I can’t believe I’m posting about Sonic Underground, but this is the Cringe App, so here are some random thoughts and headcanons:

Sonia has super strength parallel to Sonic’s super speed (Manic has no innate power, because life isn’t fair) and that should have been explored more. Like, outside of battle. Imagine all the training Lady Windimere must have put her through to act ladylike and demure and not accidentally break all the fragile expensive things around her. She casually carries her brothers and Bartleby all the time. Sometimes she squeezes them a little too hard when she hugs them. She reunites with Bartleby after a rough mission and effortlessly picks him, spins him around and throws him high into the air. She can arm-wrestle Knuckles as an equal. Someone else is working on a heavy robot or vehicle or something and Sonia is propping or holding it up for them. The van breaks down in a place they can’t stay in and she just sighs, tells her brothers to take out and carry everything they can, lifts the van over her head and starts walking. She grabs the scruff of Sonic’s neck with her fingers when he tries to run away to do something stupid and he runs in place, extremely annoyed. A very exasperated Cyrus tells her that she needs to stop hitting the door buttons so hard when she dramatically leaves after an argument (thank God the doors don’t have hinges to be ripped off of), because they can’t keep installing new ones. First Sonic wearing away the floors and heating the metal so much it could melt people’s shoes, now this? He does have a favourite triplet and it’s Manic. This isn’t the only reason, but it’s a big one.

Seriously, why didn’t the show remark more on how Manic doesn’t have a power? I guess his instrument giving him earth manipulation while the others just get lasers kinda makes up for it. Maybe super genes run in the royal family recessively. With all the stock episode plots they did, you’d think there’d be one where he felt inferior to his siblings for this reason and reaffirmed his worth by saving the day and rescuing them when they were both captured.

There really should have been a body swap episode. Here’s my pitch: tensions are running high between the siblings as they clash over their respective flaws and insecurities, when some magical shenanigans that tie into whatever Robotnik’s plan is switch their consciousnesses around. Sonic is in Manic’s body, Manic in Sonia’s and Sonia in Sonic's. Now, Sonia has been stressed lately feeling pressured to be the mature, responsible one and, with so much steam to let off, finds herself slipping into Sonic’s recklessness, impulsivity and cockiness. She can literally outrun all her problems… or so she thinks. The speed is liberating and intoxicating. Meanwhile, Manic, who was giving her shit at the start, realizes how much restraint Sonia needs to exercise to not cause more trouble than she fixes with her strength and that, while it definitely makes some things easier, having a superpower isn’t a cure-all and requires rules in itself. He gains a greater respect and appreciation for her, which enables him to remind her of the value of responsibility and caution when she runs off the deep end. Sonic absolutely hates not having any extraordinary abilities. At first his siblings think he’s just cranky because he can’t do awesome tricks anymore and has to have a normal person’s amount of patience. Averse to vulnerability as he is, he pretends that that’s the extent of it; but as his complaints shift from whining to self-abuse, it turns out that he can’t stand feeling this helpless. He’s never been this incapable before. It hurts. It takes him right back to the worst moments of his life, when he wasn’t fast enough to save his parents and uncle. Now he isn’t fast enough to save anyone. Keeping the cycle of empathy going after Manic talks her down, Sonia reflects on how amazing her new speed feels and what having had that power her whole life might have done to her self-esteem. She tells Sonic that his speed and usefulness don’t define him or his worth, and it’s okay to fail, need to go slow, make mistakes and have things that are just beyond you. Everyone does. She’s made some big mistakes herself just that day! What matters is the strengths you do have and how you use them. He’s done so much good, for all his flaws, and she and Manic love every part of him. Inspired, Sonic ultimately defeats Robotnik using his intelligence and leadership skills, with both his siblings using their new powers effectively and wisely to make the plan work. Once they switch back, they get in a similar unfortunate situation to the one that pushed their stress to the tipping point in the beginning, only now they take it in stride and deal with it together. Who am I kidding, the show wouldn’t have gone into that much character analysis and emotional depth. That’s why we need fanfiction.

Sonia has had a five-star privileged education; however, she must also unlearn all Robotnik’s propaganda and lies. Sonic has had a less thorough education, but presumably still a pretty good one and without any of the propaganda from moving in with Uncle Chuck onward. Manic has never been to school a day in his life. Think of the comedy you could get out of this arrangement. But also, is Manic illiterate? His reading and writing are probably significantly poorer than the others’, right? I headcanon he’s secretly insecure about his lack of formal education and occasionally teases Sonia for her “nerdy” advanced knowledge and makes fun of her when she doesn’t know something, in an effort to bring her down to his level.

Uncle Chuck is the triplets’ father’s brother, not of royal blood. My headcanon is that after Robotnik killed the king during the takeover, he agreed to go into hiding and cut ties with Aleena. He didn’t plan to have a role in her children’s lives until the Time arrived, but he wound up near enough Sonic’s home to visit and couldn’t stay away. He fondly told Sonic a great deal about life before Robotnik ruined everything and his birth parents, carefully omitting that they were the king and queen of course.

