Unfortunately, the second this team formed was when the Lanolin backlash started. You'd see posts complaining about "some Literally Who background OC" being "forced" onto a team next to Tangle and Whisper, who are basically the flagship characters of the IDW series. Tons of "bro thinks he's on the team" posts. Of course, as I've hopefully conveyed, Lanolin wasn't just a background character up to this point. She wasn't a star, sure, but she was an interesting supporting character who people like me had wanted to see more of for a while, and you can see how this is clearly building on her characterization in her previous appearances, however brief they may have been. Also: can I just say it was incredibly stupid seeing Sonic fans, of all people, take issue with the comics "forcing" three characters to be a team, as if that isn't something the games do all the damn time?

At Tangle's suggestion the new team is dubbed the Diamond Cutters, named for Whisper's old Metal Gear Solid-inspired mercenary team who died when they were betrayed by the shapeshifting Mimic the Octopus. Whisper is upset about this at first, and Tangle soon realizes it was insensitive and that she's reopened old wounds, but in a very sweet moment she explains that she just wanted to take up that mantle to remind Whisper that she still had people she could trust like her old team, worrying that the two of them had begun to drift apart. Granted it's kind of obvious that Whisper leaving and then coming back without actually doing much in her time away is the awkward result of a planned storyline getting aborted—Evan once brought up a hypothetical Tangle & Whisper 2 miniseries that never went anywhere on her Tumblr—and that this is just an attempt to at least do something with their separation to smooth over their character arcs. But I still thought it was nice. I digress.

Adding further fuel to the flame was the fact that Lanolin was made the leader of this new Diamond Cutters team right out the gate. You can complain about this all you want, but she's the only choice that makes sense. (Tangle will explain this out loud in #58.) Tangle can't be the leader because her whole thing is that she's childish and impulsive. She just wants to have fun and make friends. Whisper's a traumatized introvert who tends to bottle things up until she runs off to do something rash, like how she'd left the Restoration for a while to try and hunt down Mimic on her own. But Lanolin is the one with a commanding personality who takes their job seriously and is committed to the cause, to a fault. She's the one who actually seems concerned with the mission statement of the Restoration.

In terms of team dynamics, she's also their "straight man," the serious foil who offers exasperated reactions as she's dragged into crazy situations thanks to Tangle's stretchy prehensile lemur tail. This is comedy writing 101. Tangle and Sonic are also supposed to be rebellious characters, and so they need characters they can rebel against. Whisper can't be that because she's the reserved one, and also she's too charmed by Tangle, what with them being gay and all.

Maybe I just think it's funny when you give an opposites attract introvert/extrovert lesbian couple a third wheel girl with her own baggage who's like "what the fuck are you two doing" all the time. Who could say

Also, since Lanolin has no powers, she was given a Magenta Wisp affectionately dubbed Maggie as a partner to help her fight. Lanolin rings her bell collar (which is now a transforming Wispon) to resonate with Maggie's rhythm powers and attack with soundwaves. I would be remiss not to highlight this, because it's awesome.

Issues #57 and #58 really do go all out for Lanolin's main cast debut. It catches everyone up on her arc so far, it clearly defines her personality and her fun dynamics with the other characters, it gives her some badass action moments, and it even gives her a sweet heart-to-heart bonding scene with her new friends. Surely, all the pieces are there for people to like her.

And yet...

I mean, it's not that no one liked Lanolin at this point. It wasn't too dire yet. She wasn't as well liked as some other IDW-original characters, but the criticism at this point was only slightly worse than the usual complaints about the "OCs" that every new character is met with by default. And, at the risk of sounding gauche, let's be real: as you may have noticed from the way Adam draws her, there are two big reasons why many fanartists immediately fell in love with Lanolin attached to her ribcage. She had her fans. Her reception at this point was mixed, but not unsalvageable.

The new Diamond Cutters team had now been set up, but they hadn't truly been tested yet. The first two issues of the "Urban Warfare" arc focused largely on this new team dynamic, but after that they became intangible and invisible to the rest of the cast for a while due to plot reasons I won't get into, meaning that Sonic and his friends from the games did most of the work foiling Eggman's latest scheme. It wouldn't be long, however, before the Diamond Cutters faced a new challenge. And this is when fans really started to hate Lanolin.

Along came an octopus: The "Misadventures" arc

After "Urban Warfare," the comics would move on to the "Misadventures" arc from issues #62 to #68. This was a notable shift for the series where Ian and Evan both took turns writing shorter, more lighthearted stories to highlight a bunch of different characters in rapid succession. Tying the arc together, however, was a more serious ongoing subplot involving the Diamond Cutters and some of the comic-original villains.

One of those villains is Clutch the Opossum, a sleazy mob boss type character introduced in Evan's very first arc. His "legitimate business" Clean Sweep Inc. is a direct foil to the Restoration. Rather than rebuilding, restoring nature, and, y'know, helping people, Clutch uses his "cleanup efforts" as a cover to amass discarded Eggman technology and weapons and then sell them on the black market.

While on the subject, can I just say that the Restoration is one of the most compelling parts of IDW Sonic to me, especially in Evan's stories? It's easy to compare them to Archie's Freedom Fighters, but it's the differences between the two groups that really fascinate me. The Freedom Fighters were ostensibly environmentalist rebels trying to overthrow Robotnik early on, but because they were led by Sally, a princess, their true mission was to restore her family's kingdom. Once they did that 50 issues in, they went from being the rebels to being defenders of the establishment. The Restoration, though, is a totally independent network of environmentalists run by volunteers. They're just a bunch of people who want to make the world a better place, helping each other out according to their means. The Sonic games have downplayed their original environmental themes so heavily over the years that it's nice to see the comics bring them into sharper focus again, emphasizing both Eggman's impact on nature and the efforts of the good guys to restore it.

