Antoine and the OK Corral

Incorporating pilot episode Heads or Tails

The time of the first real counselling session came and Antoine arrived at the seaweed-draped hut to be greeted by the seahorse. Once he'd settled in the same seat as before, the counsellor spoke.

"So. How has your week been, Antoine?"

This was a very ordinary question. And on Antoine's paid time too! He frowned. "I would be liking us to start the counselling, please."

The seahorse thought for a moment and then said, "Perhaps I didn't phrase my question specifically enough. Let me ask again. How have your relationships been in this past week, since we last met?"

Antoine opened his mouth and then shut it again. "I do not to be understanding. With who? The princess?"

"That would be a good start."

Antoine wondered why she hadn't said so in the first place and wriggled in his seat. "Ah, I suppose it has been the same as always. She has been too distracted with plans and with Sonic."

Once the seahorse had established that 'plans' meant plans for fighting Robotnik, he continued. The past week had been as frustrating as ever.

"The princess and Rotor have been working with Bunnie to better understand the strength in her arms. Of course I wished to be helping so I offered Bunnie advice on her throwing. But she did not appreciate this. So instead I went to Sally and told her how beautiful she looks when she works. I am thinking this is when she looks prettiest."

"You appreciate her intelligence?" the counsellor said. Perhaps it was a question, perhaps not, Antoine wasn't quite sure but he answered anyway.

"Of course! And then she said that the only royalty is nature. She likes the nature very much so sometimes I am writing poetry about it for her. I was telling to her she was royalty to me but I think she did not accept this.

"She did not look happy for me to be there but she was happy soon after, when Sonic came." Antoine felt a flush of anger.

The counsellor tilted her head and blinked her strange eyes. "How do you feel about Sonic?" she asked.

"He is stupid!" he answered immediately and felt his fists clench. "He is a fool and he, he... He is making the idiot decisions! When he came he ran past me and made me be dizzy. I hate him when he does it. And then he came back to be teasing at me! I don't understand why Sally likes him. I really do not!" Now even his face was tense from the memory. He stewed in his anger for a moment and then continued. "My princess came to her senses and gave the hedgehog a telling off for not helping."

"How did you feel when she did that?"

Antoine relaxed slightly as he realised how attentively she was following his story. "Better. He tried to be charming his way out of this but my princess would not let him and soon she was to be making him help with her and Rotor's project. But when Sonic left to find the things she was needing she looked as if she liked him more because of his laziness. I do not understand it! Why does he do these things?"

He expected the counsellor to look outraged but if she was, she only showed it by stretching  the tight curl out of her tail and then curling it again.

Eventually he continued. "You see, Sally is so able and she had a clever plan to fight back at Robotnik's chemical attack. They even found time to be flirting with each other when Sally told him about a problem with the striking range. And Sonic, he was making a plan where he could be showing off! He ran out to the buzz-bombers and taunted at them in front of everybody! And then when it was over, the princess told him he was great and they walked away together with him fishing for even more of her compliments."

And he settled back, his arms folded. "There. That is what happened. What can I do, she watches him and likes his ideas but she does not like me." The injustice of it was... Was...

The seahorse settled herself again in her chair as she considered his story. "It sounds to me as if you're angry with Sally as well as Sonic," she said thoughtfully.

Antoine looked at her, shocked. "Oh no, there is no possibility that I could be angry with the princess! She is perfect in the way she is. Everything about her is the perfect."

The counsellor tilted her head and said, "Except for not being in love with you."

"Ah, but that is not an imperfection. She is not responsible for..." He stopped as he thought about what he was saying. "Well, she is not." He couldn't hold her responsible for that, of course not. "It is Sonic, it is his fault!"

The counsellor seemed to be thinking again. Then she said, "Antoine, there is something I would like to show you." She stood up and walked to an A-board with several sheets of paper pinned to it. She took a piece of graphite and drew a large plus sign on it. At the top she wrote 'I'm OK' and at the bottom 'I'm not OK'. Then to the left 'You're not OK' and on the right, 'You're OK'. Then she stood back so that he could easily see it.

"Have you ever seen this before?"

He shook his head. "Non, Madame."

