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Knuckles: friend or foe?


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11 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Genuinely curious though; the people that want Knuckles to be "the dumb one" and don't mind it. Why? What benefit does his character serve as being stupid is something I really wanna know about? Is it to make everyone else look smarter? Is it for comic relief? What?

Comic relief is part of it. Part of it is that stupidity causes conflict and conflict is the root of most stories. Rush into a situation without thinking or knowing what's going on and you're liable to make it worse, and once things have gotten worse, you can work towards making them better. A lot of times people get upset when a character does something "dumb" and makes things worse, but it's not always bad writing. A lot of times, I don't think people consider it from the character's perspective; their limited information vs the audience's wider view, what the character's needs and desires are especially in the moment vs the audience's detached evaluation of the situation, etc. Flawed characters are more interesting than ones who always make the right choice.

Plus, it's canon. Knuckles is dumb. It's been scientifically proven.

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40 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Genuinely curious though; the people that want Knuckles to be "the dumb one" and don't mind it. Why? What benefit does his character serve as being stupid is something I really wanna know about? Is it to make everyone else look smarter? Is it for comic relief? What?

He's the hot headed dumb one, there's nothing wrong with that.

It's never really a big deal, a short scene where he may make a screw up, maybe some scene highlights his social ineptitude, or if he should be important to the story he can actually make a mistake that impacts the events of the story.

Knuckles breaking the Master Emerald in SA2 wasn't the "right" thing to do, but he did that because to him it was better than allowing Eggman to escape with it. In actuality it just allowed Rouge just as much freedom to collect the emerald pieces as him, he didn't know that and that's just fine.

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Isn't it somewhat lazy to move the plot along using the character's own ineptitude to keep it moving? 

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31 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Isn't it somewhat lazy to move the plot along using the character's own ineptitude to keep it moving? 

It's not lazy for a character's flaws to help drive the story. It's just actually got to be derived from the character, not contrived just to have things happen the way you want.

Like when people keep saying Knuckles is just naive and trusting and that's why he kept getting tricked by Eggman, that doesn't work for me, because if he's just naive, he should be able to learn. The guy you trusted turned on you, electrocuted you, stole what you had sworn to protect, and put your home in danger, and the guy you had been fighting went and fixed everything, okay, you fucked up, you trusted the wrong guy, but now you know better, right? Well, no, because you let that first guy fool you into fighting the second guy again on nothing but his word. That's contrived. But if he's dumb? If he's hotheaded, jumps to the wrong conclusions, starts throwing fists rather than asking questions...that tracks. That's a fight borne out of his flaws. In a more focused story he'd pay for fucking up and work to make up for it, but SA is not exactly a tightly written story.

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It doesn't have to happen, I can't exactly tell how serious people are about it, but a lot of people don't seem to like characters making mistakes to move the plot along.

It just needs to make sense, really. The lazy thing about this usually ends up being the character's idiocy is a crutch for the writer, which is not what I was suggesting.

 

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51 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

It's not lazy for a character's flaws to help drive the story. It's just actually got to be derived from the character, not contrived just to have things happen the way you want.

Like when people keep saying Knuckles is just naive and trusting and that's why he kept getting tricked by Eggman, that doesn't work for me, because if he's just naive, he should be able to learn. The guy you trusted turned on you, electrocuted you, stole what you had sworn to protect, and put your home in danger, and the guy you had been fighting went and fixed everything, okay, you fucked up, you trusted the wrong guy, but now you know better, right? Well, no, because you let that first guy fool you into fighting the second guy again on nothing but his word. That's contrived. But if he's dumb? If he's hotheaded, jumps to the wrong conclusions, starts throwing fists rather than asking questions...that tracks. That's a fight borne out of his flaws. In a more focused story he'd pay for fucking up and work to make up for it, but SA is not exactly a tightly written story.

Given the fact that Knuckles never pays for his mistakes or is given a chance to make up for them after Sonic 3, I'm less inclined to believe he's actually stupid and more the writers were just lazy and couldn't think of anything else for him to do, or to just make Sonic look better by comparison.

In Sonic Adventure, as you said, he's tricked and it's never acknowledged again after the fact and only serves as a way for Eggman to get Chaos 4.

In Sonic X, Knuckles getting tricked is almost always used as a gag for comic relief, to the point where the heroes exploit it to trick Eggman, at Knuckles` expense. 

