#renaliassance

[thankskenpenders]

Unsure if you’ve answered this anywhere before (sorry if you have!) but! what are your thoughts on Lanolin if you’ve been keeping up with IDW?

Lanolin's been kind of a fascinating addition to the cast to me, now that she's been promoted to the main cast. I kind of love that Lanolin is unambiguously one of the heroes, but she's also, like... not very nice? But she's also not an antihero like Shadow. She's just a different type of hero than most of Sonic's friends. It would have been so easy to just make her the cute friendly sheep girl, but I think she's led to some really interesting internal and external conflicts by having such a different mindset from everyone else.

Sonic is a very Power Of Friendship type series, and most of the recurring heroes are friends with each other. IDW's heroes have slotted right into that. Tangle wants to be everyone's friend. Whisper is extremely introverted due to her past, but the point is to show her making new friends. Belle's in a similar boat. And Jewel got roped into the series because she was already Tangle's best friend.

And then you've got Lanolin, who's not really here to make friends. She's here to work. She wants to do good in the world, which is why she joined the Restoration... and then the Metal Virus Saga happened. Now she's tired and kind of jaded about all of it. She's a cog in the machine whose power is limited, having neither crazy superpowers like Sonic's friends nor any real structural power within the Restoration. So where Tangle wants to go on fun adventures and Whisper's (understandably) weighed down by her personal vendetta with Mimic, Lanolin is this third wheel who doesn't particularly care about any of that and just wants to keep the team focused on doing their job.

I can kind of understand why some might be put off by this new dynamic if they were fans of the way Tangle and Whisper operated before. But personally, I think it shakes things up in a really interesting way. I could easily see a world where Mimic's return felt like a retread of the Tangle & Whisper miniseries, but Lanolin has helped push things in a new direction. She feels like our representative of the rank and file grunts of the Restoration, and the embodiment of the responsibilities that being part of the Restoration entail. Tangle and Whisper can't just go off and do their own thing all the time anymore. For Tangle especially, it feels like the formation of the new Diamond Cutters is forcing her to grow up a little. The Restoration can't always just be this fun secret club where she gets to go on adventures with her girlfriend. It's a job.

But Lanolin's not infallible, of course. She's frequently wrong, and that leads to conflict. But I understand where she's coming from and why she is the way she is, and that makes her an interesting contrast to everyone else. She's also clearly still growing as a character, and learning how to work as a team without just seeing Tangle and Whisper as people to boss around. I'm sure that whenever she learns that Whisper really was right about Duo being Mimic in disguise, that's going to be a BIG moment for Lanolin, and I'm excited to see how that informs her continued evolution as a character.

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