"This is a graph of our belief in our own value, and the value of others. For this graph, 'OK' means 'basically valuable, loveable and valid as a person.' A person might do things that we don't like, but our opinion of their basic value is - or can be - different. Our overall existential position is about our opinion of ourselves, and about others." She paused. "Can you tell me which one of these positions you feel about Sonic?"

Antoine felt very confused. After a few moments he hadn't been able to gather his thoughts enough to answer so the seahorse spoke again.

"May I suggest one?"

The coyote nodded carefully. "Oui..?"

She pointed to one quadrant of the cross. "I suggest you feel I'm OK, you're not OK about Sonic. You described his irresponsibility and mentioned your confusion over why Sally prefers him compared to you. Would you agree that you feel that he lacks basic value?"

Antoine was taken aback. "I- Well! I did not mean to be saying he is so bad, he is the good fighter against the SWATbots."

"That's an excellent point, but I wasn't asking for your rational appraisal of Sonic. You see," she continued as she sat down opposite him. "We make decisions about whether we value other people very early in our lives. In fact, it's just about the first decision we ever make. We don't decide whether others are valuable or not based on a set of facts, we do so intuitively." Antoine didn't recognise this final word but understood well enough when the seahorse patted the area over her heart.

"I did not know Sonic until I was perhaps four years of age," Antoine explained. "I do not think this can be right."

"I'm not suggesting you decided this specifically about Sonic," the counsellor said. "'You're not OK' is much more fundamental than that and is a decision you made about the Other person."

Antoine's head was starting to spin. Did she have to use so many unusual words? And anyway, she wasn't talking about Sally, who was the person Antoine really wanted to know about. He frowned. "I would like you to use better words, please." He hated admitting to not knowing words. It made him feel like he was being accused of being lazy and that wasn't true.

The seahorse paused. "I'm sorry Antoine, I am using quite a few jargon words, aren't I? How would you like us to manage those?"

He looked at her. He was beginning to realise just how much she treated him with respect. It was very different from his comrades' impatience, the quiet rollings of eyes he'd seen so many times and the irritable corrections. It felt strange but... good. Usually when somebody used a word he didn't recognise he tried to work out what it meant from the context, often got it wrong, resolved to find it in the dictionary later, and then simply forgot. Usually because he only knew the phonetic sound of the word rather than its spelling, which wasn't his fault either.

But now that he was having a rational conversation about it, what did he want to do? "I would like to write down your words and their meanings." He'd thought of this a long time ago but somehow never did it. Well, he didn't like to be teased for it by Sonic, or he often heard new words on missions when he couldn't take the time to record them.

"Very well," she said.

Antoine pulled his poetry notebook out of his pocket. "This word, thunder-metal..."

"Fundamental. It means basic, underneath and supporting everything else. Like the concrete a building is built on."

Antoine scribbled and they continued.

"Now," the seahorse mused, "Where were we? Ah yes: the 'you're not OK' position. We make a fundamental decision soon after birth about the Other person. And Other can be anyone who isn't you yourself."

Antoine prodded his lip with the eraser end of his pencil. "So Other is Sonic as well as everybody else, including the princess?"

"Yes, that's right."

"But this cannot be correct. I feel the differently about Sonic and Princess Sally."

"You have more complex feelings about each of them because they represent different things to you. But what about your fundamental belief about their OK-ness? Let's start with Sonic."

The counsellor's preoccupation with Sonic felt very unhelpful to Antoine. It was Sally he wanted to talk about, so he told her so. "Madame, I wish to be talking about the princess. I think we should be starting with her."

The seahorse nodded as she thought about this. Soon enough she said, "I suggest we avoid directly using Sally when we talk about this model because you have a lot of complex feelings about her including a desire to see her as perfect. I think that would interfere with your ability to learn what I am telling you."

"I do not wish to be using Sonic. I feel-" he folded his arms and shrugged. "-bad, about him."

"Who would you rather choose?"

Antoine thought. "I think I will be choosing Rotor."

The seahorse nodded. "Very well, Rotor it is. What do you currently feel about him?"

Resentful, was the answer. "He was suggesting to me that I should catch Robotnik to win the hand of the princess. But he said to me after I tried to catch him that this was to be a joke." He stopped and felt the rawness of this betrayal. "He let me down."

