User blog:DarkClaw3/PE Proposal: Turbo Mecha Sonic

Following my last proposal, I was going to immediately follow up with the 2008 Graphic Novel version of the Joker, but honestly, I haven't actually read that book yet (or it's loose follow-up, Batman: Damned), so I decided to hold off on that for now. Instead, I've decided to bring up a villain that I'm not too sure if anyone else has thought of having officially approved: Turbo Mecha Sonic from Super Mario Bros. Z.

Hoo boy. If you've got a ticket for the nostalgia train, better get ready, folks.

What's the Work?
Newgrounds animator Mark "Alvin-Earthworm" Haynes was a fan of both Nintendo and Sega. And he was also a fan of Dragon Ball Z. So, in 2006, he put together a flash animated series that took all three and put them together, creating Super Mario Bros. Z, which soon became probably the most influential and celebrated sprite animated series of it's time, and even still today. Basically, in case you aren't familiar, the series centers around Mario, Luigi and their friends teaming up with Sonic and Shadow to find the seven Dragon Ball—I mean Chaos Emeralds that were transported to the Mushroom Kingdom, while having distinctly more DBZ-esque fights along the way. And why do they need to find the Emeralds so urgently, you may ask? Well, look to none other than Mecha Sonic himself...

Who is He?
Prior to his transformation, Metal Sonic was once one of many Sonic robots constructed by Dr. Eggman as part of his numerous plans to take over Mobius and defeat his nemesis. However, unlike Robotnik's other duplicates, Metal Sonic possessed an infallible will and returned to challenge Sonic time and time again. Finally fed up with his defeats, he snuck into Eggman's lab and fused himself with his other robotic replicas (Silver Sonic, Mecha Sonic from the Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog series, and the unnamed Sonic Adventure robot) in order to become Turbo Mecha Sonic. Eggman threatened to deactivate him for his treachery afterwards, but, not wanting to take orders from what he now perceived as an inferior being any longer, Mecha Sonic attacked him and crashed the Death Egg down onto Mobius, creating mass destruction on the planet. Following this, he decided to obtain all the Chaos Emeralds in order to become "complete" and obtain ultimate power (sound familiar?), and set off into Mobius to do so, whilst slaughtering everything he could come across. During his quest, he began individually hunting down/murdering all of Sonic's friends—strangling Tails, gunning down Cream and Cheese, beating the crap out of and then gunning down Knuckles, and doing something presumably less violent to Amy—while also killing both Rouge and Omega at some point along the way.

In only a few hours most of Mobius was rendered a flaming wasteland while Mecha Sonic held six of the seven Emeralds, leaving Sonic to face him over the last...which, as you can guess, didn't go well for him. Mecha Sonic then obtained the final Emerald and prepared to achieve his ultimate form, only to be stopped by a vengeful Shadow, who transported the gems to another dimension with Chaos Control. But before two hedgehogs could face him together, Mecha Sonic used the power he had obtained from the Emeralds to chase after them using Chaos Control himself, leaving his enemies stranded on the destroyed Mobius (or, at least until the scavenged the data/parts necessary to follow suit from the remains of the Death Egg). Unsurprisingly, Mecha Sonic wound up in the Mushroom Kingdom, where, upon arriving, he found a Goomba in possession of on of the Emeralds and promptly incinerated him, intent on hunting down the rest afterwards. Later, as Mario, Sonic and company are searching for the Emeralds, he discovered one of them in the hands of Yoshi and Luigi, separating the former and trying to threaten him into giving up the gem. Instead, Yoshi swallows it, and Mecha Sonic proceeds to beat the ever-loving tar out of him in one of the series' more brutal fights (if you could even call it that, with how one-sided it is), forcing him to spit it out before retreating at the sight of an arriving Sonic and Shadow.

Next, Mecha Sonic tracks the next two Emeralds down to Yoshi's Island, where Mario's crew, the Koopa Bros and the Axem Rangers X are already battling over them. Upon arriving, he takes out the Koopa Bros. in a single hit (even shattering Red's shell) and destroys the Rangers' ship, the Blade. With two more Emeralds in his collection, he begins to mock Sonic for his failure until turning his attention to the Rangers, proceeding to use the four Emeralds to power up into his Semi-Super form, slaughter the Ginyu Force knock-offs (of course, they're all robots...but still) and fight with the rest of his enemies. However, after another fairly one-sided battle, Mecha Sonic declares to Sonic that he is finally done with toying with them and decides to wipe out the island and everyone on it with a giant energy ball. Fortunately, he is stopped by Sonic and Mario using a Power Star together, who briefly outmatch him and steal back the Emeralds. Infuriated, he kicks his energy bomb down to destroy the island anyway, although Shadow uses one of the Emeralds and Chaos Control to teleport everyone to safety...well, everyone except the Koopa Bros, actually. They kind of die.

Next episode, Mecha Sonic tracks Mario, Sonic and Stuffwell down in the Pipe Maze and tries to force Sonic to give up the location of the Emeralds before deciding to simply kill him instead, which is prevented by Mario as he takes himself and Sonic down through a pipe into the Minus World to escape, with Mecha pursuing. He ends up discovering the 8-bit Mario and Sonic with Goombella and Professor Kolorado and fights with them over the Chaos Emerald in their possession. Once he takes it, he decides to use Chaos Control to escape the Minus World while leaving his enemies behind to suffer a fate worse than death, only to realize that Chaos Control doesn't work in the negative dimension, and thus decides to simply kill his enemies as painfully as possible to satisfy himself. Shadow and Yoshi end up joining the fight until Luigi causes Professor Kolorado's magic stopwatch to fall and off-set the negative energy in the dimension (yeah...Alvin thinks that the plot of this episode wasn't great, in case you're wondering), allowing everyone the opportunity to escape despite Mecha Sonic's attempts to stop them. Once everyone is free, Shadow again uses Chaos Control to warp everyone to safety right before Mecha Sonic incinerates the ground they were standing on.

