You can officially disregard ‘But Sega!’ when it comes to arguments regarding spinoff media and fanworks. 

I’m serious- there’s a particularly noxious strain of fan out there that tends to invoke SEGA and Sonic Team at every given opportunity to basically put down anything that isn’t the games and the games alone, citing that deviating from SEGA’s approval and vision is inherently a bad thing.

Well you know what? This incoming Sonic movie can only exist with SEGA’s oversight and approval. Every single atrocious decision regarding this movie, from it being live action to being a buddy cop film co-starring a human, none of it could go anywhere unless SEGA gave the thumbs up, and that includes the odious Sonic design we’ve seen. 

I’ve heard word that, evidently, SEGA themselves aren’t happy with that last one. To which I say… if that’s the case, why’d they okay it? Why’d they approve ANY of it? Even if you were to somehow believe the deeply far-fetched notion that SEGA somehow signed a bad contract that put this film out of their hands despite it being their intellectual property, then you can still trace everything back to bad decisionmaking by SEGA. 

So, the point being? “But SEGA” is no longer really a valid argument for/against anything within the franchise or fan made stuff. While SEGA’s history of deeply terrible decisionmaking might make this seem obvious (Shadow the Hedgehog the Game, Sonic 06, Rise of Lyric, etc…), this one is so radically different from the ‘SEGA Standard’ while being overseen by them, it just kinda verifies that maybe, just maybe… you shouldn’t rely on SEGA as an end all, be all argument regarding anything that exists in Sonic, nor in what you do as a fan. 

For me anyway, that’s the one silver lining in this mess of a film- it demolishes the pretense that SEGA Knows Best, and it makes the attempts to invoke them as a means of dismissing other parts of the franchise all the more weaker an argument. 

Gotta take what you can get, and all that.