Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24165717-20141120174501/@comment-26802874-20150722205325

Rainbowser wrote: That's too late. His degradation to a second sidekick for Sonic began after Shadow entered the scene (probably because they decided to let Shadow be part of the main cast and they didn't want to have the same type of character twice) so it was on the move. The Master Emerald just disappeared from the plots and since Heroes he started hanging out with Sonic and Tails (two guys he didn't even like that much in the games before SH) for no good reason. A lot of past games treated him like an idiot, I'll give you that, but saying that's the way he always was is just incorrect. He's been flanderized and misused over the years and Boom put it at it's worst. Shadow is a much better character than Knuckles, so moving him to main cast was probably a result of people wanting to see more of him because of how good of a character he was. Knuckles, on the other hand, is much more suited to the role he was given. Obviously the creators believed that Knuckles' character's stupidity needed to increase.