The Many Horrible Lives of Charmy Bee

[Music] so quite recently i put up a poll to see who was the most popular chaotix member and while i only had a small sample of the sonic fanbase voting we still had well over 6 000 votes and uh well played out almost exactly as i expected almost while i didn't expect charmy b to win the contest i certainly did not expect him to be dead last when i had also included characters that many would argue shouldn't even be among the choices yeah evie and bomb got more votes i would guarantee a large chunk of people don't even know who those characters are and seriously look at the comments you have more people complaining about who i didn't include than those genuinely upset about how bad charmy was doing which i found especially surprising because charmy is one of the three chaotix members who form the modern detective agency who keeps showing up to fill out the roster of olympic teams even when they're not really doing anything they're still around of course you could say that about most of sonic's cast but that's a topic for another time still i guess it's understandable that he's not the favorite of the bunch even back in his reintroduction in sonic heroes charming has been known to be oh irritating he's hyperactive absent-minded and just obnoxious not even anatomically correct he's got a stinger female bees have stingers not the males well who am i to tell the bug how to identify besides if we're going to compare him to real world insects there are a few more glaring inconsistencies we should probably address first or address silly inconsistencies like the localization for knuckles chaotix here in america he's supposed to be a little kid in the japanese game but the american manual listed him as 16 which i guess is just a fun little factoid sure that won't have some drastic repercussions down the road despite the fact that his character was intentionally made to be as obnoxious as a real world buzzing bug he's still a consistent part of the extended cast of modern sonic games so i thought what the heck let's dive into the history of the bug and see if we can find something charming about charming after doing some research even knowing what i already know about the different canons of this character i wasn't quite ready for what i did come across i know i got corny and melodramatic while talking about shadow the hedgehog but i feel like i should have saved all that sad energy for this video because things get rough so let's see just how miserable things get because we are smack dab in the middle of november chaotix where we are spending all month long talking about everything knuckles chaotix now for those unacquainted when i point to this guy and say he's a bee it would be reasonable for you to respond with no he's not and well fair enough he threw me off the first time i saw him too being a giant insect should make him the most terrifying member of the chaotix i mean robotnik certainly knows what bugs are supposed to look like but apparently in sonic's world they share the same face as armadillos and hedgehogs but hey if you grew up with serial mascots this might not have thrown you off too much charmy does look like he's about to bust a honeymutt all over your breakfast but like most members of the chaotix charmy's journey does not start off with the 32x title he actually started off like a surprising amount of things from the franchise in the old sonic manga where he looked like that you know i've already made a lot of jokes about the wacky character designs from europe and america but somehow japan managed to end up with the single worst sonic character design i have ever seen this sad muppet with a b but loosely attached is charmy b really and truly he first shows up after sonic's alter ego nicki no relation and his dad go flying off and then get caught in eggman's cocktail shaker which gets daddy hog completely sloshed but when he tries the same on nikki he turns into sonic so it's fine so since eggman can't roofie the hedgehog he's instead going to try and drown him but no worries charmy wakes up and uses the time box to reverse time to make sure none of this happened and if that seemed to come out of nowhere it did it really did it turns out sonic comics were out of their mind crazy no matter where you grew up what's the time box who is this bug in relation to sonic how did he just show up out of nowhere no none of it matters nothing matters and here he is again with his ass being used as a toothpick by chonk or the hedgehog here they did give us a design closer to what we would know charmy to be me but even back then he was still a complete pain for sonic and tails long before he became a detective and when knuckles chaotix came out he would find himself in the other two sonic comic series america's archie sonic and uk's sonic the comic let's start with the fleetway comic as he seems to get off a little easier in this version and if you grew up an stc fan who's never read the archie book that should raise a couple of concerns for you and we will get to them do you have a group of friends who has that one guy you know the one the one who just gets under your skin the one you can't stand not even sure why they're hanging out with the rest of the group nobody likes them