The question is whether the actual mandates regarding branding for the games are directly a consequence of the lawsuits. I have serious doubts, and a fan wiki is not going to be a good source for whether that's the case. To wit:
it's not "just the comics" mind you; a few characters from the "main" console games (well, as "main" as you get for a series like sonic), most notably black doom/evil pete, an entire villain from shadow the hedgehog, is just kinda Locked to that game now for all eternity, are just in a limbo state now.
Is that really the case, though? Black Doom not being in any game since Shadow the Hedgehog is like just about every other villain from a mainline Sonic game from that decade: Biolizard, Mephiles and Solaris, Emerl/Gemerl, Erazor Djinn/Alf Layla wa-Layla,
Merlina/Dark Queen
, Captain Whiskers,
Dark Gaia
. The only "villain" that has returned and regularly is Metal Sonic, and that's because Metal Sonic is an iconic character that dates back to the 90s. (Eggman Nega also kind of appears post-Rivals, but he's only shown up in the Mario and Sonic at the Olympics Games, so that doesn't really count.) You could equally argue that Sega/Sonic Team simply feels no need to bring back Black Doom, since he served a specific purpose for Shadow the Hedgehog that doesn't apply to other Sonic games. "But he made Shadow," you might say, but then I would go back to what I said about lore and narrative: There was a lot of excess on that front for a franchise that didn't really need it. And let's be real: Black Doom being Shadow's "father" always came off as ridiculous. (Same could apply to Shadow's origin in general...but still). Picking at that just feels like all those Zelda fans who obsess over the contradictions of the timeline, especially post-Breath of the Wild.
also the fact that sonic underground's entire ending was originally going to be put into the comics as the series never got a proper final season, but when Everything Regarding The Comics struck, that ending was just lost to copyright limbo; so there's... at least one entire spin-off that's gonna go unresolved.
Okay, I'll admit I kept my scope a little narrow here. I should've said "TV shows, comics, books, etc." Supplementary materials, in other words. My bad there. I consider them irrelevant because they don't provide anything to the games themselves, and instead the games provided them something to work with. In the case of the TV shows, exceptions apply to "SatAm," which cameoed in Spinball, and Sonic Boom. But they're exceptions, not rules. The OVAs, X, Underground...honestly, George Lucas Rules apply here, really.
the mandates also, hilariously, took out the concept of sonic showing excessive emotion. make of that one what you will.
That one's easy to make out. That just smacks of the brand mandates Miyamoto et al applied to Mario in the early 2010s. They probably wanted to codify Sonic's behavior in a way in order to maintain a level of consistency so that he wouldn't go
off-brand out of character. Overly expressive? "Cool guys" don't do that. Sonic's a "cool guy," so of course they put the kibosh on it. Happens all the time in branding apparatuses in marketing, especially for franchises. Is it stupid? Yeah sure. But stupidity is the norm for branding of
any kind.
so like... no, there were consequences of this. was the tone of our original message a bit silly? yeah. but the take of "well nothing actually happened so that's a little funny you mention it!" is just kind of. wholly mis-interpreting the entire point of the message. bc there's a reason we haven't seen evil pete in awhile and it's the "nothing" you mentioned, which when you think about it is kinda bonkers (he is pretty much a one-off villain for the game but like... that's a core-ish part of shadow's backstory from that particular game that they aren't even allowed to allude to)
You bring up a fan wiki (which, again, you have to take that with a grain of salt in terms of reliability and neutrality), and a single villain from a single game whose connection to an active character in the franchise is basically through a very tired sci-fi trope. (And that's the most "prominent.") While there were certainly consequences to the Penders' lawsuits (as I said, he fucked over the comics, and as you noted, there were some consequences to a TV series), the actual damage done to the most important aspect of the Sonic franchise, i.e.
the games, is questionable at best, extremely negligible at worst. It requires a lot of assumption into timing and coincidences, which I've learned not to trust. That's why I downplayed it.
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