Anyway, obviously all of that is bad for Clutch's business. He can't flip Eggman tech the Restoration has already recycled. So he enlists the help of Mimic, who still wants revenge against Tangle and Whisper, and sends him in to undermine the Diamond Cutters from within, inventing the alias of the totally sweet and innocent Duo the Cat.

Yes, yes, it's a story about a suspicious new guy showing up and joining the team. Can we agree to give it a chance instead of reflexively being annoyed by the trope? First of all, the Diamond Cutters are part of a huge volunteer network whose door is always open, and Lanolin's wanted more backup since the start. And pretty much everyone working for the Restoration by this point in the comics is a comic-exclusive character who just showed up and said they didn't have much experience but they wanted to help, like "Duo" is doing here. If some guy showed up and was like "hello, I am ready to be the fourth member of Team Chaotix," that'd be absurd. But this? This makes sense. I also love how Mimic says exactly the right thing to win all of them over. He tells Lanolin he wants to help the community, he tells Tangle he wants to make friends and go on adventures, and then for Whisper he reels it in and says he's gonna take the job seriously and become someone reliable.

Also it's VERY funny to me for Mimic, who is both a grown-ass man and an edgelord murderer who plays with knives for fun, to pretend to be a sweet widdle cinnamon roll. He's just a little kitten with mittens! (Which he wears to hide his octopus suction cups.)

Mimic would make his first move against the team in the very next issue, on a mission to re-green Green Hill Zone—it's still a bit sandy ever since Forces—that Silver tagged along for. After goading Silver into showing off his telekinesis by picking up a bunch of huge boulders, Mimic gives him a little kick to the heel to disrupt his focus, nearly crushing Tangle, Whisper, and Lanolin in the process.

Some more action ensues as a giant Chopper Badnik busts through the rock wall and causes a flash flood. Since he wasn't able to kill the others, Mimic at least tries to get a consolation prize by letting the fish bot eat Silver, though he quickly busts out. Silver's not pleased.

The moment Lanolin defended Duo and scolded Silver is when the Lanolin hate started to gain more steam. Keep in mind: she just met both Duo and Silver. She barely knows either of these guys. (For that matter, she hasn't known Tangle or Whisper long, either.) But knowing her deal, who's she gonna trust more? The powerless rando who just wants to do good, like her? Or the telekinetic time traveler whose Jedi rock trick almost killed her?

Obviously, yes, we the audience know that Duo is actually Mimic, and so it might be frustrating to watch Lanolin fall for his innocent act. Some have suggested this might have gone down easier if we didn't know Duo was Mimic yet, but I firmly reject this. The same readers bitching about Lanolin would've been bitching about Duo being "another stupid OC" added to the comics if they didn't know he was Mimic from the start. The point is that we know there's a killer in disguise on the team! This is a literary technique known as "dramatic irony" that everyone was supposed to learn about while studying Shakespeare in middle school. We know about a danger that the characters are unaware of, building tension and drama as we wonder what's going to happen. Don't you like when a story has tension and drama? Don't you like when there's some story in a story?

There is one character who immediately suspects that Duo is Mimic after this incident, though, and that's naturally Whisper. And so later, she goes to Silver with her suspicions, and in the next issue the two set out to try and catch Mimic.

I really wanna point out how remarkably chill and good-natured Lanolin is about all of this. After being pretty stern with Silver last issue, here she's just like "okay haha cut it out bud" when he spends a day stalking Duo and tries to launch him off a balcony. She even cracks a joke about it! She doesn't want there to be a fight!

Whisper's not here to play, though. She knows that's the man who killed her old friends, and she's not about to let history repeat itself. Lanolin tries to talk things out and asks for proof, but Whisper just wants to get past her to get to Mimic, and it devolves into a scuffle.

This is a conflict where I can understand where both characters are coming from. Would it have helped to give Lanolin a bit more explicit interiority, to get more of her side and why she's so willing to defend Duo, to balance out our inherent bias towards Whisper, who we know is right? Maybe. But everything you need to understand her is already there in the story. I don't think the answer here is to dumb down the writing and have everyone spell out their every thought to make sure no one in the audience gets the wrong impression.

There was also some contention among fans because Whisper saw Mimic kick Silver while her mask was on. Back in the four-part Tangle & Whisper miniseries where they first fought Mimic, it was a plot point that her mask has a camera built in and it records everything she sees. Why didn't she just show Lanolin video proof to settle all this? Well, for one: because then there would be no story. But I also totally buy the eventual excuse that Whisper had stopped constantly recording everything because it was an unhealthy obsession, and she was trying to move on. This is a non-issue to me.

Amidst the chaos as Whisper and Lanolin trade blows, Mimic tries to run off and Silver corners him.

If you've played Sonic '06, you'll know how deadly Silver is with an arsenal of Havok Physics tables and chairs at his disposal. Mimic's just lucky he didn't get launched into a skybox.

Mimic expertly spins this turn of events in his favor, though, by allowing Silver to hurt him. The one thing Whisper thinks Mimic would never do, even if it meant blowing his cover. (Of course, we later learn that Mimic completely faked his injury, meaning Whisper was right about that.) She immediately feels guilty for all of this, believing that she really did falsely accuse her new teammate of being Mimic and get him hurt because of her paranoia.

I saw many readers who were frustrated by this issue and the fact that Mimic got away with all this. Yes, yes, Whisper's making rash decisions while trying to catch Mimic again after she just said she wanted to move on from her trauma, blah blah blah. But progress isn't always linear, and what's the point in having a shapeshifter be Whisper's arch nemesis if they never do a story like this? Where's the drama in a story where Mimic infiltrates the team and is ousted immediately? Of course, when one of Whisper's defining character traits is hyper-vigilance over Mimic, you also can't have her be completely oblivious to him. So she catches on very quickly, but then Mimic gaslights her and the rest of the team into believing she was just being paranoid, weaponizing Whisper's baggage and desire to move on against her. And then he sticks around as a ticking timebomb.

