Aaron Webber's first interview since returning to SEGA of America!

[Mauro Fonseca]

I'm NOT intending to cast SEGA in a positive light. I even mentioned even if they did have suddenly the balls to start filtering, the result'd be something entirely unlike what the fandom wants and we'd all be screaming. I just don't like this attitude of "but why doesn't SEGA know what to do????" like we're somehow unrelated to it

[Nestor]

And yeah, the basic details of the world aren't consistent after 25 years. Because of a decade of "why is this named Earth it can't be named Earth". They already HAD made it consistent, until people complained enough they changed it again.

 

Out of curiosity (and to derail this discussion a bit back to the interview), do we actually know that SEGA consciously made this change due to the fans, or if they simply didn't really care and are just being inconsistent? Do we even know that this is a change, and SEGA hadn't always thought of it as two worlds?

[Diogenes]

It isn't even like this is a minor facet of the setting like DBZ's dinosaurs; it would be like if DBZ didn't even both explaining about Namek or the saiyans and they were... just kinda there?

So, Dragon Ball. Which was fine. Wouldn't have even reached the point of retconning them into aliens if it wasn't viable before that.

Would you suggest that TMNT would be better if there was no explanation for what the turtles were or how they came about, or what the Foot Clan was?

The turtles need an origin because they're different from the norm. That's explicitly the point, they're mutants that the normal world would never accept, so they have to live in and act from the shadows. That's completely different from Sonic, where talking animals are a natural thing, and the details of their existence aren't the focus of the plot.

[Graystripe2000]

Maybe they consider it two worlds in a FIGURATIVE sense and not a literal sense.

[Mauro Fonseca]

Out of curiosity (and to derail this discussion a bit back to the interview), do we actually know that SEGA consciously made this change due to the fans, or if they simply didn't really care and are just being inconsistent? Do we even know that this is a change, and SEGA hadn't always thought of it as two worlds?

 

The games explicitly name the planet Earth. Then after Colours we have official Archie writer Ian Flynn (who also sometimes talks too much like Aaron's doing here) going "no, SEGA says it's Sonic's World now". And now this is the first we hear of "oh it's two worlds". It's at most been established in Colours, judging by the timing of changes Archie-side.

[Wittymations]

The games explicitly name the planet Earth. Then after Colours we have official Archie writer Ian Flynn (who also sometimes talks too much like Aaron's doing here) going "no, SEGA says it's Sonic's World now". And now this is the first we hear of "oh it's two worlds". It's at most been established in Colours, judging by the timing of changes Archie-side.

But that doesn't really say that SEGA changed the setting due to fans. Just that they changed the setting.

[Mauro Fonseca]

Ok, fine, let me correct it.

 

"SEGA coincidentially changed the setting in the same time they did a whole bunch of other changes such as new voices and writers specifically for appeasing to the fans and critics, but it's entirely unrelated"

[azoo]

Just to make it clear, I think Aaron is not fit to answer any questions on what comes to Sonic's lore. Hell, not even Iizuka seems able to clear that confusion anymore. We have to take the right reins to fix this, not trust them to some fanboy or a man who can't do a good game intentionally.

But aren't we "fanboys"?

If you're talking about how he hasn't said anything bad about things, it's because he's a PR manager, not a politician. He doesn't have the right to publicly express his opinions on how bad some parts of Sonic are in public, because that's.. well, bad publicity for Sega. And considering his job in particular is public relations, he'd get fired for it.

What did you honestly expect of him?

[Wittymations]

Okay, but are we sure that SEGA did so to appease fans and critics? I don't really see too many people really complaining about the voice actors we had back then, for instance, that seems more like it has to do with trouble in between unions, or even politics.

 

Gameplay changes? We had the boost style in Unleashed and that got translated to Colors and Generations.

[Tara]

I think that the voice direction may have had some influence from the fans, but I think the actual change was prompted because of the contract for their 4Kids voice actors had expired and also because the reason they were changed to begin with (to be consistent with Sonic X) had outlived its purpose.  At the time of the change, the 4Kids cast had been voicing Sonic for about as long as the previous voice cast had been voicing the characters before they were dropped. (About five years or so) In the end, Mike Pollock was the only one to have his contract renewed, likely because he's the best received voice which the fans and critics likely played a part in influencing, but I tend to think the change would have ensued regardless of fan demand.

