# get rings ## or: semi-preserving a lost thing #### 2025-05-07 Do you ever get a memory of a thing stuck in your craw and it won't let you rest until you track it down? That was me with "get rings" by Geneva Hodgson. It's a six-page webcomic about...well, there's a lot going on there, honestly. The framing device is one of the special stages from Sonic the Hedgehog 2—the racing tubes one, where Sonic and Tails (and you ARE And Tails, right?) need to gather enough rings per checkpoint to earn a Chaos Emerald. But the comic itself is about acceptance. Sonic can't gather every ring in the paths laid out for him; it is, due to the placement, simply impossible. We can't do everything in our short lifespans, can't do all the things we want to do due to a confounding number of reasons (work, bodily needs, sometimes just bad luck). If we try for perfection, we'll always come up short. Tails asks us to accept this—grab what we can and move on. We'll never be able to do everything we wish, and we won't be able to do it perfectly—because we aren't beings of perfection. We do what we can. Sonic, of course, still frames this as "winning," as though falling short of perfection means failure. I imagine many people fall into this trap of thinking; I know I have before. Tails pushes back on it, and the end of the comic implies that perhaps Tails isn't actually there at all, but merely a spectre always in the shadow of the Blue Blur. He seems to embody a dual role of childish positivity (against Sonic's more "adult" pessimism) and adult detached acceptance (against Sonic's childish egoism). There's probably a whole essay that could live in this, but Tails is genuinely fascinating as a character and as a game element--in this comic, of course, but also in Sonic 2 in general. But I've talked your ear off long enough. Why does my subtitle say "semi-preserving" a lost thing? Well: I wanted to find this comic recently and *could not*. It seems Hodgson drew it for a zine, but the links I found were all dead, including Hodgson's website. At first I could only find a single page of it--which, at least, gave me the name. Tumblr saved the day: [it still lives on Hodgson's blog.](https://cartoonfuntime.tumblr.com/post/35066515447/this-was-my-contribution-for-the-speedhog-zine) I've saved my own copies of the pages in the event Tumblr ever disappears (which, honestly, even odds on that happening any given moment). Go check it out.