I recently stumbled upon this commentary piece by Jeff Gerstmann (https://giantbomb.com/articles/sonic-the-hedgehog-finally-makes-sense), which I found to be extremely weird. I find many of the "game reviewers/media did the real reputational damage to the series/community" to be missing the forest for the trees, but this article's discussion on young people's relationship to the games, particularly the cited example of boy who overturned a hedgehog ban in his city, kinda irked me.
So, how were Sonic fans (especially younger ones) looked upon back in the day, and has it really changed since then?
Let's see... 2009? That would have been one year after I started at TSSZ... huh. I'm genuinely surprised we did not cover it. GiantBomb also migrated to a new CMS recently and this does not preserve the old comments section, which is annoying. I want to see if I left a comment here back in the day.
Generally speaking, I do not remember this article by Jeff. It's possible I forbade myself from reading it. Jeff can be a very bitter man sometimes, and his opinions about a lot of Sega games do not align with my own. I do remember him mentioning on a podcast at one point that he played Sonic Unleashed up to the first Tornado Attack QTE level, which means he finished the first Sonic level, the first Werehog level, and then quit because he thought it was "a game for babies." (paraphrasing) That told me enough.
More to your point, what I do have a clear and vibrant memory of around this time was listening to 1up.com podcasts, and top of that pile was "GFW Radio." It was hosted by a bunch of guys who by their own admission did not like podcasts but were being forced by corporate to produce one, so every week they would do a very brief news segment about what was going on in PC Gaming and then spend the rest of the two or so hours just shooting the breeze.
And from there emerged this nickname for the podcast -- "97.5: The Brodeo." Because they were considered shock jock talk radio guys. A lot of 1up podcasts had this dirty edge to them, but GFW Radio in particular would get really dark and nasty, thanks in large part to one of the hosts, Shawn Elliot. He was a great writer, but he had the heart of a SomethingAwful poster. He delighted in rolling around in the internet's worst filth and it came out in a segment often titled "Heroes of the Web." It was an excuse to drag chemically maladjusted teenagers through the mud and laugh at them. It is also, to my arguably fuzzy memories, where "jenkem" was originally invented.
Sonic fans came up quite a bit on The Brodeo.
And from here, tendrils spread out across all of 1up.com's podcasts. I truly believe this is where a lot of the "Sonic fans are sooooo weird!" sentiment gained widespread traction. There were a few posts here or there on SomethingAwful or 4chan, but Shawn Elliot put them on the main stage.
It was a very dark time to be a Sonic fan. We were still coming off of Sonic 06, and now a bunch of pundits were using a strange minority to define the entire fandom. And that definition stuck.
It lead to Kotaku articles, like this clout chaser who bragged about having sex on Sonic the Hedgehog bed sheets. Isn't that weird? Or Patrick Klepek talking about witnessing a "Sonic the Hedgehog Orgy" inside of that Bubsy 3D fangame. Isn't that weird? Or how sexual Sonic CD's special stages are. Isn't that weird?
It has changed, and as much as I hate to admit it, it's because of Aaron Webber. I've learned over the years that a lot of people really did not like Aaron Webber, known sometimes in the community as "RubyEclipse." He was the Sonic brand manager for a long time, until he got promoted to managerial/producer roles and is still kicking around somewhere in the Sega of Japan corporate labyrinth.
I've heard from friends-of-friends who are in the know, but the press apparently couldn't stand him. Aaron was supposedly a pretty stereotypical 4chan troll kind of guy if you got to know him, which checks out given he cracked transphobic "attack helicopter" jokes on the official Sonic account during his tenure, back when the "sassy social media brand" was in vogue.
But what he did do was kind of blow off some steam and release the tension. Though he said some nasty things he never apologized for, he did also foster an environment where the Sonic "brand" kind of laughed at itself. It was in on the joke. And it kind of emboldened others to, like, "come forward" I guess, and it all sort of normalized itself.
There's still some sentiment out there that Sonic fans are "weird" but it's a far cry from what it used to be. Because, as I will always and forever maintain, the internet is weird, and you can find these kinds of people in the dark corners of every fandom. No sense limiting yourself to just Sonic fans.
