My Inspiration Went Woke

Hey y’all. For those of you who haven’t already noticed, my series The Squad: Rising was heavily influenced by the popular video game (and comic and TV and movie series) Sonic The Hedgehog.

For 34 years, Sonic has been fairly counter-cultural. Is the franchise Christian? By no means. But has it stuck to truth and morals? YES. Until recently.

Over the past few months, the IDW line of comics has been very subtly nodding to two minor characters—both male—possibly being a gay couple. Lately it’s been less subtle. And in the back of each issue, there’s a short interview with someone in the comics’ creative team, and the recent interviews have revealed a lot of the newer artists and writers are either LGBT, or are fine with it. Now, issue #81 just came out, paving the way to the big milestone #100 by introducing a brand new antagonist…

who goes by “they/them” pronouns. By the way, “they” is just a kid.

Where is IDW going with this? Who knows. All I can say is the writers of the Sonic comics—the most frequent installments of the massive franchise, releasing monthly like my own books do—have betrayed my trust. I have been very vocal about my books being like Sonic, but for the creators to go so third turning? I will never condone such a thing.

This stirred a fire in my gut. I’m going public with this. I’m going to my YouTube channel and announcing that the world of Sonic and the brilliance of the (straight) characters did heavily influence me, and I will never stop being a fan. But I will never do what the creators have done—I will never decide that a hint of woke here or there might add some flavor and attract a bigger audience. If my characters were to interact with theirs, mine wouldn’t even think about calling this kid “they.”

Will my announcement be warmly received? By my target audience, hopefully. By everyone else, definitely not. But I don’t care. I stand by God’s truth, not by they/them.

Guys—NEVER BE ASHAMED OF THE TRUTH. Never go woke.

Have a great weekend💜