I've always chalked it up as "Foxes only live about 10 years"

I assume the official ages are nonsense made up by the marketing department at SEGA, and stitch together how old they actually are from context clues.

The Sonic gang are kids in the clasic games (1,2, CD, 3, SK, M), but are adults in the modern games, because their clearly bigger and acting more adult, Their the same size as all the other adult mobians or bigger, and the entire world treats them as if their adults.

The ONLY reason to think otherwise is a number SEGA put in their bios.

I personally chalk it up to Sega being lazy and willing to do an actual timeline outside of 'X game came first, and Y game is next'. They barely want the characters to be characters outside of enough simple characterization to fulfill story beats. Is it any wonder a lot of older fans preferred the old cartoons and comics to the games? I mean I do enjoy the games, when they aren't complete garbage (another problem with Sega but not going into that in detail), but in terms of how Sega is deathly afraid to give the characters detailed backgrounds, families, etc it's all rather pathetic. Sonic and his pals are too dynamic to be treated with the same 'basic storytelling gloves' Nintendo does with Mario, which at times it feels like Sega wants to emulate and so Sonic and Co. are forbidden being beyond 'basic'.

As for the ages; again I chalk it up to being lazy and nobody being willing to show a proper advance of time.

I say "they are fictional characters" and none of it really matters, because they're not real. Of course, many many many people on this website in particular would disagree with me.

ANYWAY, I really like your art, this is a really funny picture! I hope it makes a lot of "Antis" (anti-shippers) mad.... FICTION DOES NOT EQUAL REALITY.

Huh, that is wild. I've never known about that till now.

I mean if Amy is 12 then so many people committed so many crimes! =(

There are a few ways of looking at that.
1) we measure all species by human standards
2) we accept different species age at different rates and hit adulthood at different times.
(1000 year old dragon children are not adults, but 10 year Mobians are apparantly adults for example)
3) we can assume that SEGA were only thinking with their marketing department when they decided those numbers and write them off as nonsense.

I prefer 2 and 3

I see.

it's funny, they actually aged amy UP recently.

What did they age her up to?

i mean 12 wasn't her original age. she originally was originally 8 years old. so, yeah, she's older now.

Oh dear...

Didnt they get rid of official ages before Frontier?

I did hear that. And given how much of a mess they were, if it's true, that's a good thing. But the numbers are still floating around the internet.

it won't ever go away. They should have removed them earlier but can't. This is the internet and the internet never forgets.

I guess it is because they all age differently, but then I realise: this makes no sense because they are just a bunch of animals fighting the one human-like guy using robots controlled by captive forest animals.
So I guess some poor intern at SEGA were told to make up numbers.

The "cannon" ages of Sonic characters don't matter, at all.

at this point "8 years old" isn't his age but his species

Continuity department? What's that?

It's the department that was literally not made until the release of Frontiers >.>

There is something worth keeping in mind about the dating bit, for the Archie comics at least. Most of those "Adult Women" were mid to late teens (For reference to people's ages, Sally was 17, Bunnie and Rouge were 18, Sonic was 16 then 17, etc). At this time, Tails was 13-14 because the comics were started before anybody was given any sort of canon ages.

Tails in the Archie comics wasn't reverted to his game canon age of 8 until the big reset, at which point official sonic characters weren't allowed to have romantic relationships anymore by Sega edict. This would be a couple years before Archie Sonic comics stopped.

And during the pre reset run, you also have the passage of time mentioned now and then. With characters age changing between important cannonical events within the Archie cannon. They were years younger at the start of the comic than they were at the end.

If I remember right, Tails was born around the time Robotnik took over the kingdom, He was about 8 at the start of the comic, then by the time fiona fox was intruduced he was as you say, about 13-14 years old, and she did say he was too young for her (but the hedgehog was right up her alley)

Pre reset Archie, their ages and behaviour made sense, as their situation forced them to grow up too early. Something we see in humans, when young kids are forced to take on the parental role. They kind of skip their childhood. Or Mobians simply hit adulthood a few years before humans. It was easy to make sense of it all.

Then as you say, SEGA got involved during the big reset, and oop, no. Bye bye sensibley aged characters.

And with the current way of things they seem to be waving away ages, IIRC, as it's going off of official stuff to be more ambiguous but we'll have to see if/how that sticks

But at least the Tails changes make more sense than Charmy suddenly being 10 years younger than he was in his previous game

We will see. But SEGA have a long and terrible track record of making, just AWFUL decissions when it comes to all things Sonic. It feels very much like he's successful, DESPITE them at this point.

I'm hoping with Frontiers making them seem ready to branch out, and actually hiring someone to keep lore for the series in order, they'll be on the ball but we'll have to see

It's also worth adding on to your own list for the pic, he also owns property in multiple cities, and possibly has a higher body count of non robot enemies than Shadow

and he also built and made a flying robot dog/fox assistant. Has saved the world more times than anyone can count, built a submarine with a drill on the front (for some reaoson) Oh, and if we're including sonic X...