But as for Silver? Well, all of this is sort of a riff on his role in Sonic '06, where his strong sense of justice was used to trick him into going back in time to try and kill Sonic, thinking this would save the world. Here, he actually IS going after a villain, but the villain convinces everyone that this is another case of Silver jumping to conclusions and being overly confrontational. And so he takes the blame for the whole incident, and at Lanolin's suggestion he's kicked off the team for injuring Duo.

Yep. This is it. After all this buildup. This is what Lanolin did to become the most hated IDW Sonic character online for like a year. She got tricked by The Guy Who Tricks People and was grumpy to Silver a couple times because of it. That's it.

Do I have to spell out that it was all just your typical fandom misogyny where people are a million times harsher towards female characters (and creators—do not get me started on how people treat Evan), or does that go without saying?

Let's stop and imagine if there was a male Sonic character with some of Lanolin's flaws. Someone who questioned Sonic's methods, with a no-nonsense personality that leads him to butt heads with the other heroes. Someone trying to do good in his own way, but who isn't the most affable and who can be a bit antagonistic, especially when his strong convictions are taken advantage of by a manipulative villain. Hopefully it's not too hard for you to picture this, because many of these traits could describe Knuckles, Silver, and most of all the golden boy Shadow. People adore these traits in a male character! Fans will bend over backwards to hype them up, woobify them, and justify their every action, even when they do far worse than Lanolin ever did.

But Lanolin is a woman, so we got to see endless posts about how she's a nasty bitch who made Silver look bad and she deserves to die. There's nothing fandoms hate more than a woman who gets in a man's way. And from the fans with merely internalized misogyny, we got posts about how she looked so cute and nice at first, but actually she's bossy and rude and creates problems and that's bad! God forbid a female character have a personality! God forbid a story have conflict! Why did the writers not simply make all the good guys nice to each other all the time? Are they stupid? If you're not careful Lanolin might bring out readers' repressed anger towards their mothers for the times they got grounded growing up!

Another big part of the problem here is the way people engage with stories like this. (Especially young men in their teens or early 20s.) They treat it like it's not a story with ups and downs, but a sport. You root for your favorite characters, and when bad things happen to them that means you're losing. It gets even worse when powerscaling is involved, which you see all the time in discussions of shonen manga. When a character wins a fight or does something cool, they're proving they're the GOAT and moving up in the power rankings. The second they lose a fight or do something foolish, or even when they simply don't do enough cool shit in a given arc, that means they were always a fraud. Out come the Potential Man memes! And if you're a fan of a fraud, that makes YOU look stupid for rooting for them! There are a lot of readers who only seem to want the IDW comics to be a vehicle for their favorite characters to rack up feats and nothing else, and so people who stan Silver in this way got really mad when he was chewed out by Lanolin, because it made him look weak. She emasculated him.

This is only exacerbated by the fact that many fans aren't really reading the comics and getting the whole story, but rather just seeing out-of-context moments posted by fans talking about how their faves have aura or how so-and-so is washed or whatever. Do you remember the way people were talking about Jujutsu Kaisen or My Hero Academia when their final battles were coming out, getting the story mostly via grainy untranslated manga pages leaked to Twitter? It's like that. When Sonic has so much shonen influence, it's perhaps inevitable that that attitude will bleed over, but that doesn't make it any less tiring.

I also want to point out that, for all the anger over Silver getting done dirty... he rebounded right away. He talks stuff out with Blaze, and they decide to go on more adventures together. Getting kicked out of the Diamond Cutters just freed him up to hang out with the character most people prefer to see him hang out with! This happens immediately afterwards in the backup story of the very same issue!

It was obvious that Lanolin, too, would get her resolution for this incident. She'd eventually have to learn the truth about Mimic, and probably apologize for not trusting Whisper and Silver, and they'd all hug it out. These comics are rated for age 9 and up. It's not rocket science. But this resolution didn't come immediately, so fans acted like it would never come at all.

It did, though, once we got through the next arc.

The climactic "Phantom Riders" arc

The gist of Evan's excellent "Phantom Riders" arc (#69 - #75) is this: legitimate businessman Clutch has approached Jewel about helping the Restoration expand their operation worldwide using Clean Sweep's resources. To do this, he helps them set up a big charity Extreme Gear race, the Clean Sweepstakes, where all proceeds will go to the Restoration. Jewel is relieved to have the support, though of course we, the audience, know that Clutch is secretly a bad guy working with double agent Mimic (and now also Surge and Kit) to take over the Restoration and kill Sonic and friends. Sure enough, Sonic, Tails, and Amy's machines are all sabotaged and break during the qualifying round, and while they don't get hurt they do get kicked out of the event. Later, they're approached by none other than Eggman, who calls a truce because he hates Clean Sweep profiting off of his tech. He gives Sonic a modified Extreme Gear board that will also disguise him as the Phantom Rider, allowing him to disrupt the race as a distraction while Tails and Amy sneak around and try to figure out what's really going on with Clean Sweep.

Like I said up top, the arc is a nod to Kamen Rider, right down to the transformation technology being developed by the villain. Beyond the allusions, though, it's just so much fun to see Sonic take on more of an antihero role, stirring up trouble as the heel of the race for the greater good. He's just doing what he thinks is right, regardless of what the world thinks of him. In that regard it's similar to the antagonistic role he ultimately takes on in Sonic and the Black Knight, one of the fandom's go-to favorite stories from the games. And in a deliciously ironic turn of events, Surge attacking the Phantom Rider and scaring him off from the race makes her look like a hero to the crowd while Sonic looks like the villain. There's so much to love here.

As for Lanolin, she and the Diamond Cutters are working as referees for the event, meaning she gets to play the role of the lawful good hardass pitted against Sonic, who's not trying to put anyone in danger, per se, but he inevitably does by disrupting the race. This did nothing to ingratiate her towards fans coming off of the "Misadventures" arc, but it's a role that she fills well.