And so on and so forth. And I feel the reason why so many people take issue with him being portrayed as stupid is because it's almost always at the expense of the character; it highlights a character flaw as you said, but that's where it ends because he's never in a position to redeem himself. It makes it hard to invest in the character because he's portrayed as nothing more than a screw-up who is never given the chance to prove his worth to the team. 

So his stupidity feels less like a genuine character flaw that he has to struggle with, and more like a convenient excuse for the writers to have things happen and for Sonic to come in and clean up the mess that Knuckles made. 

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If any Sonic rival was redundant it was Shadow, since we already had Metal Sonic. 

And Knuckles has always been dumb. He was dumb in Sonic 3. He was especially dumb in Somic Adventure.

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2 hours ago, Almar said:

Knuckles' own bio in JP lore sources says he's supposed to be clever just naive and ignorant.

I'm not remotely interested in that. He's presented as dumb in Sonic 3 at numerous scenes.

He stands on a launch platform when Death Egg is about to launch and he falls off in a comical style. Such an obviously dumb decision.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles Part 6: Launch Base Zone (Super Sonic & Tails ...

In Sonic Adventure, Sonic explicitly calls him dumb for trusting Eggman again.

Sonic saying "Way to go, Knucklehead!" For 10 Minutes - YouTube

Knuckles has always been dumb and his character only really changed in Adventure 2. 

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He wasn't designed to be that way. Sonic 3 also repeatedly showed him getting the better of Sonic. As for Adventure, the situation was that Knuckles had no way to tell at a distance the difference between a ME piece and a Chaos Emerald, Eggman telling him words to set up a fight, and Knuckles being hot-blooded (which is also a trait he has in that same JP lore source).

Short version is that Knuckles is meant to be clever and in-tune with his environment but hot-blooded and reckless.

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I had a entire detailed assessment almost finished that was lost because I hit a wrong button and the box decided not to save any of it for some reason. Fuck this site, fuck rewriting it again, and fuck making a character dumb when it's obviously at the expense of his other traits and seemingly in the name of propping up other characters unsportsmanlike.

Basically, he interacts in ways Tails and usually Shadow don't, he's thoughtful and even clever at times, dumb characters can't really last well by their selves though they're sometimes charming, Boom worked well because it's a vastly different setting and genre, Sonic X generally didn't push it that far despite running the basis into the ground and even relied on his other traits first half the time, and just write fuckin stories where the characters act, interact, and react in ways that make sense from different angles and naturally progresses things.

Also, in Adventure, he didn't just by into what Eggman: it was a seed of doubt.

He didn't believe at face value, wondered why that should be something he should consider, and when he does spot Sonic holding what looks like(and according to the next game, feels like) a Master Emerald shard from a distance, he confronts him to get to retrieve it because it looks worse than it is with that in his head.

Funnily enough, if Sonic had actually shown him or even Tails had simply explained to him that it was just the green Chaos emerald, his overall concern would've been calmed for the time being. 

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1 hour ago, Plasme said:

I'm not remotely interested in that. 

Well that's unfortunate, because that's the general intent of his characterization and Almar will remind you of the Japanese origins.

1 hour ago, Plasme said:

He stands on a launch platform when Death Egg is about to launch and he falls off in a comical style. Such an obviously dumb decision.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles Part 6: Launch Base Zone (Super Sonic & Tails ...

To be fair to him, he was under the impression it was a giant egg and had no idea it could take off up till that moment.

He acted based on what information he had of the situation and faltered because of what he didn't know.

1 hour ago, Plasme said:

In Sonic Adventure, Sonic explicitly calls him dumb for trusting Eggman again.

Sonic saying "Way to go, Knucklehead!" For 10 Minutes - YouTube

 

"Just because you say it is doesn't make it so."

Also, he was basically calling him a screwup.

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Incredible the lengths people will go to pretend Knuckles was never dumb.

Sonic literally calls him a "Knucklehead" for being dumb and trusting Eggman.

I give up.

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The problem with, like, every character in this series is that at some point the fan perception of a character just becomes canon. Knuckles is the big example. He's naive and too trusting became he's dumb and cant make good decisions which is definitely a bad thing. I get that they had to change him because the no-nonsense serious guy role was Shadow's job, but there were better ways to do that, I think.

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Fans thinking Knuckles was dumb had nothing to do with what he became as early as Sonic X.

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1 hour ago, Plasme said:

Incredible the lengths people will go to pretend Knuckles was never dumb.

Sonic literally calls him a "Knucklehead" for being dumb and trusting Eggman.

