Sonic Frontiers and the New Canon

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With the release of Sonic Frontiers, we’ve suddenly taken the deepest official dive into the world and history of Sonic since 2008. It was pretty much inevitable that the game would end up stepping on the toes of this story here or there. Can’t say that I expected it to be quite this much, but hey, it’s a small price to pay for some great new story content.

Frontiers will be vital to the canon of The Chaos Project moving forward. As such, it falls on me to adapt The Chaos Project as much as necessary to get the new information from Frontiers to fit in suitably. The timeline page on this website has now been updated to reflect these adaptations. There’s only one major change, but it’s a biggie. The timeframe of Zero the Hedgehog’s life, which was previously shown as “10,000 years BE,” has now been adjusted to “Tens of Thousands of Years BE.” Discussions of the early interactions the Lords of Chaos had with the planet Earth have similarly been adjusted. In accordance with this change, the following episodes have been retconned to the correct new number:

A bunch of typos in those episodes were also corrected, which is a nice bonus. It is, of course, important to talk about why. The “tens of thousands” number is obviously taken straight from Frontiers. It’s the timeframe in which the Ancients arrived on Earth. According to both Eggman and Sage, there was no fully developed civilization on the planet at the time. So why, then, would I go out of my way to force a thriving and futuristic human civilization into existence during that exact timeframe? The truth is, it’s not the Ancients that I’m worried about. It’s the Chaos Emeralds. Without completely overhauling the entire history of The Chaos Project, I saw that I had three options.

  1. Don’t change any numbers. The Ancients brought the Emeralds tens of thousands of years ago, and later, exactly 10,000 years ago, the humans discovered them. This would require a retcon to how the Lords of Chaos describe the creation of the Chaos Emeralds, which is technically only one change compared to the 10 I ended up making. This seems reasonable on the surface, but it raises a lot of questions, and quite a few dangers. How is it that a global human civilization, developing from nothing all the way to a futuristic society, never discovered the Emeralds in all that time? Same goes for the Chao, the Master Emerald, and anything else the Ancients may have left behind. All of it had to be completely undiscovered and undisturbed for nearly the entire length of history. There’s a further implication that Echidna society was built around the remains of the Ancients in what would become Angel Island. How is it that they discovered it, when the humans didn’t for so long? And the question that bothered me most: how do we explain the connection between Light and Dark Gaia and the Chaos Emeralds if the Chaos Emeralds aren’t native to Earth? Of course, there are potential answers to these questions, but I didn’t particularly care for any of them.
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  2. Retcon Zero’s time to be before the Ancients arrived. This also solves the “no civilization” issue—-by the time they arrived, the Chaos War had already wiped out society—without bringing up any of the problems from option 1. But this would be disingenuous to the plot of Frontiers in other ways. It requires that, as The Chaos Project theoretically already established, the Emeralds were created and used on Earth originally. Then they would have to be sent to the homeworld of the Ancients for some arbitrary reason, only for the Ancients to bring them back independently. Frontiers is pretty explicit about this not being the case. Sonic and Sage agree that the Emeralds are very specifically of alien origin. I would feel within my rights to claim that they were both simply incorrect about that, but again, it’s not the most enticing option.
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  3. Take the best of both worlds. Retcon Zero’s time to be roughly simultaneous with the arrival of Ancients. This allows me to say that, although the Emeralds were created on the homeworld of the Ancients, they were created for the purpose of being brought to Earth, which they were—soon to be discovered by the humans, perhaps almost immediately after the Ancients were destroyed, only for the humans to go to war over them. Obviously, this is the one I chose to go with. The issue here is the “no civilization” comment. Like for option 2, I have the ability to claim that Eggman and Sage were wrong about that fact. But unlike for option 2, I actually have a very good justification for doing so. Have a look.

