>>530692624
Tails was literally made to rival Sonic. That's why he's the competitor in the V.S. Multiplayer mode. They're supposed to be friendly rivals with Tails trying to catch up and outspeed Sonic. That's why his story mode in the first Adventure centers around him speedrunning against Sonic and beating him to prove himself. He's supposed to be a rival character to Sonic. You're outright not engaging with the text of the work if you think that.
>He even lost his super form in Heroes
That's a symptom of the damage. One of many sins subsequent writers have committed. Tails not being able to do things Sonic can, despite being made as a 'Sonic 1.5' character, while Shadow and Sonic can both do those things derailed Tails' character from the original vision to make him a boring nerd archetype that was then made to be a Sally Acorn stand-in since westfags write the series and Sega of Japan is so idiotic they let Westfags write but refuse to let them use Sally, resulting in outright character assassination and blatant mischaracterizations.
>Both are highly intelligent and both create complex mechanisms
Tails wasn't 'highly intelligent' before Sonic Adventure 2. He was just a mechanic who could tinker with planes and make simplistic robots and stuff. This trait was based on Judy Totoya's real life intelligence and love of vehicles and rocketry and mechs. This wasn't supposed to be 'literally Einstein' or 'Eggman level' nonsense. It was supposed to be grounded with a degree of realism and skill ceiling. Maekawa is the writer who started treating Tails as a 'rival to Eggman' and this was the beginning of the end of Tails' character as originally envisioned. Fucking nightmare writer with bad faith intentions to subvert the franchise to his vision. A perversion of the source material worse than westfaggotry.
