The Bizarre Modern Reality of Sonic the Hedgehog

um, on May 30, 2019, Paramount Pictures unveiled its first look at the new live-action Sonic The Hedgehog movie and the internet exploded, no one was horrified at the grotesque new design of the iconic blue

hedgehog

. his human teeth before Paramount finally pulled the trailer, delaying the film's release by several months and costing the studio $5 million. Another chapter in the strange

modern

reality

of Sonic the Hedgehog. Something I really love about the Internet is that once a medium or character goes online, you can never be sure how people will interpret it. Take Tony the Tiger's Twitter account once for example. a fairly confident serial sports-loving mascot transformed into an anthropomorphic thirst magnet to the point that Kellogg's, so confused about how to deal with the new identity that had been imposed on its mascot, decided to delete the account.

This is what happened to Sonic the

hedgehog

over three decades, Sega's iconic character has gone from king of the video game industry to a fallen icon so distorted and corrupted by the internet that simply Googling Sonic can lead to a strange world crazy and it's this world I want to talk about, but To do that, I think it's important to understand why Sonic was so important to begin with, so the year is 1991. Like the radical guy that you are, you skateboard to your local park excited to tell your best friend Jake that you finally beat Super Mario. world, but when you do, jake, his panther pins shine in the sun, he exclaims, dude, forget about mario, you gotta see what's going on at the mall, man, and when you get there, you come across a giant kiosk crowded containing two huge screens, one of which is the safe.

The attractive world of Super Mario, but on the other, there is something else, something different: a spiky blue hedgehog burns in a lush green world, destroying robotic enemies and freeing animals from their mechanized prison. This game has a style and energy you've never seen before. and you stay there paralyzed and Jake's breath smells faintly of coffee and cigarettes, he whispers friend, his name is Sonic. I know many of you weren't alive in 1991 and that scares me in a way I don't fully understand, but this was a scene. that was common in shopping malls across the United States and was part of a massive marketing campaign by Sega designed to break Nintendo and Mario's nearly decade-long stranglehold on the console market.

This is a time when Nintendo wasn't as dominant in the console industry as they were in the console industry, but Sonic was the perfect counterbalance to that, although his personality-driven '90s attitude might seem a bit over the top today. , at the time, Sonic was a legitimate anti-establishment icon in the same way that both Pepsi and Apple marketed themselves as radicals. new alternative to the established norm, Sonic was marketed as the better, faster, cooler version of Mario, and you could feel that wild energy in the fast pace of his games that introduced the world to a new type of high-speed platforming based into boosts that, if he became good enough, would allow you to destroy levels with a searing energy and style like no other did and it was fascinating.

Sonic was wild and cool and adding to that feeling was the unique way the game characterized him. Place your controller on Sonic 1 and while his competitors stood there obediently waiting for your command. Sonic was staring at you impatiently tapping his foot and it was such a subtle touch but it was also a piece of fourth wall breaking character building brilliance. Sonic wasn't just an avatar for you to control. He was a character with his own thoughts and feelings and that was important because I would say that what people loved about the early days of Mario were his games.

What people loved about the early days of Sonic was Sonic Sega building on that appeal with two comics and animated series, all of which existed in their own universe with their own distinctive vision of what Sonic was, but the one that always that stayed with me was the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon from 1993. I remember watching this show as a kid and feeling a little scared. out but intrigued by its strange sinister edge this was a version of mobius robotnik had already taken over

sonic

and his group of freedom fighter friends forced to live in this dark mechanized hell with robotnik presented as this genuine force of evil sacrificing all the life in the name of his horrible technological ambition and what made it feel real was that Sonic didn't always win, there were scenes where he failed, scenes where he couldn't save someone.

A slightly traumatic scene in which Sonic is forced to watch his girlfriend Sally transform. into a horrible mechanical version of herself, scenes like this, both in this show and in the Archie comics, were important because as a child they allowed you to see the more human side of the Sonic character while also giving you a better world realized in which to lose yourself. one that arguably felt a little more real and terrifying than the princess-saving escapades of other video games. The world was constantly on the verge of falling into this horrible technological dystopia, but there was always one cool little hedgehog fighting to stop that from happening. and say what you want about the Sonic series in general, it's still a fun fantasy to believe.

