Megathread The Lara-Su Chronicles and Ken Penders topic - READ PAGE 164, POST 4096

[Salamander]

People need to accept the fact that if Sonic is to grow as an IP it needs to go beyond the games.

 

One thing that I think is very Ken Penders about this quote is the idea of IP growth for its own sake; it's Penders the businessman looking at Sonic not from a cultural or aesthetic perspective but from a business perspective.  For him, the point of Sonic, like the point of any brand, is to get bigger, to become more popular, to make more money.  But as fans rather than people who make a profit out of Sonic, we're in a position to ask: Why is this important?  What exactly do we want Sonic to be, and what do we want it to become?  Do we need Sonic to be a vast multimedia franchise, with comics, TV series, films, merchandising?

 

I think for most people the answer will be "yes," but that's from a perspective of liking Sonic and his world as characters or as a work of fiction and wanting to see more of them, rather than because our investment in Sonic is solely in how much money the brand makes.  I accept that that may be a bit subtle as a point, but I think it's relevant in the context of how Penders always looks at things not as fiction for their own sake but as potential money-spinners.  He doesn't give the impression of having an emotional investment in his own art, let alone anyone else's.

[horridus]

 He doesn't give the impression of having an emotional investment in his own art, let alone anyone else's.

 

Nail on the head there. I would also add that a lot of what he says gives off the impression that he views consumers as generally being mindless... while a lot of people WILL by a product for it's brand, there is a limit to what they are willing to take. He's convinced people bought the Sonic comics for his ideas and that his ideas will carry LSC through, and that by this logic, he can put as little effort as possible into his product because surely, the horde of consumers loyal to him from years back willing to shell out money to see more of his sub-par art and writing. 

 

Getting this back to LSC, I'm morbidly curious as to what his replacement for all the backstory pertaining to Sonic and co will be. It just reminds me of how goddamn unweildy this thing is going to be given his insistence it's AALLLLL CANON YOU GAIZ... I mean, that's not just the history of Sonic, Robotnik and the Great War, it's also all the stuff from the Knuckles comic as well. Given the fact that Mobius blows up and its incredibly unlikely that the Not-Sally and Not-Sonic and Not-Everyone Else is going to be a major part of this, it still makes me wonder why he even bothered. 

 

I still find it funny that the replacement for the war against Robotnik/Eggman is called the 'Cyber-Biogen Global Conflict'... it sounds so overly formal, like something an anal retentive Vulcan would come up with. 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

 

I don't have links for you, but I do have my correspondence with SEGA from working to launch a film project with them.

 

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/607010247270531072

[biznizz]

I still find it funny that the replacement for the war against Robotnik/Eggman is called the 'Cyber-Biogen Global Conflict'... it sounds so overly formal, like something an anal retentive Vulcan would come up with.

This is my first time hearing this. He couldnt call it something like the Machine Wars or something else simple?

But this reminds me that all the humans/Overlanders on Mobius are probably all extinct now, and we still have no friggin context for who Michael Taylor is, where he came from, and why Ken made him YET ANOTHER type of human at all.

[SenEDDtor Missile]

This is my first time hearing this. He couldnt call it something like the Machine Wars or something else simple?

But this reminds me that all the humans/Overlanders on Mobius are probably all extinct now, and we still have no friggin context for who Michael Taylor is, where he came from, and why Ken made him YET ANOTHER type of human at all.

A space explorer who was sent off Earth/Mobius/Whatever Penders calls his new world before the conflict, and due to space time warping pseudo techno sciency stuff he came back many years later barely aged?

[Verb & Noun]

I thought he said that Michael isn't from Earth.

[SenEDDtor Missile]

I thought he said that Michael isn't from Earth.

Did he? I never paid attention to the details, so I literally cannot remember what was and wasn't said.

[horridus]

This is my first time hearing this. He couldnt call it something like the Machine Wars or something else simple?

But this reminds me that all the humans/Overlanders on Mobius are probably all extinct now, and we still have no friggin context for who Michael Taylor is, where he came from, and why Ken made him YET ANOTHER type of human at all.

 

It's right there in that Lara-Su bio preview thing, so I don't blame you for not picking up on it... it IS a rather painful read, after all. 

 

Mykael Taelor is not from Mobius, and Ken mentioned he'd be mistaken for an Overlander... but at the same time, he has also confirmed that Taelor wasn't born on Earth. Either way, Overlanders are still separate from humans apparrently, and it just overcomplicates things all the more since it'd still be pretty glaring that two separate species would look alike in this 'hard science fiction' bit, as does the fact that Mobius is eerily similar to Earth geography wise. Course, I saw someone bring this up to him and he blew it off as 'unimportant', since Mobius will be destroyed. 

[King Scoopa Koopa]

This is my first time hearing this. He couldnt call it something like the Machine Wars or something else simple?

 

Hasbro might take issue with that.

 

 

 

You know. I would like to read Penders Sonic movie script.

 

I'd like to do it, but I don't think I'd actually like doing it, if that makes any sense.

