Who is the true protagonist of Sonic?
Sonic Frontiers is out, some people think it's okay, but I'm unhappy. Why am I unhappy? Is it because I think the game is bad? No. Is it because I dislike the direction Frontiers is taking the franchise now that's it has been all but confirmed that Frontiers is quite literally a new frontier for the franchise? No. It's because there is a moment, in Frontiers, where Sonic Team thought it sensible to provide a single-screen call back to Tails watching a missile launch in Station Square from Sonic Adventure. Excuse me, but what? I know, that according to the very hands-off control that Sonic Team claims over this franchise, technically all Sonic games have been canon since the first except for 06 and Boom. (And Forces did retroactively make the 2d era games and Mania into an alternate universe instead of just a 'prequel' setting like it used to be.) But to outright just refer to Sonic Adventure directly in the wake of Forces, is like kicking fans in the face and telling them to deal with it, and let me explain why.
The world around Sonic is always up for debate as we're constantly struggling to understand where we even are. It's decently widely excepted that Sonic is set in the land of Mobius, but this ain't the same Mobius presented in the long running Archie comics series, nor the Sonic X cartoon. In all of those media snippets, Mobius is a largely undeveloped super continent with a few connecting island nations populated solely and exclusively by 'Mobians'; which are anthropomorphic animal people that live as humans might in cities with jobs and all that good stuff. (Eggman is the unexplainable exception that most media chooses to ignore.) Under examination, it's not the most creative or inspired Anthro universe ever created, as the creatives rarely take advantage of their character's animal traits to define who or what they are; but it's functional, it works. But the games spit all over this.
Why do I say that? Well how about because for some insane reason, the early 3D Sonic games all depicted the land of 'Mobius' (It's not always identified as Mobius in every game, but now that Frontiers has directly referenced Adventure we're just going to have to assume all 3D games occur on the same planet.) as featuring cities with humans. And I'm not talking about humans and anthros, oh no! In Sonic Adventure 1, 2 and Unleashed, Sonic and his friends are the only humanoid animal people in the entire world. For some unexplainable reason. Yet if we fast forward to Forces we can see an entire populace of furry animal people being menaced by Robotnik and Edgy Boi's pathetically mundane army. So what in the actual hell is going on here, what is the make-up of Mobius, and why can't Sonic Team just split the canons so these glaring inconsistences don't have to be addressed?
The most sensible, but quietly troubling answer, would be that Mobius is indeed a land walked by swathes of Humans and Mobians; only that these distinct races of people remain staunchly segregated to their separate corners of the world with such staunchness that intermingling between the races is an aberration. Sonic and his friends' various expeditions onto human lands must be seen as a great imposition upon the fragile balance of peace between the nations, and Sonic's struggle to prevent Eggman's grasp for power could very well be interpreted as a political mission to prevent a human elitist from conducting an orchestrated strike on either the humans or Mobians and kickstarting some global conflict between the two races. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 are pretty much Sonic's Operation Snake Eater, and Eggman is Colonel Volgin. But that is a rather dour interpretation of the Sonic universe, so let me offer my alternative.
I propose that not only does Sonic Adventure's human filled city and Sonic Forces' Mobian occupied city take place within the same timeline; but they could very well be the same city, filled with the same citizens, at different points in time. (It's hard to determine exactly where Sonic Forces' city is set, considering that area is only ever referred to as 'The City' in game.) I propose that the various Mobians are not, in fact, anthropomorphic animals inexplicably evolved to resemble humanity, but rather general human citizens of the world that have inducted themselves into a global furry movement and locked themselves inside a permanent fursuit linked to their 'fursona'. Perhaps they've even gone so far as to brainwash themselves into believing they are the animals who's form they've adopted. Somehow this trend has overtaken every human being within the land of Mobius. Every human, except for Dr Ivo Robotnik.
Robotnik is an intellectual, you see. A robotic scientist, to boot! He believes in the very rigid conventions of man and thus saw no allure in the promise of 'spiritual awakening' or whatever the growing furry world dogma promised it's converts. He's just a lonely, and grumpy old man probably equally confused and annoyed by the brash personality of Sonic, the young upstart who delights in tormenting the aging Doctor and defying that man's rigid concept of the world and who exists within it. Sonic was likely the first furry of Mobius, you see. The first to don the fursuit and fully embrace the representative fursona, and stoke Robotnik's bitterness, swirling with his 'savior-complex' and narcissism to the point where he thinks he has to 'fix' everything, even 'fix' Sonic from his 'delusions'. Afterall, Eggman is always trying to use his robotic expertise to invent vastly ambitious robotic machines, powered by woodland critters, to achieve all sorts of grand end schemes we never get to see play out because Sonic delights in destroying them.
But Eggman is mad. At least, the Eggman we see by the late Sonic games is. This is a man who creates apparently metal machines that are inexplicably weak to Hedgehog quills, who insists on printing his face on every invention he's ever made, who once split the entire world down the middle... for some reason. These aren't the actions of a sensible man! I argue these are the actions of a desperate man, who has grown more and more scared as the world has changed around him. Think, by Sonic Adventure Eggman had to come to terms with the fact that there was an entire posse of furry lovers following the man around as his 'friends'. Then, before you know it, the otherwise fair and sensible citizens of Mobius start picking up on the trend, and now they're all wearing fursuits and pretending they're human-cats and badgers and whatever! By the time of Forces, Eggman might very well be the last human not inducted into the Fursona world religion that has captured the soul of the planet.
So Robotnik prints his face on his giant machines, hoping that visage of humanity stirs some latent recognition in the brainwashed, he roboticises the populace hoping to confer some of their lost humanity back into them, he surrounds himself with humanoid robot confidant, whom he rages at and despises for their lack of humanity, but retain by his personal cadre for their comfortingly nostalgic shape. And once he even tried to team up with anthro aliens, recognising that if humanity can't be saved of it's own accord only an extra-terrestrial force could knock a wake-up call into their number. But nothing ever worked. Every alliance he ever made turned on him. And maybe a few times the stress of being so alone in the world made him flip and blow the world in two. A little. But what would you do, as the last person living in a world that has changed so fundamentally that you don't recognise anyone, and can't draw anything from it. Isolated and alone, Eggman still chooses to try and reshape the world to the way it once was, even if to this day he can't quite remember if Sonic was indeed the original patient-zero Furry, or simply a figment of his own tortured psyche emblematic of his tendency to create his own constant downfalls.
Calling this franchise the 'Sonic Franchise' is a misnomer. These games are a soliloquous dirge mourning the purgatory of a man adrift in a sea of isolation, atop his raft of stubborn spite. A man who, as these games roll on, has come to, or will come to, sacrifice all that he can. His calm. Kindness, Kinship, Love. A Doctor who has given up all hope of inner peace. Who made his mind a sunless space. A scientist who shares his dreams with ghosts. A human who wakes up everyday to an equation he wrote thirty-one years ago to which there is only one conclusion; he is damned for what he does. His anger, his ego, his unwillingness to yield, his eagerness to fight, has set him on a path from which there's no escape. He yearns to be a saviour against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time he looks down, there's no longer any ground beneath his feet. That is his sacrifice. He's condemned to use the tools of his enemies to defeat them. He burns his decency for someone else's future. He burns his life to make a sunrise that he knows he'll never see. And the ego that started his fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. And that's what Eggman sacrifices. Everything.
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