Tails Has Two Buttholes (Philosophically)

Hi there, everyone, here’s a blog post about how Tails the Fox from the Sonic The Hedgehog games must have two buttholes.

First of all in the vein of Bogostian Object-Oriented Ontology we must first recognise that Sonic The Hedgehog is both a system and a thing; a unit and its expression. Sonic is a brand, a game, a character, collapsed by perception of any given interpreter, with any rationale of normal, acceptable and standard being a consensus collation of the expressable mean across these interpreters.

This renders the idea of normal as an aggregation, but that aggregation must have concentrations, as there are some who have clear, defined boundaries of the Sonic The Hedgehog system and there are some who barely consider it at all; are these interpretations equal under ontological models? No The Wall of China is more real to those who live by it than those who visit it than those who have learned of it than those who have never seen it.

What then is asked: Who is more reliable an interpreter? The one rarely consulted, or the one consulted more? Which lens of reality, which interpretation of what is or is not true, is fairest? A thing can be many things at once – hence a System and a Unit – but does one interpretation get to be righter than the others? And by what measure?

One might operate on the assumption that the interpretations are equally right, but that would leave a system undefined and blurry, as the people who barely care leave vast tracts of nothing to define the perimeter of the system. The conventional academic wisdom would be that what is written down would be the definition of the core of a character, but we reject that in the name of carpentry, where what people do, make, or create represents the most proper expressions of an entity. Merely writing down things, merely according facts, those are not carpentry.

The Sonic franchise is a joke; it is also a beloved comfort space for a community. Which is true?

One could argue and I am not that the more experienced, iterative interpreter is the greater locus of existence for an unreal thing. That is to say, the people who create the most are the people most capable of determining what is true. Those are most certainly not Sonic Team – shackled by their corporate and marketing cycles and the demands of money, they are not the ones doing philosophy, getting their hands dusty with flour and panko, with grease and cooking oil. They are not carpenters – they are as the ivory tower of Academics, merely writing things down.

That is to say the poeple who care the most are the ones most capable of knowing what is true about Sonic’s ontological universe.

But as you follow this arc, you find truer and truer and more and more niche interpretations, as the schema of interpretation splinters out into hard glass. The idea most fervently held, by the fewest people, who is therefore the truest of what can be. Under Bogost’s model, no systems-of-things are wrong, but the model practiced the most is the most trustworthy.

The Sonic fandom is a psychosexual bazaar of people who care a great deal, and interpret endlessly, over and over again, over and over, and who create art and fiction and spiritd discussion endlessly. They are bound by the written word but not entirely – with their capacity to make and code games, the fandom’s structures even get to transcend language, as the original game has done.

When your beliefs require great justification, you are put to a crossroads: You believe them harder, demand higher evidence, or abandon them. ‘That fact that disproves me is not satisfying enough, I demand better facts’ goes the cry of the fervent interpreter.

By default, one assumes a coherent model of extracted reality; that is, as best we understand it, gravity behaves in one way (objects fall to the ground), and that when we create fictive universes, the same rules generally apply until shown otherwise. Momentum applies – when a story is left untouched, we can assume that generally speaking, characters’ lives and existence is as we would expect for our world. We know there are bathrooms in the Sonic The Hedgehog diegesis; we know the characters consume food. It is not unreasonable then, to assume that characters do have buttholes at all.

Thanks to the presence of bathrooms and the momentum of realities, anyone who sincerely believes that Tails has two buttholes and that it matters, is therefore, almost certainly, the most fervent believer. This interpreter collapses the sensory data of what Tails is, the metatextual impression of what Tails should be, and renders them anew.

This new Tails, is both new, and the old object. That is to say, this Tails with two buttholes is the Tails of the prior argument. Which is to say: Tails has two buttholes, because it is ridiculous to believe, and therefore anyone believing it must believe it wholly.


this is not how object-oriented ontology really works

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