"Hmm..." The counsellor's nasal voice sounded sympathetic. After a few seconds of silence that felt to Antoine as if she'd been sadly considering his disappointment in Rotor - but not accusing him in any way of causing it - she said, "Can you choose another person?"

The coyote thought. For some reason he felt unwilling to suggest Bunnie or Tails. "Snively?"

"Okay, and how do you feel about him?"

"Well - ah, bad. He is a danger. And a coward," Antoine added. Then he looked at the graph. "These other three. What do they mean?"

The seahorse pointed to the one diagonally opposite I'm OK you're not-OK. "This one is I'm not-OK you're OK. It's a position of feeling one-down compared to other people. If you're here then you feel like you're not as good as Other."

Antoine thought. It spoke to him, that position, but he wasn't sure why. "I think he feels that way about Robotnik."

The seahorse nodded. "That's very perceptive. It's very likely to be true, although you might know better than I do because you see them together sometimes and I only did once, during the coup."

"Why do you saying that this is likely to be? If I am correct and Snively does not feel as good as Robotnik then Snively would not want to be near him."

"It seems to make sense at first, doesn't it?" The seahorse said. "But think about this: what if I told you that I'm OK you're not-OKs tend to pair up with I'm not-OK you're OKs?" She pointed at each place on the graph so this didn't get too confusing for Antoine.

"But this is to the ridiculous. Why would they to be doing this? The I'm not OKs would not..." He thought about what he was saying. Surely they wouldn't like being around somebody who reinforced their belief they were not OK? "I mean... Why does the I'm not-OK you're OK exist in the first of places?"

"There are advantages to all of the positions," said the counsellor. "For I'm not-OK you're OK, the benefit is that they believe they are incapable and they spend time around their opposites because they will confirm it for them. It's not pleasant, but if they already believe they are not valuable or loveable or capable, they already feel strained enough by the rigors of life and want the world to stay familiar so at least they know how to behave. And what to expect."

Antoine found that he felt a little embarrassed by this. He waited for her to keep talking but instead she went quiet and watched him.

"But what about Sonic and perhaps Tails?" he asked, his words coming quickly. "Tails is young and he thinks Sonic is very good. I think he believes Sonic is You're OK. What about that, ah?"

The counsellor looked warmly at him. It wasn't quite a smile but it was genuine. "Well, I'd suggest that it is reasonable for Tails to accept Sonic's greater ability. It is only reasonable that an adult would be more capable than a child." Her speech was much slower and more relaxed than Antoine's.

"But this proves you cannot be right," the coyote kept talking, still surprisingly fast. "Because it is expected that Tails is less able. So there cannot be anything wrong with his believing it."

The seahorse nodded again. "So how do you think that compares against Snively and Robotnik?"

Antoine went quiet then. He wasn't sure how to answer that. For some reason his brain had ground to a halt. "I do not know. I... this-" he waved his hand at the A-board. "It is confusing. It is unusual English. I do not know what you expect me to be thinking of it."

They both went quiet and Antoine realised that he didn't feel terribly happy about how he had spoken to the counsellor. But it was true: he found it all quite confusing and didn't want to think about it any more.

After a few moments she glanced at the clock and said, "We've reached the end of our first session so I suggest we stop there."

As they went to the front door Antoine turned to her and said, "But Madame, I do not understanding why you teach me this. What has it to do with the princess?"

"You will find that you feel one or the other of the two positions we talked about some of the time, maybe even most of it. They are an important part of how many people - you included - cope with their friends and colleagues and enemies. Watch yourself this week, Antoine. And watch all of the people you come into contact with. You may find that you see examples of both positions all around you. From there, we can build a better picture of your life and Sally's."

And with that, she waved goodbye to him and he returned to Knothole.

TO BE CONTINUED...

DISCLAIMER: "Sonic the Hedgehog" and most other characters and situations in the following story are copyrighted trademarks of Sega Incorporated, Archie Comics and/or DIC Productions. Permission to reproduce this specific material may be granted by the author so long as you email first. Words and Seahorse character © 2013 Velvet D'Coolette/Hayley Deakin.