forever on speed

fandom would have a better time if they figured out where on the "blorbo-bonker" to "source-citer" continuum they laid before engaging in discussions about character, franchise, story, etc.

situations that give sonic really uber-human concerns like regular domestic responsibilities, agonising over moral quandaries, or baggage like trauma put me to sleep immediately

like fr guy's a supersonic fearless hedgehog fairy construct - narrative devices that would work well in human-centric dramas/serials come off as total nerfs on him. like, humans are far less cool than him. why would ppl wanna make him less cool?

I also think whatever tendency of questioning his goodness and treating him like an avengers mcu superhero ignorant to the collateral damage/costs he causes (yk that ABT comic about lanolin malding about sonic) is fundamentally no different to "what if cruella/maleficient/disney villain has Goodness To Them" or snyder's cynical Man Of Steel era superman, both trends/eras that i thought broad audiences on tumblr satirised through finding them tired

on that point, we're already sliding into viewing eggman as lovable father figure to Metal and Sage to boot - I had a reader of my fic say that if Joker could be a family man, so could Eggman, because they took issue with me writing him being short-tempered with Sage

I think ppl into those tropes should skip to the logical conclusion of making sonic the bad guy and Eggman good - there's only so long that postmodern subversion remains subversive if you do it constantly

most sonic fans don't realise there's a difference between canon-defining works and canon-compliant works within the sprawling umbrella that is Canon Material in the Sonic franchise, making a lot of casual-to-earnest character analysis fumble from the starting line

like there's been a couple of attempts I've seen that takes starkly different and contradictory characterisations of silver, to name an example, to be an example of "complexity" as opposed to being written by different people for different works in the franchise

example: a take out there in the wild posits Silver's idw portrayal - where he honest to god pouts and says "i get it already jeez" to sonic calling him "flatware" - to be true to his characterisation in 06 - the game where he wonders on a knee looking down at Sonic "is this a joke?" about how low-tier Silver views the blue guy's power level moments before trying to murk him

on that note, more sonic fans need to include screenshots, sources, quotes, evidence to back up the claims they make about characterisation

related to that - there's an irreconcilability to favouring the power of fan interpretation above all else and dismissing the questioning/deconstructing of the Official Statements about what should be taken as canonical

comes off as "we're against the Big Guy about our blorbos. but only if Big Guy says we can be"

the above points simmer to a baseline of uncritical acceptance of surface official taglines of Everything Is Canon, a lack of wrestling with Sonic as Platonic Character and Sonic as Corporate Mascot-Puppet - accepting uncritical premises results in generally uncritical analyses

there's a large number of ppl that celebrate "They Said The Thing" as narrative richness to my chagrin

there are a further number of people who take "They Said The Thing" as "finally some good Canon continuity/respect for Canon" to my further chagrin

my chagrin stems from the popular celebration of surface-level references obscuring the deeper ways in which characters are written dubiously, including:

very different/unrelated characters saying the same lines (not-always-but-usually a sign of indistinct and thus subpar characterisation)

characters being ooc through sudden change (e.g. Amy, among other things, as a sensible-mature-responsible-girl- keeping-rowdy-guys-in-check trope)

characters being ooc through one-dimensional reduction (e.g. Knuckles doesn't get out often enough and being reduced to ME guardian only in Frontiers when since Sonic Adventure and in other entries like SRZG he travels and treasure hunts, erasing a pretty well-known part about his character)

distraction from consideration of what the actual heart of a given story is telling in ways that marks the Sonic franchise since way back when (not even just considering the popular examples of late 2000s entries but as early back as Sonic Shuffle)

overall result: most people get too distracted by one-liners, references, pretty visuals, or engaging gameplay to be able to register the quality or import of a given sonic narrative (e.g. thinking that shadow ends up accepting of losing Maria again in shgens when every tell in the narrative says otherwise)

tangent but I think the most heinous line in shgens is Rouge saying "Don't forget; you've moved on" to Shadow about Maria - i honestly think that's probably the most callous thing anyone could say to someone about their lost loved one and am surprised that there's no boss fight shadow has with Rouge from that alone

to wind down: a couple of paragraphs i wrote about shadow gens' story:

There are many features about the human brain—such as schema, the law of closure, or information satisficing—that lead us to naturally prioritise efficient information processing than accuracy or logical consistency. We are cognitively prone to completing a picture and constructing stories from incomplete, hazy suggestions that point towards a possible, story-shaped puzzle piece that will fill in the gaps.

[...] The suggestion of a story is not the same as a story, much less a good one. That also does not stop players from appreciating the gist of what those scenes are trying to accomplish—even if their brain fills in the blanks for sounds like a plausible, pretty-sounding answer.

and with that, a final point:

so… about those anniversary murals. hi 🥹 it was such an honour to work on this piece with SEGA & Moor-Art Gallery for Sonic's 35th - since the prints are available now, here's the raw art for it, repping Sonic 1!! 💙

I'm just as happy to meme about it as anyone, but Sonic Channel did not call Sonic a Japanese word that means "mature sexiness." They called him 色気 "iroke" and the translation software just turned that into sexiness because there's no English equivalent to what that word is meant to convey.

First, it is very common in translation across any language pair (especially for languages from noticeably different language families like Japanese to English as opposed to, say, French to English) that you have words that lack isometric, direct equivalents. This in itself does not equate to being untranslatable.

Anyone with any measure of bilingual or multilingual capacity could tell you that nuance is arguably ALWAYS lost in translation, even for sentences with direct translations available.

At the end of the day, the source language can never be the target language. The two languages are necessarily different and translation is an art form.

That being said, a lack of a directly equivalent term does not equal to being untranslatable.

Even a term that is far more obviously difficult to translate, よろしく (yoroshiku), by genuinely lacking a direct equivalent in English, is still translatable! Precisely because there are multiple possible ways to translate the word, multiple possible techniques employing indirect means, that term can be translated! It's just that the exact nuance you'd have in the source language is harder to capture – but again, that's very much a feature and not a bug of translation.

You have translation choices that could be closer or farther from capturing the nuance of the original, but the only term that actually fully captures the original nuance is...the original term. In the original language.

For the term in question itself, there are multiple possible meanings – it is up to the skill level and judgement of the translator to choose the most appropriate translation (which, in some cases, may not even involve lifting one of these definitions directly! It may be appropriate to be more indirect translation techniques). In my personal opinion, judging from the intended target audience of all-ages for a franchise like Sonic, a term like 'mature charm' would be most appropriate, with 'allure' being possible. Invoking 'sex' or 'sexiness' would be inappropriate for the source material and its inferable intentions.

Another thing to note is that the article cited is generative AI slop.

It is from a Medium account with a genAI profile picture with a slew of articles in the same structure: that various Japanese terms (which, just from a glance at my level, are very, very translatable) are elevated or special in some way by virtue of being...Japanese.

This is orientalism.

Related to the point, I actually texted my friend, who is Japanese and lives in Saitama, the other day about an Instagram reel arguing that Japanese street fashion in Tokyo is so special because people save up for distinctive fashion pieces that won't go out of style soon. His general remarks, with a bit of vulgarity that's out of place with this blog but I personally have no issue with, that I've pasted below are relevant.

(Incidentally, taberu means 'to eat'.)

Chaotix drawing inspired by an illustration from the Sonic Japanese Survival Guide

Official Glasses Pics! January 2026- June 2026

I love this pairing so much