Circumstances of Creation
| Inspiration | Sonic-3, Sonic & Knuckles |
| Visual style | Sonic Adventure (child’s hand-drawing) |
| Creation motivation | I wanted to make a good girlfriend for Sonic |
If you look into my childhood stories about the Powerful Four, Sonya is Sonic’s cousin there. But the story behind her creation is quite amusing in itself: I was misinformed about “Sonic’s bride”. One infamous blabber of the neighborhood, who witnessed me play Sonic-3 at the computer club, said that “the raspberry dude is actually Sonic’s fiancée who’s testing him.” I don’t know how this twist of fantasy came to be in the 9-year-old boy’s head, but for me it was an incentive to create a “normal girlfriend” who “doesn’t bully guys”. So I drew a picture of Sonya confronting Knuckles, but I didn’t know his name was Knuckles at the time.
Subsequently, after playing more Sonic games, I learned as much about the characters as possible from the content of the games themselves, and composed the “Powerful Four” of Sonic, Knuckles, Sonya and Dive (whom I stubbornly used to call Tails at the time). As Sonic’s cousin, Sonya also had some supernatural talents, but these were associated with electricity and an emerald ring around her neck that allowed her to set off a chain reaction in the Chaos Emeralds, which switched the entire Powerful Four into their super-forms. Since the emerald ring could not be removed from her neck, Robotnik constantly tried to kidnap her wholly.
One of such episodes of abduction involved copying physical qualities from Sonya to one of Robotnik’s mecha-clones. The clone already had the physical qualities of Sonic, which allowed him to run really fast, and of Knuckles, which allowed him to levitate. Sonya’s qualities would have given him the power to manipulate the electric currents, but eventually, she befriended this clone and he sided with the heroes.
The funny thing is that Quatu the Clone appeared in my story way before I watched Sonic OVA. On the other hand, ideas of cloning were popular at the time and constantly in the air. In addition to his accumulated qualities, Quatu, much like Shadow, wore jet boots to maintain speed comparable to Sonic’s. In general, without going into details, I wrote a lot. Part became a fan fiction, another part materialized as pictures, and yet another one became music. But I didn’t know how to do that one important thing at the time – to finish what I started, so all I have left from that time period is dreams and some materials about those dreams.
