Monday, December 10, 2018

Sonic the Hedgehog: DTY.

So like, the other day I was judging the Avengers sequel by the title-a title which they clearly should have run past me first, and today I'll be judging a movie by its teaser poster. Now before you roll your eyes, look at this and tell me if I'm being unfair:
Someone, somewhere said to a room full of people:
"So what if Sonic the Hedgehog was real and had like
a sexy runner's body. You'd see that movie, right?"
"No! More 'tude damnit. More!"
-Some Sega 
exec circa 1990
Sonic, for those of you with lives and only a hazy awareness of the dark years of the console wars of early 90's, was Sega's answer to Nintendo's Mario. And by answer I mean the product of a company wide mandate to group-think up a mascot character to compete with Nintendo. He was cobbled together from a design contest at Sega of Japan where he was called Mr. Needlemouse, was in a band and had a human girlfriend named Madonna. He was then revised by the company's American branch to be a less batshit insane. They also added the requisite, yet difficult to describe 90's quality of 'tude.

"Kids are wearing scarves.
Give him a scarf."
-Same exec, in 2014  
The design they ultimately settled on was a pot-bellied cartoon character with eyes that sort of run together like two eggs in a frying pan. It sounds weird, and it is, but it's one of those things that works better in two dimensions which is all they needed for the games at the time. They did eventually start making 3D games, and I always thought he looked kind of wrong in those, but since they were all objectively terrible, who cares? Over the years the design has been updated and he's gone from kind of round and childish to weirdly tall and lanky in what I think is an attempt to make him appeal to whatever it is business people think kids these days want in a rodent video game character, but it all feels like what it always was: design by focus group.
And this new Sonic promises to be the logical extension of that: soulless and unnerving. And also kind of a furry. Furries-that is people who enjoy putting on costumes and embodying anthropomorphic animal personas-are often unfairly lumped into the kink-enthusiast category even though that's just a small part of it. In fact, according to this, only 4% of furries say that furry-ing is about sex. That said, this I think it's apparent from the Sonic poster that this particular hedgehog is clearly DTY.
You know, DTY as in down to yiff. In my extensive research
on the subject, the verb 'to yiff' is furry-speak for doin' it.

No comments:

Post a Comment