Sonic’s Amy Rose Never Had to Be The Series’ Most Worthless Character

While many of Sonic the Hedgehog’s characters are beloved, one of the most contentious is Amy Rose. Even though IDW Publishing’s current series hasn’t succeeded in making her a more compelling character, Archie Comics’ much older and now-discontinued series actually found the perfect recipe to actually make Amy Rose appealing.

In Archie Comics, Amy was originally like Tails in that she was quite young and therefore not allowed to help the Freedom Fighters in their war against Dr. Robotnik – no matter how much she pleaded. The fact that Sonic let Tails fight alongside him was a major point of contention with Amy who tried using this bit of knowledge to help her case. But no matter how hard she tried, no one indulged her. So, she had no choice but to take drastic action. Aware that her people’s rulers possessed a magical ring – different from the power rings – that could grant any wish to someone with a pure heart, she snuck to where it was being held and made a wish to become an adult, in Sonic the Hedgehog #79 from Justin Freddy Mendez-Gabrie, Karl Bollers, Ken Penders, Michael Gallagher, James Fry, Steven Butler, Chris Allan, and Dave Manak.

Naturally, there were many implications that came as a result of Amy’s stolen wish. First, this failed to convince Sonic to let her join the Freedom Fighters since she still didn’t have enough experience, nor did he believe that aging equated to maturity. In other words, Amy wasted her youth for a worthless cause. Second, Amy’s wish had larger ramifications on the overall storyline. As later revealed, the ring could only grant one wish – meaning that no one could use the ring’s power to help the mother of Sonic’s girlfriend Sally Acorn and the queen of their kingdom. The queen had been missing since the beginning of the series, and when her subjects only recently found her, she was in a coma. The uniqueness and irony behind Amy’s story is clearly enough to change the minds of even the pink hedgehog’s most vocal critics.

In IDW, writers not only tried to give Amy Rose more substance but all of their female characters by creating a story that revolved entirely around them instead of the male-dominated cast of famous heroes including Knuckles, Shadow, Silver, and even Tails. But the attempt flopped. Unfortunately, IDW continued the games’ interpretation of Amy as an obsessed Sonic fangirl. Amy doesn’t have a compelling backstory to make readers care for her, either.

Archie Comics later paired amy off with her own evil twin from another universe, Rosy the Rascal. Before Rosy’s introduction, every main character had their own upside-down counterpart who eventually complemented them in ways that invited further interpretation about their inspiration from fans. And Rosy the Rascal is undoubtedly the greatest of them all, even more so than Scourge, the anti-Sonic, for she’s essentially a deranged killer who sings eerily about killing the victims she hunts. The fact that she especially enjoys swinging her massive hammer at Sonic only serves to exemplify the real Amy Rose’s obsession with the Blue Blur. For future issues of IDW’s Sonic the Hedgehog and even other games, writers should take notes from Archie Comics on how best to portray one of the most worthless characters in the entire franchise – because she doesn’t have to be.

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