OK, so feel free to ignore this post completely because it’s just some silly stream of consciousness nonsense I wanted to write. I don’t really engage in Sonic the Hedgehog media. I don’t play the games, watch the shows or read the comics. But in my random stumbling through the internet, I have discovered a silly factoid that I want to share: There exists a character named Surge the Tenrec in the Sonic the Hedgehog Universe, and she’s my new favorite.

Longtime readers of this blog might know that Knuckles the Echidna is my all-time favorite comic book character, and that remains true. (Remember when Knuckles had his own live action TV show, and it came out earlier this year?!). But Surge the Tenrec, man…this is crazy.

Why is Surge the Tenrec my new favorite, you may ask? I can answer that question by posing another question: What the heck is a Tenrec?!

Surely you’ve asked yourself that very question upon seeing the headline of this blog post. Surely you’ve already gone to Google, like I did, to find out. If you haven’t, let me save you the search.

This is a tenrec:

It’s a real animal! It’s a little shrew-like mammal that lives exclusively on Madagascar. I’d never heard of a tenrec in all my years on this planet, until randomly stumbling upon this character. Did her creator already know about tenrecs and always wanted to create an original Sonic mammal character? Did they spend time searching up hedgehog-like animals to turn into new Sonic characters?!

I don’t know why I find this fascinating, I just do. Surge is pretty much exclusive to the new IDW comics, but it seems she’s been in the Sonic Rush mobile game too. Maybe she’ll appear elsewhere someday.

I just think it’s really, really nifty that a tenrec is a real creature and has now been turned into one of these tiny, furry mammal Sonic characters. What a world.

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