When critiquing Lost World one of the things I see people say is this moment where Sonic kicks the Conch of Plot Contrivance out of Eggmans hand was a moment of Sonic acting out of character. And I gotta be honest.
I don’t see it.
Sonic is brash. He does leap before he looks. It’s just usually it works out for him, this was the only time it ever really went south.
In Sonic Adventure he follows a bunch of cops who were chasing down Chaos and charges in after the cops fall back, Sonic doesn’t know what the situation is. He doesn’t know is Chaos did anything wrong (he DIDN’T as far as we the players ever get to see) or if the cops are OPENING FIRE on some innocent creature who didn’t do anything to warrant an act of deadly force.
Instead he just snarks and jumps in for a boss fight.
In SA2 Sonic gets falsely arrested and proceeds to kick a bunch of cops to the curve and JUMPS OUT OF A HELECOPTER.
Also that time he basically carjacked the President of SEGAmerica.
Does everything end up working out fine in the end? Yes. Does Sonic end up being vindicated in these actions? Also yes.
Does that mean the one time it DIDN’T turn out to be such a bright idea is “out of character”? No. The motivation and action is the same, the only difference is the resulting consiquences. The Cause is what is motivated by Character, not Effect. It isn’t “in character” just cuz the Effect happened to be good and “out of character” when the Effect happened to be bad.
Sonic is a brash boy. It’s kinda about time that blew up in his face at least a little bit.
Say what you will about the overall execution of Sonic making a mistake in Lost World, but at least he actually acknowledged it and seems to make an effort in trying to not be as careless afterwards, even if he doesn’t do a perfect job.
By contrast, one of my nitpicks with Unleashed is how Sonic doesn’t spend much if any time on considering that Eggman breaking the planet and releasing Dark Gaia was partly his fault (due to him falling for Eggman pulling a Wily). Sure, you could say there were more important matters at hand, but then that leads into the IDW zombot arc routine, doesn’t it? “Confronting me over my fuck-up? That’s not important right now!”