 

 

One thing that I think is very Ken Penders about this quote is the idea of IP growth for its own sake; it's Penders the businessman looking at Sonic not from a cultural or aesthetic perspective but from a business perspective.  For him, the point of Sonic, like the point of any brand, is to get bigger, to become more popular, to make more money.  But as fans rather than people who make a profit out of Sonic, we're in a position to ask: Why is this important?  What exactly do we want Sonic to be, and what do we want it to become?  Do we need Sonic to be a vast multimedia franchise, with comics, TV series, films, merchandising?

 

Reminds me of this:

 

In the early 1980s, "conglomeration" was the business world's buzzword du jour. It was no longer enough for a company to excel at what they had been doing; now they had to buy up stakes in unrelated companies and manage those as well. The benefits of entering into unfamiliar industries were said to be diversification, tax breaks, and the possibility of synergy. Kalinske, however, knew the real reason: power. He could see this in Mattel's board whenever it announced new acquisitions, ranging from the understandable (Ringling Bros. Circus and Western Publishing) to the absurd (Turco Steel and Metaframe Pet Supply). Though Kalinske tended to disagree with this type of corporate expansion, he voiced his doubts to the board only when investment in these new businesses came at the expense of what had gotten Mattel to this point: toys. Whenever he objected, his dissent was noted and not forgotten. The board of directors had the final word, and there were always ways for them to silently retaliate.

From here.

[biznizz]

That's what I was trying to say.

 

So in Ken's continuity, you have: Overlanders, a subspecies of humanity which may or may not be easily identified by them having four fingers. These beings are most known to the world of Mobius since they are responsible for the Great War (it's still called that right?).

 

Humans, the progenitors of both Mobians and Overlanders. Most of them are hidden and, to the best of my knowledge, the only real city of them is the Station Square-equivilant. Odds are most of the population would be unfamiliar with them save for the Acorn Kingdom and the Floating Island. Unless Ken decided to make his proposed "Station Square invades Angel Island, leading to a conflict of Echidnopolis with Station Square and new ally Knothole Kingdom" story canon.

 

And finally, whatever the hell Micheal Taylor is. An alien from another world who in contrieved coincidence looks exactly like an Overlander/human, and has no real stakes in the story except for possibly being the audience surrogate, in which case the only reason he probably looks human is so the reader doesn't have to feel uncomfortable in identifying with a "talking curry".

 

I'm guessing that we probably won't be seeing any surviving humans/Overlanders on Floating Island or those other biospheres* so the audience won't be "confused by the differing human types" despite claiming that everything he did is still canon.

 

*The reason I have a hard time believing there are any other survivors of Mobius other than Floating Island is that, if the planet blows up, wouldn't huge chunks of the planet fly off in all directions? There are supposed to be, what, 14 or so biospheres mentioned? So there are about 14-15 pieces of habitable planet chunks which just so happened to fly off in the same direction, at the same speed, and they're all able to communicate/travel with each other?

 

Having one is had to swallow at best, having more than a dozen goes beyond convienient.

[horridus]

Heh. Maybe Taelor is actually the descendent of pre-Xorda human colonization attempts off planet, and when the Xorda came and apocalypse'd everything and turned Earth into Mobius, Taelor's people just picked up where they had left off and continued to develop away from Earth. 

 

But of course, this is Ken Penders we are dealing with, and this reasonable enough explanation won't come to him. Hell, I don't think he's even going to really reference the fact that Mobius is a future earth, given that he insists 'THEY'RE AAALLLIIIENS NOW'. 

[Agie]

Besides, Mobius being future Earth was Bollers' idea, and if I'm not mistaken, Ken had different ideas.

 

And we all know how Ken feels about one person's ideas contradicting his own...

[Osmium]

*The reason I have a hard time believing there are any other survivors of Mobius other than Floating Island is that, if the planet blows up, wouldn't huge chunks of the planet fly off in all directions? There are supposed to be, what, 14 or so biospheres mentioned? So there are about 14-15 pieces of habitable planet chunks which just so happened to fly off in the same direction, at the same speed, and they're all able to communicate/travel with each other?

 

Having one is had to swallow at best, having more than a dozen goes beyond convienient.

[Disonoid 3000]

I'm sorry if I'm ignorant, but how exactly did Mobius blow up in the first place? Is there even an explanation? 

 

As far as I know, not yet. The script excerpts imply something hit the planet. 

[Osmium]

As far as I know, not yet. The script excerpts imply something hit the planet. 

 

Having something hitting a planet is nowhere near close to the idea of "Blowing it Up". The Earth-Theia impact has chunks of both planets come out, but all the rock came in and either reformed the Earth or went in orbit and coalesced into the Moon. Nothing went flying out forever. 

 

The amount of energy required to have a collision where all the pieces of the planet fly out and start roaming about is imaginable. Those planets would have to be coming at each other extremely fast and it would have to be a perfectly direct collision which are rare. 

