Coming Back to Sonails

Rondo of Blog - Published: October 2, 2024

The silhouettes of Sonic the Hedgehog and Tails, standing in front of a slightly out-of-focus blue checkerboard background with golden diamonds.

Well, I tried. To the best of my ability, I tried to change how I liked Sonic the Hedgehog in order to fit in better with other Sonic fans. It never worked.

From my vantage point, two options remain - either I give up publicly liking Sonic, or I say fuck it and take back what I gave up.

So… Fuck it! I’m gonna write Sonails fan-fiction again!

Let’s back up.

It is no exaggeration to say Sonic the Hedgehog changed my life. I can draw a straight line from the night I played my first video game, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on my uncle’s SEGA Genesis, to virtually every important life event that’s followed since.

The escape that Sonic gave me in my childhood was invaluable, as a kid with undiagnosed Autism & ADHD who’d later learn she wasn’t straight or cis. For my Queer identity in particular, I first discovered it through Sonic when I viewed a Sonadow comic on DeviantArt back in the 2000’s.

But it hasn’t all been sunshine and roses, I’m sad to say. Being a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog also led me to encounter other Sonic fans on the internet, who instilled more shame and self-doubt in me than you’d think fans of a series all about freedom and finding your own way in life would be capable of.

It was the overwhelming toxicity of the Sonic fandom in the early 2010’s that led me to quit Sonic for the first time, after years of watching the cartoons, reading the comics, and playing the games when I could afford to get them.

After I discovered my transness, in an order I’ve seen some fans of Sonic suggest is fairly predictable, I found my way back to Sonic - but there would be a palpable difference in how I engaged with Sonic this time!

By this time in my life, I had discovered I loved shipping guys together. (For whomever it matters to, this interest emerged prior to me figuring out I was a girl.)

But while Sonadow was the ship that gave me my first Queer awakening, it was not the ship I would go on to tweet about over a thousand times. (Seriously, back then Twitter said how many tweets were in a very long thread.) That honor belonged to none other than Sonails.

For reasons I’ll get into later, thinking back on this period of my life feels… alien, to me, now. I was absorbing as much Sonic as I could find, writing and drawing Sonic, listening to Sonic music and reading Sonic fan-fiction - especially Sonails fan-fiction. Honestly, I can’t think of another time in my life where I was more unabashedly a Sonic fan as I was back then.

The sheer amount of joy that seeing Sonic & Tails together brought me was incredible, as anyone who knew me well at all could tell you. I was telling my friends online who didn’t play Sonic games about how they belonged together, talking about it any chance I could at the Queer hangout I used to go to, I lived and breathed it as much as you could live and breathe a ship.

But every now and then, some Sonic fans would confront me to criticize me for shipping Sonails because of some video game instruction manual lore about their ages that not once came up in any dialogue in any Sonic game.

These Sonic fans saw me, a then-teenager having a perfectly innocent time enjoying Sonic & Tails being together, and wanted to shame me out of it. I was stubborn, though, and I didn’t let them. Tried not to let them, at least.

I wish I could say I succeeded, that they failed to take my joy and put shame in its place, but every time I look back at those old stories I wrote I see the doubt they instilled in me written all over them. As an emotionally-vulnerable teenage trans girl, I started feeling the need to reference how much older they were than they used to be. I started emphasizing how much time had passed, in the hopes that somehow it would be enough.

Today, I deeply regret that shame. I’m mature enough now to recognize how baseless it was all along, how simple it would’ve been to point out that not a single one of the Sonails stories I wrote or read as a fan of the pairing ever involved Sonic preying on Tails, but I didn’t have the perspective to be able to look past their judgment back then.

Part of me had to know it was all over when the Sonic fan group I was once allowed to be tangentially part of turned on me and used my love of Sonails against me as they suddenly developed moral reservations against it after I had already tweeted about it over a thousand times.

I knew then that it was all a lie, that it was cover for the fact that they were angry I argued with one of their own about their flagrantly acephobic views and decided I needed to be ejected at any cost. It didn’t matter. I was out, had several people I considered friends suddenly ripped away from me, and Sonails was used as ammo.

