A Loose Canon Encyclopedia
Shax Davis
2006
All characters (C) SEGA, Archie and S Davis.
Used without permission.
Contact the author; trojan_masters@hotmail.com
Introduction
I can't say that I'm a fan of the concept of a worldbuilding FAQ. In fact, to me it always reeked of lazy writing, a kind of a cop-out from having to introduce a concept the old fashioned way. If you need to give some kind of summary about what your world is all about, I figured it meant you simply haven't been bothered to introduce these concepts within the story, that you've been impatient and overzealous.
But I've come to realise that, in some cases, a bit of clarification doesn't go astray. Especially if the world you have created for your story is so huge that people may be prone to forget parts of it. Tolkien made use of appendices to offer the dedicated reader a more refined history of Middle-Earth, he even wrote an entire novel for this purpose, the mindblowing Silmarillion after which this worldbuilder is jokingly titled. Orwell did a bit of appendix work himself to clarify a few of the concepts in his complex version of Earth in Nineteen-Eighty Four. "What's your point, Shax?" Well, none really, except that, when I'm about to do something I'm afraid will come off as nOObish, I like to justify it to myself by thinking about what really really popular authors might have done it too. Of course, that doesn't mean it won't come off as nOObish when I do it.
Anyway, here I am, writing for the Wordbuilding section. This is more like a textbook than a fanfic, and as such it's possible (likely, even) that you will find it boring. Don't feel obligated to read it. It's more a reference than anything. Primarily I gathered this material for my own use, being that I often forget it myself, and decided what the hey, someone else might like to flip through it sometime.
This is a guide to my Mobius, not the official Mobius of the comics or the games. I don't speak for the official continua, I know little about them and prefer to shape my way through my own world. So most of this stuff, maybe even 90% of it, I made up myself. Roughly speaking, the concept of the Freedom Fighters is an original creation of the Archie Comics and DiC cartoon versions of the Sonic world. The Acorn Monarchy, Mobitropolis and the destruction of both by Robotnik to create Robotropolis is a story arc that belongs to this continuum uniquely (no such story exists in the universe of the games). I have used these concepts, but I have not followed the official storylines; Exactly how Robotropolis came about is a story all of my own. My stories are not set within any of these worlds - think of them as being as unique as Archie is from Sega. Same characters, different storyline.
I like to think of the universe as being composed of an infinite or near-infinite number of alternate realities. Stephen King described these worlds as being levels of a Tower, and I am a great fan of the analogy. If you visit another level, you find yourself in a new world where things happen differently, perhaps just a little or perhaps a lot. You might visit a world that is exactly the same as yours except that the President of the United States is somebody different, or you have two brothers instead of a brother and a sister, or the gunman in the Ford theatre misfired and Lincoln served his full term. Or, you might visit a world where everybody was killed by a massive plague or nuclear war and the only survivors are hideous mutants. It depends on how far you travel from your own level.
My fanfics take place on another level of the Sonic 'Tower'. They are not canon, but they share similar events and similar characters to the various canon storylines. In this way, the stories will be familiar to canon fans, but indisputably a completely original and unique experience. When it comes to adapting games and other storylines that someone else has already written, I can't imagine anything more boring than simply recounting what happens in the canon without any creative licence. That's not an author, that's a stenographer.
This guide is divided into two parts: The science and the history of Mobius. The scientific guide combines the geographical, the demographical and the physical characteristics of the planet. As this is an alien world we're visiting, this is the guide that explains what the planet looks like, the nature of its people and other characteristics (i.e. the nature of Chaos energy) in a raw scientific sense. The historical guide, on the other hand, explains the political side of things - the state of the world's sociopolitical climate and how it got to be that way.
I just heard you groan. Yes, I wasn't kidding when I said this was dry. Feel free to use this as a reference of you're confused about something, and if there's something you don't understand that isn't clarified here then feel free to contact me and perhaps I will keep it in mind for a later edition.
This guide will be fairly regularly updated, and I don't know if it'll ever be 'finished' in the sense that I'll add to it whenever such amendments occur to me, and so it'll probably grow as the series does. I'll put an update history on this page to record alterations.
Shax