The Pseudoscience of: Sonic’s Rings

ShinyHello Internet!

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now: continue “The Pseudoscience of” series. Today’s subject, the gold rings of Sonic the Hedgehog.

If you have ever played a Sonic game you should know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, in pretty much all the games you will encounter golden rings floating in midair which you can collect by running into them. As long as Sonic (or whoever you are playing as) has at least one ring you can survive any damage except bottomless pits or being crushed by certain walls or objects. However, you drop all or most of your rings when hit. When you think about it, this doesn’t make that much sense. You could just say they are magic, but I have come up with another explanation.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the rings are hardly ever mentioned in the game stories. Sure, they are used in shops during some games, but other than that the only mention of that kind of ring in the cutscenes is Tails asking where he puts them, but since he doesn’t get an answer and he uses the rings himself we can ignore that. So what if we assume that they don’t necessarily appear to the characters the same way we see them, or even at all?

I’ll start with Sonic himself and then explain the slight differences for other characters. What if the rings Sonic collects are really small changes in air pressure that Sonic can collect using his quills? Under water they would be air bubbles large enough for him to collect but too small for him to breath. If he is hit he instinctively releases this air to form a very brief shield strong enough to even deflect laser beams. This would also explain his ability to use rings in Unleashed and Generations to increase his speed with the boost created by a controlled release of a small part of the air while still leaving some for his reflexive shield.

For other characters, they would get “rings” from different sources depending on their abilities. Knuckles and Shadow would get their rings from Chaos Energy (and I do have a non-magical explanation for that too, but that is for another day), while Blaze get hers from variations in air or water temperature, etc.

Is this a perfect explanation? No, but I like it anyway.

In other news, as of a short while ago I was tied for first in the contest I mentioned in my last post. You still have until midnight tomorrow to enter and a week after that to vote.

Till next time,

Goodbye Internet!