Sonic and Manic love to hear Mindy and Bartleby’s stories about Sonia before they met her. Though they are sad that the people who could tell such stories about them are all roboticized, so unless until a deroboticizer is invented there are parts of their early lives they don’t remember or fully understand that can simply never be told. In general, seeing Sonia with her old friends makes them feel Big Feelings. They’re glad one of them still has people from before in their life, but… it stings.

Where? Was the triplets’ grief?? Over their parents and guardians??? Where were the bonding moments about it? Where were the reminiscing scenes and Sonic explaining how he lost his old family twice and had to watch the first time? Where were the dramatic, heartwrenching confrontations with the roboticized guardians? FANFICS I NEED YOU

Manic likes to tinker with machinery when he’s bored, anxious, frustrated, guilty or even excited. Basically, he reaches a significant intensity of emotion and gets out the tools. He’s a fidgeter in general and always doing something with his hands - why do you think Farrell supported his impractical, attention-drawing hobby of drumming? A deroboticizor is a top priority ongoing project in the Resistance and if he’s in a really bad mental state, especially if he’s missing his dad, he can probably be found working tirelessly on one of the prototypes. Sleep, hunger, other people, the passage of time all mean nothing to him in that state. Sonic is the best at snapping him out of it because swap engineering with running and vigilantism and he essentially has the same coping mechanism, so he gets it in a way Sonia can’t. However, the sign that the hyperactive brothers are completely crushed and hopeless is that they lose their energy and motivation. If they’re notably still, slow and restrained in movement, they are Not Okay.

Sonia’s contrasting coping mechanism is to distract herself and her support system from her feelings with others’ business. That can manifest as criticizing someone else (constructively or destructively), wanting details on some aspect of their life, stoking drama and gossiping about them, or trying to fix their problems and/or make them open up about their issues. The last one is increasingly common since embarking on her character development. She’s always been a social butterfly and was a duck in water in the social perception, awareness and shrewdness-centric culture of the upper class; genuinely loves using those skills to help people so this is still in character on a good day; and is so at best charismatic and at worst overbearing that she can easily make you worry more about whatever she’s latched onto as a diversion, whether you agree with her stance on it or not. It takes a trained eye to catch when she’s actually neglecting herself. An indicator is that if her drive is the subconscious desire to avoid confronting her own feelings, she’ll be or become over time less tactful, patient and respectful of boundaries than usual, or resort to pettier topics in her desperation. Her brothers are the best at telling these behaviours apart from her healthy altruism and harmless theatrics and making her talk.

The medallions are royal family heirlooms. The rare, potent magical crystal they were carved from was a primary resource of Mobotropolis and the reason the capital was built there, their clean energy used for rapid magical/technological advancement that brought huge prosperity to Mobius, hence the paradise it was pre-Robotnik. Shards of them were incorporated in many royal regalia pieces. Through past political upheavals, disasters and thefts, most of the ornamental fragments have been lost. The medallions were made relatively recently to celebrate the dawn of a new golden age of art and culture; music was a key part of Mobian culture, so it was symbolically very fitting to give the rulers and protectors of the people instruments and weapons in one. It represented the ideal that they should give as much as they were able to take - even if they took up arms, they would at the same time have to preserve the life and spirit of Mobius through playing music. Hopefully that would tether them to their conscience. Plus, what’s more gloriously badass for a monarch than defeating your enemy by playing a rock cover of your national anthem? Robotnik’s relentless mining extracted the last of this precious resource years ago. He forgot the sustainable methods his predecessors used to harness the magic indefinitely because he can’t be bothered to understand magic, so he’s exhausted the power of every existing piece of the crystal besides the three medallions that have remained out of his grasp. He keeps trying to synthesize it, but you can’t synthesize ✨magic.✨ The sudden decline and loss of a longstanding reliable power source has made everyone reliant on Robotnik’s dirty energy. When the royal family retake their thrones, the medallions can either be given up and used to power Mobius or the very similar Chaos Emeralds used instead upon relearning the magic crystal energy harnessing techniques. Wouldn’t it be cool if discovering the Chaos Emeralds or recovering them from Robotnik was what turned the tide of the war? Sonic, Manic and Sonia going super and defeating Robotnik once and for all? Yes, yes it would.

Sonia is the oldest. Manic is the youngest. Sonic, as in the movies, is the middle child. Sonic and Sonia believe their birth order is important and she will never stop lording it over him, since before they got ahold of their birth certificates he’d assumed he was the oldest. Manic doesn’t care and wishes they would drop it.

Having been eager to help his uncle around the house and then needing to pull his weight in the Resistance, Sonic is a reliably good cook. He likes to learn more whenever he has the resources and time to experiment. Manic had no technical skills initially, not having had a kitchen and all, but is learning quickly under Sonic’s tutelage and has the sheer ingenuity to make a meal out of pretty much anything. Sonia can’t cook for shit. Sonic won’t give up on trying to teach her… but he’s certainly been tempted.

Sonic is afraid of fire due to the trauma of watching his old home burn down when he lost his parents (I put him at eight at the time, like Batman, and so he spends an almost equal number of years with his adoptive family and Uncle Chuck if he’s fifteen in the show). The smell of Sonia burning toast is enough to trigger flashbacks. Once Robotnik trapped the siblings in a burning building and he just froze, overwhelmed with terror; Sonia had to carry him to safety like a firefighter.

Follow-up with Tails.