Canon

**Canon** refers to events that are branded as official in a given piece of media, and though a fanwork, *Sonic: What If?* operates as close as it can to the official Sonic the Hedgehog video game canon. However, Sonic canon has been known to shift over time, with wide-sweeping retcons (lit. *retroactive continuity*, changes to previously released canon media proposed by subsequent entries in a series} making changes to the world of Sonic as well as it's history.

While trying to keep to the rules of canon as best as possible, The Sega Scourge also makes the occasional personal addition to stories or characters where information is sparse or even non-existent. The following page details elements of the *Sonic: What If?* version of Sonic's canon that are not explicitly confirmed in the original source material. For more information about the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series, see the Sonic Wiki Zone.

## The Rules of the Werehog Form

In *Sonic Unleashed*, Sonic transforms into his Werehog form whenever night falls, returning to his regular state come the break of day. The exact mechanics of this are not fully explained, however, and some information is only available in the game's Wii/PS2 version or the tie-in animated short *Night of the Werehog*. Taking inspiration from these different sources, The Sega Scourge outlines the rough parameters of when Sonic assumes his altered state in *What If Sonic Never Lost The Werehog Form?*.

While on Earth or in Camelot, Sonic's Werehog form functions identically to the original game, transforming him at night and returning him to his true form in the day. However, in space, rules inspired by *Night of the Werehog* come into effect. In the short, Sonic remains in his Werehog form after dawn has started to break, transforming back upon the sun's light touching him. Likewise, while in areas of the Interstellar Amusement Park with no clear 'night' or 'day', Sonic defaults to his Werehog form and is transformed back to normal only when exposed to the light of the sun.

In White Space, where there is no concept of time nor any visible celestial bodies, Sonic assumes a unique form nicknamed 'Dusk Sonic', an amalgam of his two forms with their powers averaged out. When entering pockets of time captured in White Space, such as the sunny Green Hill Zone, Sonic follows the normal rules of the Werehog transformation.

At the current moment in *WI01's* narrative, Sonic has been trapped in his Werehog form for as of yet unknown reasons. Not even standing out in broad daylight will banish the transformation, with no hypothesis yet formed on what might have changed in Sonic's body to cause this development.

## Emerl's Copy Ability and Transformation

In the original *Sonic Battle*, Emerl's animations imply that he is unable to transform parts of his body into others, most evident by his flying animations; for Tails, Cream and Rouge's flight techniques all have Emerl swinging or flapping his arms rather than sprouting wings or rotors. He is, however, capable of forming weapons required to perform certain fighting techniques, such as Amy's Piko-Piko Hammer or the arsenal of Chaos Gamma.

In *What If Emerl Survived?*, however, Emerl is shown on multiple occasions to grow and enlarge parts of his body to closer resemble the individuals he's copying techniques from - particularly Knuckles the Echidna and E-123 Omega. He also partially transforms his body into liquid on occasion, in order to recreate the skills of Chaos. This transformation feature is attributed to Emerl's copy ability evolving over time, but has been lost after his reset in Part 4.

Additionally, while it is never outright confirmed in the original canon due to the two never appearing in an official piece of media together, Emerl in *WI02* is unable to copy the skills of Gemerl due to their similar body composition.

An example of Emerl transforming his body to form Omega's legs, while his arms grow in size and gain spiked fists from Knuckles.
## Sonic Rush

As stated in *What If Emerl Survived?* Part 2, *Sonic: What If?* operates under the notion that *Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)* takes place before *Sonic Rush*, despite their release dates suggesting otherwise. This is based on The Sega Scourge's personal interpretation of the relationship between the two games, which has been nebulous and unclear since their release.

## Super Shields

In *Sonic Heroes*, Tails and Knuckles participated in the final battle against Metal Overlord alongside Super Sonic, but notably did not receive traditional Super Form designs. Instead, they were granted golden bubble shields, which has been a point of controversy when compared to the designs of their transformations from *Sonic 3 & Knuckles*. In *Sonic: What If?*, The Sega Scourge refers to this power as a 'Super Shield', formed by the excess energy of a 'true' Super transformation.

This power first appeared in *What If Sonic Lost His Memory?* Part 1, used by Tails and Knuckles via the excess energy of Super Shadow's transformation.

Super Shield TailsSuper Shield Knuckles
## Sonic Heroes and Frontier Canyon

The Sega Scourge posits in the *What If Sonic Lost His Memory?* series that the gorge Sonic is seen running through in Team Sonic's opening cutscene from *Sonic Heroes* is actually Frontier Canyon Zone, a stage from *Sonic Rivals 2*. Both areas are wide, arid regions devoid of many people, and a name for the area seen in Team Sonic's opening was never given - which would be problematic for the narrative of *WI03* due to the location being the site of a major battle spanning Parts 4 and 5. As such, the two locations are considered to be one in *Sonic: What If?*, and referred to by the name Frontier Canyon.

## Ristar

As confirmed by the February 2023 artwork by codesonicthehedgehog, the events of Ristar - another SEGA game released in the 1990s - are canon to the depiction of Sonic canon used in *Sonic: What If?*. Due to the events of Ristar taking place in an entirely isolated area of space (the Valdi System), they by their nature cannot contradict with existing Sonic lore, and simply fill out the wider universe as explored by Black Shadow in *WI03*.

For more information on the series, visit the Ristar Wiki.

## Sonic Adventure's Flickies

### Names

In *Sonic Adventure*, the three birds that play a central role to the stories of both Amy Rose and E-102 Gamma are not given names; only the anime - Sonic X - would offer some, but the blue Flicky named 'Lily' was notably changed to be female in the anime's continuity, while it was male in the games. To be more accurate to the source material, original names were opted for and the blue bird's original gender was used. These names are Mi (blue), Fu (white) and Ko (pink), referring to the Japanese words for water (*mizu*), winter (*fuyu*) and heart (*kokoro*) respectively. Additionally, Ko is referred to using female pronouns, while the others use male.