When Chris Thawndike showed up on Mobius, in order to compensate for Chris stealing his spotlight...
Built and supplied a GIANT space ship with a giant cannon that could fire Sonic out of it. Wrote a whole operating system to run the thing, built a giant underground base, a secret cliff front door, scanned space to find where the emeralds went, and launched the ship into outer space... IN A SINGLE DAY!

And did our boy get any respect for that? No. Chris had invented some NEW SHOES or something. OOoooooooh!

The submarine with a drill on it was a call back to his solo game. You had to build a sub to go underwater but some of the underwater passages were blocked by rock walls so you needed the drill to break through them. The theme of Tails' game was to explore levels to finding missing tech that allowed you to progress further in previous levels. It was a pretty cleaver idea for non-linear level design. Shame such a concept was never used again.

And if you take IDW into consideration (it is considered canon) he drinks coffee and has approved the chain he buys from using his likeness for their logo.

The no romance thing, I'll be honest, hamstrung enough storylines and character arcs that its STILL keeping me from being as invested as I could be, even now that the contract is with IDW.

Also Sonic was lost in space for a year even though it only felt like a few weeks for him. He has a birthday not long after when he gets back (relatively speaking. He gets back to Mobius in 130 and the birthday/Ian Flynn’s debut is 160 but in universe not a lot of time seems to have passed) which means he probably missed a birthday while in space. Archie Sonic is physically 17 but legally 18. Go figure on that. (I also don’t personally care that Penders had him still referred to as 16 during the time he took over again and claiming Fiona was the same age while Tails is 11. He refused to acknowledge anything that wasn’t written by him.)

Age is a number. My statistic teacher always said that numbers are fragile little things. You torture them a little and they will said whatever you want.

By example, One year on Pluto is 247.94 Earth years. Pick the right planet as point of reference and you can be 8 years old again.

You know that's not wha I meant 😭 it won't de-age me

Oh, technical truth, the most painful kind of truth!

Now I want to read a comic about the life and times old age pensioner tails.

In my day, robots tried to take over the world for a fat man with a moustache who decided to name himself after food, instead of using the perfectly good name he had already. Now Robots want to date you and show you pictures of their grand kids"
"Grandad, don't be stupid, that's just Nicole. And no one calls themslves after food."
"Two words Sonney Jim... Egg, man. Now excuse me..." <tails stands up and shuffles over to the window.>
"HEY! GET OFF MY LAWN!"

funnily enough, have any of the doctors called himself Eggman? In some of the series I think he adopted the nickname, but they've basically all been mocking nicknames given by sonic and friends.

SEGA mandate that he's not called Robotnik. If you buy the old Megadrive/Genesis games, they even changed his name to Egg Man in the documentation because it's a more accurate translation of his actual japanese name.

They have relaxed their stance in recent years and said, he adopted the insult and turned it around as his actual name. So he used to be called Robotnik but is now called Eggman.

I refuse to call him Eggman, because it sounds silly.

My wife has commented on this too. She finds it weird that SEGA never lets Tails grow up, he's been around for roughly 30 years now, and she likes the idea of him being able to age in our worlds real-time rather than being a stuck as a little kid eternally.

Iirc, the only times their ages were shown was from the Sonic heroes manual which supposedly were randomish numbers chosen by the American localization team, which Sega of JP never really signed off on.

Apparently that book has a number of mistranslations too.

"Apparently that book has a number of mistranslations too."

Like them not realising "フェミニスト [feministo]" doesn't mean feminist in Japanese (or at least that didn't use to be the common meaning back then, might've changed since then).

My favorite example of this to bring up is Amy is supposedly 12 but she rents an apartment in the city by herself. Checks out. Sega had recently got rid of the character ages and I think that’s for the best. Like you said they never made any sense outside of Cream and Charmy.

Chad response! I've seen way too many people lose their crap whining about them being x age when they don't even act those ages in the main content.

Related: how far apart are the events of the games, time-wise? Does Eggman try to take over the world every Sunday or something?

(exceptions being explicit stuff like Sonic 3 taking place right after Sonic 2)

Sonic games are the weakest, most error riddled source you could ever turn to for any form of official cannon. This is one of the reasons the cartoons and comics do so well. They fill the vast aching void of meaningful world building and lore that SEGA tries to fill with an ever growing minagare of sonic's friends characters. Because of all the people who've ever written for Sonic, Sonic Team have proven they are... lets be polite and say "not very good"

The issue here, is that everything but the games is by deffinition, a side cannon. Though perhapse this has worked in the characters favour, as you can pick which version of the character's back story and universe that resonates for you.

You think Sonic is bad. Try being a Zelda fan.

Maybe it is a tax-evasion thing?

Not to mention Sonic has had at least two on-screen Birthdays (in Generations and one of the mobile games) yet hasn't aged up from 15/16... not to mention the nonsense of Amy aging 4 years after CD while Tails didn't age at all.

What The Hell?