To make matters worse, Mimic soon decides to use his shapeshifting to pose as the Phantom Rider and attack the Diamond Cutters and the racers, then reveals the identity of the real Phantom Rider, framing Sonic for his misdeeds. Tangle and Whisper are there when Sonic is unmasked and are completely shocked by this apparent betrayal, but Whisper later figures out that there were two Phantom Riders, and that the one who attacked people was riding a different board than Sonic. They decide to get to the bottom of all this... but don't tell Lanolin anything. She hasn't been taking her inability to stop the Phantom Rider very well, and now Mimic is egging her on further and trying to drive a wedge between her and her friends...

A lot more happens that I won't recap here, but by the end of issue #74 Sonic is outed as the Phantom Rider to everyone else. Lanolin is furious, believing that Sonic should be held accountable for his actions (including the ones Mimic framed him for, since at this point she still doesn't know there were two Phantom Riders).

I will, however, point out that Lanolin is quickly able to set this aside when Sonic points out that people are in danger, since Clutch has set his giant airship base on a crash course for Central City after his crimes were outed to the world. They have to stop that crisis first, and then they can work everything else out. Once again she proves to be WAY more level-headed than critics make her out to be, even as Mimic actively tries to get her to turn on Tangle and Whisper.

And so we arrive at the climax of the arc, the extra-long milestone issue #75. It's a hell of an issue. Maybe my favorite issue of the whole series so far, full of action and twists and moments for so many characters to shine. Lanolin isn't in it much, but she has two pivotal scenes. First, early in the issue...

Yes, after being so meticulous about not blowing his cover, the truth about "Duo" finally comes out because a panicking Clutch calls him his real name on the radio. A lot of people found this anticlimactic and lame after all the buildup, and I understand why. The Diamond Cutters had completely given up on suspecting him of anything for like ten issues, and then they find out the truth out of nowhere. But I also feel like a little slip-up on someone else's part feels like the most realistic way for this to go. I don't think it's amazing, but I can live with it when the rest of the arc is killer.

Lanolin's face when she learns the truth and realizes that she's been defending Mimic this whole time, though... man. It says a thousand words.

Later in the issue, we rejoin the Diamond Cutters as they pursue Mimic, who gets away into the stands. The audience of the race is in danger as everything falls apart around them, and in comes Lanolin for her big hero moment.

I really like this scene. Lanolin knows she's fucked up, she knows that she's turned into kind of an asshole, but at the end of the day she's doing everything she does because she wants to help people. Tangle and Whisper get that, because they're her friends, and they also get that they've fucked up, too. None of them handled this whole situation great. Now's not the time to play the blame game. Now's the time to save people.

The arc ends with Clutch's ship destroying the Restoration HQ hidden in the ruins of Emeraldville on the edge of the city, as redirecting it there was the least bad option in this particular trolley problem. It's a bittersweet victory, but it's one where EVERYONE comes together to help in this crisis and make sure no one's hurt, with Sonic's unflinching optimism leading the way. As Tangle, Jewel, and Lanolin put it in the end: the Restoration was never about the cool secret base. It was about the people. Anyone can be a hero, and we can do great things when we work together. That's what it's all about.

A great ending to a great arc! And Lanolin got to say her piece and apologize. So that's that, right? We're all good? Hold on, I'm being told there's an epilogue issue.

Uh oh.

Exit Lanolin, stage left

Evan's "Phantom Riders" arc is immediately followed by a cooldown issue from Ian where the cast assesses how things are going. For me, the most relevant scene is the one where the Diamond Cutters finally talk things out.

I do not like this scene.

The first to break the ice is Jewel, and she declares she's quitting her job as leader of the Restoration. She takes the blame for trusting Clutch, which ultimately destroyed their home base and almost got everyone killed. In response Tangle picks her up with her tail and quite literally holds her like a baby and tells her that it's okay because we all make mistakes and learn from them. Clutch is the bad guy here for tricking her. It's not Jewel's fault.

Then Lanolin speaks up.

God, there's so much that rubs me the wrong way here. Jewel isn't at fault for getting tricked by Clutch, but Lanolin is at fault for getting tricked by Mimic? She has to offer this big apology for it where she calls herself a liability, on top of the big apology she already gave Tangle and Whisper last issue?

There's no sense that Lanolin was wronged here. That anyone has anything they should apologize to her for, like Tangle and Whisper not telling her what they knew about the two Phantom Riders. Instead SHE has to apologize to THEM for being lied to! Whisper never has to admit that she could've handled the Mimic situation better, that she didn't have to pick a fight with Lanolin and escalate things. What happened to her saying she'd made mistakes too last issue? No, it's all on Lanolin's shoulders for defending Duo. No one acknowledges that Lanolin is just as much a victim of Mimic's trickery as everyone else, that he was totally gaslighting her, that this wedge between them was the product of his manipulation. Instead we get Silver glaring at her and Tangle rolling her eyes, and Lanolin meekly shrinking herself down into a smaller role that'll be out of everyone's way and leaving the team in penance. No one asks her to stay. They immediately move on to talking about other things. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

After this issue, the Diamond Cutters are no more. Lanolin and Jewel decide to stay behind and rebuild Emeraldville. So, sure, Lanolin technically still has an unresolved plot thread, but she's been kicked off the team and given a non-combat job away from the rest of the cast. Given it's been over a year and we haven't heard from them again, right now it really just feels like they sent her to a farm upstate.

