>>535125520
>How the fuck is it that Flynn and Stanley, with all their comic writing experience and years of dealing with Sonic's timeline and lore, still can't consistently write better than literal game developers who had zero writing experience?
Because you japfags have a massive experience bias for the games and can't comprehend that the comic writers, especially the ones who came before Flynn, were doing more with less. You look at the pre-160 era and only see a mess, but you don't get what a miracle it was that it even had a coherent story to begin with. Those guys had NOTHING to work with. The games had no lore. They were building a universe from scratch while Sega of America was limping along before having to deal with Sega of Japan's nonsense on top of that. Bureaucracy all the way down and no one told them anything usable. Even worse, you had the writers themselves, like Penders and Bollers, in a war with each other, actively overwriting and ignoring each other's plotlines. Penders has openly said he didn't even read what the other writers were doing.
It added up into a bloated, insane, and convoluted world, yes, but one that had history, stakes, and character arcs that went on for years and years. Where story developments had lasting consequences. They were juggling hundreds of characters and plot threads from games, TV shows, and their own stuff.
You all praise Maekawa for SA2, but that was a self-contained project over months. The Archie guys had to make a monthly comic for over a decade under those conditions. Flynn's biggest job when he took over was literally just cleaning up the mess because the old staff had too many original and interesting ideas and storylines to use.
The problem isn't just that Flynn or Stanley are hacks, it's that they're mere corporate cogs. They're eager to write slop and not contradict whatever Iizuka thinks is canon this week. Pre-Flynn Archie might have been a clusterfuck, but at least it was a creative clusterfuck.