you just talk crap about them when they leave the room and then talk crap about them again when they come back into the room if you don't know who that is in your friend group it's probably you and i should know because i am absolutely that guy ask any one of my friends in iowa they will back me up one thousand percent they cannot stand me and that guy is also uk charming seriously the entire chaotix crew cannot stand this insect at first i couldn't blame them too much he just talks in stupid doodly words he's like a british ned flanders the chaotic straight up kicked this dude out for just making too many stupid noises and even when charmy saves them all from a group of villains when he returns home with his colony and straight up torches them and then turns them into pottery even after all of that the chaotix are still like get out get you and your stupid family out and sonic is just the worst to him he barely knows the guy and is just a total dick even when sonic comes across what seems to be a kidnap attempt on the bug he seriously contemplates just leaving him to his fate i mean yes he does go to charmi's aid but even then he's saying he's probably gonna regret this yeah i guess i better help him but this dude sucks and when saunders discovers that these are actually royal escorts and they need to return charming to his hive for some reason charmy is allowed to bring a friend to speak on his behalf asking sonic to his face to be his friend in his time of need sonic's like i am not your friend his top priority before anything else is just to make it clear that he is not friendly with this damn pop but becrudgingly he once again helps and even when sonic discovers that charmy is royalty and the bee asks the hedgehog not to tell the chaotix sonic makes him swear that he will ever tell the team that sonic helped him out his cred is that important to him i do not want to associate with this loser whatsoever i don't care what kind of royalty he is this guy's a dork and i want nothing to do with him seriously you guys think sonic was a dick in sonic x you have no idea this dude was an honest-to-goodness jerk in the uk book were you a nerdy outcast in school big fan of sonic the hedgehog but you don't really talk about it because you know the more popular kids will just mock you well guess what buddy that's the type of person sonic wants nothing to do with he is that popular jerk who does not want to hang out with me you does not want to hang out with you it's okay to like children the media as an adult okay guys stop making fun of me it gets to the point where you honestly feel bad for the bee and maybe relate to him a little bit god digging damn it he's there to be a punching bag and he's under the impression that his friends are just playing around and don't actually mean all the horrible things they say it was a lot more acceptable to just have your characters be dicks to intentionally obnoxious characters but looking back on it today this feels over the top harsh he seems like a sweet kid but is also a little delusional and a bit of a masochist he's hanging out with a chaotix crew by his own volition he could easily return to his hive as a prince but instead chooses a life where he's belittled by his whole team at least in the modern version there's still a sense of brotherhood between the detective agency charming might be annoying to vector but it's in more of a kid brother kind of way espio and vectors still love the little guy uk charmy hands down gets the most disrespect compared to every other version of the character but even when designed to be disliked this is still not the worst the bee had to put up with it's time to talk about archie charming like his uk counterpart he too was a prince of a royal hive who ran away from his duties but thanks to sega of america this charmy was a teenager he's growing into an adult and would eventually return to take up his mantle and responsibility with his childhood friend now fiance saffron as his queen so unlike the fleetway version he has no yippity yappy deadly dumbassity speech patterns and his friends genuinely love him he really is everything the british bee was not and his life is trash because this bee has so much more to lose now when it comes to sonic comic riders on the american side of things while there are plenty who have contributed to this franchise there are two who stand out in any conversation i am of course speaking of ken penders and ian flynn generally nowadays ken gets a lot of heat but you will still find loyalists who respect the world and lore he built in the older days ken was given free reign to get about as wild as possible because there was very little oversight and crafted something that was drastically different from everything else in the franchise on the flip side most fans generally loved the work ian flynn put into the archie book when he took over as head rider after ken was fired and was so beloved that they brought him on board when the archie book was dropped and idw picked up the license two very different creators and for obvious reasons generally if you adore the writing of one you tend to dislike the work of the other but the one thing these two writers seem to have in common is putting this bee through some real heavy