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Do you see it? Let me zoom in for you.
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There it is. In this flashback, we see the Ancients piloting the Titans in one last effort to stop The End. And there, down on the surface of the planet, are lights. Manmade lights, spread across the continent, clear as day. There is no doubt there is an advanced, living civilization shown on that planet in this screenshot. Canonically speaking, this is the truth. What Sage and Eggman say elsewhere is simply their interpretation of apparently-incomplete data. They know how long ago the Ancients were here, and they don’t know of any civilizations that existed at the time, so the Ancients must have predated all of them. They simply don’t know about the human society that was already there, getting ready to wipe themselves out. (Quite unfortunately, I have already chosen to name these humans “the Ancients.” More on that later.)

Of course, there’s probably a simple explanation for all of this. They had a very pretty-looking model/texture made for Earth for the final boss fight, and they decided to use the same one for this earlier cutscene without actually considering the consequences. That would be a very “Sonic Team” thing to do. In any other context, I’d be happy enough to ignore this oddity for that reason. But since it works unbelievably well in my favor to use it as it’s presented, I’ve decided to do exactly that. And so, our good friends Gregor Robotnik and Nagashi Song are likely somewhere down on that planet at the very moment of that screenshot, waiting to make the discovery of their lives. So technically, they’ve now sort of appeared in an official Sonic game. Not something I was expecting to happen to any of my characters (who aren’t Johnny), but hey, it’s cool.

While this was the most relevant retcon made, there were a few other minor alterations that had to be dealt with. As mentioned earlier, there’s a slight issue with the fact that “the Ancients” is a concept which has already been mentioned in The Chaos Project in a way that is completely irreconcilable with Frontiers. This, of course, is technically the fault of Sonic Boom, since I was just using the concept they introduced, and Frontiers apparently had no issue with walking all over that concept. Regardless, in order to address this issue, the following change was made.

  • In S2 E5: Bygones, Sonic’s reaction to Sticks’ explanation of “the Ancients” is slightly more confused, forcing him to work out for himself that she refers to the ancient humans, and not the “Starfall Island ones.”

The rest of that episode, and all other references to the human Ancients, have been left unchanged. As much as I was hoping to reconcile the two different concepts of Ancients into one, that just wasn’t quite possible. Thus, there are now canonically two different civilizations which share that name. Those who don’t know about the Starfall Island Ancients, such as Lyric and the inhabitants of Bygone Island, will continue to refer to the humans as such. Those who do know about both (pretty much just Sonic, Tails, and Eggman right now) will probably refer to the ancient humans in a more specific way.

Also of note here is the existence of Sticks herself. As of Sonic Frontiers, she is, apparently, a canon character—one whom Amy knows personally and identifies as a friend she apparently hangs out with regularly. I am very frustrated by this decision. You don’t just pluck a character out of a dead universe and pretend like she’s always been here, that’s not how storytelling is supposed to work. You’re supposed to do what I did. Reintroduce the character. Let the audience know who the character is in this world, play off of their expectations a bit, maybe explain the differences in how this character met the main cast. Knowing Ian Flynn, the answer is probably, “Sticks appeared in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, so obviously everyone already knows her, because everything is canon.” Ugh. If we’re saying that this actually is the same Sticks from the Boom world, meaning that everyone knows about the existence of the Boom world, and that Sticks somehow freely has the power to travel to and from it, that’s a whole different can of worms that’s been opened, let alone the “Mario is canon” issue. Regardless, I don’t have enough information to make a proper judgement at this time, so, for now, I’ve chosen not retcon this particular aspect of the episode. If the Sticks mentioned in Frontiers is indeed Boom!Sticks, then it makes perfect sense for this new Prime Sticks to introduce herself to Sonic as if they had never met, and they can talk about the fact that he already knows a different version of her offscreen in the days they spend together. No retcon necessary. On the other hand, if Amy was referring to some Prime version of Sticks that we haven’t met yet, it is absolutely possible that this is just an Amy thing, and Sonic has no idea who she’s talking about. Again, no retcon necessary. In fact, for all we know, this could be a completely unrelated character who happens to be named “Sticks.” Until the day that Sticks actually physically appears in some definitively canon material, this episode will be left the way it is. Same thing effectively goes for Tangle. A mention of the character does not canonize the entirety of the comic series, so the comics will remain on the non-canon list until proven otherwise.

