It depends on the period. When he first came on, he was liked cuz mocking and making fun of Sonic was the cool thing. And then near the end of his run, people started getting annoyed at the constant memes. His memes really weren't that funny though, and not even because I was one of those disgruntled 2000's kids. It just... wasn't that funny. Sonic Twitter in general isn't funny, even after Webber left.
Most of the webber era sonic tweets are either poorly aged or just were never funny in the first place. Like cmon.
Some of it was kinda cringe, yeah, but shit like this and this was hilarious and you cannot convince me otherwise I'm honestly surprised they never deleted that. It was a jab at Tumblr otherkin but came around the time that meme got co-opted by shitheads so... yeah it was definitely ill-advised.
I have complicated feelings on Sonic Twitter; on the one hand, it basically managed to ride, fuel and escape the brand twitter zeitgeist in about the most graceful an arc any brand was ever able to achieve. Some of those fuckers stuck around waaaay longer than the jokes were funny, even at the time. I think that the overall effect of Webber's humor was positive for the series; when it started, the popular media conception of Sonic wasn't just that it was bad, but that it was utterly convinced it was the greatest thing ever while actually being complete dogshit. This coincided massively with the whole "Sonic and autism" thing, another part of the series' perception I've never liked. The benefit of all this was that Sonic being able to laugh at itself between this, the Boom cartoon and some of Pontaff's better jokes, showed that whether the games were great or terrible, a lot of the people making them were just along for the ride. We're in a new era of people being really sincerely into the series, and that didn't just come from Frontiers being Sonic Team's best game in a decade. It had a lot to do with being willing to accept Sonic as he is, and that wouldn't have happened if it kept up a self-serious nature. In fact, this is probably a big part of why Rise of Lyric exited the conversation so much faster than 06 did (apart from being a better game, fucking fight me). Sonic didn't have an ego that was fun to kick, he'd kick it himself! The other side of this, unfortunately, is that absolutely none of it has aged well. You don't get to hijack current trends to make yourself more popular and come away with all of it aging wonderfully. It's real cool to hate Pontac and Graff's writing right now, along with a lot of the worse jokes in the Boom cartoon (though frankly some of that shit was horribly dated before it even aired, like the "Justin Beaver" stuff). Most of the old twitter bits are stupid and unfunny nowadays, and every time I see brand twitter trying to be hip I think about how Sonic is, in some part, responsible for that. Ew. This is mostly unrelated but I'm gonna go ahead and push back on it, because honestly, the idea that it was about kinnies is revisionist. This is the original post (CW for everything you'd expect). The language here isn't just not how kinners talk, it's pretty explicitly a caricature of how LGBT people talk (or, rather, how the nasty OP thinks they do). I think a lot of the "well it was actually about kinners" talk was an attempt to rationalize away some of the badness of it by redirecting to a more popularly-acceptable target, but frankly, kinners weren't really hurting anyone, they didn't deserve this any more than trans people. EDIT: that's not me blaming anyone here, to be clear. I was a shitty teenager once and I might still have some SSMB posts worth deleting. When you're not exposed to this stuff for real, you don't think as hard as you should about the implications of what you were saying. I remember once seeing Vinesauce Joel being confronted on an Earthbound stream for his repetition of this meme in his old Windows Destruction videos (where I first saw it), and he was completely dumbfounded that this was the reference.
Arguably, that's a problem that has always haunted Sonic. Early 90s cool is very different to early 2000s cool and so on and so on. Sonic is a very reactionary franchise that is constantly changing with the times to reflect what's currently cool, it just isn't always as successful. Mind you, I think the classic Sonic games (and even the Adventure games) have aged pretty well, but I wouldn't really call what the brand was back then cool anymore.
