#essay time

Apologies for taking so long to answer this ask (or any for that matter)

Life is kind of kicking me in the ass rn, not to mention the mental health

But I'm glad you liked my take! While in general I feel a lot of fans toss familial dynamics/relationships onto characters just cause (usually related to shipping), there are times where I do agree that certain characters are being written in such a way for the reader to be able to draw parallels to family dynamics (one example in this case being how Team Chaotix is written in IDW).

But often, even when I agree that you can read into parallels to family dynamics or when I agree with other fans that certain characters may be interesting in a familial context (another personal example for me is the idea of Agent Stone being a parent figure to Movie!Shadow), I often find myself at odds with most fans because of exactly what you described

I'm not very fond of flattening their dynamic into purely having only 'familial' roles

I get that it's easier for people to shove character dynamics into more palatable boxes. It's kind of why fandomization of characters happens so swiftly. A lot of people want to brainrot over the characters and their relationships, and it's easier to mass produce stuff for it (memes, art, fic, rambling posts, etc) if you can use common templates or tropes to do that.

But I like complex relationships and character dynamics.

Sure, I do personally read into IDW Sonic and the Official Sonic Cookbook as having an angle you can read into where Vector and Espio are the typical married couple and Charmy is their adoptive kid, but that's not all that's there. Vector is Charmy and Espio's boss. Vector has a textual crush on Vanilla. Charmy's response to Vector telling him what to do is "you're not the boss of me", before Vector reminds him that he very much is his work boss (from Idw Sonic #77). It's got this entire vibe where, well. The three live together and have been working together for a while. Their current relationship is just something that came about from being around each other and being together for so long. And their relationship and all its angles is colored by that closeness, the fact that they live together, the ages of the characters, and even the fact that their group relationship isn't solidly anything aside from coworkers.

By flattening their relationship into a cookie cutter mold for the ideal or average American family (whether you ship Vespio or see Vector as group dad), you've thrown out everything else that isn't that. And...there's no interest in that kind of relationship for me.

As a final note too, I also hate it from an analysis or "this is the characters' canon relationship basically" standpoint. Because, as mentioned, familial dynamics isn't all you can read into Team Chaotix. Their relationship is made up by a multitude of angles one can tackle in order to understand their group dynamic better. When people look at the characters and say "well Vector is basically their dad and that's that" (exploring only the familial angle), they end up ignoring any facets of the group dynamic that don't fit. If Vector is such a good dad of all time, then why is Charmy allowed on dangerous missions if he's supposed to be just his young kid? If Vector and Espio's relationship is about a single dad raising his teenage son and wingmanning his relationships, why do the two bicker about who was supposed to pay the power bill or the things they keep telling each other to stop doing?

In all other continuities they are just really close best friends, especially in the games.

There are two things I have to say

First of all, I agree. My first sonic properties in general were SATAM and AOSTH, and my first game was SATBK. Despite being invested in these as a kid, Sonic wasn't a hyperfixation or anything per se, so I really didn't know much more about the characters than what I knew from the first few Sonic tv shows (satam, aosth, and underground) and hadn't played enough games to determine it. Keeping this in mind, up until I started my slow fall in 2021 (with the release of Colors Ultimate) I pretty much believed whatever people I knew told me about the Sonic characters (aside from Sonic himself). Due to an ex I had who was really into Sonic, I even believed that game Tails was depicted as highly childish and basically 5. This is all to say that once I properly started to get into the games, comics, and the other tv shows, I started to get a better idea on how the characters are treated from property to property. And frankly, adaptations where they did consider each other family (such as aosth) aside, I came to the conclusion myself that all of these adaptations were their own thing. Just because I had grown up with AOSTH and SATAM didn't mean that game series Sonic and Tails had the exact same kind of relationships those versions of Sonic and Tails had. And here's the thing about idw games or even the Sonic games themselves:

