Sonichu
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Warning! Mature Content!
This following work contains material and themes that may include coarse language (albeit censored due to New Qualitipedia rules), sexual references, and/or graphic violent images that may be disturbing to some viewers. |
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"If we try to take this comic seriously, we see power-ups taken from I don't know where, plot holes, inadvertent comedy, absurd pasts, edgy stereotypes, villains who are bad for their reason, fetishes, fetishes, and more fetishes. What I have been able to say so far is what thousands of people have already said, and I also saw that we all agree on something: The comic itself, not only in the drawing, but also in terms of argument, is horrible. Sonichu, in my opinion, is a lousy comic wherever you look at it. In fact, no kidding, I wish to see the first person on planet Earth to be up to speed on the comic. I want to see who has endured so much sick content, and say: "How...? How do you manage to stand with all that?" There is no way, there is no existing number to qualify Sonichu, because giving it a 1 out of 10 or a 2 out of 10 would be a pity. It is a comic that, regardless of what kind of tastes a person has, I would not recommend it. Nobody. Not even my worst enemy. It's not the worst comic ever, but I'm pretty sure it's in the top 10 in the Hall of Shame. Chris-Chan's track record is immense, and the truth is that what I have said and thought to you in this video is not even 10% of what he has done. Do me a favor, guys, and stay away from this topic. Beyond the weird memes and fanarts on purpose, there are dark things. Things that no one should see."
— SonicEpicFan (S.E.F)
Sonichu is a 2005 fan-made webcomic, originally a crossover fanfiction, created by the infamous vlogger, Christian/Christine Weston Chandler, better known by his nickname, "Chris-chan". It stars his original character, Sonichu, who is a mix of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu. Currently, the series has 19 issues including unreleased/incomplete ones, however, due to the author's legal situation (see trivia) it is unlikely that these issues will ever see completion or that the series will be ever continued.
Premise
The story is about a male Pikachu colliding with Sonic the Hedgehog to form a rainbow and creates numerous species and even hits a female Raichu and thus, both Sonichu and Rosechu are born and many other "Electric Hedgehog Pokémon" are also created, and many misadventures happen during the events of the comic, and alongside Chris Chan and many other familiar faces and new faces that often appear throughout the entire series, and with the evil schemes of Mary Lee Welsh (one of Chris' teachers) and other enemies and foes, it's up to Sonichu and his friends to stop them and save the day, so that things can go back to normal and the characters can relax and have fun playing with each other.
History
According to the CWCki, Sonichu was the creation of a computer graphics class session, as Chris had to make a CD album cover for an assignment, and Chris wanted to use both Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu on the album cover since he was a massive fan of both Sonic & Pokémon as he loved Sonic for his cool and chill music, and Pikachu for his cute and adorable look. However, he wasn't allowed to use copyrighted material since his high-school wanted to avoid having any lawsuits with either Sega or Nintendo, thus Chris was struggling during the session and had used all of the original characters he had made at that point. However, he decided to merge both Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu together as an idea he had recently began thinking of at that point, thus he decided to draw the character, and thus Sonichu was born and his CD album cover was done and finished with the lesson in general. Chris was so proud with Sonichu that he decided to create his own material with his creation and wanted to make a franchise out of him, as he made a medallion of him and later decided to make webcomics out of him, starting in 2004 where he made short strips that were the debuts of both Rosechu and Black Sonichu, which were made for the strips in mind.
However, he decided that he wanted to make a web-comic out of Sonichu, and went to work on a new series by drawing and coloring in pages of new artwork and began writing sentences and new dialogue pieces to accompany the new comics online, and thus on the 24th of March 2005, the first issue of Sonichu was released to the public on Chris' website at the time, and was available for everyone to read, and later, more issues followed it's release and the series was a minor hit when released in 2005 and gained more notoriety due to the creator becoming infamous amongst the internet after he was discovered on 4Chan.
Why It Sucks to the Extreme
- Misleading Title: Despite being called Sonichu, the comic series is more about the author and his personal struggles in real-life, and the title character is mostly relegated as a side character, and later issues of the comic mostly focus on Chris and not Sonichu, and while the main title character does get some focus in other issues, most of the time it usually focuses on Chris and his bizarre hobbies that always result in some conflict happening in the issue, and Sonichu is sometimes not even there, who by the way was advertised as the titular characters and was meant to be his story according to issue 0. In fact, Chris has more appearances in this comic series more so than Sonichu himself and is always there to move the plot forward.