Thanks for this - I'd actually never seen that original post until now. So yeah that tweet was not good then and certainly not good now
It had only been six months into Aaron's tenure as social media manager when he posted that. As I recall, he WAS chewed out by SEGA behind the scenes (which is why, for several days, that account went silent) and he never posted anything like that again. When the Uganda Knuckles meme was popular later on, he didn't ride that wave, he understood how controversial it was and instead posted a link for donations to Uganda. Personally I didn't understand transgenderism at all (as in I literally didn't know what it was) in 2015 or so when that meme was popular yet I was saying it anyway, so I'm gonna chalk this up to yet another case of a social media manager repeating an internet trend with zero regard for its context, like the Digiorno #WhyIStayed scandal. However I must also say that for the account as a whole, Webber's humor was reflective of internet humor in general in 2015, which was a far cry from what it is today. Gen Z memes, Discord, and TikTok weren't a thing yet, so everything was still in that millennial Rick & Morty/Jontron weird+loud=funny era. So if it seems unfunny today, that's probably why. There's also the fact that corporate Twitter being #relatable wasn't really a thing yet either. Seeing the Sonic Twitter do that was, at the time, crazy. So what was funny about it was less the actual jokes and more "I can't believe a corporate account is doing this".
This is why social media accounts picking up trends is a double-edged sword. Sure, you farm that sweet engagement but that's only temporary, hence why a lot it aged poorly. One of the main reasons people hated it was because instead of celebrating the series and why people liked it despite its problems, it catered itself exactly to the people who either grew older and jaded at the state of the series and wanted some ironic enjoyment out of it, or people who never really engaged with Sonic and mostly knew it through memes. That was the era where the likes of Projared and Arin "Egoraptor" Hanson were at the height of their popularity and some of their most popular content was taking jabs at Sonic. Relevant, but notice how positive people were when the social media account posted a video detailing who Fang was, narrated by Cybershell of all people. Don't get me wrong, I get why Aaron Webber did what he did, he was just giving the audience what they wanted. He was just unfortunately pandering to the wrong crowd. I'm glad the social media account is run by people who actually promote the series in an unironic way. It still posts memes, but they're far less mean-spirited and cynical. You can actually like Sonic now without being made fun of for the most part.
That Cybershell video is good but it's so evident how much he's being restrained by Sega. No mention of the weird shit Fang's involved with in the Archie comics? Smh
Not everything has to be generational. I get so sick of being lumped into a category like that. Humor just changes fast. I liked Webber's approach at the time. I didn't know that's who was running it, it was just the funny Sonic Twitter account to me. But Colors is one of my all-time favorite Sonic games, and so of course I spent way too much time back then arguing with people who hated the 2010s. The self-deprecation being focused on the older games made me feel validated. Even the people making Sonic agreed with me! But in the long run, I think that only led to a bigger backlash. It was all fun and games for the rest of us, but it made fans of those games feel even more alienated, and that's sad. I can better relate to how it'd feel if the official account was constantly poking fun at my favorite games... because (unpopular opinion incoming) some aspects of Frontiers actually do make me feel that way, like it's rejecting what I know and love about Sonic. So, whether it was a good idea at the time or not, I'm glad they've kept the funny memes and the irreverent tone, but dropped the deprecation.
I’m mixed on the Webber Twitter era. I think it was important for Sonic to maintain some relevance in the face of declining sales and cultural cachet, but it was done by simply laughing along with the fact that the brand was a joke rather than rebuild it. The brand did end up recovering and as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve seen more kids here in Denmark the last two years buying Sonic toys and wearing merch than I saw throughout my entire childhood in the US during the late 90s and 2000s. So I think Aaron did his best while the others got around to actually making good (well, better) products. So while I think it was fine at the time, its legacy and the impact it had on the brand’s image and tone is less than great. I’m trying to think of an analogy… something like a man having to debase himself to put himself through college, but even after he graduates and has a respectable job, he’ll always be a guy who did that in the eyes of others (whatever it is you want to imagine him doing). I also generally don’t like snarky corporate accounts. Even if they were a pretty early mover on that, I think it’s a bit lame and they’re very rarely genuinely funny.
Cybershell is weird, but he's actually informed about Sonic. That qualifies him more than the likes of Egoraptor imo.
Something that always personally stuck with me was a post they made the day after Trump was elected. It was a gif of Sonic in Angel Island doing his idle animation (pointing) at a ring next to him. The caption was along the lines of "no matter how bad things get, you just need that one ring." I found it pretty heartfelt and still think about it from time to time with warm fuzzies. YMMV of course.