 

Everyone would die even before the planets collided. Mobius and the other object would elongate and heat up to millions of degrees, vaporizing everyone before they even collided.

 

So that's even more stupid. Did Penders even pay attention during High School? Or any school? 

[Salamander]

"The fundamental laws of physics are different in the world of THE LARA-SU CHRONICLES."

 

Or, the honest answer, magical science.  Genuine hard science fiction is the preserve of people who know very, very well what they're talking about, but it's not necessary for everyone to have that kind of knowledge, so long as they don't feel guilty about their fictional universe being anything other than one hundred percent plausible.

[Osmium]

"The fundamental laws of physics are different in the world of THE LARA-SU CHRONICLES."

 

Or, the honest answer, magical science.  Genuine hard science fiction is the preserve of people who know very, very well what they're talking about, but it's not necessary for everyone to have that kind of knowledge, so long as they don't feel guilty about their fictional universe being anything other than one hundred percent plausible.

 

I'm not expecting Penders to know all that shit, but if he's saying that it's genuine Hard Sci Fi and he wants all of us to take this seriously, then this is ridiculous. 

 

I'm just saying that this is such Soft Sci Fi it's funny, and he has no idea what real Hard Sci Fi is. He should just say it's Soft Sci Fi and move on, but that would require toning down his ego a bit. 

[King Scoopa Koopa]

but that would require toning down his ego a bit.

Like taming a lion with a rubber band and a paper plate.

[horridus]

And we have a few tweets in which LSC is brought up, more specifically the problems of trying to make it In Continuity with Sonic.

 

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/607929718369755136

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/607784546365370369

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/607784824443535360

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/607795084319289345

 

Evidently, The Storm (or as he puts it. "THE STORM") will serve as the means for us to see how that can be, and of course, his usual claim of how 'he figured out the whole thing without invalidating anything'. I am morbidly curious as to how he can verify that given that I doubt he's read ANY of the work by his co-workers, let alone Flynn. I should further note that The Storm was teased at months ago with claims that there would be more within the week. At this rate, I'd be very surprised if it came out in time for SDCC. 

 

Also, I find it interesting that he claims it's ALL CANON when he's replaced Athair with a female duplicate, Auri-On, and this in turn somehow leads to Janelle-Li being in stasis rather than dead. Her death in the proper timeline was a big part of Athair's backstory and why he was no longer a part of Haven. I'm not entirely certain I like the implications that a gender change somehow alters things enough that Janelle-Li is 'only' in stasis rather than dead, but then again, he's likely only doing that because many people got on his case about his one female guardian dying for vague reasons. 

[Neon Zephyr]

Janelle-Li's death was also a big part of Sabre's backstory. In some ways, more than Athair (who wasn't going to leave the Tribe, anyway, iirc). And it was important to their interactions (in fact, it was ironically one of the few inter-personal things that actually made some level of sense, at least in concept. "Grandma's dying and you won't leave to even go to her, then I'll go and fulfill her wishes" is actually sorta like things real people experience in their lives.)

 

I kinda suspect that he made Lara-Su a girl (instead of Knuckles having a son) for similar reasons as this "new" Auri-On (that name makes no sense to me, no matter how I try to pronounce it, it doesn't seem to flow off the tongue at all.)

 

Besides, "In-Stasis" typically means "functionally dead but we don't want to write ourselves into a corner if we kill them." Considering Auri-On/etc isn't supposed to be the primary focus, and this isn't an ongoing monthly with potential room for focus on secondary/etc characters, it really doesn't make sense to do for any other reason. 

[SBR2]

I love he keeps insisting his stories aren't non-canon despite the fact they've been wiped clean from history.

[horridus]

I love he keeps insisting his stories aren't non-canon despite the fact they've been wiped clean from history.

[Monkey Destruction Switch]

I'm not expecting Penders to know all that shit, but if he's saying that it's genuine Hard Sci Fi and he wants all of us to take this seriously, then this is ridiculous. 

 

I'm just saying that this is such Soft Sci Fi it's funny, and he has no idea what real Hard Sci Fi is. He should just say it's Soft Sci Fi and move on, but that would require toning down his ego a bit. 

 

It's even weirder considering soft sci-fi isn't inherently inferior to hard sci-fi, it's just a different genre. But I guess it's not unlike his belief that Sonic is automatically better if he (allegedly) makes it about "sci-fi" instead of funny animals.

 

Man, I really wish he would stop making ties to Archie Sonic. It makes it much more confusing to newcomers, and most existing fans of Archie Sonic ceased to be interested long ago. He's obviously trying to draw attention to his "major accomplishment" of working on Sonic that inflated his ego to begin with, but so far LSC has done nothing but destroy his reputation. Just let it go, man. It's not working and it's not worth it.

[SenEDDtor Missile]

It's even weirder considering Soft Sci Fi isn't inherently inferior to Soft Hard Sci Fi, it's just a different genre.

You put down Soft twice. Fixed for you???

[Monkey Destruction Switch]

Thanks, though funnily I had already edited it to fix the typo before I even had a chance to see your post.