The thing that really kills me is that Ian would give Whisper, Tangle, and Silver their final battle with Mimic a mere three issues later. Lanolin will be back at some point, but it's so brutal that she's yanked off-stage right before the climactic battle that would've given her closure with Mimic and a chance to right her wrong. And that battle is extremely final, because it ends with Mimic killing himself. After getting his ass kicked he blows himself the fuck up at the last second before Whisper can finish him off. That's certainly one way to get around the moral dilemma over whether or not Whisper should kill him. Yeah, yeah, nobody stays dead in comics, but this feels like a very clear statement that they're done with Mimic. In a bottle, I think it's a good issue, and a fitting conclusion to Whisper and Mimic's years-long rivalry that will hopefully allow her to finally move on. But it's also an issue about Whisper embracing the power of friendship and teamwork, how her friends are her strength rather than the liabilities Mimic tries to make them out to be... where Lanolin is very deliberately excluded. Friends aren't a liability, unless that friend is Lanolin.

Rereading the whole arc front to back really drives home that Lanolin's apology in issue #76 doesn't feel like it's written for the characters in the story. It doesn't even feel like it's about the events of the story, because Lanolin barely did anything wrong. It feels warped by the misogynist fandom response. It feels like an apology written to try and appease all the fans who'd been hating her online for two years, who celebrated that that annoying bitch who was mean to Silver was finally gone.

The trend I'm worried about: Is all the fandom discourse influencing the comics?

Monthly comic books are basically always an exercise in throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Back in the day you'd end a character's debut story by breaking the fourth wall and asking readers to send in letters with their opinions. Do you want to see more of this character? Do you hate them and want them to die? Write in and tell us what to do! Perhaps the most famous example of this reader feedback-driven storytelling was when DC asked fans to decide whether or not the Joker would kill Jason Todd, following a couple years of declining popularity for the character. A majority of readers said to kill him, so they did, and he stayed dead for 17 years. These days, the sentiment usually isn't expressed so bluntly, but it still exists to some extent. Many comics still have letters pages, sure. But going through official channels isn't even necessary when the creative team can just glance at social media to see what their most vocal readers think.

Look. I don't want to speak for Evan or Ian or assume their intent. They're both talented writers and cool people. I'm not here to point fingers at any one person, and I have no idea what conversations are happening behind the scenes. I don't want to be an accusation, but rather an expression of concern. Speaking as a fan, I worry that the hostility on Twitter may be influencing the direction of the IDW comics, and that this goes beyond just Lanolin. Ian has outright admitted certain aspects of his own stories were based on fandom feedback (Tangle and Whisper became mainstays and got their own miniseries because fans loved them, the Deadly Six haven't appeared again since "Zeti Hunt" because fans disliked them, etc.), which is pretty normal. But what happens when that feedback has morphed into constant anger over every little thing?

I first started to really think about this when Evan started altering her art style in 2024. Again, I won't jump to conclusions about her motives here. Your art is naturally going to evolve over time. It happens to all of us. It's entirely possible she decided to change things up of her own accord, or she wanted more consistency with other artists. Or maybe it's just tied to her new job doing promo art directly for Sonic Team. That's all totally fine!

But, well, when I saw certain fans ripping her art apart on Twitter for not looking exactly like how Sonic Team's Yuji Uekawa draws the cast, and then she went and changed her art style to more closely match it... as someone who already liked how Evan drew Sonic characters, it worried me. Her more recent stuff is still all fantastic, because this is Evan we're talking about, but I liked the way she drew facial expressions before. I liked the way she gave Sonic's quills this believable three dimensional volume. She made him feel like a character with some physicality to him, while also being cartoonishly expressive, like he's sculpted out of clay. These weren't flaws that needed to be ironed out to me, these were unique strengths of her version of Sonic.

Evan isn't the only artist on the book to be doing this, either—go compare how Adam drew Sonic in issue #50 to how he looks in #77 or the "Spring Broken" special.

Like Evan, in 2024 Adam was suddenly drawing way more "on model," typically cheating Sonic's spines so that they appear more flat and only three of them are visible at any given time unless we're looking at him from behind. Critics had been nitpicking how Evan and Adam drew Sonic's spines for some time on Twitter, framing their ability to render them with 3D volume as a weird error, with some even accusing them of tracing the models from the games. And then, one day, the way they drew Sonic completely changed.

In general it seems that the franchise has begun favoring artists who can match the Uekawa models as closely as possible since 2024. Maybe you've noticed this just from scrolling down this post and seeing the art change over time. And, again, they're doing phenomenal work! This is not a dig at these artists! They kick ass! But when everyone's trying to draw the same, who's drawing what feels way more interchangeable than it did just a few years ago. And when I literally see some of the IDW artists directly engaging with people endlessly nitpicking their art on Twitter to try and defend themselves or explain their decisions, it's hard for me not to assume all that nitpicking over muzzle curves and eyebrow shapes and quill lengths is a factor here.

On the writing side, the arc lengths have been varying wildly in recent years as fans complain about them being too long or too short. Whatever length the arcs currently are is always, inevitably, the wrong length. Some fans also reacted negatively to Belle the Tinkerer and her prominence in the comics a few years back, and then she was moved to the sidelines for a while. It took about 30 issues for her to have a major role again. And, y'know, I can write that off as a coincidence. She wasn't supposed to be the new star, she was just a character being used as the connective tissue for that series of otherwise mostly unrelated arcs. She got some closure, and now she's more of an occasional supporting player. It didn't necessarily feel like Belle was being downplayed due to backlash, it felt like that was always the plan.

But now we've had the much more pronounced backlash to Lanolin, because she's a female character who dared to have unflattering character flaws that created tension in the story. It felt like they wanted to do so much more with her, especially if you were looking at the little sketch comics Adam was posting to social media to flesh out her character further. And then they just... didn't. Because people got annoyed by the arc where Mimic tricked her and the team, and she took all the heat for it. Sure, characters get shuffled into and out of the story all the time. It's natural for a series with such a big cast. We'd had a lot of Lanolin in the span of about 20 issues, and it makes sense to move her aside for a while to let other characters have the spotlight. But it really does not feel to me, as a reader, that her exit was a natural end point for her arc with the Diamond Cutters. It feels like a sudden course correction after people bitched about her on Twitter.