Some time after this, Mecha Sonic confronts the now-solo Shadow out in the desert and demands he give up the location of the Emeralds, leading to a fight between them...which we never end up seeing because the show was cancelled afterwards and rebooted a few years later (although Alvin confirmed later on that, had the original series finished, Shadow would have lost, Mecha Sonic would've collected the Emeralds and achieved his final form before holding a Cell Games-style tournament, where he would presumably be defeated once and for all).

What Has He Done?
As the amalgamation of some of the worst villains Dragon Ball has to offer (with some voice clips of Cooler thrown in for good measure), you can probably imagine that Mecha Sonic would be pretty bad from the get-go. And he is. But I have to say—going if you're going into this series blind (like I did so many years ago), you probably wouldn't expect him to be this dark. Because usually, most fan projects I've seen don't have their main villains start out by rendering their whole world into a wasteland and committing genocide on nearly all life there. That's pretty messed up by any standard—but of course it doesn't end there, as he then hunted down and murdered all of Sonic's closest friends shortly afterwards for no reason other than to spite his organic counterpart. And, while the reason why Rouge and Omega were added to his body count isn't really known or explained, he could've also been out to spite Shadow as well...or maybe he killed them off because he's a sadistic psychopath with no regard for any life but his own. That seems more likely.

And then we have what he does when the series actually starts. He murders a terrified and confused Goomba mere seconds following his arrival in the Mushroom Kingdom, and a few hours later beats Yoshi within an inch of his life for refusing to give up his Chaos Emerald—admitting after their fight that he would have killed him regardless. The next time he shows up, he knocks the Koopa Bros unconscious and brutally slaughters the Axem Rangers, and casually beats the daylights out of his remaining enemies with a fraction of his newfound power for fun, only to decide to wipe out his enemies and all of Yoshi's Island in a single stroke—showing sadistic glee when Sonic mentions how many innocent lives will be lost if he does so. When trapped in the Minus World with Mario and Sonic, he chose to spare his enemies only because they would be trapped in the dimension forever without a hope of escaping, claiming that they were destined to either starve or kill themselves, and upon realizing that he was going to share their fate he decided to drag out their deaths so he could get some satisfaction out of it. In the same episode, he decides to kill both Goombella and Kolorado as well. Why? No other reason than them being annoying and unworthy of standing near him. Guys, I think Mecha Sonic might be taking the whole "god-complex" thing a little too far...

There's really no telling what he would have gotten up to had the series continued—besides getting the Emeralds and achieving his so-called perfection—but it's safe to say that there's not much else he needed to do to solidify himself as an utterly irredeemable and monstrously sadistic sack of circuits.

Heinous Standard?
This series has a collection of Mario and Sonic villains kicking around in it (mostly just Mario, though), but none of them even remotely come close to Mecha Sonic. Ignoring the fact that he destroyed almost all life on Mobius, which puts him leagues above all other antagonists in the series when it comes to what they've actually done, he is the only one who is consistently a threatening figure not to be messed with, whereas everybody else the heroes have faced have are given moments of being humorous/non-menacing or other redeeming qualities; for example, Basilisx, who is also portrayed as sadistic and remorseless, primarily wants revenge on Mario for causing the death of his best friend hundreds of other Koopas over the years. Mecha Sonic gets no such excuse for justifying his horrific actions. On top of that, he's the only one of the villains to have a sizable body count—hell, he's the only one with a body count at all.

To bluntly explain how sorely outclassed all his competition is, even the Axem Rangers X, who enslaved the Yoshis and then nearly threatened to destroy their whole island using the power of their Chaos Emerald, are not only dwarfed but horrified by his incredible sadism and ruthlessness before being killed by him. And then, in the following episode, Bowser, the other primary antagonist of the series, is genuinely disturbed to learn that he obliterated all of Yoshi's Island and killed the Koopa Bros. I think that says all you need to know right there.

Mitigating Factors?
Heck no. Despite the partly comedic nature of SMBZ (courtesy of Luigi most of the time), the main story is taken quite seriously all throughout, and Mecha Sonic is treated with the utmost severity whenever he appears, rendering all humor almost null and void. Plus, it's made crystal clear that he is sentient and his actions have nothing to do with his programming, particularly given that he had a will and a conscious even as Metal Sonic, solely being the result of his own quest to obtain ultimate power while bloodying his metallic knuckles doing so. The only claim against this occurs during Sonic's dream in episode 5, where he states that his actions are the result of him fulfilling what he was made to do, but that is an obvious lie given his defiance towards his creator and frequently demonstrated free will...plus, this claim appears in a dream anyway, so it doesn't really count in the long run.

Also, before this argument gets brought up (and it will be), although he is clearly taking inspiration from Cell with bits of Frieza thrown in, he falls under the "homage" spectrum of a on his page and doesn't satire either villain by any means, as the series as a whole is designed as a passionate tribute to both DBZ and Mario and Sonic's respective games. If he was supposed to be a parody, he'd probably be much funnier and taken far less seriously as a threat.

Verdict?
Feels sorta weird to say this about a villain from a fan-made series (well, at least to me it does), but Turbo Mecha Sonic makes the cut with flying colors. Even if the series never finished properly (and likely never will, unfortunately), he's more than vile enough to qualify.