Artwork by SegaSteven used to communicate the names of the birds and their meanings.
### The Birds' Owner

> *See: Aya*
>
>

Another unanswered question regarding the birds in *Sonic Adventure* is the identity of the individual that placed the locket on the blue bird, which held inside of it two important items: The photo of the three birds that helped E-102 Gamma awaken to some of the pink bird's memories and the cyan Chaos Emerald, which was sought after by Doctor Eggman and E-100 Alpha. Since the photo shows the three birds arranged together, a fourth party must have also taken the photo, implying that the three of them may have had a shared owner.

To this end, The Sega Scourge created Aya, the first original character in *Sonic: What If?*. She is the owner of the three Flickies from *Sonic Adventure* and a lover of taking photographs, explaining why she would give a sentimental photo to one of her pets. So far, Aya has only appeared in *What If E-102 Gamma Survived*, where she is a major character, but she presumably exists in all other What If? timelines.

## Flicky Island's Location

Flicky Island is the setting of *Sonic 3D Blast*, home to varied species of Flicky birds living among the landmass' diverse ecosystems. As it is a fairly obscure island in the middle of the ocean, it has never been said where exactly Flicky Island sits in the wider context of Sonic's world. As a small Easter Egg, The Sega Scourge mentions in *What If E-102 Gamma Survived?* Part 2 that Flicky Island can be found in the **Barracuda Sea**, an original area in an unknown part of Earth. It can be assumed, however, that it is not that far from the landmass housing Station Square, as E-102 Gamma Mk.II was able to fly from the latter to the former in a single night without rest.

The name 'Barracuda Sea' is a reference to a cheat code present in the Mega Drive version of Sonic 3D Blast, in which the player can access the game's level select by inputting B, A, Up, Right, C, Up, Down, A. This spells 'Baracuda', a corruption of the name of a real life fish.

## The 4 Year Timeskip

The idea that there are 4 years separating the 'Classic Era' (*Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)* to *Sonic 4*) and events of *Sonic Adventure* onward. This is inspired by the retconning of Amy Rose's age from 8 to 12 in *Sonic Adventure*, meaning that all characters would in turn be 4 years younger than their official ages prior to that game.

This, so far, has only been mentioned in *What If Espio Trained Was Trained By Master Zik?*, in which Espio is 12 years old during the first part. Espio's official age in the video game canon is 16, but as the story branches off from said canon in the 'Classic Era', he was younger.

As of 2023, the official Sonic Channel character bios have had all mentions of ages removed, with official interviews also using more vague terminology to refer to the ages of characters like Sonic ('teenage' rather than 15, for example). Because of this, future instalments may in turn use more vague language regarding the passing of time.

## Retcons made to the Sonic: What If? canon

### Two Worlds

In an interview with Takeshi Iizuka in 2017, he claimed that Princess Elise lived in 'the human world', and that the Sonic series actually took place across two different planets - One with realistic architecture and human characters (*Sonic Adventure, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) etc.)* and one with fantastical environments and animal characters *(Sonic Colors, Sonic Lost World, Sonic Forces etc.)*. While the vague boundaries between the two worlds were set, no games were actually confirmed to take place on either planet with the exception of *Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)* and *Sonic Colors*, and the only hint as to how the characters travelled between worlds was that they used a 'magic gateway' offscreen, which was never depicted in any games. This sparked controversy within the community for being such a large change to Sonic's lore and history, as well as for the creation of many plotholes seemingly to avoid having to explain the lack of humans in 2010s games.

The Two Worlds canon was never directly addressed in the series itself until the release of *Sonic Forces*, where attempts were made to hint at the idea that Sonic and his friends were 'aliens' by having all written scripts in the game be in a fictional language, but debates still went on as to why this change was made to begin with. In support of Takeshi Iizuka's creative decision and wanting to spread positivity about the new direction, The Sega Scourge stuck to the Two Worlds canon in *Sonic: What If?* all the way until 2022, taking input from the community on how to handle certain aspects of the vague lore - such as which games took place on which planets.

In 2022, with the release of TailsTube #1, Two Worlds was officially decanonized as part of the series' role in recapping the video game canon's lore. As such, Two Worlds was phased out of *Sonic: What If?*, with only *What If Sonic Lost His Memory?* having made heavy use of the proposed canon in its narrative. Mentions of stories taking place across two planets have been edited out of the original videos in post.

### Classic Sonic's Super Form

In *What If Sonic Never Lost The Werehog Form?* Part 4, it's stated that Classic Sonic does not know how to transform into Super Sonic as he has never heard of such a thing before, claiming that he is 'post-Sonic 1 Sonic'. This was retconned shortly after the episode's release.

### Sonic Saved Vanilla (WI03)

In *What If Sonic Lost His Memory?* Part 3, Vanilla states that she feels like she owes Sonic after he saved her, despite the fact that in a previous episode it was stated that the first two *Sonic Advance series* games occurred after Sonic's presumed death after falling from the ARK. After the episode's release, this statement from Vanilla was explained to have been an error, and she had never met Sonic.

## References

1. ↑ *The Sega Scourge*
2. ↑ *Sonic Wiki Zone*
3. ↑ *The Sega Scourge*
4. ↑ *"Also, I know I'm jumping from SA2 to Heroes without any mention of Advance 1 and 2, even though I do consider those games to be canon [...] but I decided to omit them from this story as they don't really expand on anything narratively. They could've still happened, sure, but I'll leave that up to your imagination." ~ What If Sonic Lost His Memory? Part 1*