Sonic Prime brought a lot to the table, including many different worlds and characters. Many of
these characters display varying levels of intelligence. Today,
we will explore just how smart or not these characters are.
I'm Kyle with WickedBinge, and this is Sonic Prime Season 1 Characters: Dumb to Brilliant.
We have a couple of points to make before we begin:
We will only focus on characters that played a prominent role in the story thus far.
We will treat each alternate version of a character as their own character.
Lastly, spoilers ahead!!
Today, we’ll be starting with the dumbest
character… and working our way up to the most brilliant. This first
category of characters… Are Not To Bright. As one might expect, we will start with the
character with the lowest level of intelligence and work our way up. At the very bottom of the
intelligence scale is Mangey. This is an alternate version of Tails that Sonic finds when he travels
to the forest world. The big disadvantage this little guy has when compared to others is that
he is a bit more primitive. He acts more on animal-like instincts, and he is shown
to not always be able to think for himself. He barely even knows how to say most basic words,
and he even attacks Sonic right after he saved him. Don't worry though. We still love him as
much as the next person. If we listed these characters based on how adorable they were,
Mangey would easily take the top spot. For our next entry, we have a couple more
forest friends for you: Gnarly and Hangry. Coming from the same place as Mangey,
these are that world's versions of Knuckles and Big respectively. They are certainly smarter than
Mangey, but they are still not very bright. An example for Hangry comes when figures of
speech are used about cats or beef. For Gnarly, we thought of the moment where the group hears a
voice in the distance, and Gnarly automatically assumes that the trees are the ones talking.
Prim makes it clear that they've talked about this before, and Gnarly STILL thinks this way.
You'd think, with how long he's lived in the trees, he'd figure that out by now. Add
in their still semi-primitive nature, and you've got some quirky goofballs.
With the dim characters out of the way… we now move onto the Average Folks.
Avast, ye buccaneers! We be sailin' the seas to explore the legend of Knuckles the Dread
and MOST of his crew! The exception to this entry is Sails (Tails), who we will discuss
later. The intelligence of this crew is relatively average. They don't exactly have any dumb moments,
but there isn't much of anything groundbreaking either. They usually just wind up following the
captain's orders, regardless of what they are. They didn't even seem to know how to fight using
the cannons on their own ship. Speaking of the captain though, Knuckles the Dread doesn't fare
much better. You COULD argue that he is among the smarter of the group since he is their leader,
but there is one glaring issue that takes him back down a few pegs. In his backstory,
Knuckles the Dread is in pursuit of a specific treasure. As he got closer to it, he thought less
and less with his brain. He did not consider the safety of the crew or the dangers he was putting
them and his ship in. After these events, you would think he would have learned from that,
which appears to be the case at first. However, as he is convinced to go after it again,
the same thing essentially happens again, only the results were less severe this time
around. Maybe a third time will be the charm if they return in a later season.
We have another forest duo for you now in the form of Prim and Thorn Rose. These two are on different
sides of an argument through most of their story so far, but they think almost the exact same
way on that argument. Prim and her group all were taking way more from the forest than they needed,
not realizing how harmful it could be. Thorn Rose witnesses this, and decides that the best thing
for her to do is to knock them away with her hammer, forcing them to live in the treetops.
After doing this, she wants to close the forest floor off from them with more trees, preventing
them from ever coming back to do more harm. What she failed to realize is that she was closing
off the forest floor from sunlight, which would also do harm to the forest she loved. Overall,
these two are generally smart, especially compared to the others, but they could have been seen in a
better light if they just sat down with each other to actually think and talk it out. Had
they just done that, much of what happened to separate them could have been avoided.
We can't have a Sonic show without the blue blur himself, Sonic, now can we? When it comes
to intelligence, Sonic isn't awful, but many have pointed out that he isn't as bright as
other iterations of him have been. Granted, other iterations think with their feet first as well,
but Prime Sonic seems especially so sometimes. Two instances come right in the first episode.
The first time around, Eggman fools Sonic into thinking he is in his mech, and Sonic
goes to attack him. Tails warns him not to do this at least twice, but Sonic does it anyway,
leading to Eggman finding the Paradox Prism. Then, as Eggman goes to grab it, Sonic jumps
to attacking yet again, despite the cries of his friends. These actions cause the Prism to break,
triggering the events of the rest of the show thus far. This eventually leads to more of
Sonic's goof-ups. If he would just learn to stop and think, or even listen, for just a moment,
then Sonic could not only be seen as smarter, but he also could have possibly prevented much
of what happens in the show. Also, how did he not notice that Rouge got into Tails'
shop the exact same way he did moments before? Now we go from Sonic to MOST of his friends,
that being Amy, Knuckles, and Rouge. They may not be the main character, nor do they have a
lot of screen time, but they certainly seem to at least ACT smarter than Sonic. For one,
they aren't jumping into action like Sonic does. They even are seen planning what to do before
fighting back again. Just as they are saying that they should stick together, Sonic runs off on his
own. Despite this, they stick to their plan, and it proves to be quite effective. Goes to show that
thinking things through is typically the better move when possible. This alone puts them above
Sonic, and hopefully they will be able to demonstrate more smarts in the future.
That wraps up our average-intelligence characters. This next category is made up of The Smart.