It was the power of that fantasy combined with the quality of its games that allowed Sega to do the impossible and steal market share from Nintendo, bringing Sonic to the peak of the industry. He is now an icon pursued by millions, so in In the early days of the internet it was natural for

sonic

communities to start forming and some of the first ways you could see this were in sonic sprite comics, in which fans would tear apart sprites from different Sonic games and paste them together. in their own stories, but where this concept really started to take off was when people started taking these sprites into flash and animating them with sites like newgrounds.com, which allowed users to upload their creations and share them with a wider audience.

Keep in mind, this was years before YouTube reached mainstream popularity, so stumbling into new territory and finding an entire community of people making animations about the same things you loved was something of a revelation, like discovering this sub hidden. -world of video games that belonged entirely to fans and outside the control of corporations and over time the quality of these animations began to skyrocket; Titles like Sonic Final Fantasy did strange experimental things like pairing nicely done sprite animations with interactive turn-based battles. The king of sprite animations of this era came in 2006 in the form of Super Mario Bros Z.

Like many sprite animations, Mario Bros Z pulled different assets from different games, but what made it different was the level of skill and creativity. of its creator. Alvin Earthworm manipulated these sprites by animating them with a real sense of waste and impact, even breaking them to the point of cheating three-dimensional camera movements, giving Mario Brothers Z a genuinely cinematic feel. They were all sprites that you were familiar with, but now they were colliding and exploding with all the spectacle and excitement of the best Dragon Ball Z showdowns today is impressive, but back then the idea that a person, like a fan, could create something so ambitious by telling a story that, despite the name, focused heavily on sonic journeys.

Back to the mushroom kingdom after Mobius and all his friends were wiped out by Mechasonic Mechasonic was originally a pretty standard goblin drawn from Sonic and Knuckles, but here he transformed into this world-ending nightmare, a genuinely terrifying villain whose appearance in any scene spelled. death and destruction giving new life to what had originally been a very small part of the sonic universe. Over time, people even began creating their own Sonic fan games with creators like Christian Taxman Whitehead building their own Sonic Engine and other users using that engine to create Sonic. games that could easily pass for an official title, other developers even completely break the concept of what Sonic is and transplant it into entirely new genres like Sonic Smackdown, a fighting game created by indie developer Arc Forged that is so astonishingly polished that It's something shocking. is not an official release, there was actually an official sonic fighting game and it's really bad and I think this is where you can really see the beauty of fan creations, the ability to take characters and concepts from a fictional universe and give them the life they have.

I've never had one of my favorite examples of this before as the webcomic starring two minor characters from the Sonic universe, Amy Rose from Sonic CD and Metal Sonic from Sonic 3. Neither of whom appeared so extensively in these games, but here we are. It shows a world set years after the events of the Sonic 3 story in which a reformed metal Sonic tries to reintegrate into society and in the process forms an endearing relationship with Amy Rose and it's really cute and a little sad, great part of the charm. Seeing these characters casually spend time together in a way that would never be possible in an official video game and presenting it all in this really cute and fun art style, a lot of the appeal of these fan works comes from seeing the artists reinterpret them. characters in their own visual language like Evan Stanley, author of Ghosts of the Future, a webcomic that ran for 10 years during which you can see Stanley go from being a hobby comic artist to a truly amazing illustrator with newer fan comics like Sonic Skyline with an accent on Lala is one of the most genuinely beautiful visual treatments I've ever seen.

Sonic becomes official or not. When you look at all of these things together, it's pretty clear that Sonic has inspired a universe that fan creators really want to be. a part of and while there is a level of infamy that comes with that that we will get to, I think it would be shitty to ignore all the truly incredible work that people have done out of pure passion for Sonic and his universe, however, where is ? Sonic's more nefarious side would begin to emerge at the dawn of the new millennium, bringing dark times for Sonic. The year is 2001.

You've just finished watching Jake's DVD copy of Osmosis Jones when the sound of your Nokia 3210 message alert breaks the silence of the night. Jake will probably give you the latest on his parents' messy divorce, but then you see, buddy, Sega canceled the Dreamcast and your mind is spinning. That has been impossible for years. It's been you and Jake defending Sega, defending Sonic against all your. friends who had playstation sonic adventure games were good people I just didn't understand them how this could happen and what it would mean for sonic what it would mean for you and jake and for the first time in your young life the future starts to feel uncertain the turn of the millennium It was a difficult time for Sonic Sonic later for the Dreamcast, which had the unenviable task of adopting Sonic's high-speed drive-based gameplay in 3D and people have wondered for years whether that's something these games did successfully or not, but for our purposes The important thing is that these games split the Sonic fanbase between an audience that longed for the old 2D Sonic classics and a newer audience that accepted 3D with infighting between the two groups common on gaming message boards. ;