- It's also pretty hypocritical since issue 0 said that the comic was said to be Sonichu's story and nothing else, yet in later issues, Chris gets more focus and Sonichu rarely makes a lot of appearances after that, which contradicts what Chris said in the first issue and later gets changed in it's remake by mentioning Rosechu, which isn't any better, since Rosechu doesn't appear very much in the series, and even on the front cover of issue 0, Chris appears as Sonichu's Pokémon trainer and is depicted to be an Ash Ketchum-like character with Sonichu being merely a partner for him, thus making the comic more of a fictional biopic rather than the misadventures of a fan-made Sonic the Hedgehog character.
- To get the elephant out of the room, the illustrations themselves. They look like something that an elementary school kid would make and have seen little improvement over the years. There are bound to be visual errors that occur within the illustrations. Keep in mind that the author was 22-years-old when publishing the first work, and it barely even have improved after many years.
- The panel layouts are rather confusing, and pages are often chock-full words in the wall, making the comic itself way too wordy. Not to mention grammatical errors, typos, and misused phrases throughout the pages.
- Even the first line in the first issue has a typo. "Our story begins in an open field 5 MIES (he meant MILES) from the city of Station Square, which is under siege by the perfect chaos monster." Also one comic has THE misspelled as THW.
- A common problem with writing is that it tends to explain unnecessary details in the most elongated way. The writing doesn't condense its exposition properly.
- Likewise, important parts of the story that require exposition are similarly glossed over.
- The creator has also used the dialogue as an opportunity to insert his personal beliefs and info about himself, he would constantly remind us about his homophobia, marital status, girlfriend requirements, etc.
- Chris sometimes interrupts the story and inserts self-advertisements for his products and even other companies' products like AXE.
- When Chris doesn't advertise his products, he pops up in nonsensical moments such as in episode 6, where he comments on Dr. Robotnik and his song.
- The problem became worse in episode 12.9, which has full pages of texts, that we could consider the episode as a novel.
- The creator inserted himself into the comic by issue #2, making the titular Sonichu completely a side character and turning the comic from the adventures of a Pokémon combined with a power-upped hedgehog from the chaos emeralds along with other electric hedgehog Pokémon to a fantasy fulfillment and later a violent revenge fantasy.
- Keep in mind they are self-inserts that were done right, like Guts being Miura's avatar in Berserk.
- All the characters are one-dimensional and even Sonic characters were massively downgraded from their official counterparts with even bad iterations from the worst Sonic games being more memorable than Chris' versions.
- This goes double for the females. They're just characters who like to shop, cook, and are treated as sexual objects.
- Most of the characters came from other franchises were pointless, and only appear in few issues. Metal Sonichu from issue 1 is a crowning example. What happened to him after being launched to the moon and surviving at the end of Episode 6? This was somewhat answered in issue 12 where he gives Naitsirhc his powers back.
- Chris-chan, the actual main character, is a perfect, flawless character with god-like powers and can appear in his comic whenever he feels like it. He can transform into a Sonic clone and can give bad luck to enemies (curse-ye-ha-me-ha). Everyone, aside from the villain characters, is written to praise him and side with his "heroic" actions. He is also very bland as a character, depicted as a generic loser protagonist in romance media. It should be worth noting that all Sonichus and Rosechus refer to him as their "father".
- In fact, he is so powerful that it made the other Sonichus and Rosechus redundant.
- All the villains are just caricatures of people who angered Chris-chan in real life, including mall cops (called jerkops), store managers (called mana-jerks), Mary Lee Walsh, later changed to Slaweel Ryam, who was the dean of student affairs at Chris' college, (yes, really) and eventually internet trolls, with no motivation beyond making him suffer.
- Moreover, the protagonists were supposed to do heroic things, like how the comic portrayed them. Instead, they committed several atrocities. Like Sonichu quietly stalking Rosechu, Chris defeating mall security guards when they were just doing their jobs, and punchy Sonichu supposedly killing Mypoe by punching her through the roof.
