comment: >
  
  I would say that if you want to go for the "youthful super genius" route, go for a Good Will Hunting kind of vibe. Make Tails 18 and freshly exploring the world, while Sonic is maybe 21. Knuckles and Amy are around Sonic's age; Rouge is a bit older and more streetwise and world weary.
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  I mean, Ash Ketchum has bed the same age over a huge period of time. Same with the Simpsons characters. Characters in media don’t always age, even if they have a canonical timeline of events. It’s not realistic, but neither is a talking flying fox.
  Tails is whatever arbitrary age Sega says he is. If they say he’s 8 tomorrow he’s 8. >
  
  This is why I specified that he is not 8 years old in any meaningful sense. If Sega says that he is 8, but this does not allow us to make any sort of inferences about his behavior, how others treat him, or how long he has been alive and doing things, then what meaning can we derive from it? >
  
  Official canon age is a meaningful sense of age. >
  
  I'm not the OP but I don't agree with this. Having authority over a universe doesn't make completely arbitrary nonsensical assertions acceptable on the base premise that you have authority. 
  If the creator of Sonic came out tomorrow and went "umm actually Sonic is a wolf" you would not go "oh well it's from an official source so that is a meaningful sense of the characters species" would you?
  When you create a universe that in any way attempts to be believable by establishing rules and expectations you kind of become beholden to your past choices moving forward because you've already asked your consumers to accept those choices as truth. 
  That's the entire reason the word retcon exists. Because it's not acceptable to just randomly assert contradictory or nonsensical things about an existing universe. Even if you own it. >
  
  That’s what a retcon is. The authority makes some statement, and asserts that’s actually how it was all along, ignoring preexisting canon. The fandom might get upset, and maybe they cause the decision to change, but if they don’t there would be a new truth going forward. 
  Now, the sonic creator probably doesn’t have the authority now, as Sega is now the authority.
  If Sega committed to sonic being a wolf, sonic would be a wolf.
  Real world example of this happening: JK Rowling deciding Dumbledore is gay. Happened after the HP books came out, but is still canon >
  
  Yes, but the key there is the acknowledgement of the inconsistency. The creator says either "I am changing this" or "this was never established and I am establishing it now". 
  Sonic is a Hedgehog. If anyone from Sonic Team claimed otherwise they would be lying. I can say this with certainty because it has been established as a fact that Sonic is a Hedgehog by Sega, Sonic Team, and every piece of media to ever reference the franchise. 
  Sonic Team could come out and say "we're changing Sonic to be a wolf and we're going to move the story forward as if he always was" but they can not claim that he was always a Wolf to us. They established the fact that he was in fact a Hedgehog and that will always have been the truth up until the point where a new narrative becomes true moving forward. 
  This is why unexplained retcons go over so poorly with mass media audiences. If a universe creator asks their audience to buy into a premise and then obliterates their investment and trust, future investment and trust in any new premise will be very hard to come by because the creator loses creative authority. 
  This is easily demonstrated by two amusing recent pop culture incidents. The final season of Game of Thrones and the pronunciation of the word "gif". 
  With Game of Thrones the production company was given freedom by the fans to change aspects of the story for the sake of making a TV adaptation of a book. Many of these changes were well received. The ones that weren't were changes that fundamentally altered the books narrative intent. Being a creator does not afford you unlimited good will with regard to your creations future by your consumers. You become beholden to the expectation you establish.
  Similarly, one day the creator of the word "gif" thought it would be amusing to irritate the world with an establishment of a contrary pronunciation on the premise that he simply has the authority. Clearly that wasn't the case. He probably did at one point. Earlier in the terms life he could've made the same announcement and no one would've cared. But after 20+ years of silence he lost the authority to establish what truth was with regard to that. His silence over that time was permission for the world to establish a belief that became truth when it wasn't contradicted. Which is why when he tried to change that truth, despite the fact that he was the creator of the word, his new truth was almost universally rejected and his authority was simply not recognized. 
  Creators only maintain authority over their creations so long as they maintain good will with their audience. 
  I'll be the first to admit that I'm taking this way too deep lol I know that but that doesn't change the fact that it is true. Is it pedantic and excessive and ultimately pointless? Sure probably lol but I see this as an exercise in intrigue about the greater concept. >
  
