Sticks the Badger

"*Yeah. You see, you switched sides and your bad luck overpowered Eggman's good luck, but you were really on our side. So by losing, you won.*"
— *Sonic Boom* Official Website

## Physical description

### Eye color

Blue

**Sticks the Badger** (スティックス・ザ・バジャー Sutikkusu za Bajā?) is one of the main characters in the *Sonic Boom* series. She is a wacky anthropomorphic jungle badger, the only descendant of Jebediah Badger, and a force of nature in every way. Since her childhood, she has lived and flourished alone in the wilderness and is therefore new to friends in general. She eventually formed a strong bond with Team Sonic and joined them as their wild card in their ongoing battles against Dr. Eggman.

## Concept and creation

According to Hiroyuki Miyazaki, Chief Content Officer for the Sonic Brand, Sega of America, "Sticks is a significant addition to the *Sonic Boom* universe and the *Sonic the Hedgehog* franchise" and is meant to form the core ensemble featured throughout the *Sonic Boom* franchise alongside Sonic, Tails, Amy and Knuckles. Helping round off the cast, she is meant to bring a quirky personality and perspective to the team dynamic and her character adds an endless amount of humor and surprise to the Sonic Team.

According to Bill Freiberger, the impetus for creating Sticks is very often to deliver his message, and represents his point of view and belief system. This is the reason why Sticks will say something absurd, only to be proven correct in the end. In Freiberger's opinion, Sticks brings a healthy dose of cynicism to the series to counter the heroism of her friends, making her more akin to an anti-hero.

Early artwork of Sticks shows she was supposed to have white sports tape for her hair locks and only have one eyelash. The sports tape was eventually changed to auburn strings and she ended up having two eyelashes.

## Appearance

Sticks is an anthropomorphic badger only slightly shorter than Amy. She has orange fur with long thick hair on the back of her head, which she keeps in two locks with auburn strings, and two brown stripes across each of her eyes and bushy round ears that reach the end of her hair. She is rather scrawny, with a peach muzzle, a small black nose, blue eyes and a medium-long bushy tail.

Sticks' attire consists of a midriff-baring tube top and a skirt with an auburn rope belt, each made of worn-down gray fabric stitched together, and tan fur-skin boots, one which has a fur cuff and the other which has metal bands on it. As accessories, she wears a golden band on her right upper arm, a spiral bracelet on her left wrist and a necklace braided with seashells and a gold ring.

In addition to her usual clothes, Sticks has a number of additional attires:

* At the Awardy Awards, Sticks wore a black one-shoulder dress with white hemlines and black medium-heeled shoes.

* For cold weathers, Sticks wears a pair of yellow ear warmers, an apple green winter jacket, a yellow scarf, tan mittens with yellow cuffs, and tan winter boots with fuzzy yellow cuffs.

* For high-altitude trips, Sticks has an advanced white spacesuit with orange boots, belt and arms, and a white helmet with an antenna, cylinders to accommodate her hair locks, and a transparent visor.

* When playing for the Pin Dashers, Sticks wears a dark blue and white-striped bowling shirt with matching bowling shoes. Her shirt is likewise emblazoned with the team's logo.

* For soccer matches, Sticks has a soccer uniform that includes a white and blue t-shirt with a blue chest logo shaped like Sonic's head, long white socks, and white shoes with blue laces and red soles.

* At the olympic games, Sticks wore a pair of black bike shorts in addition to her regular clothes.

* On holidays, Sticks has been known to wear a green and white Santa Hat, a white shirt, a green skirt with black lederhosen suspenders, and green and white versions of her regular shoes with white fur balls on the toes

## Personality

Sticks is energetic, free-spirited, and primal. She has sharp animal instincts, is a fearsome combatant, a tenacious hunter, and will enter a feral frenzy when she is angry. Because of her isolated life, Sticks has become off-kilted, obtuse, mental and just plain nutty, and she thinks others are living in an alternate world different from the normal one, something that unnerves friends and enemies alike. While Sticks recognizes that she is a kook, she does not like having herself and her ideas written off as crazy by default (as she often turns out to be right).

