User:Manwithoutabody/Second Soliloquy
You can read more of my babbling over here.
Chris and Manos
This was originally on my user page, an then it was on my first rambling, but now it's over here.
To me, Sonichu is like "Manos" The Hands of Fate: unspeakably awful, yet somehow fascinating. Chris himself is the Hal P. Warren of my analogy, a self-satisfied, talentless bully who is frequently covered in shit (although in Warren's defense, he was a professional fertilizer salesman, whereas Chris is just too lazy to bother with the toilet). Characters like Bill, Yawning Squirtle, and Bouldrer-Dropping Whale are like Torgo, strangely likable and incredibly high. And Clyde, Liquid, Alec and Tito? Well, they're Tom, Crow, Joel, and Mike (in no particular order). It would be funny enough without their commentary, but with it? Utterly priceless. Vivian is Gypsy
Why Sonichu Stands Out as Particularly Awful
Issue 2 was where it all got fascinating.
Sure, 0 and 1 were terrible, but they were blandly terrible. I'm sure you could find a million dumbasses on the internet with equally inane and stupid fancomics. I think that's what SonichuIzCool, poor soul that she is, liked. Back then, it was just low quality adventures with terrible characters. She probably liked it just because she liked Sonic and Pikachu, and, like Chris, lacked the ability to judge a work by its quality rather than its premise. Sure, it got worse, but in both their minds, it remained the relatively innocent thing it was at first. Unlike Chris, though, that poor girl (as far as I can tell from what little is known about her) isn't a bad person.
It was with Sonichu 2 that Chris's terrible personality finally began to take over the comic. 1 and 0 were a cliche storm, but they kept Chris's awful, self-justifying personality limited to the Sub-Episodes. Chris was a recurring guest character in his own comic, which, in and of itself, isn't too bad (whiny though his segments were). With Issue 2, it became all about him, and that's when it became the single worst webcomic in known history.
One of Chris's many problems is that, due to his lack of imagination and general laze, he never writes anything that is just Sonichu. At least, not since Issues 0 and 1, which were very cliche-ridden and uncreative. What I mean by this is that not once do Sonichu and friends have any adventures that are only there to entertain. They don't travel to a strange new country to help the locals thwart Count Graduon's invasion. They don't track down the Sonichu Crystals (or balls, or whatever). They don't have to deal with a monster of the week.
Sonichu 3 introduced the Chaotic Combo, but none of them really did anything. Sure, they had their whole "dating education" bit in Sonichu 9, but that was hardly the sort of high-flying adventure Chris clearly wants the comic to be. Their introduction was a way of stalling; Sonichu can't go on epic adventures yet because we haven't introduced all the characters! After they were introduced, Chris lost interest in them, so Issue 4 was all about him again.
From what I gather, Chris intended the comic to be akin to a Saturday morning cartoon, and such shows - regardless of their quality - consist primarily of what is technically filler. There will be many episodes that have no real impact on any plot arcs and only exist to fill up space and entertain the audience. They may still be excellent episodes (I will admit that "Vincent and the Doctor", despite adding very little to the ongoing plot arc of Doctor Who, still made me cry a little). Almost any given episode of Pokemon will (or at least, this was the case when I was watching it) have the following plot:
1.Ash and friends go to a place where people and Pokemon are interacting in an idiosyncratic way (dealing with a Diglet pest problem, making perfume with help from Grass types, farming Ponyta, going on safari to watch Kangaskhan, etc.)
2.Team Rocket arrive, deliver their introductory speech, create problems
3.Ash and friends defeat Team Rocket
4.The people Ash helped thank him by waving at him a lot as he leaves with his friends
That's not artistic brilliance, but it's professional. It's clear that the writers, animators, and actors want to get paid, and they're giving the fans what they want, and that's fine. It's pulp, with a fairly young target audience, so you can't expect too much from it. Maybe once in a while, they'd do an episode that was really personally important to them (like that Digimon episode with the out-of-nowhere Shadow Over Innsmouth homages) and leave all the fans scratching their heads and alienated. That's not professional; that's personal, and they're taking a big risk by doing that. If they want to keep being, first and foremost, pulp, then they'd better do it very infrequently.
Starting with Issue 2, Sonichu does this all the time. We're given some standard goals for the characters (save Crystal, get the Sonichu Crystals, defeat Graduon, save Zelina from Clawdorf), but nobody, least of all Chris, puts any effort into them.
Partly, this is because it's an amateur comic. Chris makes no money on it, so he doesn't need to give the fans what they want, and can just do whatever he wants. Because Chris lacks the discipline to create filler adventures for his characters, the most he can do is repeatedly assure us that Sonichu and friends are superheroes, but we don't really get to see any real evidence of this. In Chris's mind, they're frequently off fighting villains who aren't personally important to him. Villains like Robotnik, Giovanni, Metal Sonichu, and even (at first) Blake and Reldnahc. Notice anything these guys all have in common, besides being monstrously unoriginal? They all either vanished altogether from the comic or else had their personalities greatly retooled. That's because Chris doesn't care about them. Even Count Graduon, who was supposed to be the main villain of the series, has more or less disappeared. Mary Lee Walsh, formerly another primary villain, was finally defeated with ridiculous ease, while most of the issue was focused on torturing and demeaning four characters who had never appeared in the comic before but in real life had annoyed Chris.
He doesn't really enjoy writing these adventures anywhere near as much as he enjoys making personal attacks on his enemies. Seriously, when was the last time a villain appeared who wasn't based on a troll?
Even when Chris was writing the comic, he didn't really care about it. If he did, he would have created villains and adventures that he found appealing enough to write but weren't just recreations of his own life and his own problems.
Another problem is the wildly inconsistent tone. Because the comic is controlled by the whims of a deranged manchild, it's only about whatever is on his mind at the moment, and because it's updated so infrequently, this can vary tremendously between pages. It's supposed to be a Pokemon/Sonic-esque adventure series, but there are no real adventures anymore. Sometimes it's pseudo-romantic ("The Genesis of the Lovehogs"), and sometimes it's a bawdy comedy about a guy who can't get any (those few moments when Chris is able to laugh at himself, although they're still not funny), and sometimes porn and sometimes it's torture porn. Chris can't come up with a "status quo" for his comic (a la The Simpsons, where almost nothing ever changes), but he can't stick with any major plot arcs either (a la The Prisoner, where if you miss a single episode you're lost, but then, you're probably lost anyway).
This is why he's always giving us "previews" of upcoming developments in Sonichu, like the Giant Penis Comic. He wants to skip ahead to the parts that personally interest his id, and leave the rest of it for us to fill in. When there's no particular message he really needs to get out, he doesn't just write filler like most people do. He writes nothing whatever.
Sonichu was once a derivative and generically crappy fancomic, but now, it's Chris's default way of lashing out at his enemies, and nothing else. It's gotten to the point where he never updates for any reason other than that.