State of Decay: The full story.

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Fucking shit I never expected this to be some sort of controversy.


So, three and half years ago, I posted the prologue to my third collab with my good friend :iconbattlebrothertherix:, and it was generally received very strongly. I think. Honestly I have no idea when the bullshit started. According to :iconkivathedcwizard:, he liked it the first time reading, and then less so after that, but that probably doesn’t apply to everyone.


State of Decay was probably the most ambitious thing I’ve attempted, and apparently the least well-liked? At least among my regulars anyway, which would be significantly less of a problem if I had more than 15 readers.


The story was inspired by a conversation I had long ago with :iconthatblue-bolt:, about his comic plan. The idea of a world conquered by a triumvirate of some of Sonic’s more active villains,while one key member of the FF had been out of action for a long time was intriguing.


When it looked like Bolt would be unable to produce said story, I took it upon myself to do something similar, but change a bunch of stuff up so that it was my own thing. This resulted in a shift in focus from Tails to Sonic, and the cause of his absence from a huge argument brought on by stress to a temporary death.


THat was the genesis of SoD. I wanted to do something dark and grim, and SoD was the idea that worked best for that. In fact, we deliberately made the opening of the prologue as generic and unchallenging as possible to make the twist at the end- that Sonic loses both the battle and his life to his foe- all the sharper.


Of course, I didn’t really have the guts to go that far with the grimdark and the result was that the FF had victory after victory and never really felt like they were forced onto the back foot, which somewhat hindered the story tonally.


For almost a year, Therix and I toiled over this story, worked out all the little twists and turns and laid the groundwork for a follow up that will now not be made because Therix left the fandom. And for a long while, it seemed to have been well-received by everyone around. Okay, so :iconprimalprince: hated it, and so did :iconmixedfan8643:, but the latter was the guy that told me I was an idiot for not liking his favourite comic, and he only read four chapters, sooooo I didn’t care about that, and honestly I wasn’t too worried about Reece not liking it. It’s not like we read and loved everything everyone did in that group. I wasn’t reading stuff people did for other fandoms at all,and never started. If this one wasn’t something he liked, I could honestly live with that. I didn’t want to retool something I thought the majority were enjoying to please the minority, and I thought he would like the things I was making outside of SoD, so losing one wasn’t bad.


Yeah, turns out basically a good 60-80% of my readers hated SoD. Or at least didn’t enjoy it. (Inaccurate number. Subsequent comments have shown that the opposite is true. The only ones that did this bullshitwere the ones I thought of as friends, ironically) Oops. Of course, you’d expect them to voice this concern before I got the wrong impression, buuuuut nope!


Apparently, they had decided that my interactions with Mixedfan were proof that I was a spiky asshole who refused to accept his own mistakes. Reminder, this is someone who at the time thought I was stupid because I said Mecha Sally is shit. Surprisingly, I was not the most courteous toward people who treated me like a moron because I called a spade a spade when it came to garbage preboot Archie stories (Though to be fair I'd rather deal with 2013 angry Mixedfan than modern-day condescending emoji spam Mixedfan). What a fucking surprise, right?



Before I go any further, I want to stress something, though. I do not hate this story. I never said that I did. I said I thought it had flaws. And it does. Of course it does. Every story has flaws. There are no perfect stories. Do I think SoD is more flawed than other things I’ve done? Yeah. It’s not a patch on the Uncivil Trilogy. I think when you finally get to see Uprising, the story that originally inspired SoD, in all it’s glory, it’ll blow SoD out of the water. Do I think it’s the worst thing I ever committed to digital page? Hell no. Most of my old work is garbage. I didn’t have a good story that got eaten by the hacker bullshit of a few years back like some of us, I just have some stuff that I’d delete if I could do it quickly.


Still, I want to address some of the flaws people have with this story so as to set things straight.



1) “It’s too long!”


Give me a fucking break, guys. Some of you are sitting pretty on 100+ chapter doorstops and I’m not allowed to do a 49-er? Fucking hell.

Besides, I didn't actively set out to make a long story. It took as long as it needed to.

2) “The 10 year gap was too big!”


I wanted the gap to be wide enough that there was an actual sense of despair among the FF. It needed to be big enough for everything to go to shit, but it’s stressed at several points that not everything went downhill immediately after Sonic died. Most of the bad stuff took 4-6 years to set in.



3) “Everything with Super forms is just like DBZ.”


Yes. This is true. Because Super Sonic is a total rip-off of Super Saiyan anyway. He even had green eyes originally. And if I didn’t add a spice of DBZ-style combat to them, then every fight with them would just be air-jousting, that is, characters flying into each other over and over… and that’s in DBZ too! It’s also boring. So I thought it would be a good idea to embrace it, just without the three hours of screaming before the punching starts. Super forms = Super Saiyans, enjoy your Dragon Ball.