 

Not to discredit your overall point or anything.  Just saying.

[Nepenthe]

That's not exactly correct - my original point was that there were so many variations from our Earth to the point that it seemed rather pointless making it Earth in the first place, not that simply having any fantasy variations made it unrealistic.

It's also weird that Mobius proponents keep insisting that an alien planet makes more sense, despite the fact that that raises just as many questions as it does answers since the similarities to our Earth make no sense in a scenario where humanity has long since achieved interstellar travel and large scale planet colonization (because the likelihood of an alien planet being an abstract Earth, complete with humans exactly like us that evolved naturally, is zero). You're telling me it's easier to swallow the fact that after all of these amazing achievements we remade San Francisco, Egypt, and China, rather than these things simply being symbolic markers of Earth in a fictional universe? No. At this point, Mobius proponents have a much bigger job at explaining a decent narrative that reconciles the obviously Earth-like planet as not being Earth at all than they put on.

I'd suggest that basic world-building always adds to narrative cohesion of the overall canon. Sure, knowing what Sonic is doesn't alter the narrative of an individual game specifically, but for the overall experience of a coherent fantasy world, obvious questions like "Why are there only a dozen furries wandering around?" or "Why is this Earth if it doesn't resemble almost any aspect of Earth?" should be at least faintly hand-waved.

Do you assume that any story that doesn't show all 7 billion human beings on Earth is some post-apocalyptic wasteland where only the characters we see are the only humans alive? Of course not; you extrapolate that fact by filling in the blanks with implied information from the story and setting. The same goes for Sonic, where almost no one is surprised at anthro animals walking around and Sega instead clarified that Knuckles is the last echidna, as well as that Shadow was man-made, precisely because they have always operated on the assumption that these animals were naturally born, thus have ancestry, and thus are part of a species with a bigger population. Otherwise, these bits of information would be redundant. Sega is not obligated to show billions of anthro animals to spoonfeed extraneous information to an audience that has failed in discerning where the burden of proof lies due to simple inferrence.

Same goes with Earth, and it's disingenuous to say that nothing in the Sonic games resembles our planet when almost every flora, fauna, element, tool, and location is simply an abstracted or even a realistic version of the respective item in real life. I don't need photorealism to tell me that Green Hill is made up of grass, dirt, rocks, trees, flowers, and water.

It isn't even like this is a minor facet of the setting like DBZ's dinosaurs; it would be like if DBZ didn't even both explaining about Namek or the saiyans and they were... just kinda there? With awesome powers, for some reason? Would you suggest that TMNT would be better if there was no explanation for what the turtles were or how they came about, or what the Foot Clan was?

The explanation of dinosaurs in DBZ holds as much importance to the strength of its plots and appeal as explaining the origins of anthro characters in Sonic's universe beyond "talking animals are appealing," which is why I equated them (speaking of which, I'd like to know what plot holes are created by not explaining through canon why Sonic is a talking animal.) As for Saiyans, Goku was retconned from human freak of nature in DB to alien in DBZ. He existed as the former in Dragonball, and no, audiences didn't rebuke the work as terrible because "humans don't have tails."

I'm also not suggesting that TMNT as it is would be fine without explaining what either of those things are. My argument is that the quality of a plot is determined by elaborating only on what is necessary for the plot to work. What those necessary components are isn't universal because writing is an artform whose principles are guidelines and tips, not scientific or rational laws (e.g., you MUST explain why an animal talks or the story WILL be bad), so while you can't change the origins of the TMNT, that doesn't mean you can conclude that the classic Looney Tunes shorts are trash since no one at Warner Bros. bothered to clarify how these animals evolved to talk to humans. You cannot make an argument that the way one artwork does things in its story is how every relevant artwork should do things in order to be good.

Again, there is a large aspect of personal preference to this; some people's threshold for suspension of disbelief is higher than others. Similarly, you don't have to obsessivley fill in every single detail - I'm not suggesting we need Sonic's eating habits and shoe size. But filling in pretty obvious voids in the setting does give a more polished experience and I'd argue is better storytelling.

