hunt is one of the best Spider-Man stories ever told, and the tragically dark ending of Sergei Kravinoff taking his own life after a long battle with his mental illness and insecurities about losing to Spider-Man drove him over the edge. But decades later, Joe Kelly's Grim Hunt storyline has Kraven's surviving family members uniting and using a dark magical ritual to resurrect him, something even Kraven himself thought was unnecessary. Kraven was now immortal unless Spider-Man himself killed him, which we know would never happen. Now Kraven's Last Hunt feels like Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. It's just a silly title because we know it became historically incorrect, and that ending loses some of its power when we know that. 'Eh, he'll be back.' It's probably one of the most ill-advised character resurrections in the history of comics (which will become a theme in this video).
"Spencer's run tried to have its cake and eat it too. I think Spencer is fully aware of all the issues that the status quo creates for telling good stories in ongoing cape comics: nothing is permanent; another writer will always want to use this or that character again later on down the line; nothing can be definitively finite... but he made an attempt to work around this by having Kraven create a near-identical clone of himself that's just several years younger and still in his prime. The story sees Kraven attempting one last time to emotionally break Spider-Man so that he can finally break the curse. But Spider-Man's faith and optimism wins out in the end. So Kraven breaks the curse by becoming Spider-Man in essence and taking his own life once again, it's all very… flowery and kinda dumb. He's been re-killed to bring us back to Last Hunt, but Spencer future-proofs the story by leaving behind Kraven's more powerful clone to take up the mantle and essentially be the new permanent Kraven for all other writers to use in the future. The story has a lasting effect, but will also allow the cycle of repetition to remain unbroken.
"The problem with all of this is that… it's ultimately sort of pointless in fixing what was broken. The damage has been done! Resurrecting Kraven at all still harms Last Hunt retroactively, and laying him back to rest again can't undo that damage. The Kraven clone running around is still going to be a blemish on that original story by not leaving well enough alone. We devoted dozens of issues to building up this "Great Hunt" storyline for it to ultimately end right where it started. There's still an alive and well Kraven the Hunter running around, and Grim Hunt still exists as part of the story. The effort is appreciated, but it's just unfortunately something that can't ever be fixed, making the effort… fruitless."