(For the record, my only experience with DBZ is from Team Four Star, which notably trimmed the fat out of most of the series, and made some of the issues with the plot more acceptable, by roasting them (Freeza not knowing how long five minutes is, Goku being a dodgy family man, etc), leaving just the good bits. Definitely recommend watching it if you somehow haven’t already)


4) “You wasted Eggman!”


Eggman is boring. He is also a terrible villain. What was I supposed to do with a villain as pathetic as Eggman in this sort of story? The man that designed Mecha Sally 2.0 cannot be a smart character. The man behind the plot of Sonic Pinball Party cannot function in a story where the villains are supposed to be an actual threat. Could I have reworked him into an actual threat? Maybe. But given how much I loathed the Egg Beater in all its forms, there was zero chance of me giving Eggman anything like weapons-grade plot armour that would let him challenge post-rebirth Super Sonic, so the final battle would’ve involved Sonic easily ripping the mech open and depositing a half-mad seventy-year-old man on the ground. Not exactly a compelling finale, is it?



4) “You shouldn’t have used Scourge and Miles!”


Eh, I can kinda see a point here, but honestly, Miles had some of the better scenes, especially in the last part of the story. There was also the underlying issue of, in a story about the death and resurrection of Sonic, there has to be a way for Sonic to come back. I wasn’t going to have the villains do it, since that would firstly be pointless with Scourge there, and secondly, result in an extra unnecessary bit about the heroes getting Sonic back on their side.


Someone working for the heroes would have to be the one to bring him back, and tampering with things like resurrection is sort of crazy-unethical. Could Tails have done that? He was definitely smart enough. Would be be in-character for him, Rotor, or Nicole to do it? No. If someone was going to be delving into necromancy, it had to be someone on the neutral-evil side, and Miles was honestly the best fit for that, since all the crazy powerful Chaos and magic users that were good-aligned in the Archieverse seemed to be fucking dedicated to never doing crap to help (See: Merlin and the Brotherhood).


As for Scourge, he provided a useful dumb thug villain to harry the heroes while Metallix was scheming, as well as a motive for Miles’ involvement. Also, Scourge will always be an elephant in the room where Fiona’s concerned. You can’t really have her around without addressing his absence.



5) “You shouldn’t have used Metallix!”

Yes. I should’ve avoided using probably the best Sonic villain in existence as the big bad of a story where the villains are in the lead. What, would you have preferred Mephiles again? It couldn’t be Mogul, since that clashes with his plan of waiting until the competition dies. Couldn't be Naugus because he'd never work with Eggman. 



6) “Tails and Fiona’s argument shouldn’t have happened!”


Yeah, I’ll give you that one. That whole scene was us trying to cover our asses after we accidentally slipped back into writing Splintered Shadows/Violet Era Tails, and I caught it later on. We dun goofed, and instead of trying to sweep it under the rug, we decided to address it in-story and have Fiona point out his attitude problems. This didn’t sit well with some people, and I understand why. I’ll hold my hands up and say “My bad” to this one, but I’d have preferred doing this to chucking a retcon at it any day.


(There was no romance between Fiona and Miles, however. Fiona was Miles’ only surviving friend, but he couldn’t look at her, Sally, or Nicole without seeing shadows of the family he lost in his own world.)



7) “It should’ve been a reboot!”


No. God no. Reboots are a mammoth undertaking if you want to make them good. Everything has to be worked out. State of Decay was 49 chapters in length and that was heavily reliant on existing lore. If it had needed to establish the world as a whole from the ground-up, it could easily have been double that, because a bunch of characters and relationships and development would have to have been established before we even got to the twist, especially since most of it would’ve been making the characters exactly like they were in the comics anyway.



8) “Ken shouldn’t have been evil!”


This is one that I think came out of most of my readers having much less experience with pre-Flynn Archie, and mostly knowing Ken from Iron Dominion, although my main example as to why this was a believable jump was actually from Issue 209.


Ken is an asshole. Ian wrote him a boring lump of pudding with some secret angst but he was an asshole in basically everything before that. Dude’s first appearance was him abducting Sally because he wanted to bang her. He didn’t improve much until Ian did his good ol’ “carve the brain out with a spork, replace them with my vision!” trick on him, and even then, we have Issue 209.


In this issue, Ken tries to murder Nicole because she’s brainwashed. Sonic and Sally are in her mainframe at the time, so that will probably kill them too. Our hero?


Apparently he does it because brainwashing made him kill his friends, but here he is trying to kill his friends to stop it… Yeah, Iron Dominion sucks. Canon, though, so it counts.


Given that Ken’s primary motive during SoD was that he jumped ship and joined the Alliance before they could stomp the FF and kill or brainwash him, he believed he was saving himself and Sally from ending up the same way Sonic did, or end up like Fiona would shortly afterwards, I think it fits.