More often than not they consider each other best friends, best buds, close friends, etc. Sonic Colors is a game where they spend the whole game together on a journey. Even the manuals call them best friends. In Sonic Forces, Tails spends a decent portion of his appearances looking for Sonic (who he is sure isn't dead) and spending time with Classic Sonic. In Sonic Prime (which I personally think should be an adaptation but is part of game canon apparently regardless), there's a lot of emphasis on how important Tails is to Sonic, and Sonic doesn't even call Tails or Nine or any variants any variation of "brother" the whole show (despite there being scenes where he calls Shadow bro or brother as a slang term, even if Shadow does reject this as an interpretation of their relationship). In fact, just about every instance in all the games (including the manuals) where they considered each other bros or Sonic called him "little bro" was either specifically added to english manuals or explicitly removed from JP versions of the game/manuals. And really, the few mentions in the games themselves pale in comparison to the amount of times they call each other some variation of "bud", "buddy", "best friend", "best bud", or even just each other's names.

So...yeah! It confused the hell out of me too. Because with that kind of conviction I was expecting them to call each other "brother" explicitly in multiple games like. At the very least. Much less people's tendency in fanon to have them call each other brother or bro 5 times a sentence. This was actually partially why it blew my mind that Sonic movie 2 and Sonic Prime were directed/written the way they were despite being told by the fandom these two were supposed to be canonically siblings. But all of the actual in game "proof" of it is so miniscule that it starts to feel like people decided shipping those two was off limits a long time ago and the "they're brothers you sicko!" was a convenient way to shame people out of it because they personally didn't fancy the ship or shipped the characters with other people. I also have a feeling that there are people who grew up with some of the same adaptations I did (and also archie sonic) and decided to derive all of their interpretations of the game characters from those and sort of uh imposed those ideas on people who were neutral or didn't agree. Or, in other words, I get the idea there are at least some Sonic fans who seem to operate as if every single adaptation and game and version of Sonic canon operates under all the same rules and characterization/relationship, rather than just being able to admit or handle how different and separate they all are.

But really, even though I'm a shipper of them, this is kind of exactly why the heavy handed in your face "see them as brothers or you're a bad person with no media literacy" rubs me the wrong way. Because you can seldom find fan depictions or interpretations of them as their canon relationship (best friends and partners) in any form that doesn't reduce them to "just brothers" while acting like sibling relationships are the end all be all for strong platonic relationships

(Yes for the record I have seen multiple people claim that they do show that platonic relationships can be just as strong as romantic relationships and then follow it up with "because I depict these characters as having a strong sibling relationship". Which. Hate to break it to them. But claiming that the only two strong relationships are romantic or familial (or that a strong platonic relationship that doesn't turn romantic must turn familial) is not the take you think it is)

Now, the second thing. Sontails is one of those relationships (like S0riku to me) where my interest in finding proof of their canon relationship or arguing they may not have a sibling type relationship squarely falls in the category of "I enjoy them in a canon context, and while I am not claiming they will or should be canon, I am saying that it's a valid read of their relationship to see this potential". So, although I do not see them as canonically brothers, given my enjoyment of Archie Sonic (as an example) I would still enjoy them this way even if the games swore they were "totally siblings" on top of depicting them the way they do now (which, haha, is how Archie sonic feels to me with their depictions of Sonic and Tails). Frankly, even if this was the case, I would still consider the fandom attitude to be out of line and much too, eh, "personal" so to speak (as in people taking how people treat fictional characters personally) over people interpreting canon in different ways than them or pushing little fictional guys together like barbie dolls.

So...yeah anyways

Tl;dr: I can only speculate how we got to the point of people claiming with the utmost of seriousness (with moral panic to boot) that the two canon best friends must be siblings or you're wrong and bad, and I think fandom attitude is waaay too serious and out of line, even if these characters did canonically have that kind of relationship.

ㅤ

Woof okay time to take a breather for a moment.

As always, I'd like to thank you for the ask, anon! I won't be putting this one in the main tags, as I'd like to limit the starting of any discourse here, but I would be lying if I said I haven't been wanting to talk about this specific thing for a while

And that's...mostly because the last thing I'm trying to do is to start shit with people who are just having fun with their headcanons/interpretations of Sonic and Tails who haven't done anything and don't harass people