This is especially true because it feels like the new Diamond Cutters team never got their big win together—or hell, even a catastrophic enough loss to feel like a major event. They helped in "Urban Warfare" and "Phantom Riders" but weren't really the focus of either arc, and beyond that most of their time together was spent on the Mimic plot. (Also there was a whole thing about Surge and Kit joining the Diamond Cutters and having a rivalry with Whisper in #67, and then they never really interact again after that? Again, it feels like plans changed.) Lanolin never really got to do much. And maybe I'm totally wrong, and it was always the plan to just use her for these arcs, disband the team, and come back to her down the line. But can you blame me for thinking that it wasn't?

It just worries me that this is becoming a trend. It feels like many unique traits of the comic's visual identity, its cast, and its narrative style are being sanded away to try and please a vocal minority of angry fans on Twitter who were never going to be happy in the first place.

Sonic Twitter is hell, the endless IDW discourse is its lowest circle, and the algorithm is making it worse

Sonic fans, as a group, are impossible to please 100% of the time. The Lanolin discourse was but one small part of the constant discourse that overshadows the comics on Twitter, due to the fact that there are many different flavors of Sonic fan who all want different things.

Fans have wildly opposing takes on art styles, story lengths, the proper amount of dialogue, and which prior Sonic stories are the gold standard the IDW comics should be taking inspiration from. There are fans angry that their favorite ships haven't been canonized yet, and fans who get angry at even the slightest suspicion of shipping bait. There are fans who want an actual story with character drama, and fans who just want hype moments and aura for the sake of powerscaling arguments. There are fans like me who consider the comic-original characters one of the main draws. There are older fans still upset that the Archie cast is gone, who won't give the new characters a chance. There are also a lot of fans who hate the idea of the comics including any characters other than the game cast, period.

And, of course, there's the East vs. West purism. The fans who don't just have their preferences, as we all do, but who have to proclaim that every Sonic story written in Japan is good and every Sonic story written elsewhere is bad. The fans who spend all day debating the nuances of the game characters and the way they're drawn down to the tiniest details, based on cherry-picked examples from fan translations, manuals, concept art, and random trivia factoids gleaned from messaging Naoto Ohshima on Twitter, and then get mad when the comic crew aren't following Sonic Twitter's current consensus on how the characters are "supposed" to be portrayed to the letter. (You know, even though key members of Sonic Team are personally approving every line of dialogue and every single panel of the comics through multiple extensive rounds of rewrites.) Each word that comes out of Sonic's mouth has the potential to start a days-long argument over whether or not he would say that and whether or not the IDW comics are betraying Sonic's Japanese spirit every time new preview pages drop. Just look at the sprawling debate the DC crossover sparked over whether or not Sonic could be described as "cocky," based on semantic arguments over the specific wording of Google's definition of the word and whether or not Sonic's cockiness is an invention of those dirty Western adaptations, even though that is literally a word head of Sonic Team Takashi Iizuka has used to describe Sonic.

In case I need to say this bluntly: there's nothing wrong with having preferences or criticizing the comics. I've criticized parts that didn't quite land for me before, and will continue to do so. I'm using this very post to explain how I'm not satisfied with the current trajectory of Lanolin's arc and her exclusion from the final showdown with Mimic. I also found the "Zeti Hunt" arc and like half of the Classic Sonic comics to date underwhelming, I had issues with how Ian characterized Amy early on, I've always thought leaning into the question of whether or not Whisper would kill Mimic was odd when she obviously can't in a kids' book, I thought the recent arc with Lunar felt rushed due to being crammed down into three issues, etc. etc. Yes, sometimes I even roll my eyes a little at an Ian Flynn lyric quote that sounds a little clunky. You can criticize these comics in a level-headed way! That's fine and good and normal! But there's a difference between good faith criticism or liking some other Sonic thing better, and obsessive hate reading and harassment.

Perhaps one of the core problems is that many fans don't treat the IDW crew like human beings, but rather like Sonic content machines.

I've seen people say the most obnoxious shit directly to them on social media. I've seen them get yelled at over decisions they had nothing to do with. I've seen people praying for IDW to go out of business and for the crew to all lose their jobs. I've seen people pick apart the art of random panels of comics from 5+ years ago to an insane degree just because not every last panel is perfect, as if the artists on monthly American comic books aren't infamously overworked and underpaid, frequently giving themselves wrist issues and burning out at a young age for a job where they don't even get fucking health insurance. I've seen people harass Evan for delays, acting like her drawing personal art is directly responsible for issues she's not even working on getting pushed back a couple weeks. I've seen people go on Ian's personal Q&A podcast, which he does because being a freelance writer doesn't pay the bills on its own, just so they could berate him for an hour. I've seen people say they wish he would die! I've seen people say shit so vile and bigoted I don't even want to repeat it here! All this over a licensed video game tie-in comic for kids! And if the IDW contributors tell these bullies to fuck off or block them, then they just get called "unprofessional." Just shut up and keep churning out Sonic content to my exact specifications! It's a nightmare.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that these people getting mad on Twitter are but a tiny fraction of the millions of people around the world who like Sonic. The fandom also has its many good qualities. People who are actually enjoyable to be around. Artists and musicians and fanfic writers and cosplayers and speedrunners. The people who show up and sing along at the live concerts. We have a whole annual online expo primarily focused on Sonic fangames because the scene is so vibrant. Fans figured out how to recompile Xbox 360 games for PC just to create an unofficial port of Sonic Unleashed, for Christ's sake! And, yes, the IDW comics themselves have tons of fans, as evidenced by the huge outpouring of love and excitement that Tangle and Whisper saw when they were announced as playable racers in CrossWorlds, or when they received voices for the Chaotix Casefiles audio drama podcast. The difference between these top YouTube comments and the tenor of conversation on Twitter are night and day.

