Sonichu Redeeming Sonichu: is a good rewrite even possible?

  • 🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
Given how personal a work Sonichu is, it's a fool's errand to try and "improve" it. Doing so would rob the work of one of its more distinguishing characteristics. If it were any better than what it is, it would just be another mediocre webcomic that would be lost in a sea of mediocre webcomics. And although Sonichu will never rise above being a dirty little secret on the Internet, it more than likely will outlast all of the derivative efforts that try to "fix" it.
 
  • Agree
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Like
Reactions: Syaoran Li, Crichax, Sexy Senior Citizen and 3 others
Someone in a Tree said:
Given how personal a work Sonichu is, it's a fool's errand to try and "improve" it. Doing so would rob the work of one of its more distinguishing characteristics. If it were any better than what it is, it would just be another mediocre webcomic that would be lost in a sea of mediocre webcomics. And although Sonichu will never rise above being a dirty little secret on the Internet, it more than likely will outlast all of the derivative efforts that try to "fix" it.
Click to expand...
Said it before. Will say it again.

Chris is the Henry’s Darger of the Wired, and Sonichu will continue to be read by and puzzled over by curiosity seekers and fucked up artbum types for years to come.
 
  • Agree
  • Like
Reactions: Cardboard Box Mountain, Chester Rigby, Someone in a Tree and 1 other person
A talented writer could probably make an okay story out of it but at the end of the day it's still about a Mary Sue Sonic recolour. The only way to make anything good out of Sonichu is to have it be a parody. Anything else is wasted effort if you're trying to make a serious story.
 
  • Like
  • Agree
Reactions: Cardboard Box Mountain, Crichax and Syaoran Li
The only way to make a good and artistically genuine Sonichu remake is to make it about your own life, to base Chris on you (You can't replace Chris.) and about your own arc of failure, presented with a lack of self-awareness of why you fucked up, and with Sonichu and crew.

It's an incredibly pretentious and self aware project to remake an incredibly un-aware childish art piece. Even if the result sucked, a sincere attempt would be of astronomical artistic value. But also an insane and self destructive project to embark on.

If you wanna remake Sonichu and you want it to be good, go big or go home. Just parodying Chris isn't "good". You're just making fun of some autist and his obscure comic to get a chuckle from other borderline lolcows on some forums. If you want to make something "good" you have to go hard.

I'm basically saying it's possible but it's basically the artistic equivalent of opening the Hellraiser puzzlebox.
 
  • Agree
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Like
Reactions: Syaoran Li, Cardboard Box Mountain and Crichax
UngaWunga said:
The only way to make a good and artistically genuine Sonichu remake is to make it about your own life, to base Chris on you (You can't replace Chris.) and about your own arc of failure, presented with a lack of self-awareness of why you fucked up, and with Sonichu and crew.

It's an incredibly pretentious and self aware project to remake an incredibly un-aware childish art piece. Even if the result sucked, a sincere attempt would be of astronomical artistic value. But also an insane and self destructive project to embark on.

If you wanna remake Sonichu and you want it to be good, go big or go home. Just parodying Chris isn't "good". You're just making fun of some autist and his obscure comic to get a chuckle from other borderline lolcows on some forums. If you want to make something "good" you have to go hard.

I'm basically saying it's possible but it's basically the artistic equivalent of opening the Hellraiser puzzlebox.
Click to expand...
And if one is to put all that time and effort into something, they might as well apply it to a work of their own instead of just remixing Sonichu.
 
  • Like
  • Agree
Reactions: Syaoran Li, Cedric_Eff and BScCollateral
Someone in a Tree said:
And if one is to put all that time and effort into something, they might as well apply it to a work of their own instead of just remixing Sonichu.
Click to expand...
OR SHOULD THEY?

(They probably should seriously why do people keep trying to make Sonichu fanfiction? What is wrong with you people?)
 
  • Feels
Reactions: Cedric_Eff
Rosechu's Story was, I think, really headed in the right direction and could've come close to pulling it off; I liked especially the background origin story of Liquid/Solid Chris splitting apart, and the foreshadowing of how Sonichu, who'd come into Rosechu's life seemingly as a wild, untamed creature, having some type of disturbing, perhaps mind-controlled relationship with the Mayor; from there, I like the idea touched on by several above about Sonichu/the chu's in general being products of some kind of vile experiments.

