Sonic as a character is an easy enough subject to handle. We can talk about him soon enough. For now, it’ll be about someone else for a change…so let’s start with this.
There is a problem with Amy Rose.
There must be, because she has somehow become the most hated, abused, and flat-out horribly written character in the fanfiction universe. Holy crap. I kid you not, Amy Rose is a million times worse in fanfiction than she is in any of the games or even the comics (Archie, Fleetway, whatever your fancy). And what makes this so much worse is that Amy is such an easy character to write about if you’re just going for surface details most of the time, which most authors should be sticking to along with their superficial depictions of all the other characters in the series. But in this first part of my article on Amy Rose, we’ll see that fanfiction writers seriously try to change or even completely alter her psyche for the sake of plot…or whatever caricature of plot you can see. This is where most writers stumble over themselves – they’re in way too deep for their own good.
We can start simply enough with a breakdown of who Amy is. The details I take and what I presume a writer for a series franchise like Ian Flynn (head writer for Archie’s publication of the Sonic the Hedgehog comic series) would come from the games. This is the source material. I’m not putting myself on any level with Mr. Flynn, even if I disagree with some of his ideas (well, very few of them to be clear about it), but good writing is cut from the same cloth – not a mindless obsession over the characters you write about, but just really knowing your stuff. That means playing the games, paying attention to what’s going on and how characters react to certain things. You start to notice patterns, especially with the games that have included voice acting. To sidetrack, Sonic Rush has minimal VA work but the cutscenes provide huge windows for the characters involved. You can easily get something on Cream and Vanilla from the few lines they have in Rush. Sonic characters aren’t too terribly deep, that’s something that you have to admit. They’re not highly complex and don’t usually have detailed backgrounds (strange how Shadow is now less of a mystery than Sonic, wouldn’t you say?) but I feel that it’s enough for a good adventure or two or more. Everyone has the desire to make the characters more detailed than they are, everyone has the desire to bring a bit of creativity to the table. And that’s great, it’s a good thing. But when writing about characters with established personalities and backgrounds and all of that, it’s best not to stray too far from what the characters actually are. And this happens to an extreme with Amy.
So getting back to that breakdown, Amy Rose is an energetic character in every sense of the word. She is highly emotional, and that isn’t a bad thing. Her moods can swing from love-drunk to violent-drunk in an instant, to say the least. Highly devoted to Sonic and his causes, but can and will be independent for her own sake and for the sake of her friends. She is a kind person, loving, and can be thoughtful at times. She has a huge heart and isn’t afraid to show it. Amy doesn’t like to reign in her emotions when she’s riled up, but she can be calm and collected. She can – get ready for this – get frustrated with Sonic at times. Amy is able to hold her own in battle and if you want to take anything from SA2’s Battle mode, can hold her own with the boys to a degree. It can be said that she has some sort of connection with magic or more likely Chaos Energy because of the huge mallet she whips up out of nowhere, the Piko Piko Hammer (named for the sound it makes when hitting anything). The Sonic CD manual says she can read tarot cards (this was used to an extent in a story I read, but while that was interesting the rest of the story wasn’t even close) so it implies that she has psychic potential. Her strength is legendary along with her temper, she’s quick enough to chase Sonic around, and is a frequent target of Eggman. The only non-villain character she has a problem with is Rouge, at least to a point. Amy is able to make deductions and can read people fairly well.
I listed all of that for reference material, and if anyone has any doubts about what I’ve put up, check out the games she’s been in. The only ones I don’t remember much of are Sonic Shuffle and Sonic Riders, which I really don’t take too much from as a whole. I don’t think I’ve even gotten everything about her, but that’s what I have off the top of my head. The thing I’m trying to say is that there is so, so much on Amy that can be used in different combinations without damaging or altering her character for the sake of a story.
Small wonder it gets ignored.
It’s not even laughable, it’s just outright sad at this point. The majority of stories have Amy either in high school against some manufactured conflict, or have her being raped, or have her in a generic anime love triangle, or have her doing something mundane and just undeniably stupid. Shipping I don’t really care about, despite the fact that a good chunk of stories I’ve written have a Sonic/Amy tint on them in some form. But even the stories that lean towards that interest are mostly awful and feature…things…that need not be discussed in this post. Possibly others will contain that content if my stomach is feeling sturdy on those days.
Amy fundamentally is a bouncing ball of a character. She goes up and down and all around emotionally; she is not made to rest for a long time on any part of her character besides the happy/bubbly part. That’s not my opinion, as much as you might think it is. Now, extenuating circumstances are totally fine. If Amy snaps because of trauma, then I can’t hold a grudge against that if it’s well written. And it’s usually not, so you see where I’m going with this. Amy has moods but is not moody. She isn’t a grouch; she isn’t a moper unless again, plot properly demands it. She has fears and you can play them up if – again – plot properly demands it. She’s a fighter unless it puts her friends in danger. She’s self-sacrificial to a fault. Amy is stubborn – not dense. That’s Knuckles’ department (and we’ll talk about that with him). She can be sassy, but her aura is bubblegum pop slash category 5 hurricane. She isn’t Rouge or any variation thereof…which doesn’t reflect badly on Rouge in any way. But of course people make seductiveness equal sluttiness for God knows what reason, intentionally or not. Amy is a character made up of many different things but something just keeps getting thrown off whenever she’s written in most stories. And we can probably deduce that it’s the influence of anime and manga that causes this, the logic that playing up a minimal amount of traits in a character will make them stand out and be more entertaining.
That’s a problem. It’s a problem when the character in question is made up of a finite amount of character traits and a few of those are played up above anything else, or even worse, they’re played up so that an author can erase the rest of her positive/negative traits in order to make her a Mary Sue/author avatar/self-insert/etc. And the problem worsens when you are trying to have her side with one character or another in a relationship that couldn’t possibly have worked before (Sonic and Shadow are both equally invalid for one reason or another, and they’re the frontrunners here). And so the story, which usually revolves around this shallow caricature of a character (as insane as that sounds) becomes laughably stupid in one respect or the other, because the other characters around her are warped into ridiculous versions of themselves as a result. Amy becomes so stupidly polarized that your story couldn’t look like more of a joke if it tried – she becomes a magnet that draws in parts of your story while actively repelling others, and that just sounds like a bad day from the outset.
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I’ll continue by talking about Amy’s placement on the character spectrum as I see it, and why that becomes important when trying to write in general. Other things are soon to come.
Thanks for reading.
Supercruise! 