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a lot of people i know say that archie tried too hard to make Sally not a sue to the point that they messed her up.

I disagree and I'd call it character development and watching the character grow once the narrative got beyond the context it started out in (the lone rebels). I've liked seeing Sally knocked down a peg or two, acknowledged for having serious attitude problems and even admitting it herself - I've got more issue with the way that Ian seems to be turning the clock back to her SatAM personality in that respect.

And seeing that Sally is a princess isn't it obvious that she'd have fans?

This brings me back to world-building again, since it feels like a chicken and agg scenario. I just don't get why the series needed to be built around an original character princess (and to a lesser extent, her entourage) in the way it was.

Not to mention that all the core freedom fighters were friends since childhood. Why wouldn't they like Sally? Friends tend to like each other. Thats the trend.

Not arguing that. Just wondering why they found her likeable. She was arrogant, she was insulting, she was immature, she was rash... And all her friends ever seemed to do was ignore it or pat the poor dear on the head for being stressed. Yes, they were all kids together so maybe that was it - but the rest of the core FFs didn't seem to have that problem, on the whole.

I found Bunnie an example of a more attractive personality for me, so it's not as though the writers couldn't write them. Sally just seemed to get lots of adulation purely for her status and for being physically attractive. To paraphrase Jim Henson's Dinosaurs, it's "I'm the Princess - gotta love me!", no matter how big a brat she is.

Not to mention she being a princess, Sally is basically a hope figure for all rebels.

I know. I guess I'm just used to that being... y'know... Sonic's job - him being the eponymous hero an' all. Again, I just have a hard time figuring out why she was a necessary addition to the cast.

Why do you hate her for being competent? You wanted Princess Peach?

For me, there's a difference between competent and feeling like the writers're taking the mickey a bit. Characters with one or two or even a few standout traits're one thing, but:

She's a princess, which gives her automatic right to shove her nose in everything and pull rank.
She drives the central plot hook.
She's apparently so beautiful by furry standards that guys fall in love at first sight and flit after her like bees around a honey pot, despite the fact that she openly plays them against each other and insults them to their faces.
She's apparently super-smart enough to've invented a device for communicating with wild animals that nobody's ever invented before, despite the fact she's been hiding in a forest without so much tech as a water wheel since I was five years old.
She hates being told she's wrong and basically sulks or does her own thing if she doesn't get her own way (she takes Tails' place in the should-carry-own-ransom-note stakes on occasion, when she's not consistently saving Sonic), yet everyone mystifyingly makes excuses for her, despite the fact that her and Sonic're the only characters who make a habit of this.
She just happens to be a kick-tail martial artist.
She just happens to be the only one to have a handy-dandy piece of tech that'll tell her the answer to virtually anything on the planet she doesn't know and enable her to do a load of other stuff that she wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

Basically, the character is written as physically and mentally all that and a bag of chips, and held in adulation despite not really being all that nice. I have a problem with any character where despite blatant evidence to the contrary, the only flaws that their companions seem to admit they have are the likes of "Can't play the nose flute", "Only got 99% rather than full marks in an exam once" or even fudges like "Cares too much" or "Tries too hard", that anyone else might see as a compliment.

Besides Archie, Sonic's never gotten character development. In Sonic X,AoStH, Sonic the movie, satAM and Sonic Underground he's the same guy coming out as he was going in.

You haven't read any Fleetway, have you?

Because back in the day his personality was, and kinda still is, flat as a steamrolled pancake. Thats what Sega wanted. Remember when Sonic wasn't supposed to cry ever? I'm pretty sure writers had a tough time making Sonic interesting when the only personality he could ever convey was 'surfer dude' Even Michelangelo from TMNT was allowed more emotions than that.

I'm not sure how this is relevant, but... Sonic did show emotion in both AoStH and SatAM (and I reckon that he developed in Sonic X, as well - but that'd be off-topic in here). He cried, he got scared, he did a whole load of stuff. I just don't see why he needed a picture perfect little princess as his sidekick to do it besides.

C'mon, DC - I already said that it's not a simple matter of her existing. Give her less prominence and dial her abilities back a little, and I'd have no issue - again, I've liked a lot of what's been done with her in Archie until quite recently.

It's not that I wanted to see Sally bashed - just a bit more sense of perspective. You don't have to kick someone when they're down as the only way to tell them that they're out of order at times. There's a difference between being kind and understanding and just letting someone get away with anything they want, and caring in the respect of telling someone if you think they're screwing up or going to get into trouble.

But what I'm basically saying is that it wouldn't even have needed that if she hadn't seen written in that way to start with.

Again, I'm at work at the moment, so I can't expand on things as much as I'd like to. But we seem to be blurring two issues here: the fact that Sally held the role she did in the narrative and her actual personality. I'd see them as two separate things - but to return to the first one, I agree with Kayla that the only character who already had canon development (Tails) being the one who got basically no role in the series until the back end of the second season (whilst the original characters sprang into life fully formed) just didn't seem to make any sense, whether I like Tails as a character or not.

I was one step off saying the same thing myself, since I wouldn't try or expect to change anyone's mind like this - just tell people what I think, which I've done. I didn't mean to derail the thread like this.