At first, my response was to call out the arbitrary nature of the “canon ages” used as evidence of the ship’s moral depravity. I brought up how Amy was once the same age as Tails, but was aged up in Sonic Adventure to be closer in age to Sonic (who was actually aged down a year,) yet no one ever claimed SonAmy was on the same level as Sonails or vice-versa. SonAmy was fine, Sonails was problematic.

I pointed out the selective moralizing, how these supposedly righteous concerns about the canon ages seemed to only ever come out when it was a Queer couple and never in a man/woman pairing. I ranted about this so many times, but none of my former friends ever saw it.

So, eventually, I tried to give it up. I tried to “go straight,” be a respectable Sonic fan who respected the canon ages more than I respected myself and my own views of the characters, at least publicly. While I would never come in contact with the friends I lost before, during this time I did end up meeting other Sonic fans and felt some sense of belonging with them as I conformed.

But as time went on, the loss weighed on me. That, and the continued toxicity I endured for various reasons as I navigated Sonic spaces, exacted a toll that was draining me of a lot more than just my enjoyment of Sonic games - though that too faded over time.

Since 2022, I have seriously considered outright giving up Sonic itself dozens of times.

The ambient pain from what I lost, trauma from being ostracized, and the alienation I feel every time I look at the Sonic fans of today bragging about what a consensus they’ve reached and how “united” they are now… it was all getting to be too much of a burden for me to bear, on top of keeping up with work and trying to support my family.

What ended up happening is I took a step back. I’ve missed months of comics, paid much less attention to news surrounding Sonic, and really just didn’t care when (for example) the Knuckles series barely resembled the character of Knuckles as he exists in Sonic Team’s games.

But, 6 years after I last posted a Sonails story, I’ve had enough.

If I may share my truth, more openly than I have in years, I never stopped loving Sonails. I only closed myself off from the joy it gave me out of fear of what others would think of me for it. I never truly saw Tails the way Sonic fans insisted I should, as an 8 year-old little brother who never ages or grows and can never be an equal to Sonic, and I’m no longer letting others dictate how I view or enjoy Sonic and its characters.

I played the same games, read the same comics, watched the same cartoons, collected the same damn chaos emeralds as anyone else did. Who is anyone to tell me I don’t deserve to love Sonic and to love Sonails how I choose to?

Thus, earlier this year, I had an idea. A simple, elegant idea. What if I made an AU?

Not an AU whose goal was to be a reflection of all my favorite parts of Sonic by consolidating everything I like from multiple continuities into one big omni-canon, but something that was basically the same as always except it played by my rules.

Because that’s the point of fan-fiction, right? I get to tell the story, I get to decide what shape the world takes, so this just formalizes it.

With that, I would like to introduce my Sonails AU - Aerial Union.

Sonic the Hedgehog and Tails Prower sharing a tender moment with one another while standing in a golden warp ring that has “Sonails” written on it and a small peek at a world of diamonds inside it. Sonic has his hand on Tails’s arm, with Tails placing his hand on Sonic’s. Sonic has brown skin instead of his usual peach complexion, while Tails has white tips on his hair and is wearing round black glasses.

Clicking on the illustration above will take you to the “landing area” I’ve made for the AU, where you can learn more about what makes it different from Sonic Team’s continuity. The main difference? Time passes. Maybe forever-adolescence is acceptable for some Sonic fans (god knows they embody it themselves) but I will not waste any of my free time writing stories beholden to it.

The Sonic & Tails you see in the stories that take place in the present-day of Aerial Union are adults who love each other, without apology and without need for the approval of others.

Going forward, I’ll be posting links to stories set in this AU on social media with the tags #SonailsAU and #AerialUnion - starting today with The Missing Ingredient. If you for whatever reason aren’t interested in reading, I welcome you to mute those terms and to not bother me with your disapproval. Life is just too short to care about pleasing everyone.

It’ll take time before I fully heal from the scars I got on the way here, but I’ve felt so much lighter since I decided I was going through with this idea. Since I decided to take back my joy and return to Sonails. It seemed like my only option at the time, but today I know I was wrong to ever let go of the ship.

For lack of having a way to go back and change things, I’m glad I’m back where I am now. There’s no way I can walk away from Sonic, at this point in my life, so… I’m making myself at home. :)