  The creator might lose creative authority, but until that happens they still control the canon. And this is hardly a case of destroyed authority >
  
  Foxes typically only live for 4 years, so Tails is actually ancient. >
  
  Indeed! Perhaps it is part of the mutation that gave him his twin tails, or perhaps Mobian foxes are simply more long lived than Earth foxes. In any case, we know that he has not reached the end of his natural lifespan, because his parents, the prominent pro-democracy activists Commander Amadeus Prower and Councilwoman Rosemary Prower, are still alive. >
  
  I'm talking more like, this is just a dog years thing.  Yes tails is 8, but in dog years, hes 56. >
  
  I think his argument was that only holds up if Tails is near the end of his natural life span. Given that his parents are still alive and he is 9 years old and hasn't had children it's reasonable to assume his parents are at the absolute minimum, twice his age. If Mobian foxes live to 18-20 then it's not a 1:7 ratio the way it is commonly described between dogs and humans. It's closer to 1:5 or 1:4. Problematically though your point still stands lol that would make tails effectively 32-40. Which is still very reasonable given his life so far. >
  
  "8 years old" as a perception of behavior is relative. An 8 year old dog might seem like it is in old age vs an 8 year old person. Tails is a fox and thus has lived more than 2x longer than foxes usually live. For the purposes of talking about his behavior that makes his behavior perfectly acceptable from a believability stand point. 
  That being said if Sonic Colors is official canon then Tails is 9.
  Also looking across the scope of age within the sonic universe it's pretty "normal" for relatively young characters to seem mature in behavior compared to our real life experience of age. 
  It works inside the narrative, it's typical for the universe canon, and it's accounted for via the universe's time line. I don't really see an issue with it. >
  
  Okay, the dog years argument makes sense. !delta. So he's both 8 and an adult? That makes sense about his behavior and how people treat him, but still doesn't make the timeline make sense in my head >
  
  The timeline for Sonic is a bit of a doozy because they have established that it moves. A year passes between the canon before Colors and the beginning of Colors' story so that firmly establishes that time exists in the Sonic universe, it passes, and that passage effects the world and ages its characters.
  The doozy is that Sonic Team would have you believe that between the events in Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega, and Sonic Frontiers only a single year, at maximum two years have passed. That is difficult to accept as plausible. You are absolutely right about that. 
  It's not impossible I suppose... It just seems very unlikely. Sonic's life would have to be an unending barrage of catastrophe for that to be the case. Though it's possible a year is simply longer or is a relative term. Their years might not be the same as ours. Off the top of my head I'm not sure there is any way to nail that down. You would need displayed dated material within the confines of a time period where the exact degree of the passage of time is known. I don't think any situation like that exists currently. >
  
  I can say he's probably not 8 anymore in the canon. before Frontiers came out SEGA erased every character's ages from their bios. whether they're going to go back and adjust them, we don't know, but they're definitely not the ages they were introduced at anymore. the writer for the game, in a Q&A, said "characters are however old you want them be" (basically "I don't care this is a stupid question). I'd say any age could be what a character is as long as you keep the age differences in check like Sonic being older than Tails and Knuckles being similar to Sonic's age.
  hard to really gauge how old characters are because there IS an established long canon now after Forces (tried) and Frontiers (succeeded) in connecting stories, rather than just one off adventures >
  
  But what are the other characters' ages, I ask because I had this crazy idea for a Sonic broadway musical (in a similar style to the Spongebob one, characters conveying species through iconic animal parts and design-conveying clothing and a completely original story that tries to fit everyone in) if I could get the rights and even if the actor playing Tails wouldn't have to be around 8 and therefore too young to safely do harness-work without a lot of special precautions, he couldn't be too old or you lose the feel of the dynamic between him and Sonic and the novelty factor of his intelligence