I give up.

Just because a character does something stupid from time to time doesn't make them just stupid. It makes them fallible, error prone, and /or fatally flawed, which is realistic.

It's not even that this issue is simply him being dumb, it's that some seem to wanna have him be ONLY dumb. 

28 minutes ago, thumbs13 said:

The problem with, like, every character in this series is that at some point the fan perception of a character just becomes canon. Knuckles is the big example. He's naive and too trusting became he's dumb and cant make good decisions which is definitely a bad thing. I get that they had to change him because the no-nonsense serious guy role was Shadow's job, but there were better ways to do that, I think.

Pretty much.

20 hours ago, Original Character said:

My opinion on "how": Bickering, teasing, showboating, two fat egos in freindly competition. Deep down they really care about each other.

Honestly I think Shadow starts looks less of the "rival" by that point, he's kind of done his own completely seperate thing each game now.  Apart from racing games, and even then I don think it's Sonic per se. But I can't be assed to reasearch Sonic Free Riders or TSR's "story"

 

 

Essentially. 

In TSR, he was there to put a stop to whatever Dodon Pa & Eggman's planning and gets into a spat with Sonic that results in a few stages where they're away from the others.

From what little I know of Free Riders, he's just kinda arrogant and antipathetic.

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Like I 

5 hours ago, Plasme said:

If any Sonic rival was redundant it was Shadow, since we already had Metal Sonic. 

And Knuckles has always been dumb. He was dumb in Sonic 3. He was especially dumb in Somic Adventure.

Metal Sonic had made very few appearances after CD, so it was understandable they wanted to use a new character.

 

I don't have a problem with Knuckles being portrayed as dumb; my problem is that it's always a trait that comes at the character's expense. Knuckles doing stupid shit is usually only used as a plot device for either comic relief or so another character can clean up his mess.

It's fine in Sonic 3, because that's his debut and his campaign that takes place after Sonic's, he manages to redeem himself by defending his island after being tricked.

He never gets those moments to redeem himself after that. His stupidity becomes less of an endearing trait that's a flaw in his character, and more just lazy comic relief to make other characters look smarter at Knuckles' expense.

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Offtopic: I don't know what's up with the new headers or whatever, but it currently says "They wanna play with my Emeralds? They playing with the wrong guy!"

2 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

Like I 

Metal Sonic had made very few appearances after CD, so it was understandable they wanted to use a new character.

 

I don't have a problem with Knuckles being portrayed as dumb; my problem is that it's always a trait that comes at the character's expense. Knuckles doing stupid shit is usually only used as a plot device for either comic relief or so another character can clean up his mess.

It's fine in Sonic 3, because that's his debut and his campaign that takes place after Sonic's, he manages to redeem himself by defending his island after being tricked.

He never gets those moments to redeem himself after that. His stupidity becomes less of an endearing trait that's a flaw in his character, and more just lazy comic relief to make other characters look smarter at Knuckles' expense.

This sounds an awful lot like a comment about Tails in Forces.

Hm...

10 hours ago, Diogenes said:

It's not lazy for a character's flaws to help drive the story. It's just actually got to be derived from the character, not contrived just to have things happen the way you want.

 If he's hotheaded, jumps to the wrong conclusions, starts throwing fists rather than asking questions...that tracks. That's a fight borne out of his flaws. In a more focused story he'd pay for fucking up and work to make up for it, but SA is not exactly a tightly written story.

I was rereading and just wanted to highlight this because it, while on a different level of perspective/opinion, sorta gets it.

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18 minutes ago, DabigRG said:

Offtopic: I don't know what's up with the new headers or whatever, but it currently says "They wanna play with my Emeralds? They playing with the wrong guy!"

This sounds an awful lot like a comment about Tails in Forces.

Hm...

It's a problem across the board with a lot of the main characters recently I've noticed.

Tails being a coward is only ever used to make Sonic look more brave.

Knuckles being stupid is used to make Sonic and Tails look smarter.

Shadow is more aggressive and confrontational to make Sonic look nicer.

Etc etc

 

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5 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

It's a problem across the board with a lot of the main characters recently I've noticed.

Tails being a coward is only ever used to make Sonic look more brave.

Knuckles being stupid is used to make Sonic and Tails look smarter.

Shadow is more aggressive and confrontational to make Sonic look nicer.

Etc etc

 

That too.

I was mainly just stressing the flanderization of many characters.