But, as is always the case, the loudest and most argumentative voices are the ones most likely to chime in to The Discourse, while the more level-headed people mind their own business. I suspect this will only become worse on Twitter as more and more of the reasonable people in the fandom leave for other platforms like Bluesky or quit microblogging altogether, leaving behind only the discourse addicts on Twitter as its Overton window shifts further and further right every day.

If the Twitter algorithm knows you like Sonic, then it will inevitably shove that discourse in your face, because it favors drama posts and quote retweet arguments over everything else. It will show you random vagueposts and takes out of context to make you click through and go "what the fuck is this person talking about" because it is literally tracking every second you spend trying to figure out what the fuck that person is talking about and marking it down as the type of thing that will keep you looking at Twitter. In the olden days there were always haters on places like /co/, Something Awful, or certain fan forums, but you could just not visit the websites with communities you didn't vibe with and ignore all that. Now that people are congregated on central "town square" social media sites, random strangers' comments you otherwise never would have seen are elevated to a pressing concern. After all, quote retweeting a bad take to dunk on it is still helping it spread. And so one random person's nitpick gets picked up by the algorithm and becomes a take that every Sonic fan has to debate for days, and everyone just gets angrier and angrier about it, with the members of the IDW crew who still post there often getting dragged into the argument as well. On the flip side, if you do like the comics and say so on a public Twitter account, you're just spinning the roulette wheel to see if the algorithm will end up showing your post to haters who just want to quote retweet you to argue about how Ian Flynn is the devil. Truly, the trolls have never been better fed.

Seriously: I cannot overstate how much Twitter, its algorithm, and its always-on quote retweet function are contributing to this. It's inherently a breeding ground for arguments where the most immediate, most extreme responses are encouraged. I've been on Bluesky for a few years now, as have most of the IDW crew and the Sonic news accounts and whatnot, and I never organically encounter this shit there. There are also whole tags and entire blogs dedicated to "anti-IDW Sonic" nonsense on Tumblr that I just don't have to see because no one I follow interacts with those people, and so their posts get like a dozen or so notes and then fade into obscurity for the rest of time. Curated feeds! Who'd've thunk it! Oh, would you look at that? A study specifically showing that prolonged exposure to Twitter's algorithm makes people more conservative. Gee, I wonder why things are so miserable and angry there? @grok, what do you think about this?

Much of this behavior isn't new or unique to the modern day Sonic fandom. I already made comparisons to how people talk about shonen manga, and we've all seen stupid arguments about localization, and fandoms have valued the wellbeing of fictional characters over the people who created them for as long as the concept of fandom has existed. But I think there's one key element that makes it worse here with Sonic, the real reason why so many Sonic fans seem constantly upset even though the games, movies, comics, and more are all generally considered to be doing great:

Embarrassment.

Sonic being the butt of so many jokes online for decades has really done a number on a lot of fans. When you've tied so much of your identity directly to the Sonic brand, when that's your "thing," when it's all over your profile, it's easy to feel that the performance of said brand reflects directly on you, the fan. You've always believed that Sonic is cool, actually, and all the people making fun of the series all these years just don't get it. But you NEED them to get it. You NEED the series to prove how cool and badass and peak it really is, because if Sonic is cringe, then you're cringe for being obsessed with it. The current state of Sonic thus becomes a pressing concern that you have to post about every day. This is why you so frequently see fans around the ages of 16 to 22 (the age range when people online are most likely to be needlessly cruel, in my experience) get so worked up about these things, freaking out over individual lines of dialogue in the comics that sound a little corny or remaining bitter over self-deprecating jokes that the official Sonic Twitter account made a decade ago. See also: the outrage over Sonic's Fall Guys clone for iPad babies doing a Care Bears collab. They're embarrassed. They have an inferiority complex. They're still trying to prove Egoraptor wrong in their heads. When the IDW comics focus on the mostly female comic-original characters and their feelings, it means that it's a cringe gay furry comic for girls instead of the cool shonen bro series they want it to be.

There's a desire among many of these fans to have an authoritative voice from Japan who can settle the debates and tell people what the "correct" version of Sonic is, and for everything else to fall in line with that. A common pick is original character designer Naoto Ohshima, who's active on Twitter. One time he said he considers Sonic's footwear to be boots with the tops rolled down, for example, and suddenly fans on Twitter started calling them boots as often as possible. This can't just be a neat trivia factoid, as it might've been decades ago. Everyone has to signal to each other that they're not fake fans or "larpers," they're part of the in-group that gets every minute detail of "the true vision," this pure platonic ideal of the original Japanese Sonic that's been diluted by those damn "westoids" and adaptations that just don't get it and spread incorrect ideas about Sonic to the masses, and that if we can RETVRN to that Japanese purity by following all the rules then the world would finally understand just how cool Sonic is supposed to be, and how cool the fans are by extension for liking it. At worst, this devolves into a sort of corporatism where fans act like the misbehaving western contributors need to be disciplined by daddy Sega, even though Sega has already been micromanaging everything for years. (I've seen angry Sonic fans on Twitter try to snitch tag Sega when they're annoyed by something someone on the IDW crew said or did.) If only the Sonic franchise was MORE tightly micromanaged by its corporate overlords, then surely everything would be better! That's how it works, right?