- Not only that, character development is pretty much non-existent. The only two characters that go through any form of change are black Sonichu, known as Blake, and Wes-Li, based on magician Wes Iseli, Blake only defects to the protagonists, simply because he has a crush on Bubbles Rosechu and mistreatment from his master, Naitsirhc. There also isn't any reason for Wes-Li's defection to the antagonists at all.
- Chris and Sonichu then plagiarized all of Alec's TRUE and HONEST creations, followed by having them beat the senses out of Alec and accusing him of keeping female prisoners in his basement.[1]
- Chris and their corrupted officials had a kangaroo court for four men (whose only crimes consisted of slandering, and even then they didn't slander Chris and only wanted to tell the truth), before having them sentenced to death with cruel ways, with little to no evidence against them. [2]
- CWCville quickly becomes a North Korea, or Turkmenistan-like micronation within three issues, without mentioning the US government about this change in his story. Homosexual relationships aren't allowed to exist, possession of drugs, aside from caffeine, is a serious offense, and any villain Chris has fought throughout the series gets punished without a trial. Sometimes, Chris argues they deserve the death penalty, despite claiming to be against capital punishment.
- Speaking of CWCVille, the city is named after the author himself, which boosted Chris' ego more. What's worse is that to Chris, it serves as escapism for anything he does not like.
- Unfunny attempts at humor ranging from lazy references, jokes that fail to be funny, or jokes that are too hard to understand. Chris sometimes even has to cite where the joke originally came from, or explain how the joke works. Chris calls it "random-access humor", in which he would blurt out a random thought in his head, thinking that is funny, when most of the time, it's nonsensical.
- The plot changes rapidly with each issue. Every issue would retcon something from the plot and suddenly introduce plot elements out of nowhere without proper setup. New characters appear randomly without explanation as well as some old characters being forgotten, and the plot initially went from being a fancomic about a Sonic recolor to the adventures of an unlikable nerd with superpowers battling against his haters.
- In issue 5, Chris and Wes-Li battle using Yu-Gi-Oh cards which is then never brought up again or even set up. This is because Chris was playing Yu-Gi-Oh at the time and wanted to interpret them into his comic. Likewise, Darkbind Sonichu appears in sub-episode 4, because Chris was into Darkwing Duck and The Legend of Zelda at the time.
- Many of the plot elements also contain references to Chris' real life, and they expect you to know about it. This includes Chris battling mall security, his loitering at Target, and his interactions with the trolls.
- There's even a moment where Chris writes down an almost romantic encounter with a girl at the mall. When the girl said that she was not interested in him, he shouted "NO!" This literally happened in real life.
- Issue 12-9, numbered to avoid representation of the unlucky number, is another example of how Chris' life can derail the continuity of his story. Despite being part of the Sonichu storyline, it features no references to Sonichu and instead is solely devoted to the author's self insert character of My Little Pony. Chris only made it because he was a fan of the My Little Pony franchise during its development.
- Issue 10 is possibly the most offensive issue out of all of them. Before the issue, one of the characters featured was identified as having been created by someone else and used without permission, and when the creator of a Sonichu fan comic asked Chris to stop using the character due to it being stolen, Chris decided to kill the character off-screen and then reveal that she had a daughter who looks exactly like her but with yellow fur instead of orange and a different hairstyle, which looks even more like the fan character Chris stole. The issue also includes a scene which involves Chris infecting the world's water supply with his "straight blood", which is offensive to homosexuals, transgender people and others in the LGBT+ community, as well as a scene where he destroys a building full of people that disagree with him. The issue also has a disturbing scene where many of the protagonists murdering people such as the original creator of the fan character Chris stole as well as the person who told Chris to remove the character from his comic. However, this was changed in other releases of the issue.
- Some of the names for the original characters are either lazy, unimaginative, corny, stupid, uninspired or just plain dumb, as an example of is Giovanni's son Naitsirhc, whose name is just Christian spelled backwards, and that's it, proving how lazy Chris was when naming one of his original characters.
