Saturday, October 8, 2016

The Antoine and Bunnie Retrospective - 95

“Enemy Mine” - Sonic the Hedgehog #95 

This issue is mainly set ups for later stories; Snivley returns, Tails goes missing, and Sonic and Bunnie team up on a solo mission for the first time since what seems like forever. 
I usually love Sonic and Bunnie’s team ups. I think they complement each other really well and it’s always nice to see her interact with someone other than Antoine on occasion. Unfortunately this particular outing has a few problems. 

First there is, for some unknown reason, a heave focus on narration text from Sonic. It’s really unnecessary and quite distracting after awhile. 
The audience already knows all this shit, or at least can infer it from what we see on the page. I guess I should be grateful; at least said narration is written coherently and isn’t a Frank Miller knock off. *shudders* 

The second problem is the fact that neither party accomplishes anything. They both leave the city without further investigating why Eggman hasn’t killed or robotize everyone, nor do they attempt to convince anyone to leave with them. 

Once outside Robopolis, they stumble upon Kudos and Uma Arachnis fighting each other. They join the fray only to get their asses handed to them both. 
I…I don’t know weather to laugh or cry? The dialogue acts like this is something super serious, yet the way Bunnie gets hurt is so cartoonishly over the top.  And it’s all made worse by Sonic’s overreaction to the event afterwards. 
Jeesh, this is bad. For one thing, Bunnie wouldn’t just blindly follow Sonic’s orders. She would stay and help him out weather he wants it or not. The other problem is that this doesn’t really show off you’re hero in a good light.

 I understand what Bollers was going for; Sonic’s been under a lot of stress lately and blames a lot of the bad things going on currently as being his fault, so he’s being over protective here. It’s the execution that’s all wrong. No one stops to talk about the problem, no one communicates effectively, no one sets Sonic straight, and worse of all Sonic goes and fucks it all up yet again shortly afterwards all because he couldn’t just say, “hey I’m worried about you.”  

The only way I can accept this scene is if Bunnie is storming off, rightly pissed at him, going “fuck you” under her breath and giving him the finger as she walks off screen. 
Also, not only is this redesign bad, but they can’t even keep it consistent anymore. She somehow lost her shorts during the battle and regained her organic arm. :P

After Bunnie leaves, Sonic tries to fight Kudos on his own, gets beat up and has to be rescued by none other than Arachnis.
So just to reinrate, neither Bunnie nor Sonic accomplish anything heroic, nor do they progress the plot forward. They were only here so Arachnis could save one of them in order to set up her redemption arc that comes later. And even then both of them apparently wasn’t needed at all.   
The second story this issue is the further adventures of Green Knuckles. Only this time it involves Tails and, going against received wisdom, it’s pretty good. There’s a least actual stakes and emotional consequences that the cover story lacks. 
I can believe it Knuckles, and so can most of the audience. Shame you’ll never learn from this experience.  

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