we would first discover charmy's royal heritage in a knuckle story arc that kicked off with his childhood friend dying from an overdose of hallucinogenic drugs ustc fans think the european book got dark well hang on to your hippity hop hats because america goes hard and we are just getting started so this story arc was a take on a crime thriller in the world of sonic which leads us to the aforementioned bug buddy odin in a dark alley and later on in the same story charmy and the rest of the chaotix end up having a bad trip on some lsd-laced chili dogs can you feel the sunshine i can feel it inside me i can feel it burning me i am the sunshine and later on we get this pov shot of charmy undergoing surgery and fun little factoid a lot of comics in the 90s would represent their blood with black ink instead of red mostly to skirt around some censorship oh and would you look at that there's some of charmies squirting out all over for all the children to see the story ends with charmy returning to his hive to bury his friend but they weren't done here much later on charmy and saffron would end up in knothole to report to sally that the golden hive colony had been destroyed in almost all of the hive captured in robotnik's egg grapes no that's not a horrible fusion of fruit and fowl that's a giant machine that harvests energy from living beans in grape-like clusters and it's not some matrix-like happy dreamland crap if we look at the little status bars on the sides of these things it looks like they drained the life force of their victims while also apparently wiping their minds and infusing them with toxins i don't know why just to be extra dickish i guess i don't think we ever truly see the end results in the comic itself but the writers have confirmed that yes they will suck you dry and not in the fun way it really goes to show you how little of a damn sega gave about what we were publishing here in the west that is until ken and archie caused a big enough ruckus to wake up daddy in japan and gave kenders the boot now it was left in ian flynn's hands and if you thought things would ease up for the little bee well you might need to sit down for this next part alright so going by my previous comic videos you would assume i am a big fan of ian flynn's work and you'd be correct but i don't for a second think it's perfect it's true i'm a little more harsh with his detractors and because of this you might think i'm biased and being unfair to other writers and you know what on some level maybe i am while there is legitimate critique for his work a lot of the more baseless complaints come from people who don't know what they're talking about who don't seem to understand that flynn does not get free reign to do whatever he wants he is writing for a licensed property a mascot of a brand this is a product to make you more interested in the franchise as a whole and when you write for a corporate brand it's not always about telling a story it's also about solving problems and working in elements that the company wants in the book it doesn't matter what they allowed in the past if that's the direction they want to go with the brand you will either figure it out or they'll find someone else who will ian came into the archie book that had years of messy messy cannon and very little oversight he needed to keep true to the world that had been built before him i'll make it fall more in line with the game universe and this time sega was paying much closer attention that means having to change up characters so they better match the version sega made for the game and if you recall the american manual from knuckles chaotix listed charmy as 16. but the modern version of the characters fell more in line with the japanese version who was six it did not matter to sega that charmy was treated as a young adult who was allowed to grow to a point where he was engaged to marry all that mattered was that the game saw him as a child so the book needed to reflect that as well so did they do that by messing with time some goofy age potion maybe no no no no no no no oh god no what they instead did was torture the bee in eggman's egg grapes and left him as a bee if you think i'm being insensitive keep in mind that's a line from the team chaotix theme in sonic heroes the same game where vector called rouge abroad yes seriously they did this in the archie book pre-reboot charmy is still not a child his mind has just regressed to the state of a child i want you to seriously think about the repercussions of this are you engaged are you married do you have someone in your life you see as your life partner can you imagine what it has to be like for saffron charmy isn't the same person and not even that he is practically a kid she's engaged to someone with the mind of a child who doesn't even remember that he was once a prince to an entire colony can you imagine how heartbreaking that would be she's no longer his romantic partner she's his caretaker and i'm not overplaying that either that's literally how they describe her in the comics encyclopedia yes charmy is written more in line with the game counterpart and that was probably fine for brand new readers but if you had read everything leading to this point seeing charmy talk like this is sad and unsettling and