Your personal thresholds are not enough to found an acceptable argument for the quality of a work in the same way that someone loving Sonic 06 doesn't make it a good video game. This entire time you've made the notion that the franchise's storytelling is bad in part because Sega failed to explain why Sonic has human qualities, when you've neither defined what narrative is impossible to understand solely because we lack this information nor how Sonic is an exceptional case to other works like DBZ or Kung Fu Panda where anthro animals exist on Earth totally unexplained. You've failed to make any reasonable correlation that doesn't stray from merely reiterating your personal preferences for certain information.

That isn't exactly what I'm arguing though - the problem I see with Sonic's setting is that there isn't a whole lot of internal logic.

Again, things like the planet name (or even number of planets...) and what exactly the main characters are are pretty major details of a setting; I'm not suggesting anything more than a vague handwave, but most settings of Sonic's nature have at least a vague outline. Do we need to know the history of the Aquatic Ruin Zone or exactly how Eggman's moustache doesn't droop? Of course not - but as others have suggested, it does rather speak volumes that what should be really basic details to most settings aren't even concrete after 25 years.

The name of a planet or why an animal can talk are not objectively necessary facets to enjoying a story, because the fact remains there's plenty of quality media examples where neither of these things are given or spelled out.

And again, I lay the blame for the inconsistency partly at the feet of fans who were unhappy with the changes introduced in Adventure to the point that Sega sought fit to try and reconcile competing canon interests in the first place, as well as those people who claim that Sonic is some unique franchise on the basis of its aesthetics without actually making an argument that's not easily rebuked by bringing up another comparable franchise people take at face value.

Again, lay out exactly WHY we need to be given an explanation for Sonic's existence in order to be privy to better writing. What problem in the writing can be objectively pointed to as a direct result of this lack of information? Or is this entire argument based on the fact that you simply prefer more explanation than what may be necessary?

[Sean]

Literally I have no basis in fantasy or real-world parallels when I say I like Mobius. I'm just used to it, much like how I'm too used to names like Robotnik and Nack to start naturally using Eggman or Fang without forcing myself to

Plus, if Sega's going to go with the "Sonic's world" shit, I might as well give it a name. I think calling it Mobius or Earth affects literally absolutely fucking nothing

[Nepenthe]

Literally I have no basis in fantasy or real-world parallels when I say I like Mobius. I'm just used to it, much like how I'm too used to names like Robotnik and Nack to start naturally using Eggman or Fang without forcing myself to

Plus, if Sega's going to go with the "Sonic's world" shit, I might as well give it a name. I think calling it Mobius or Earth affects literally absolutely fucking nothing

I understand the argument of using interchangeable terms for personal preference, and didn't mean to lump you into the argument above if I did so. I have no beef with people calling the planet whatever at this stage. My hang-up is that the arguments being put forth about why having the series take place on Earth is inherently worse than having them take place on an alien planet called Mobius don't make sense to me.

[Sean]

Oh yeah I wasn't directly responding to you. I was following up on my initial post which came off as snobbier than I intended it to

[Celestia]

Personally I don't see the point in taking the two worlds thing seriously. 1) Literally no-one in the fandom figured this out on our own so obviously, even if it is true (I'll get to that in a second), it doesn't really factor into anything, and 2) I didn't watch the video so I dunno if something Aaron said contradicts this, but for all we know this was a weird translation thing / misunderstanding / joke / whatever. For example, they might have meant Classic Sonic / Modern Sonic.

 

 

 

Also I like the name Mobius and consider the planet to be an alternate Earth that's kinda like our own but it's got some pretty obvius fantastical differences and one of 'em's the name. :V For some reason it feels like the kind of thing someone in the Sonic universe would call the place. But yeah I never understood how that was an issue but I don't really blame SEGA for being wary abut it considering, well...our whole fanbase.

[Rad Dudesman]

The "2 worlds" thing matches up with what a guy on 4chan said last week.

 

Link: https://archive.moe/v/thread/300121994/#q300131805

 

 

 

The Internal Sonic Bible at SEGA has some notes in it. For example, only male hedgehogs are allowed to have super forms now, effectively killing off Super Knuckles. (Blaze is able to get around this restriction, since she uses the Sol Emeralds.)