In spite of her background, Sticks is intelligent, especially when in her right element, though her manner of speaking comes off as strange to other people as she speaks in a primitive dialect she taught herself. Also, there is a definite method in much of her madness, and her hair-brained ideas can sometimes be strokes of brilliance that lead to solutions that no one else could have thought of. Due to living in the jungle, Sticks has no concept of formal behavior, a fact she is aware of and worries will embarrass her in fancy situations. She is also disgusted by anything cute, adorable and fuzzy. Despite this she has no problems with Miss Tomatopotamus and found the idea of Tails being in love adorable.

While not quite a tomboy, Sticks is far from feminine and has no understanding of this concept. However, she does have her rare moments of girly-ness. She loves spending time in her burrow and returns to it for safety when a situation becomes too bizarre for her. Like Tails, she is passionate about arts and crafts and makes things from what she finds in nature. Unlike Tails though, Sticks usually considers technology her enemy because it "can't be trusted." Regardless of her standpoints however, she is willing to compromise her principles for the right reasons. She has also curiously enough displayed an unlikely amount of affection for otherwise dangerous or disgusting robots, such as D-Fekt and Buster.

Sticks' social skills need plenty of work. She always speaks her mind, even if it comes across as socially uncalibrated, and her wildness sometimes gets her into trouble during social situations. Sticks is not the most trusting individual and is full of outrageous suspicions and paranoia (though her instinctive skepticism often turns out to be quite accurate). She is very superstitious and senses danger and conspiracies everywhere, which leaves her in a state of constant stress. She also exhibits personality traits based on various conspiracy theorist stereotypes, in that she suspects the government of being behind a lot of shady activities, including mind-controlling the public, and often thinks about toppling it. As such, she has equipment prepared for even the oddest situations. Sticks is also one who believes in speaking the truth, and cannot stand the real stories being withheld. Despite her dislike of lies, however, she is not a snitch.

While the concepts of sharing, compassion, and friendship are foreign to her, Sticks has a good heart and a genuine desire to get closer to Sonic and his friends (though she is also completely comfortable being alone), and is fiercely loyal to them. Perhaps most noticeably, she is unwilling to rat out her friends, even when they do something she does not disagree with, although she expects them to come clean in the end. However, her loyalty also means that she feels very hurt when her friends do not trust her enough her when she needs them to. Her closeness to her friends also creates an internal struggle for her; on one hand she is not sure she can handle the life outside her burrow, but on the other hand she loves her friends and wants to hang out with them.

Sticks has a horrible singing voice, which has been likened to "bagpipes in a wood chipper" and was bad enough to set off Tails' Disasterometer.

## Powers and abilities

Sticks possesses unparalleled and quite accurate animal instincts. These include an expert sense of smell accurate enough to let her sniff out specific targets, like an animal. She has extremely sharp wilderness survival skills in various areas, such as creating shelters and fires, knot tying (being capable of tying an entire net in a flash), bird calls, identifying edible mushrooms, navigation, and time measurement without modern instruments. She is also an excellent swimmer who can pull off undersea traversing where regular people need wetsuits. Sticks is as well a talented hunter who can take down any prey with her signature equipment. Physically, Sticks is very swift and agile and has acrobatic skills on level with a circus acrobat, being capable of dodging successive laser shots and making high leaps with little trouble and minimal reaction time.

In battle, Sticks is a great warrior with fearsome combat skills due to her wild side. Sticks is proficient in the usage of several forms of weaponry (including expert archery), but she is most well-versed in the usage of boomerangs. She can throw boomerangs with absolute precision and without fail, including make-shift boomerangs made from things such as ladles and robot parts. Even without her weapons, Sticks is an adept martial artist and has descent skills in hand-to-hand combat. She is also skilled in weapon crafting, which is exemplified in the self-made weapons she uses. Also, while technology is not her forte, Sticks has some skills in programming missiles due to her past experiences of being caught in missile silos.

Sticks has an uncanny sense of foresight, and often predicts the occurrence of unexpected situations long beforehand. Her imagination and awareness together make her very capable of devising uniquely effective solutions. After eating an Evil Cookie infused with Eggman's DNA, Sticks briefly gained genius-level intelligence. However, it reverted back to her normal level after being cured.