gator jesus helped me we are not done safran doesn't get a lot in terms of character growth but she is a sweet gal and you can tell she loves charming more than anything because she's still there charming cannot be left to fend for himself he needs her and because of that that means the bug still has something no someone left to lose because pender won the lawsuit that required archie to remove all the characters he had hand in creating they had to get all of them out without so much as a goodbye and while i keep reiterating that ken did not make the freedom fighters she did help create saffron so like all those echidna ocs safran was unceremoniously removed via warp ring never to be seen again this tiny little panel is where pre-reboot charmy story ends about to be told by knuckles that saffron is gone with no way of bringing her back and yeah they rebooted and now charmy is a happy-go-lucky kid but wow it's almost understandable that a handful of fans are still really ticked off with the way things were handled flynn himself has expressed regret with the whole brain damage business going so far as to keep charming out of comedic situations as to not seem insensitive and yeah again ian was put into a tough place but this absolutely should have been handled differently and thanks to all the ugliness from that legal battle we will never get proper closure for pre-reboot charming yeah the stories were all over the place but it all ends here in a silent silhouette so yeah pretty heavy stuff for such a little bug huh putting all of that aside in the world of the games charmy is a kid he can be annoying but honestly it's hard not to like the little guy especially since he's hands down the most overpowered character in knuckles chaotix i sometimes wonder if they put in that stupid ring tether just to keep this bug in check unlike tails he can always fly instead of jumping he just starts in a direction and yes it kills anything and as my uncle reminded me you can pull off a robotnik and swing around heavy like a wrecking ball leaving you pretty much indestructible honestly charmy is a lot of fun to play and while we would not get any more 2d adventures with the bug it's little surprised that naoto ashima would go on to be both character designer and director of pinobi a 2d platformer where you get to play surprise a bee and look i really don't want to end on a downer note here charmy has been through a lot thanks to some overly dramatic storytelling but that's archie that's kind of what they did i don't think it should have ever happened to begin with he's better off as a kid and flynn was very sure to establish him as a child the instant he popped up in the idw book and he's just great in sonic x he plays off well with the stoic sbo and the latin mouth vector he's just a happy kid and that's who he's supposed to be he's adhd in insect form irritating as hell to the reptiles he hangs out with but when push comes to shove they love him like a brother he's an integral part of the chaotix detective agency the chaotix freedom fighters and whether they like it or not uk's chaotix crew always sunny always optimistic and also a serious powerhouse in his first playable appearance he doesn't need all this insane drama from the archie series but honestly saffron deserved way better and apparently still wasn't as bad as it could have been apparently there was a plan to take her out with piano wire at some point for real i do not understand how archie got away with printing out this for so long charmi's never been my favorite character and that seems to also be the case for a lot of you as well but i appreciate the little guy and understand why people come to the defense of this bug despite all we as sonic fans have lost over the years i'm certainly glad charmy is still buzzing around because he makes this franchise just a little more charming and that's gonna be it for the video for today i know some of you like it when i ramble on for a bit after everything's said and done but we got a lot left to do before this month is over so i will see you next time choo choo toodle yickety buzz bumble i don't know so unlike the fleetway version he has no yippity yappity dippity he has no yippity yappity diddly dumbassity speech panther he has no yippity yappity diddly dumbassity god so hard to say this underscore my aunt skippity bebop stupid

Channel: Game Apologist

Views: 131,319

Rating: 4.9635358 out of 5

Keywords: game apologist, sonic the hedgehog, knuckles chaotix, chaotix, archie charmy, archie sonic, stc charmy, chaotix crew, charmy bee, charmy, sonic heroes, sonic x, charmy bee crying, charmy bee tripping, charmy bee brain damage, sapphron bee, knuckles the echidna, sonic manga, ken penders, ian flynn, espio, vector, charmy bee kid, character analysis, sonic lore, sega, 32x, can you feel the sunshine, sonic mario olympics, sonic forces, awesome chaotix, challenges of charmy, team

Id: ehSmdWsrW7c

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/WhalepingDavis]

Oh yeah. It’s fucked up what they put Charmy AND Saffron through. An ugly stain that will never go away unless Sega can make it up to both characters.

What happened to Charmy is the cruelest thing ever done to a Sonic character that Sega had direct involvement in.