I'm toying around with a Chris Chan themed WH40K parody fanfic about a Chaos God of Autism and it's cult with the 'chus as it's daemons and various kinds of spergs as its army but its pretty spergy as it is; I've posted a bit about it elsewhere. Inquisitors, played by the parts of various trolls, try to root out the source of the heresy.
 
  • Like
  • Feels
  • Optimistic
Reactions: Syaoran Li, Cardboard Box Mountain, BigTubboWithLittleChina and 1 other person
I think you've answered that question yourself. There are quite a few good ways to rebuild the story from the ground up, but the fact remains that simple tweaks would be a drop in a bathtub in terms of increasing the quality of the comic...
 
  • DRINK!
Reactions: Cedric_Eff and BigTubboWithLittleChina
Make it some kind of goofy silver-age comic or some brutal, over-the-top Frank Miller-like comic, complete with the repetitive dialogue, useless women characters, and unnecessary amounts of text.

So I guess don't change anything?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Syaoran Li and Cedric_Eff
One idea I've had for Sonichu would be for it to have a Wolf of Wall Street sort of vibe. Chris's OC is already fairly close to Jordan Belaforte (with the only difference being Chris doesn't have women throwing themselves at them). All you'd really have to do is play up Chris's excess and increase the sex appeal (All the women naked, all the men handsome). In fact you could actually keep the homophobia as in the original book there's a scene where Jordan pays the police to beat the living shit out of his gay butler for throwing an Iron John gay orgy in his house.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: Syaoran Li
This is almost certainly not original, but I havent seen a post about this, but what about have a story from the viewpoint of one of the citizens of CWCVille? Perhaps the story starts during Bob's reign, as apparently he founded the city. While thing could be much better, the situation isnt horrible and everyone has enough to get by. Then Chris begins a revolution, and it is no longer safe out in the streets due to the revoluionary's blatant disregars for civilian life. Eventually Chris takes over as dictator, and the city begins to spiral into shit, and the poor civilian the story focuses on's life takes a turn for the worse along with it. Maybe police brutality ends up killing/imprisoning someone close to him. Maybe he gets drafted and forced to fight in the "Mayor"'s pointless wars, and sees firsthand the horrors the Mayor's cronies inflict on those they deem to deserve it. I dont know.
This is just an idea, i dont know if its actually good or not.
 
Part of what made Sonichu so infamous was because it was that perfect storm of "So Bad It's Good" that was informed by the creator's own personal hangups and defects.

Almost like The Room meets Henry Darger, but with a level of weird that was perfect for the then-newly emerging Web 2.0 culture of the late 2000's.

Any attempt to "improve" Sonichu without removing Chris or the copyrighted stuff like Sonic and Pokemon basically would elevate it to a mediocre 2000's fan fiction at best. And if you removed the copyrighted material or the stuff from Chris's personal life, then you might as well write an entirely different story altogether.

Sonichu and Chris was the first modern lolcow as we know it today, and he popularized the term in internet culture.

Before, you had a few lolcows in the Web 1.0 and Web 1.5 eras but the major lolcows were usually semi-mainstream figures who were already kind of laughing stocks outside of the internet like Jack Chick, Hal Turner, or the Church of Scientology.

The lolcows who were primarily based in internet culture were guys like David Gonterman, Usagi Kou, Christian Humber, Gaming In The Clinton Years, or Gecko45, and were fairly minor lolcows by comparison.

Most of their notoriety didn't really become cemented outside of the fan communities they were involved in until Chris got a following.

Chris was the first "internet culture" lolcow to get a major following across multiple communities and this was a game changer. It was a "lightning in a bottle" moment that could never be duplicated again, although Jace would have come closest to succeeding if he were actually real.

Chris was the first major lolcow of the Web 2.0 generation, much like how Jack Chick was the first major lolcow of the Web 1.0 generation (at least in my opinion) and both had dedicated followings long after their internet heyday.

Parodies and grimdark AU stuff were kind of cool back in the day because of how Chris was so childish at the time and typically disliked anything that could give him the prickly-wicklies or whatever. But it eventually became old hat, especially in light of A-Log or the messed-up fad of Sonee and Rosey guro fan art.

Even Chris's interests in darker stuff like Cannibal Holocaust, Saw, and God of War was either motivated by troll influence (in the case of the first two) or because God of War had boobies in it and that was cool in the eyes of Classic Chris.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BigTubboWithLittleChina
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back