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19 hours ago, Kuzu said:

Isn't it somewhat lazy to move the plot along using the character's own ineptitude to keep it moving? 

Also I dunno. For those who like knuckles, kinda sucks this character you really liked is now just reduced to stupid. Tails and Knuckles fans have it rough in that regard.

7 hours ago, Kuzu said:

It's a problem across the board with a lot of the main characters recently I've noticed.

Tails being a coward is only ever used to make Sonic look more brave.

Knuckles being stupid is used to make Sonic and Tails look smarter.

Shadow is more aggressive and confrontational to make Sonic look nicer.

Etc etc

 

Hot take: Maybe the narratives should be about different people, when different people are around. Because reducing other characters to flanderizations in this instance only shows how hollow your protagonist is. And this is something that I have seen people who don't like sonic notice particularly the statement " sonic is kind of an asshole now " , which seems to have the opposite effect that type of characterization is going for.

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26 minutes ago, Shadowlax said:

 

Hot take: Maybe the narratives should be about different people, when different people are around. Because reducing other characters to flanderizations in this instance only shows how hollow your protagonist is. And this is something that I have seen people who don't like sonic notice particularly the statement " sonic is kind of an asshole now " , which seems to have the opposite effect that type of characterization is going for.

They did that in the older games, but it got to a point when Sonic himself wasn't all that important to his own series, so here we are, oops.

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7 hours ago, Kuzu said:

It's a problem across the board with a lot of the main characters recently I've noticed.

Tails being a coward is only ever used to make Sonic look more brave.

Knuckles being stupid is used to make Sonic and Tails look smarter.

Shadow is more aggressive and confrontational to make Sonic look nicer.

Etc etc

...I honestly don't think any of these are true. I mean to some extent how a character acts does describe the characters around them by contrast, but I'm not sure of any situation lately where I'd say that was the main purpose. Like in Forces, Tails isn't afraid of Chaos to make Sonic look good, it's because he's dealing poorly with Sonic, his hero and best friend, being missing and possibly dead. "His" Sonic never even intersects with that plot line (possibly in part because they abandon it almost immediately, but still), and Classic Sonic showing up to save him isn't about him being braver than Tails but him filling in for the Sonic that Tails has lost.

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3 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

...I honestly don't think any of these are true. I mean to some extent how a character acts does describe the characters around them by contrast, but I'm not sure of any situation lately where I'd say that was the main purpose. Like in Forces, Tails isn't afraid of Chaos to make Sonic look good, it's because he's dealing poorly with Sonic, his hero and best friend, being missing and possibly dead. "His" Sonic never even intersects with that plot line (possibly in part because they abandon it almost immediately, but still), and Classic Sonic showing up to save him isn't about him being braver than Tails but him filling in for the Sonic that Tails has lost.

The result is still the same; Tails has to look inferior to emphasize his relationship to Sonic.

That by itself is not bad, but let's be mindful of the fact that Tails has watched Sonic apparently die before and wasted no time in turning his righteous anger onto the one responsible .

If the intention was to give Tails a character arc showing him dealing with the grief of losing Sonic, then they really did a poor job of it. But I honestly don't feel like that's the case at all. I hate Lost World's writing, but I can at least see what they were going for with Tails. Literally everything that happens to Tails in Forces is resolved in literally one scene the second classic Sonic shows up, and it's never brought up again. So it leads me to believe that the writers just wanted a scene to introduce Classic and have him looking heroic by saving someone, and they just chose Tails for it. 

There's been a LOT of situations like this recently ever since they decided to just streamline everything; all of the characters are just reduced to one or two character traits and exist merely to emphasize Sonic.

You have the scene in Generations where they all just stand by and cheer Sonic on (By comparison, everyone contributed something in say, Sonic Heroes when they were all together), the Deadly Six have no other function than to just lose to Sonic, they constantly emphasize how much of a loser Eggman is and how Sonic always beats him like it's his job, and the entire world goes to shit in the span of six months with everyone depressed simply because Sonic wasn't around to save the day.

 

And I get it, I really do. The series wants to keep things simple and broad enough, and streamlining the characters in the plots is the most of effective way of doing it as opposed to expending resources in trying to keep a consistent and serialized world. I get it. But the result is that the characters who used to have some level of agency and some degree of dynamism, are just caricatures who exist simply to take up space. If you're someone who has had any level of investment in what came before, then seeing what these characters have become just fucking sucks.

If you like it, power to you. But this goes far beyond the woes of a boomer fan who is just nostalgic for the old days.

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