Starting off the top five, we have the fearsome Rusty Rose. This is a mostly robotic version of
Amy, and that could arguably be the biggest reason why she could be seen as a smart character. She
is constantly able to use her installed tech to her advantage, and this can especially be seen in
combat. As Renegade Knucks and Rebel Rouge arrive in the Chaos Council's chamber to help free Sonic
and Nine, Rusty joins in on the fight to stop them. Regardless of the ability of her opponent,
she seems to know just what to do to overpower them. If Knucks and Rouge attack together,
she uses her extendable arms to push them back against the wall. When Sonic is her opponent,
she pins him down so that he isn't able to move. We also want to bring up the moment where she
encounters Black Rose, a.k.a. Pirate Amy. Despite having her “evil” programming back at this point,
seeing another version of herself allowed her to overcome that programming for just a moment and
to think for herself. If she can stay that way in future seasons while also honing her skills
with her robotic body, she could wind up being depicted as even smarter than she already is.
We have almost made it to the top three, but the characters who just barely missed the mark are
Renegade Knucks and Rebel Rouge. These two are up against the Chaos Council, who put them in
a scenario similar to that found in Sonic Forces. Their home has been turned into a dystopian city,
and they are trying to fight back against this. Through these events, Renegade and Rebel are put
in a situation where they basically have to think smart in order to survive. They are also leaders
of the whole rebellion, meaning they have to come up with strategies that will not only accomplish
their mission, but to also keep the citizens safe from harm. They struggle for a while,
but once Sonic and Nine come into the picture, they quickly adapt their strategies and start
pushing much further forward with their plan. We have no doubt that, if they can strategize
and adapt to whatever is going on this well, they will eventually take back their home.
Taking the bronze medal for smarts is none other than Shadow the Hedgehog. Shadow may
not plan a lot of strategies or work in groups like some of the previous entries,
but he is still a pretty smart guy. The first we see of him is when he is smashing through rocks,
eventually stumbling upon a Chaos Emerald. Since he was going after rocks specifically, this tells
us that he somehow knew one of the Emeralds would be hiding in a rock without appearing
to have a locater of any kind. He also is on the same page with the other heroes in that he can't
stand how Sonic rushes into situations without thinking. This implies to us that this iteration
of Shadow also likes to analyze the current scenario before taking action. That being said,
he is capable of thinking quickly when he needs to. After Sonic causes that first initial blast
by destroying the robot, Shadow immediately knows that it was Sonic who caused it. Also, upon his
arrival on top of the mountain where everybody else was confronting Eggman, he only sees the
Paradox Prism, which he had presumably never seen before, for mere moments before Sonic strikes and
breaks it. Upon the Prism shattering, without knowing exactly what the Prism was capable of,
Shadow immediately knew that the best thing for him to do was to use Chaos Control to get out of
the way. While he does end up getting stuck in between dimensions for most of Season 1,
he could have easily suffered a worse fate had he not known what to do on the spot. This may
also at least partially explain why we don't see any other versions of Shadow in the story like we
do with the other characters. Oh well! At least we can see a pirate version of Shadow in Sonic Dash.
Finally, we get to the characters who sit above the rest in the brains department. These
characters are The Brilliant. Our Silver Medal will be divided into
three, with each piece being given to a different version of Tails: Tails himself, Nine, and Sails.
Regardless of which of these Tails we talk about here, each one can be seen as a technological
genius. The original Tails is the one we think needs the least amount of explanation. He also
gets some points of intelligence during the first battle with Eggman. While Sonic has Eggman's mech
backed up to the edge of a cliff, Tails catches on to the fact that Eggman doesn't normally do that,
as he would be too smart to put himself in that position. As a result, Tails figures out very
quickly that Eggman is not actually inside that mech. For Nine, we thought of two things. For one,
him adding seven metal Tails to himself to become like a nine-tailed fox is clever and useful in and
of itself. These extra tails seem to work similar to Spider-Man's Iron Spider suit arms in the MCU.
We also give him points for harnessing the Prism shard. After Sonic disappears upon touching it,
Nine takes it with him and quickly figures out how to use it to transport himself to another world
entirely. Finally, Sails may be lumped in with the rest of the pirate crew for the most part,
but there is one thing that makes him stand out: his own metal arm. We aren't entirely
sure where he would have gotten the resources from to pull this off, but we gotta give the
guy props for his ingenuity and being able to work with what had been available to him.
Where the Silver medal of brilliance was divided into 3, our gold medal entry will DOUBLE that!
This is because it is being handed to The Chaos Council as well as Dr. Eggman. Like with the
original Tails, the original Eggman needs little to no explanation. He is able to mass produce
robots and other machines almost effortlessly. He keeps trying to take over the world,
and he likely would have at this point if Sonic and his friends didn't get in the way so much.
With the Chaos Council, they are all different versions of Eggman, so you know they are going
to act and think in a similar fashion to some degree. They each pilot machines of their own,
with each one tailored to their own style. Also, unlike Eggman's mere ATTEMPTS to control the
world, these guys have successfully done that. Granted, it may help that there were five of
them instead of just one, but still. They also are able to keep a few of the other characters
at bay for a while. Towards the end of the season, they capture Nine and quickly utilize his tech's
portal-making technology and use it to their advantage. This means that they might now be
able to take over multiple worlds and control them simultaneously, especially if they keep advancing
their technology AND smarts! Even if they don't succeed in that, just the fact that they found
a way to do so makes them not only intelligent, but a massive threat. With all of this in mind,
we are sure that all of these doctors are the most brilliant in the show thus far.
But let us know in the comment section if you agree. And let us know what you
thought of Sonic Prime's batch of episodes. Make sure to hit
that notification bell and binge our other videos. But most importantly; Stay Wicked!