hey, i'm a new sonic fan (really digging your writings btw!!!) would you mind explaining a bit of this tag of yours? i get the feeling youve been in the fandom for a while haha X)
hello, I am SO sorry for the late response. I am terrible with my asks and kind of disappeared for much of the winter. Some might say this particular hedgehog was hibernating! That said, welcome to the fandom!
You are right! I've been here since 2012, but I've done many blasts to the past to learn about the things before my time lol.
This is gonna be an off-the-cuff answer, so bear with me, but this ask was in reference to this post where I mentioned some "questionable Amy Rose characterization." In short, it's only within maybe the last eight or so years that North American Sonic has been in decent sync with Japanese Sonic, as a franchise. While there are still plenty of localization differences between these two realms (from characterization to plot/lore implications), they are largely on the same page, now. This wasn't always the case.
When Sonic first appeared in the 90s, there was essentially a version of him for every "video game region" (North America, Japan, and Europe). Sonic was characterized very differently depending on where he was. Again, super off the cuff, but American Sonic was a super cocky, sassy speed demon who made fun of his enemies and had no fucks to give. Japanese Sonic was still arrogant and sassy, but a lot less flashy about it. European Sonic, I am the least familiar with, but I know him to be somewhere in the middle of NA and JP. NA and EU also have their own cast of characters on top of the official characters we know.
To the core of your question about Amy, Amy chasing Sonic is a trope in JP media between young lovers and was largely meant to be shown as a game between the two. Amy also reads as a lot more "cute and endearing" in Japanese iterations of her in the 2000s.
However, NA Sonic, as a franchise, played up her romantic feelings for Sonic to an absolute extreme for laughs, but it ended up with some really dubious results. Amy's NA characterization makes her out to be more of an active aggressor. Words you might see floating around about this include "stalker," "fangirl," and "obsessed." These things led a lot--like, A LOT a lot--of people to dislike or vehemently hate Amy Rose.
Some iterations of this aren't so bad, but the ones people really point at are Sonic Battle (she mistakenly believes that Sonic intends for a robot named Emerel to be their son), Sonic Heroes (Amy's reason for hunting Sonic down is to "get him to marry her"), and Sonic Adventure 2 (Amy says that she will only free sonic from his prison cell if he agrees to marry her; she is unsuccessful and frees him anyway).
To be clear, I FIRMLY believe that the latter two examples I gave were meant to be understood as jokes and that IS how Sonic takes them. People also point to a moment in Sonic 06 where she says she would choose Sonic over the fate of the world, but I also firmly believe that people misinterpret her meaning (more on that here). However, the fact this is a hill I need to die on shows that it wasn't made clear enough by the American writers. And anyway, this really starts to simmer down around 2008 with Sonic Unleashed.
The general consensus in the fandom, to my knowledge, is that this happened for two reasons. 1) Amy's crush combined with Sonic's (at the time) purposefully ambiguous feelings for her made for the type of gag humour that was big in the 2000s, and 2) Sonic already had a highly popular love interest in Sally Acorn, a NA-exclusive character from the 90s cartoon (Sonic the Hedgehog/SatAM) and the Archie comics that largely acted as a continuation of that cartoon's story.
Sally was so much "in Amy's place," as it were, that the NA instruction Manual for Sonic CD (Amy's introductory game, mind you) deliberately refers to Amy as Sally.
I'm not super well informed about Archie Sonic, but Amy has kind of a bad rep in those comics too. She has a uncomfortable back story (she uses magic, basically, to make herself older so she can join Sally's freedom fighters and be with sonic), is consistency depicted as overbearing and mean, and I've even seen people complain about the way she's drawn (she always has this unbecoming, large mouth that makes her unpleasant to look at).
However, the Archie comics underwent a total reboot in 2013 (the comics ended in 2017), and my understanding is that Amy's characterization is dramatically improved from there on out.
Again, SUPER off the cuff. There were a lot of micro details I skimmed over. I 100% encourage you to go on the deep dive and draw your own conclusions, but I hope this gives some good background to get started!
In summary, NA Amy Rose (and, to a lesser extent, Amy Rose in general during the early 2000s), is kind of rough to watch. SEGA over-corrected a little bit around 2012 by taking her down the hyper-independent route, but settled on something really solid for her in 2017 starting with Sonic Forces and the IDW comics.