- Poor publishing. The comic suffers from numerous visual errors, unfinished artwork, poor grammar, and many other inaccuracies and comical faults that it makes the comic very easy to laugh at for how bad it is and not in a good way, since the comic wasn't finished at all and there are many times where the dialogue goes out of the speech bubbles or are incorrectly placed in random spots on some of the pages, and by the way, Chris usually works on these comics for 6-7 months and yet they still look unfinished and rushed likely due to his laziness, and since web-comics usually are in development for the same time that the Sonichu comics are in, it makes this even worse since there are webcomics that are way better in terms of writing, artwork and story than Sonichu, and since most of the comic is based on Chris' real life situations, it shows that Chris had no care in making these comics and instead play things safe and never change or improve the comics at all, mainly because of his massive ego.
- The designs for the Sonichus and the Rosechus are just horrendous, as most of them are just Sonic characters, but with body features from Pikachu that look awkward on most of them, and what is that some of them like Bubbles are just recolors of Sonichu which is just downright lazy at best, and considering that Chris is in his 30's, he should know how to make actual characters, especially ones who are variants of the main characters. And on top of that, some of the human designs are just as bad as the Sonichu and Rosechu designs, if not worse, since they look ridiculously ugly, and poorly drawn at worst, especially Chris who looks nothing like he does in real life.
- For example, punchy "Sonichu" is actually just a bastardized Knuckles, who is an echidna, not a hedgehog, and barely looks like a Sonichu, or even Sonic, at all. Plus, he is drawn so terribly, that his eyes look slanted, which comes across as a racist Asian stereotype.
- There are far too many variations of Sonichu: Chris-chan Sonichu, ultra Sonichu, and Metonic.
- In fact, the regular Rosechu is just Amy Rose with a few body parts of Raichu and barely any other changes aside from that, showing how lazy Chris is when it comes to creating his own characters.
- False Advertising: The series is intended to be read by younger audiences (7-14), but yet it contains material unsuitable for that demographic: very explicit sexual references, bad morals and graphic violence.
- Issue 8 is one of the more obscene issues, it had sex scenes, and that Chris provided "censored" versions, with one omitting the inappropriate scenes (TV-7, yes, Chris specified the rating, despite not being televised, and those rating names are meant for TV, not comic books.) while the other having barely even censored the sex or imagery (TV-14)!
- What makes it worse is how all of the comics are filled to the brim with pornographic content!
- Some parts of the comics make absolutely no sense whatsoever, such as Sonichu for some reason calling Chris, "father", despite the fact that Chris didn't make Sonichu in the comics, and only made him in real life, and first meet in the CWCville mall. Heck, some parts are even retconned, and bring in a plethora of plot holes into the comics themselves.
- They are littered with an insane amount of political propaganda in them, mainly when it comes to the females who are treated like the greatest things in the world and are seen as perfect, which comes off as biased towards females, most likely as a result of Chris-chan's past relationships with several girls, which is just downright creepy for him to do that.
- Sometimes, there is an unnecessary amount of fourth-wall breaking from Chris himself that comes out of nowhere and is only there because of the creator wanted to tell people about his interests and personal hobbies, which can come off as creepy and uncomfortable since one of his interests is about getting a new girlfriend which Chris had been wanting to have around the time of the comics release and not for a very good reason, since he was known as a creepy stalker and made one of his friends, Megan, very uncomfortable and had been harmed by him for the rest of her life. This makes the comic come off as disturbing and overall unsettling.
- It suffers from having a wasted concept being implemented onto a one man's awful fanfiction, since the idea of a crossover between both Pokémon and Sonic the Hedgehog seems like it could work and have some decent potential. However, it's being done by Chris-chan, who is infamous for his terrible behavior and massive ego, and is being wasted on a lazy "unoriginal" character who is just a fusion between both Sonic and Pikachu, and not much of the comic uses elements from both franchises, and instead uses more original elements that were done by the creator to avoid copyright lawsuits and character infringement, and since most of the comic is mostly about Chris-chan, it makes the comic feel more like a figment of the creator's imagination rather than an actual Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon crossover with any care or passion put into it.
- Many parts of the comics are very poorly researched and aren't accurate to their original depictions, such as when wild Sonichu can go invisible from an unknown Porygon, who by the way, can't even teleport in the games or anime at all, which makes the scene make less sense and more confusing to fully understand, which makes wild Sonichu look like an idiot for doing that, or how Layla Flaaffy is supposed to be a Flaaffy, yet she does not look anything like that Pokemon.