However, another deeper problem was also forming and that was exactly what Sonic was in the year 2000. The same rebellious attitude that had made him feel so fresh 10 years ago now felt tired in part because Sonic had been so successful that had spawned a wave of '90s attitude full of animal pet impersonators rocky rodent aerobat bubsy mr mad punk skunk awesome opossum radical rex wild woody jazz hare high seas havoc get the lizard shawn michaels each diluting sonic's personality to the point that by the late '90s the mascot with attitude had become a parody of a parody of a parody diminishing Sonic's appeal as a marketing tool and its core identity, Sonic was beginning to feel lost, not just appearing on consoles of his former enemies, but even struggling to find a way to remain relevant, leading to a disastrous series of Sonic titles, each of which struggled to reinvent the character.

In different ways without success, Sonic and the Black Knight saw Sonic transported back to a medieval fantasy world engaging in sword fights controlled bymovement with the sound of the early 2000s and Bot Rock Shadow the Hedgehog starred as Sonic's edgy rival Shadow in which he had a gun and shot people. and sonic unleashed turned the sega icon into a stretchy armed boar oh god im sorry its just at what point someone like the guys let's turn him into a werewolf but the lowest point of the entire franchise came in Sonic 06, such a rampant disastrous game with poor design choices and game-breaking glitches, became a laughingstock, plummeting Sonic's metacritic to the lowest it's ever been.

Sonic had never felt further removed from his rival Mario, who at the time was releasing some of his most critically acclaimed games in this period, giving rise to the term Sonic Cycle describing the pattern of excitement that would run through the fanbase before the announcement of a new Sonic game only for that hope to be dashed by the inevitable disappointment of its release for Sonic fans. This was a crushing period of disillusionment, but to everyone else Sonic had become a joke, a fallen icon who had once ruled over the gaming industry now starring in low-quality garbage and you could feel that frustration rising in the community. of Sonic fans with videos of irate Sonic fans over the state of Sonic and his fanbase, the most infamous of them being the now legendary 13 minute speeches by classic Sonic fanatic Sami you are the Sonics for everyone, are you? what will they learn?

I have to say that Sammy and others were probably playing characters for the sake of these videos, as was quite common back then, but they were still watched by millions and millions of people who didn't know that creating a strange and distorted perception of Sonic and people who played their games, that's not to say there hasn't always been something slightly cursed about the Sonic franchise, whether it's the Macy's Sonic Day Parade float getting caught. a pole and bust ken pender's weird sonic comic stories that culminated in him suing archie and sega for the rights to his characters and winning due to archie failing to set up a proper contract or at that time that sonic made out with a lady Human Sonic has always been strange, but now the decline of the Sonic games combined with an angry and frustrated fanbase began to mutate the type of fan content people were creating.

Now you're starting to see strange, surreal depictions of Sonic, creepy, amazing works that distorted the very idea of ​​what Sonic is. was and at the epicenter of this change was a webcomic by artist Tyson Hess called Sonic's Big Adventure, but instead of being a loving interpretation of the world of Sonic, it was a surreal satirical version that lampooned every part of Sonic, from his characters to their gameplay. even to its own fans and blew up, it's hard to say how big this comic was in the late 2000s as the original was removed, but an animated version on youtube has racked up almost 10 million views, the reason why which I think this comic too The new wave of distorted sound art resonated with people because it captured something real sound that was really starting to feel like a broken and corrupted image of itself and this art spoke to those people who now create fan media to reflect that broken and distorted image and what is really interesting. about a lot of this stuff is that there's this kind of strangeness to it, it's hard to tell what is a genuine and loving piece of fanfiction, what is a parody and what is an absolute mockery of Sonic and his fans and possibly the strangest example and strange of this is the story. of stories is trolled on February 18, 2012 a post appeared on the forums about something horrible titled sonic and his friends are trolled the post linked to a deviantart comic where a deformed story, the fox was harassed by internet trolls before returning later with a shadow and violently murder them and there was something so strange and angry about this comic that had distorted and misshapen artwork, its characters spoke in incoherent strings of insults and curses riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, some panels were so strangely hilarious which became memes in their own right and the posters were kind of horrible. mercilessly descending upon the comic and tearing it apart, criticizing everything from the artwork to the strange way the characters spoke, some even showing concern for the mental state of its author, laserbot, but then, little by little, something really strange started to happen. really really good there was character development there were plot twists there was a genuine narrative with themes forming and what's crazy is that you can see the tone of the shapes start to change as the story progresses as the disbelieving people start to seriously enjoy the story.