9) “Amy shouldn’t have died!”


Oh boy, this is the big one. I didn’t realise there would be so much outrage for the death of a character who ultimately has no function outside of stalking someone who doesn’t love her.


Amy was a character that, perhaps, should’ve gotten more focus. Examining what happens to someone who has dedicated her entire life to a childish dream that she would one day marry someone unattainable when that dream dies could be a fascinating story. I think that’s what Kiva was aiming for in his plan for Amy’s Insanity/A Red Mentality, before that got passed off to Therix and I, and ultimately died when Therix’s interest in Sonic did.


Amy built her entire life around the idea that she would one day be with Sonic. Even when she accepts Sonic and Sally’s relationship, it’s with the caveat that she believes Sonic will be hers in time. This is actually deeply disturbing. Amy is not healthy, mentally, and having her source of stability die on her? Things go wrong.


Of course, Amy ended up being less important, being captured in the first Death Egg raid and returning later on, only to get axed off. I didn’t handle that well. But I maintain my angle that she couldn’t recover. And if she wasn’t in the story, she’d have been killed during the timeskip anyway, because she doesn’t have any purpose outside of Sonic. She’d either get herself killed by Metallix trying avenge him, or stew in her rage for ten years only to have Sonic revived by Miles and immediately start trying to get Sally back. She was doomed. There wasn’t enough depth to her for her to survive the absence of Sonic, unfortunately. She needs him to function, and without him, shit goes wrong.


While some may take the route of having her grow past her need for Sonic, and I certainly intend for that to be the case if I use her again, in this case, we didn’t see much of a need to put focus on what we thought was a minor character.



Still, it’s a learning experience. I made mistakes with this story, sure. And I can improve on those mistakes, of course I can. But only if I know what they are, and only if I agree. The fact that people chose to hide their criticisms from me and just circlejerk about it via Notes and emails did no favours to anyone, did it?


So, what’s the result of this? A complete recanting of all my interest in the story, followed by it being deleted and me going back to the crappier stuff I used to produce long before that? Back to spilling all my ideas into RPs that drag on way too long and go majorly off-course? Back to crapping out dodgy stories like IP2.0?


No.


IP3.0 is probably done, though. I can’t exactly motivate myself to get it going again, which is a shame, because some of the later stuff would’ve been pretty good. I think, anyway, but a lot of the ideas I had then are now ones that I’m not so fond of, or I think could be better served in other works. Maybe I’ll make a post about what my plans for it were, I think some of it may surprise you.


Kiva assured me that he was interested in seeing UU continue, which it will soon, so that’s something. I’m glad I can finish it, and have people care, because I don’t think people want that to end off with all of our likeable characters in such a dodgy place.


I think people have gotten sick of good guy Miles, and that’s okay… because I have too. A character of his caliber really should be chilling in the Big Bad zone, not buddying up with the heroes. So yeah, I’ll still use him, but not so much in that capacity. Naturally this means that Scourge isn't going to be the big bad guy of any Suppression Squad/Moebius stories any time soon, but I don't think people will hate that too much.


Metallix will have his time in the sun, still. Probably the best thing to come out of Eggman’s nonsense anyway.


Am I sorry for SoD? No. Do I regret making it? No. Could I have done better? Yes. Are there things I would change? Yes, of course. But I had fun writing, some people had fun reading it, and if that’s the case, then I’m satisfied that I did what I set out to do. This was just to clear everything up, and make my own position understood. I wanted to explain why I did the things that pissed people off, and I think I succeeded in that. If my explanations don’t satisfy you, then there’s little I can do to help you further.


And hey, it’s not like I’m the only one that’s changed things around and done something different before. You all have. I just didn’t make something that was guaranteed to go down well, but then, if I was looking to make something popular, I’d have made something crap, riddled with Sonamy bullshit, generic plots, etc. I could’ve embraced the fandom take on Scourge and made him just a misunderstood angsty guy who totally loves Fiona for realsies. I could’ve played to the crowd and made something bland and forgettable, but instead I told a story that I wanted to tell, and broke from the norm for a while with it. In that respect, I won’t regret even an iota of what I wrote. And most of the readers enjoyed it anyway. And if that's the case, then I consider it a job well done. 


So yeah, love it or hate it, that’s my take on State of Decay. Hopefully, you’ll like what comes next.


(EDIT 22/08/2017: Added some extra stuff, corrected the number of people that dislike the story.
© 2017 - 2024 ToaArcan
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Bandincorperated's avatar
It's been a while since I came here, but I remember your SoD fanfiction, and I actually liked it very much.  Even after I lost interest in the Sonic franchise I actually remembered it as one of my favorites.  The only problem I really had was the under use of Eggman, as he is Sonic's most well known villain, so I feel he should be treated as such.