Monday, December 19, 2016

The Antoine and Bunnie Retrospective - 116

“Heart Held Hostage” Part I - Sonic the Hedgehog #122 

At long last we are finally coming to the end of the bullshit love triangle. 

Mina has captured Sonic’s attention with her singing talent. They perform a duet, with him on the guitar and everybody gathers around to listen. Sally of course catches this totally innocent and not the least bit romantic performance and starts to pout about it. 
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Bunnie, with her hair now cut again, (seriously girl how fast does your hair grow?), tries to comfort her. 

Despite their lack of interaction in the past few eras, Bunnie is still meant to be Sally’s BFF. It’s nice that she’s the one to realize when something is wrong with Sally, even though Sally herself has failed to communicate her feelings to literally anyone.        

Unfortunately before they can have any serious heart to heart, the plot kicks in. 
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Ooooh, that’s gotta hurt. 

This is perhaps the greatest frustration I have with this era. The comic provides plenty of opportunities for character driven moments, but because of the compressed story telling these are either rushed or ignored outright. There’s no shortage of fluff pieces where we could glean a bit of actual character development from but nope! We gotta make room for useless forgettable stuff like giant catkillers that are defeated in two pages, unnecessary cat fights that take up half the story, Green Knuckles and Penders’s boring mythology, or flashbacks and AUs that have fuck all to do with the current story and are merely leftovers from from previous eras.       
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Anyways, Sally gets kidnapped but Sonic manages to capture one of Nack’s goons. The FF try to integrate him and we get this cute little scene with Bunnie. 
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Huh, I never would have considered Bunnie to be a “Grammar Cop” before, but I guess years of having to correct Antoine’s English may have become habit forming. 

Well since Bunnie’s too much of a lady to off someone without being trapped in a cage fighting for her life first, Max comes in to finish the job. 
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Behold! The one and only time where Max is competent! When using his goons to beat people up for him.  
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Max learns where the kidnappers took Sally and asks the Freedom Fighters to save her, but Sonic’s done raced a head without them in his desperation; ending part one. 

Other stories in this issue include the still continuing Green Knuckles arc, where we learn about echidna afterlife, meet the echidna “god”, and find out Locke did indeed microwave the baby. 

There’s also a story where Julie-Su and Vector reminisce together about the currently deceased Knuckles and in their shared grief come to a mutual understanding and put aside their personal feud with each other. I swear it’s the only worth while thing to come out of the mess that is the Green Knuckles arc.  

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