The conflict between the tales and the trolls gradually expands outward into a massive war that draws in fictional characters from several different universes, all with their own motives, philosophies, faction relationships, and backstories that were so strangely well-developed that even there were shonen style battle mechanics. The artwork was genuinely tense and exciting to the point that people began to wonder if Tails being trolled was itself a huge troll. One page could see the genuinely devastating dissolution of Sonic and Amy's relationship. The next saw Knuckles being stoned in a hot tub with Spyro the dragon. It's crazy, but the more I looked into it, the more I started to feel like there was a genuine seriousness to this story.

Check out Laserbot's deviantart gallery and you'll see that he's no stranger to online harassment and I think the heart of it. The story comes from how he uses that experience, there are even points in the comic where he addresses people's criticism of him directly and at one point his deviantart account was even hacked and he wrote that into the story, as well as making the stories are trolled, this strange and fascinating meta-narrative of what it's like to be hated by strangers and how best to combat that rush. Which I think makes Tails trolled. Is he someone who explores his own personal issues through the Sonic the Hedgehog universe and that's actually pretty common in the fandom? media, but especially in Sonic, just look at the sheer abundance of original Sonic characters or OCs.

Sonic OCs have their roots even in the days of sprite ripping, when people would modify existing sprites to create their own characters or redraw frames from the Sonic X TV show. Do the same, Sonic fan characters became They became so rampant online that it even became a popular meme on message boards and then on Twitter, Googling your name, the hedgehog, and posting the results. I think the reason this meme took off is because it gave people an idea of ​​the shocking volume and depth of the Sonic fandom there were thousands of these characters and I have a theory as to why it might be that many of these fan characters They come with detailed biographies that list even small details like their favorite bands and movies.

These biographies would lead me to believe that most of these characters are made up of young teenagers who perhaps fell in love with the sound universe at a young age but as they They grew up and could feel that they were getting older. Sonic is a property aimed primarily at children, so they create their own characters that are, in their eyes, edgier and more mature to fit their own perceptions of themselves as young adults while still enjoying the safe escapism of the sonic universe. that they loved when they were children, as if the stories were trolled.

I think these fan characters are people trying to understand their own identity, and like everyone else on the internet, including myself, I became the subject of cruel mockery, but as the Your Name The Hedgehog meme spread, the People began to notice other strange subcommunities in the strangely patriotic Sonic fandom. sonic christian sonic but the one that really surprised people was the strange world of sonic the hedgehog porn wait there a minute later john uh turns out youtube doesn't like it when you talk about sonic the hedgehog porn who knew that so I'm going to edit that part out at least for the moment, the general idea was that yes, there is a lot of adult-oriented Sonic fan material out there, but here's the thing: there is adult-oriented fan material from every property fictional universes that you can imagine and I think it comes down to fans getting older and trying to figure out what they're getting into through the fictional universes that they love, trying to understand themselves better and I really don't think there's anything wrong with that, but that being said, it became quite infamous.

Hot spot online, let's go back to the original video. Oh, and no one allows comments on how I look in this video. I've been in quarantine for five weeks and I'm depressed, the reason Sonic porn became so infamous when so many other erotic fans made the media not discussed is because people were searching for Sonic and his fanbase already had a strange perception online and the discovery of an erotic subculture only added to that narrative, people now create media in response to that new kinkier identity, but it wasn't just about Sonic anymore, it was now about the people who loved him, which brings us to the Sonic Dreams collection.

Sonic Dreams Collection is a free downloadable game from Arcane Kids presented as a lost Sonic title. It is a collection of four mini-games, each of which comments on Sonic. fanbase in its own way a strange broken character creator where you design your own sound oc a strange first-person movie creator who follows your oc throughout his life as the scenarios become increasingly strange and fetishists, this game is a nightmare, but the highlight if that's what you want to call it comes in the form of my roommate sonic where the first person player is instructed via a mobile phone to carry out a set of increasingly intimate actions to seduce Sonic and culminates with the player looking deeply into his eyes only for the students to converge opening a black hole in which the player is sucked into an alternate

reality

where they now become a grotesque version of sonic.