Super Emeralds are non-canon, as are the Hyper forms.

Also, when making a game, you have to choose to either set it in Sonic's world (without people) or on "Earth" (with people.) Mobius is an official thing in Sonic's universe, but it is not the name of the world itself. It's actually the Sonic universe's equivalent to Mars.

I can dump a whole lot more info, but cannot provide scans. These shits are ID numbered to track leaks.

Blaze's dimension is still considered a separate dimension, but she can visit whenever she wants due to her scepter's power. Marine is her Tails.

[Indigo Rush]

 

 

Here's the thing. While Tails and Knuckles have been shown to use the Emeralds to some degree, they never fully "transform." It's true that they're referred to as Super Tails and Super / Hyper Knuckles, their bodies do little else but glow a little. Meanwhile, Sonic, Shadow and Silver show complete transformations into gold, complete with new hairstyles and eye color changes.

Could this mean that in order to use the Chaos Emeralds to their fullest potential, you have to be a male hedgehog? It would seem so.

 

 

Called it.

 

Three years ago.

[Zero Dozer]

For the one who quoted me: I don't think so, about liking Sonic making us fanboys. To me, fanboys are blind people that will always agree to whatever the company does, no matter how crappy the game ends up being. For example, a Sonic fanboy loving Sonic '06 or Boom (the game, before people crucify me), despite those being trainwrecks. About RubyEclipse, my point is that I don't expect him to answer our lore questions, nor I want him to. No one should, also. It's not his job. As you said, he's a PR manager (and thank God he's better at it than Ken Balough).

Now, about the discussion. Listen, I may be jumping to conclusions due to not taking my time to read all the text walls, but to me, Sonic's world is Mobius, and I don't do it because I watched SatAM or because I knew the Archie Comics. It's because Mobius as a name for Sonic's world makes sense to me. SEGA keeping that world unnamed didn't solve a thing, it only opened a new breach, a new abyss, know what I mean?

 

I actually wanted to take Iizuka's place in there. Y'know, start correcting the mess Sonic Team made along the years, fix Sonic's lore to something people understand, make games that the people really wanted and needed. And yeah, I know this is much of a big distant dream.

[Shaddy Zaphod]

To me, fanboys are blind people that will always agree to whatever the company does, no matter how crappy the game ends up being. For example, a Sonic fanboy loving Sonic '06 or Boom (the game, before people crucify me), despite those being trainwrecks.

 

So, liking things about Sonic that you don't like makes a fanboy, then?

 

What exactly do you expect this PR person to do, other than promote a franchise they work with?

[Diogenes]

The "2 worlds" thing matches up with what a guy on 4chan said last week.

 

Link: https://archive.moe/v/thread/300121994/#q300131805

It's really hard to take seriously the idea that Sega has used the name "Mobius" for a planet that has never had even the slightest relevance in the series.

[Zero Dozer]

So, liking things about Sonic that you don't like makes a fanboy, then?

 

What exactly do you expect this PR person to do, other than promote a franchise they work with?

 

It depends, do you defend it no matter how bad the games are? For example, I like Shadow's game, myself, though I recognize that the game was badly done in a lot of ways. Hell, I even liked Unleashed when I played it on PS2, despite the Werehog part being quite boring and dominating two thirds of the game.

 

About RubyEclipse's reputation, he was known as such from BEFORE he was a PR manager, that's the part you're not getting.

[Shaddy Zaphod]

It depends, do you defend it no matter how bad the games are? For example, I like Shadow's game, myself, though I recognize that the game was badly done in a lot of ways.

"How bad the games are" is already an issue that is dependent on your perception of it. You call Sonic Boom a trainwreck, I call it an average game that I enjoyed that gets more shit than it deserves. I'm not about to call it the best game ever, because it isn't, but am I a fanboy because I disagree with the notion that the game bites people in the dick and burns their house down?

 

 

About RubyEclipse's reputation, he was known as such from BEFORE he was a PR manager, that's the part you're not getting.