Even fanworks have become much less transformative because of this wave of purism. This stuff is still out there, but compared to the '00s or the 2010s you're less likely to run into fans offering their own wildly diverse takes on Sonic through super indulgent OCs, AUs, redesigns, and the like, especially on Twitter. Nowadays it feels like the new generation of fanartists are mostly reaching for a perfect platonic ideal of Sega's Sonic, proving to each other that they "get it," rather than taking liberties with the source material, or even riffing on some of the weirder alternate adaptations that already exist. (The only exception, somehow, is the haunted game cartridge creepypasta Sonic.EXE, which refuses to die.) It's like everyone is just building a portfolio for Sega to hire that man. Artists are frequently obsessed with staying "on model" and trying to draw like Uekawa or the Sonic CD opening FMV, focused on getting all the little details exactly right. Fangames are trying to look and sound like Sonic Mania, rather than embracing the variety of the series and its potential for interpretation. Why can't everything just be exactly the way it's "supposed" to be?

But man, fuck all of that.

So what's my point here?

I just hope that the needlessly heated climate largely centered on Twitter isn't causing the IDW crew to make compromises and sand away the things that make their work unique.

The comics have experimented with so many changes that align with fandom feedback. The art style unification, varying arc lengths, less well received characters like Lanolin being benched, "Urban Warfare" mostly being an excuse for the core game cast to have hype moments and aura, "Phantom Riders" being a big Sonic Riders homage and making Sonic more of an antihero to evoke the fandom's beloved Black Knight. But through all this, the haters have remained haters. They don't want to be won over by the comics. Half of them probably aren't even actually reading them, and if they are they sure as shit aren't paying for them. They just want something to get mad about on the internet. They want a villain. They'll always find something to get mad at. If there's nothing currently making them mad in the comics, they'll just dig up something from years ago to complain about. Usually Sonic's monologue from issue #50 again. Even when the IDW haters do get something they like, such as the currently running manga series Sonic and the Blade of Courage that strongly evokes Sonic X, that enjoyment has to be framed in opposition to Ian Flynn and the IDW comics. The team sports mentality persists. It's us vs. them, and there can only be one winner. There are people out there making up conspiracy theories about how Sega has an institutional bias against Japanese creators because Blade of Courage isn't considered canon like the western-produced IDW comics are and getting mad about that instead of just enjoying the damn manga.

Sorry, let me repeat that. They think that Sega. The Japanese company. Based in Japan. Has an agenda against Japanese creators. Because the new Sonic manga is considered an alternate universe. There is no point in trying to reason with these people.

Obviously, yes, Ian and Evan don't own Sonic, it's Sega's property and they should represent it accurately, it's not their job to just write stories for themselves, blah blah blah. But fuck that. I don't read these comics just because they say "Sonic" on the cover, I don't read them because I want them to be exactly like the Archie comics from my childhood, and I don't read them because I want to delude myself into thinking it's still the early 2000s and I'm reading a lost story from Sonic Adventure 2 writer Shiro Maekawa illustrated by Yuji Uekawa (whose work was, itself, a huge stylistic departure from what had come before). I read the comics because I like the IDW team's version of Sonic. I like what they bring to the table that's different from other takes! I like it a lot!

The Archie days certainly weren't without their discourse, especially shipping wars, but at the very least it felt like more people understood it was someone else's vision. It was inherently a weird alternate universe offshoot of Sonic that played by its own rules, and for the most part you either you were okay with that or you just ignored them. But now that the IDW comics are our monthly window into the canonical universe of the games, and especially now that Ian is also writing the games themselves, there's this pressure for everything to be perfect with no room for divergence or creative preferences.

But if you step outside of the Sonic fandom bubble and look at the wider world of comics based on existing properties, it's not the runs that are micromanaged by license holders, editors, or the fandom to "give the fans exactly what they want" that leave a lasting impact. Fans don't actually know what they want! They think they do, but their ideas can only be based on what's come before, usually things they latched onto in childhood. They can't know whether or not they'll like something they've never seen before until it exists. But it's the fresh, risky takes on old favorites with distinctive creative voices that make a big splash, not the ones that just play the hits exactly how the fans remember them. Ultimate Marvel, Absolute DC, Claremont era and Krakoan Age X-Men, The Dark Knight Returns, All-Star Superman, Immortal Hulk, Justice League International, Transformers: More than Meets the Eye and Daniel Warren Johnson's run at Skybound, Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, Ryan North's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Olivia Jaimes and Caroline Cash's Nancy, Peter Gallagher's Heathcliff, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, and on and on and on. Not the ones that play it safe. Not the ones that are constantly shifting gears to try and find a direction that won't piss anyone off. The ones where the powers that be prop up talented creators and let them actually make the shit that they want to make, to explore the things that speak to them in an established character or series, even if it's very different from what came before. Especially when it's very different from what came before!

This is the beauty of comic books to me. That the input of each individual creative is so much more visible than it would be on something like an animated series made by a huge team split across multiple continents, and that those creatives are allowed to put a new spin on characters who've been around for decades. To truly enjoy comics is to embrace this cycle, not to wish the creatives involved would just be invisible cogs in the machine churning out nostalgia-tickling stories to your exact specifications, even if it means that sometimes someone might do something you're not into with one of your favorite characters. Making good art inherently means taking risks.

I'm going to practice what I preach here and not flip out in Ian's mentions about a story decision I didn't like. I'll wait and see where things go for Lanolin. She'll be back. Fans have warmed up to her more as the Twitter hate machine has moved on to other arguments. Her recent appearance in two of the Sonic mobile games are probably a good sign that she's sticking around, too. I just can't help but worry, in the back of my head, about the toll the constant toxicity from the increasingly radicalized fandom on Twitter must be having on the creative team when I see them engaging with those arguments daily, and when it feels like the comic has become afraid of those fans. But I also know that the last year of comics were a transitional phase where old plot threads were resolved to make room for what Evan has planned in the next phase of her run with this big mystery villain, which I'm very excited to see. I hope that this is simply a speed bump on the way to that, and that Evan and Ian and everyone else writing for the series have the room to tell the stories they want to tell, and that they know there are still readers willing to give those stories a chance.

I don't think they should have to hedge their bets creatively. They should be hedging their hogs.

Anyway the moral of this story is to stop using Twitter