i have a question, as a fellow Orbot and Cubot fan, how do you feel about most recent content showing all egg man's robots as his children and them all being siblings? i like it for metal, belle, and sage, but i don't know about Orbot and cubot. also i get worried about shipping them? i totally shipped them before frontiers but after sage referring to them as her brothers idk how to feel. i joke that cubot is a "brother in law", but idk how long canon will allow us to ship them before it gets weird. anyway, just wanted to know your opinion! thanks!

I'm not the biggest fan of the fanworks showing Orbot and Cubot as siblings/Eggman's kids, personally. Nothing wrong with it, never was, just not my thing. As for the canon stuff...honestly? I don't think it's as big of a deal right now as people worry about.

When I first heard the news I hadn't seen all that far into Frontiers yet (it was only a day or two old at this point), so all I knew was from seeing someone i follow saying "well shit theyre canon brothers now guess im not shipping them anymore" out of nowhere. Which. Without any context. Did make me a bit afraid at first.

But later I saw what was actually said in game and realized...this is just some kid trying to learn what a family is supposed to be, and what her family would be compared to that, with her father figure basically going "yeah if you say so i guess". This is not Orbot and Cubot calling each other siblings. They aren't even there to call Sage their sibling. Sage is trying to connect the relationship of inventor/invention to parent/child, which, while functional sometimes, is not an accurate assumption 100% of the time.

I am an extremely firm advocator for how relationships involving sentient robots has very different rules to organic beings. A robot and their creator can have a parent/child relationship, sure, but they could also be a couple, siblings, friends, enemies, literally any relationship to each other should they choose. The parent-child dynamic could even be swapped, with the robot taking the parental role and the creator being their child (they've done this in the Sonic franchise already, see Mombot and Eggman from Sonic Boom). Same goes for multiple bots of the same maker. Partners, families, anything. And one robot seeing the creator as a dad doesn't mean the other robots made by that creator have to see them that way too. I feel like this especially applies to things on the scale of Eggman's robots. He's made thousands, if not millions or even billions of robots. At that point it's more like a whole race/species/community/something on that larger scale than one single family.

I also have a distaste for the "all eggman robots are siblings and are kids of eggman" thing especially when it gets used for ALL Sonic universes, not just the modern universe? For example, if you apply that to Boom, you get some...uncomfortable clashes with some canon relationships (see: Cutebot & D-Fect, Mombot, every time Cubot hits on another machine, probably other things I'm forgetting)

Anyway. Obviously I have a lot to say on the topic, but in the end...who cares? I don't see them as siblings, I probably never will, regardless of what canon does to 'em. None of my shippy art or writing will ever have them as siblings, and I assume the same of all that I reblog. I've been here on the cuorb/cueball train for years, other people have been here even longer than me. Definitely a whole lot longer than Sage's little throwaway 'brothers' comment in Frontiers, or Orbot's 'big bro' gag in Rise of the Wisps.

If those things make the ship feel icky to you when it hadn't before, and you don't wanna ship it now, that's fine. Sure, it sucks when a ship you love doesn't work out, but it's not your fault canon threw a curveball at you. Sometimes that ball hits you in the gut hard, makes you feel sick. You can hit it right back - choose to ship it anyway, via au or canon divergence or whatever else - but there's no shame if that ball hits you hard enough that you gotta sit out the rest of the game.

So, my final verdict?

Just do what you want. It's more fun that way.