All art is at once surface and symbol

Hey guys! Wanna know how infamously glitchy Sonic 2006 is? Here ya go!



I've been watching the LP of Sonic 2006 to pass the time when Jean wasn't reading Homestuck with me, and lately, I've been getting a strange sense of nostalgia from my time in Sonic fandom. Hell, after I talked to Sipp on Plurk, I felt inspired to make an RP account for E-102 Gamma from Sonic Adventure 1, and did it. I'll refine it and make icons for him later after I replay the game. Just... wow. I used to love Gamma. :o And I totally shipped him with Amy. I still do.

Aside from Pokemon, Sonic the Hedgehog fandom had a lot of "firsts" for me. My first serious crush on a fictional character (Shadow the Hedgehog, which I felt a lot of guilt for, mostly because I was scared of being a "rabid fangirl" and that I was gonna be labeled as a "furry", though I eventually stopped caring about the latter. :P Former, on the other hand... hoo boy), the first time I started receiving attention for my work in fandom (not BNF-status, but I've had a couple strangers who went up to me and said, "Hey, aren't you the one who wrote that one fic/that Sonadow essay at ship_manifesto?" and gave me warm, fuzzy feelings inside. Usually those fans and I became friends. ;;), and hell, even the first time I wrote smut... a looooooooong story which deserves its own entry. :P Gods, the first AMV I ever made was a Shadow the Hedgehog AMV using "Bliss" by Tori Amos. I think I lost it and never recovered it, which is kind of a shame, but then again, I made a couple other old Sonic AMVs too, haha. XD

It's kind of painful for me to look back on my years in Sonic fandom since I went from being a cheerful fangirl who did what she loved to being a paranoid worrywart who was concerned what people and older fans thought of her because she loved Shadow and Sonadow and felt "ostracized" because she enjoyed playing the newer (at the time) games as well as the classics. When I look back on them now, Sonic Heroes and the games after them are crappy. Yet even knowing games like Shadow the Hedgehog are horrendously and painfully cheesy and has all these flaws and tries way too hard to be hardcore ("Where's that DAMN 4th Chaos Emerald!? DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN WATCH ME SAY DAMN."), I get a sense of guilty pleasure from them due to the time I spent with friends in fandom. Under normal circumstances, I would've found a character like Silver stupid and annoying, and today I really wish he didn't have to be another hedgehog, but... ngggh. Fucking Narm Charm. gjdskgjdksg

My heart will always belong to Sonic Adventure 2 and the earlier games like Sonic CD and S3&K though. Fuck yes.

I don't get me started how much I whined about Sonic elitists. It's like I spent the last part of my active years of Sonic fandom feeling "persecuted" and miserable, and it shows in the last few Sonadow fics I written. To the point I think my friends were calling me out for it. When I think about it, the more I want to strangle my past self. I was so concerned with being a "good" Shadow and Sonadow fan, even in the eyes of people who didn't like them, and... gdhskjghdkjsgh. I even gotten into fights with a couple friends about this, and lost one of them because of it. I spent too much time worrying about what other people thought. You can see why this was painful for me to think about. I feel like Karkat from Homestuck with his self-loathing and how much he detests his past self for being so moronic, 'cause I'm feeling exactly the same way when I look at myself in my late years of Sonic fandom.

As my Sonic obsession waned into hiatus (a little before I got into Earthbound), I finally got around to watching SatAM despite feeling "poisoned" and what do you know, I loved it. I started to mellow down, thank god, and stuck around to spazz about the series for a while. Sonic/Sally became my favorite het pairing for Sonic, I shipped Bunnie/Rotor, and it was around the time the Sonic Kink Meme (kinkyclosetzone, which I helped name) opened. It's pretty much dead now, I think. XD The other day, my friend and I were talking about robot sex ("How does it work? Transformers fandom is divided over this."), and though she wasn't much familiar with the fandom, I linked her to my favorite Shadow/Omega fic (NSFW, despite wires and robotics) for referential purposes. (Her response: "Hee hee. Code-fondling.")

So yesterday, I decided to browse the kink meme to read old fills. I came across an old request of mine, which wanted Sonic/Griff from the "Warp Sonic" SatAM episode. I went on, expecting nobody answered that one ever, except... bam. A fill. Written two months after I left it. And... it's fucking incredible. (NSFW) I don't know how I never saw that fic in my LJ message box, but it's been about three years before I finally read this fic. Even though the writer will probably never know my thanks, I left it anyway. God, I wonder if I should've de-anon'd myself. But just... I'M FEELING SO MUCH EMOTION. WHOEVER YOU ARE, YOU HAVE ALL MY LOVE IN THE WORLD. ;; I wonder if it's even someone I know, though I don't think I recognize the style. I can't help but feel guilty somehow. But still... anon, whoever you are. Thank you.

Reading that fic meant a lot to me, and I've been feeling sort of crummy lately. Namely about my creativity (or lack of it).

Sometimes, I wonder if ought to finish that humongous Sonadow fic I started that was going to be one of my fandom magnum opuses. Post-SA2, Shadow was caught in space and taken inside a hidden lab in the Mystic Ruins run entirely by a sentient supercomputer named P.A.N.D.O.R.A. PANDORA likes to build creepy advanced robots, including the Leviathan, and has experimented on an unconscious Shadow for three years. Shadow wakes up before he's "ready" and steals a Chaos Emerald one of the robots brought in and escaped. Sonic, having since moved on, is troubled why he still remembers a rival he barely knew. Meanwhile, Dr. Eggman wants to seek out PANDORA and claim the lost lab and the creations inside for his own. Shit goes down in Mystic Ruins and Sonic chases Dr. Eggman. The Leviathan is trying to hunt Shadow, and the two hedgehogs meet again... Cue "WTF!?" In short, Sonic and friends must stop Eggman while figuring out what the hell is up with the PANDORA business and its connection to Shadow. Sonic & Shadow begrudgingly work together, and end up more tangled in each another than they'd like to admit, playing right into PANDORA's logic-minded hand...

If I stopped to work on it, would I feel closure? Sometimes I wonder if I should save it as maybe a future original work, but the story is clearly written to be for the Sonic universe. To take out all the Sonic essence would be robbing it of its soul. I will never be able to unsee it as something that used to be "about Sonic." I'm like this with my other incomplete big fanfic projects I started too. Augh.

tl;dr: Puri was a self-pitying paranoid moron for her latter years in Sonic fandom, and is now wibbling over old crap and a lovely fic featuring a super obscure pairing someone left her in a time capsule. She then goes on to fret about her own fanfiction again. WHOO SELF-DEPRECATION

Damn blue hedgehogs giving me feelings.