- Most of the content in these comics are mostly stolen from other pieces of fiction created by other people or different works that were made by different companies without even crediting or mentioning them. In other words, this series is an infringement onto a majority of copyrighted material, and since Chris had the nerve to copyright his work without informing their original creators, it makes the entire Sonichu comic book series come off as one big art theft, as many examples include stolen "unoriginal" characters, characters from franchises that are owned by major companies, artwork traced from official material, material that Chris never made to begin with, and also artwork drawn by different people that Chris stole for his own comic book series, thus proving that Chris was illegally breaking the law, and even with Sonichu himself, who is just a combination of both Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu, which are copyrighted characters, making the entire comic book series a stolen work from numerous sources.
- Heck, many characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon franchises appear in this comic book series, and the creator didn't even bother crediting either Nintendo or Sega for owning both properties, and what's even worse is that Chris decided to put his own copyright of his original characters, and even the comic book instead, which is illegal since none of the characters in these books were already owned by different companies or created by different artists, proving that Chris only wants to have things his way, and refuses to let others have what they want, making him very egotistical and selfish overall.
- The series didn't get a proper closure, as there were more than 5 issues incomplete or straight-up canned altogether, and some of them weren't even released, or had missing pages in them, and since issue 19 got the spotlight to released, it seems that the series is now dead, and with Chris-chan getting arrested, and the original Sonichu comics getting deleted online (though, it was uploaded on WEBTOON since August 10, 2021), it's safe to say that Sonichu will never come back and with no end to conclude the series on a high note, this means that the series has sadly ended on a cliffhanger with no later issue ever coming out as of the controversy surrounding Chris-chan sexually assaulting his mother. However, with Chris being released from prison and having his incest case dropped, it's very likely the series will continue.
- However, Chris hasn't made any updates on the comic series, and instead mostly does streams on YouTube, instead of finishing the comics, meaning that Sonichu is currently on hiatus, and has a currently unknown fate at this point.
The Only Redeeming Quality
- The webcomic is widely considered to be "so bad, it's good".
Reception
When first released, Sonichu was a minor hit and gave the creator more attention and fame, however over the years after the controversy Chris has caused and had earned himself a negative reputation for being a creepy stalker and committing incest on his mother in the early 2020's, Sonichu began received more negative feedback and criticism over the years and is often regarded as one of the worst comic books of all time, and has became an example of poorly-written fanfiction.
Critics like DStecks, DiDi and Dillion Thomas have criticized the comics for their awful writing, awful illustrations, annoying characters and creator's personal fantasies, and have cited one of the worst fanfictions of all time. Linkara, while he didn't review them, has stated that he doesn't want anything to do with the comics and wishes it never existed alongside its creator, and many Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon fans have expressed a massive distaste for these comics for the same reasons as others.
The series has garnered a reputation outside the internet culture and has also been acknowledged in pop culture, almost to the point where even Sega has acknowledged the existence of the character and have mocked Sonichu on Twitter and have made fun of Chris in Sonic Boom where one of the characters kidnaps Sonic and is revealed to an obsessive fanboy. Sonichu also has appeared in Uncut Gems as a medallion, which was another example of mainstream acknowledging the existence of the character.
Trivia
- Sonichu was originally made by Christian Chandler, because he wanted to put Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu on his CD album cover as a high school project, but couldn't, because copyrighted characters aren't allowed to be inserted, so he fused his favorite characters Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog as a loophole for this, and he thought that was his original creation.
- It got an unofficial intentionally bad animated series on YouTube that was actually decent. Take a look. However, it was cancelled after adapting issue 10 because the creator was tired of trolling Chris.
- Christian had sold some drafts of unpublished issues due to his own financial problems.
- In August 2021, Christian was arrested for committing incest with his elderly mother after admitting to the act during a phone conversation with a troll. After his arrest, the original Sonichu comics were deleted and now became lost media. However, in 2023, Christian would be released from jail by court order and the charge for incest was eventually dropped, meaning that there is potential for the comic to continue.
Videos
References
https://sonichu.com/cwcki/List_of_unheroic_protagonist_actions