One other change was made, which was simply the result of a bad prediction.

  • In S3 E3: Impending Doom, Seraph’s cut-off reference to “the Titans of Starfall” has been changed to “the enemy of the Ancients.”

I’m vindicated in the fact that I predicted all that time ago that the inhabitants of the Starfall Islands were aliens, but, unfortunately, it didn’t end up making sense that the Titans themselves would be listed among things that make space travel dangerous. The End, on the other hand, fits the list quite nicely. How exactly Seraph would know about such things is a topic to be addressed in the upcoming episode.

That’s it. Those were the only changes made. Relatively few, all things considered. But there are still questions remaining. How do we explain the connection between the Gaias and the Emeralds? What’s the connection between the human Ancients and the Starfall Ancients? What does any of this have to do with Zero? The answers to come in future episodes of The Chaos Project.

On the topic of continuity, there is one other issue I’ve been avoiding, which I might as well come clean about here. As prepared as I was for a game like Sonic Frontiers to rip my canon to shreds, what I was not prepared for was Sonic Origins. It’s just a compilation of ports, games I’ve played at least a few dozen times each. How much damage could it do? Well, as it turns out, unlike Frontiers, which forced me to make just a few single-sentence edits here and there, Origins is asking me erase roughly half of Season 2, and rewrite it from scratch. If I were to do that, it would be about a year before I could make any more forward progress on the story, and the Season would be left far worse off for it. That is not even remotely close to worth my time.

The issue comes in the timeline placement of Sonic CD. Originally, it came out between Sonic 2 and Sonic 3. But the Sonic 2 story proceeds pretty contiguously from Sonic 2 all the way to Sonic & Knuckles, so there isn’t really any room to squeeze CD in the middle there. It’s always been a pretty binary choice, that CD either comes before 2 or after & Knuckles. Given the presence in CD of Metal Sonic, the model of Sonic robot that Eggman chose to stick with for the entire rest of the franchise, next to Silver/Mecha/Robo/whatever-you-want-to-call it, the bulky prototype model from Sonic 2, the choice seems obvious enough. You build the bulky prototype first, and then you slowly refine it into the highly specialized Sonic-like model that you keep. 2 comes first, CD comes last. It honestly surprised me to learn there was ever any real debate about that. But then Origins comes around, and aggressively insists that CD comes immediately after Sonic the Hedgehog 1—yes, “Sonic the Hedgehog 1“. I don’t get it. But this time around, there’s no dodging the issue in a way that still respects the newly-established canon.

The entire plotline of Season 2 depends heavily on the notion that CD comes after 2. The whole “Metal Sonic is actually Sonic” thing has no real impact without the added revelation that Metal Sonic met Tails before his transformation. This connection opens the dialogue between them. It gets Tails to see his point of view, and leads him down the rebellious path that it still affecting the story up to this very moment. It explains why Metal Sonic cared so much about Tails, why he saved his life, hence why Sonic saved Metal’s life, thus creating Cyber Sonic, whose dynamic with Tails once again depended entirely the ways his past lives knew Tails before his transformation. The Season completely falls apart without that one crucial detail. And so, even though I would have been happy to accept Origins as the definitive version of those Classic stories in any other circumstance, I was instead forced to demote Origins to a lower tier of canon—”it might have happened, just not exactly as you remember it/not in the same chronological order you remember it happening.”

And I think that’s everything! All appropriate pages and posts on this website have been updated to reflect the retcons and changes to canon made. With this, we’re ready to move on with the story! Part 2 of the Frontiers Celebration is just a few days away, so stay tuned!

-And until then, keep fightin’ the pain away! (The canon’s not quite in ruins)

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