And is he outwardly praising even the worst of Sonic games, such as 06 and Shadow? Because that's how you defined a fanboy, and I see him promoting F&I, talking about improvements i.e. noting that there were improvements needed over Shattered Crystal, which there were. And he's giving semi-legitimate-if-a-little-vague evidence to suggest that there have, in fact, been things improved. So I don't understand the characterization of him as a fanboy. I see this coming more about his optimistic attitude, which is in no way a fanboy characteristic and certainly the way you should act when it's your job.

[Nepenthe]

The planet's name is in no way responsible for the objective problems of the franchise.

Also, why are we still talking about RubyEclipse's character as a Sonic fan? Sorry you don't have a career at Sega like he does, but constantly putting him down because he potentially has different tastes than you do is doing nothing for this topic.

[azoo]

I still think this whole "two worlds" thing is absolutely super dumb, but..

 

If the series would've had this sort of explanation for things really early on and never dropped any notion of this being the case, it would be sort of okay and I wouldn't mind that much.

 

Because you see, that's the thing. If there was any sort of consistency, this wouldn't be a problem. It would make some sort of slight sense that Sonic sort of goes from one world to another between games, and despite there being a lack of focus on what Sonic is trying to protect / ludicrously massive plot holes to fill / et cetera, it could totally work.

 

But it doesn't.

 

This is yet another idea in which came straight outta nowhere, completely fabricated without any care or tact on Sega's behalf. It's more of that kind of "write this as we go along" kind of thing that they've been doing for ages now. They apparently write themselves into a corner so much that they feel the need to completely change everything about the setting(s) that Sonic's universe takes place in, and can't seem to hold any mythos down whatsoever.

 

To be honest, this kind of thing started from Sega of America trying to meddle with everything Sonic Team was able to conjure up about the series, and pretending that (even though they made the flipping games) whatever they wanted for the series didn't matter because they didn't trust them to make anything good or something like that, and so everything was made super inconsistent because the western canon bull was made into three different TV shows, two comic books, several other little books and two hilariously different tie-in video games (Spinball & Mean Bean Machine) and then whatever else they wanted to simplify and/or straight up change about the games.

 

So by the time Sonic Adventure rolled around and they were still trying to attach to their Japanese canon they've stayed pretty loyal to up to that point in the mainstream series, there was massive backlash. And with that, SoJ had to try to answer all sorts of ridiculous questions that confused everybody outside of the eastern hemisphere because SoA/SoE changed everything they built.. except fans saw it the other way around and assumed Sonic Team changed everything they knew.

 

I feel like that was the beginning of this madness. That Sonic Team / SoJ didn't know how to cater to this other part of the world that got a whole slew of things that were ultimately part of nearly completely different kinds of Sonic, and so that combined with their downfall for a while and everything else combined like whiny critics and whatever, Sonic Team just apparently decided at one point to stop caring about having any sort of consistency in the first place, and just started rewriting rules when they felt like it.

 

But I digress.

 

Why is this the answer they give, though? Why is this a logical answer? I know the schematic of calling it "Earth" or "Mobius" and whatever doesn't matter in the long run, but everyone should've known this was some really stylized, crazy earth that has both 'funny animal' anthros and humans as WELL as actual animals; and that this world could be the same place that holds areas like Chun-Nan and Apotos as well as Green Hill and Chemical Plant.

 

It's a bizzare fantasy world with a mysterious background; it's been done before, sometimes in even more extreme ways. So why is this their answer, out of all things? 

 

Naka's answer for how this worked (as stated in a 2011 interview) before was that Sonic and co were on islands that had little to no human population (and thus a mostly animal / anthro population) in the original games, and that Adventure - onward was when he started to travel to the "mainland" and meet humans.

 

I don't know why that wasn't a reasonable enough answer. I just don't know. 

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[RubyEclipse]

Hey there Sonic Stadium! 

 

 

I wouldn't worry too much about trying to force together the pieces in the Sonic storylines from various games. Trust me - I've tried, and it makes your brain hurt sometimes. That said, I totally get that there will always be some question or answer that people want to read more into or analyze... that's what we do as fans!

 

I hope you guys enjoyed the interview, but if there are any parts that make you ask questions or that you're more interested in, let me know and I'll see if I can comment in more detail!

 

Forever yours until the release of the upcoming fictional Big the Cat game,

 

Ruby