Mauro Fonseca

A while ago on twitter, an artist I know was complaining that SatAM and AoSTH were not acknowledged by marketing during the anniversary of Sonic celebrations in June. To that effect, I replied something like "imagine they made shitass interpretations of your work and you got away with ignoring it, wouldn't you?". This person sending the anon ask took this as me just openly hating on SatAM and AoSTH, combined with me in the past hating on Archie Sonic. And you know, fair enough, I'm not subtle about my dislike of a lot of the early localised content. Yeah I probably can be reasonably described as hating SatAM, or Archie Sonic in its wide berth.

But I do like AoSTH. And Sonic the Comic. And within this context, they too are "shitass interpretations".

Because that's the thing. My point in that reply wasn't that they're bad. What I was trying to do, what I was hoping would happen and which I think did happen to the person I was replying to, is asking you to see for once these things not as a fan but as a creative. As a fan, I can often love some really weird shit that happens because of corporate handling of properties. Hell, I love Disney Comics, and those are nothing if not a century of people doing increasingly weirder and out of character interpretations of a cartoon mouse Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney created.

But I think with Sonic, fans are often coming in from the POV of being fans of these weird corporate interpretations, which is fine, but unable to consider there being artists behind the concepts. Sonic is not Mickey, despite everything. The people that created Sonic, the artists that made this thing and their ideas, are still by and large there. It's not all a dispassionate corporate product- Metal Sonic or Amy or Shadow's designer is still there. The guys who did programming and designing and conceptualising on this thing from the 2nd game onwards are by and large still there. And now they're even collabing with one of the guys who outright was there from the start. We're talking people who've been there since 1992, more than the age some of these fans have. And who still care, still are involved, still make choices. You might like or dislike those choices, but they're there making them.

I've once tried to explain to someone that while Sonic is a corporate franchise, if there's a scale of "creator-driven" to "corporate-driven" that goes from Usagi Yojimbo to TMNT, Sonic actively still is closer to Usagi. Not that closer, but considering that the games drive the franchise and a lot of their decisions are still by the people who created this material, it's still a lot more creator-driven than a lot of fans understand. Iizuka, Uekawa, Hoshino are still there directly getting involved with even just the comics to opine on them and suggest ideas and refuse ideas and accept ideas.

So within that context, yes. Imagine you had an OC and story. You made it for a company though, so they grabbed it and across the world some people made some weird ass interpretations of your OC and story. It's absolutely their right, they own it. But surely can anyone blame you if decades later, after it turned out your OC and story was successful and you got to keep personally working with it, you turn a blind eye to those early weird takes that were made without you?

That's all I want Sonic fans to understand when complaining about the lack of acknowledgement of early localisation stuff. You don't have to like it, I'd certainly be ok with some Sonic the Comic references - but understand where it's coming from. Because otherwise you tend to instead get takes like "it's because they're Japanese and hate all Americans", as I so often see.

And sure, I did then add that the Sonic movies or Sonic Prime fit this category. Sonic Boom too, I'll add here. I feel these are fairly self-evident- they're further weird divergent takes on the material by creatives halfway across the planet and I think it's pretty clear that the way they get references in other Sonic materials nowadays is primarily down to marketing- see also how Sonic Forces references Sonic Boom but once a few more years were added and it was no longer recent product to sell, Sonic Boom got memoryholed. This isn't an indictment on their quality- I enjoyed episodes of Sonic Boom- again, just how it works.

And yes, if any smartass wants to say this too- IDW Sonic might well go the same way. I think there's some more ties- it's a product intentionally made to be canon with active participation and feedback from Sonic Team (reminder of how for instance Whisper's mask was outright designed by Uekawa) and with them directly using elements of it in their games and products- but the same also applies to Sticks and she certainly seems to be gone in the void for now. So sure, maybe if IDW Sonic ends a few years later Sonic Team'll act like it didn't exist. My point is that that'll be entirely up to them, understandable if they do since it's their character to feel like that about, and the quality of our work is irrelevant to that.