The Sonic Dreams Collection delivers horrifying glee in its haunting dissection of the Sonic fanbase, but it was that haunting quality that made it a popular title among streamers that exposed the game to millions upon millions of people, distorting and corrupting it. further the image of Sonic and his fans online. Now it seemed as if the once lovable hedgehog had been replaced by something darker and more insidious, and in the mid-2010s For many people, the idea of ​​simply being a Sonic fan carried some uncomfortable implications: the year is 2015. You lean against the wall of a crowded train car as a muffled version of Adele's greeting shuffles among her passengers when suddenly Look next to you, OMG it's Jake, I'm sure his hair is shorter now and it's weird seeing him in a suit , but it's him, Jake, you cry, your eyes meeting for the first time in nine years, yeah, things had gotten a little complicated between the two of you. the last time you met, but it's still so good to see him and as your mind took us through your memories together looking for something, something to say, you stutter the words, have you played Sonic Generations?

It's pretty good and an emotion flickers. You don't recognize him at all in his face and when the train stops, he looks at his briefcase and stops before muttering no, I don't play those games anymore and he gets off the train and leaves your life forever and in that moment in the middle of the crowded carriage you have never felt more alone at this point the different layers of what Sonic had become on the internet had compounded the fallen quality of his games the strange distorted fan works in the ocs the porn everything combined into this twisted amalgam that gave origin of sonic sonic was inspired by a meme in which different artists drew distorted versions of sonic running and from that primordial soup of deformed hedgehogs emerged sonic a perfect twisted encapsulation of what the internet had done to sonic people even taking sonic media and replacing them sonic with sonic in eerie parodies of how far the iconic hedgehog had fallen.

There is a video from this period called sonic vs sonic, a fan game recording where sonic is chased and hunted by sonic like a gargling nightmare version of the green hill zone theme. Every time it comes around, the video has almost 10 million views and I think that's partly due to how comedic it is, but I think it also reflects the plight of

modern

Sonic. A character fighting a twisted parody of himself. There is a short film of this. period called the hedgehog and I love this movie, it's about growing up to become the things that seemed so strange and evil when I was a kid, but I think it also really captures the tragedy of Sonicwhen a boy dressed as the iconic hedgehog wanders through a lonely desert.

World Sonic had been lost, his identity had been forgotten, he had nowhere left to go, so when the trailer for the Sonic movie appeared and revealed the grotesque new design, it felt like some kind of nightmarish poetry, even for Sega itself. Sonic now seemed like a twisted and strange version of his once relevance had fallen into a sad and strange darkness, or so it seemed, but then on November 12, 2019, it was announced that the Sonic character redesign was being directed by Tyson Hess, the meme little lord of shit from Sonic's big adventure, was now the series. Salvador The new design was not received with disgust but with joy, people were delighted with the new look of Sonic and not only that Hess had gotten the job thanks to the animation work he had done on Sonic Mania, a game directed by Christian Taxman. whitehead and other members of the Sonic fan community that became the highest-regarded Sonic title in nearly two decades and Evan Stanley, author of Ghosts of the Future Fan Comic, went on to illustrate idw's official Sonic comic, which in It's actually pretty good, the reason why all this is like this.

The important thing is that, for all the mistakes Sega has made with Sonic over the years, it is its willingness to embrace its own fan culture that has arguably resurrected Sonic as a mainstream pop culture giant. The Sonic The Hedgehog movie is going to earn one hundred million dollars at the box office. Office surpasses even Nintendo's Detective Pikachu. I think fandoms reflect the best and worst of what a medium is and Sonic is now a character that exists in a thousand different forms in countless different mediums and yes, well, they can be strange and disturbing at times.

These are the people who love Sonic and now draw his comics, program his games and design his movies, bringing the once fallen character back to life and I think that's amazing. I guess that's the strange modern reality of Sonic the Hedgehog, folks. Thank you so much. for watching this video and especially to those of you who have watched it again, if you want to see the original version you can find it in the description below where you can also find a link to my patreon which is really the only reason why I can make silly videos like this so if you support me thank you and if you want to keep going.visit patreon.com slash super wolf with eye patch where you could also be thanked personally like these popular thin arrows pointing towards the left matt 0777 karen lindquist buttface mcgee I like trains aaron procopanko and bo the doggo, you can find me as always on Let's Fight a boss video game podcast or on twitter at ipatchwolf friends, take care of yourselves and see you next time, next year en 20 20.

Hi, I'm Jake, I saw the Sonic movie, I miss you.