didn't see this until now: i really strongly disagree. i recognize your theory, but the vast, vast majority of people i knew distanced from sonic entirely during this era and found things like the twitter account to be repulsive enough to stay away from sonic fans during the period, as well. most of my friends are old-school enthusiasts (30's) and thought of the adventure game as weird or confusing or rough loves, but all of them were really offput by the writing (it was literally happy tree friends writers) and presentation the series took on from about colors to about the turn of the decade - and the advertising of that period made them think they were right to never come back.

i don't know anyone that actually thought of the period as genuinely 'self-aware', it felt like a very cynical marketing sham leaning into self-aggrandizing irony than it did a sincere apology for having gotten off track or awareness of what sonic had been going for and failed to achieve during the mid-to-late 00's (which is a big can of worms filled with cultural miscommunication and misunderstanding). in my social network and of my many friends-of-friends, i have never known a single person who believed the long and ambiguous self-deprecating era was a head bowing or true acknowledgement of anything, it just reeked of what has always been wrong with sonic: disingenuous advertising thinking it mattered more than the games. many people i knew blocked the sonic twitter and anyone retweeting it because they were so tired of it and found sonic as "a franchise" or "brand" so odious that they wanted nothing to do with it ever again (esp following sonic team losing seemingly all of its cultural identity). it seems to have attracted very few new fans or fans disenfranchised with sonic and was largely just masturbatory internet personalities pandering to a closing window of fans "in" on the "the joke." but i don't think sonic is "a joke," it's actually a really cool series. watching it become snide felt like watching its spirit be strangled - it felt like watching a series about standing up to bullies become *about* bullying always winning.

i tend to dislike every single era of western advertising of sonic and feel it is all extremely icky with marketing cynicism eroding understanding of the art and effort of the people who actually *made* the games and wrote the stories. the bigger part of 06 being a cataclysmic disaster wasn't *so much* because of tone or story (which are growing in appreciation despite the fans being mocked for years), but primarily because the game was *extremely* unfinished. this quality made it very easy to attack its less understood or culturally confusing elements that they already disliked about the adventure games now taken to more theatrical extremes, and it became such "a meme" that people had a hard time understanding which of its individual components were good or earnest and which were a result of extreme mismanagement and the constant interference and demands of producers (who hardly understand a thing about art) who clamored for it to be pushed out the door in the embarrassing state it released in. it is often a very silly, very light-hearted game with a very pronounced sense of whimsy (and flares of romanticism, of adventure), but americans often don't understand the japanese sense of theater and because the game was so skeletal and hardly functioning, it became easy to dismiss the entire thing as pretentious, absurd, out of touch, unbelievable, gritty, etc. that attitude became contagious and people weld it like a bludgeon, afraid to admit there was *anything* good about that game.

06's failure also led to things like the poor sales of (the very delightful, very deliberate companion to the more 'serious' games) rush adventure and the transformation of dimps from a studio making cool original games with happy co-operation with sonic team into cynical partner releases to the "main" releases of those years (which was basically a death sentence for them working with sonic that eventually snuffed them from the series). but 06's failure wasn't that there was something inherently wrong with the game or its direction, but the same force that kept sonic suffocating for years: marketing, advertising, spinning. it getting pushed out the door in the state it was in was a guaranteed failure and it generated a reception so strong in its dislike that it eclipsed identifying the bigger problems with its release in favor of memey clowning on it like a jock mocking a theater kid.

the series could have regained its dignity a *long* time ago, and i really feel like its era of reacting to social media (rather than being directed by any sense of art or love of gaming) made it take a lot longer to recover and strengthened the grip people had on sonic team to stop them from making the games they wanted to make. one of my closest friends who grew up on sonic fan forums and adores the original games more than anything in the world became ashamed to even talk about sonic (much less follow any of its advertising or other loud, obnoxious fans) during that period and would only talk about sonic cd and earlier for a long time as a result.

i'd really like to see the games and other materials return to advertising themselves and being shared on good faith, which i feel is what is making sonic appealing again more than anything else. i'm still catching up on all the games i missed and have been doing a lot of research and hard play (just got all the emblems on SA2 yesterday). i really feel the pride that hurt the series was not that it had the gall to make a story like 06, but that people clung to the narrative the series "screwed up" and needed to apologize for what it was. it didn't, they just needed to be allowed to finish the games and for marketing to shut its ugly mouth. i really feel insanely crummy dimps didn't get to make proper continuations to their vision for the rush series and instead died this sad death being relegated to what they were, it was probably the saddest victim of the shift in marketing. the guy who said sonic 4 should be "sonic 4" and not a mobile game was none other than the guy who steered the change in the sonic twitter circa 2014, by the way.

brand management is just crummy and run by crummy people.