Countless essays and satirical videos about Sonic the Hedgehog’s unique fanbase dominate the web. A competitor to Mario in the 90s, Sonic has now taken on a multimedia life consisting of movie adaptations, TV cartoons…and a very odd Internet following.
It’s impossible to tell now if the love for Sonic is ironic, sincere, a hodgepodge of the two, or some new emotion human beings don’t have a word for yet. What is clear is that there’s a LOT of fan-art, fan fiction, and other materials on the web reconstituting Sonic lore into new (often very horny) artistic expressions. Much like J. Robert Oppenheimer staring out at the lake at the end of Oppenheimer, Sonic creators Yuji Naka, Naoto Ohshima, and Hirokazu Yasuhara must also be gazing out into the distance in a hollow fashion seeing what this franchise has become.
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That’s already a lot to process. Believe it or not, though, there’s another unexpected corner of the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom you might’ve never expected to witness. Believe it or not, this critter that inspired someone to utter the phrase “if only we could see her take wing” has a tremendous trans following. How did that happen?
You can never predict what art will resonate as an enduring classic. Similarly, there’s no way to foretell what kind of audience your art will cultivate. Sonic the Hedgehog was just meant to make some money for Sega back in the day. Nobody involved could have expected it to assemble a sizable trans following. That’s partially why, though, it’s garnered so many trans devotees. So little mainstream art directly and explicitly reflects trans points of view, leading trans audience members scramble to transmogrify the art they like into being deeply relevant. If the world won’t produce art that’s a 1:1 parallel to our lives, we’ll find trans-resonant materials within unrelated pop culture.
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“We suddenly felt like we were immediately vulnerable with each other and it just felt like we had each other’s backs,” Connor said.
Plus, there’s something a little cheeky about taking completely non-trans pop culture and claiming it “belongs” to trans folks now. If you want to exclude us, fine, we’ll just “take” cis-het art and say it’s ours now! This phenomenon gets all the more amusing applied to the last art anyone would put under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. Enter: Sonic the Hedgehog! However, this co-opting maneuver only partially explains Sonic’s hefty trans following. What else is going on to make so many trans individuals gaga for this video game fixture? Resonating with this demographic partially reflects a community often intersecting with trans folks: furries.
According to a publication called Unicorn Zine, “1 in 8 furries identify as transgender.” That statistic isn’t sourced in Unicorn Zine, however, it’s appeared in other publications like a Grindr blog post, while OutWrite News Magazine states that this figure first showed up in a 2020 survey. And dig around in the realm of furries and you’re bound to uncover things connected to Sonic the Hedgehog. Specifically, you’ll find Sonic-themed equivalents to fursonae if you toss a stone into any corner of DeviantArt or any social media platform.
As a 2020 New York Magazine piece observed, “One key feature of both the furry and Sonic fandoms is the creation and cultivation of an anthropomorphic cartoon animal alter ego.” The ubiquity of folks online making their own Sonic characters inevitably inspired games like Sonic Forces to allow users to concoct their own official playable Sonic creations. A Fursona in furry culture often reflects a person’s deep desires, personality traits, and ambitions. So, too, could these fan-made Sonic creations.
With Sonic so profoundly meshed into the furry realm, it was inevitable that trans folks and Sonic lore would collide. The same can be said for another community frequently intertwining with trans identity: autistic folks. Countless Reddit posts, essays, and YouTube videos have already been concocted reflecting the phenomenon of autistic folks carrying a torch for Sonic. There is no one way to be autistic. Similarly, there is no single mold for why autistic people like Sonic material. What’s even cleare is the fact that research has shown autistic folks are highly likely to be trans. Furries and autistics (and many autistic furries!) have helped to make Sonic the Hedgehog inseparable from trans people.
However, it’s not just the furries reclaiming Sonic the Hedgehog as something new in trans spaces. In recent years, the trans Sonic the Hedgehog fanbase has been boosted through popular artistic reinterpretations of the character spurred by trans artists. Most notably, voice actress, trans gal extraordinaire, and master of Kermit the Frog knowledge Penny Parker has used her YouTube gaming channel SnapCube to make several popular Sonic-themed channels. These include videos where several voice-over actors, many of them queer and/or trans, join in to provide live dubbing of cut scenes from video games like 2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog or Shadow the Hedgehog.
Within these videos, inspired bursts of comic lunacy ensued like Dr. Eggman’s Twitter announcement, nonchalant comments from “the Devil from Da Bible”, or a delightfully chillaxed version of Storm the Albatross. These exceedingly creative videos thrived on great comic timing and incredible rapport between the various participants. Similarly, art has manifested on platforms like Reddit from trans folks reflecting things like the release dates of various Sonic the Hedgehog movies coincide with key points in their personal gender journeys. Within the last decade, Sonic the Hedgehog, of all things, has been a fantastic vessel for trans individuals of all genders to express themselves.
This universe offers opportunities to create glorious material like “ha ha, one!” that gloriously let trans creativity and joy thrive.
Trans femmes leaving the new sonic movie (art by @keithjohnstack I think)
byu/ladyisabella02 intraaaaaaannnnnnnnnns
I suspect Sonic resonating so much with trans folks is also a byproduct of the classic subconscious war between nostalgia and grown-up recognition of how many things we loved as children were actually silly. In his breakdown of ceaseless Shrek memes, writer David Sims of The Atlantic ruminated on how the original Shrek franchise was “symbolic of so many things we briefly loved before quickly realizing their emptiness.” The plethora of ensuing memes, then, was about instilling value into something carving out large chunks of our memory that also isn’t super substantive. A similar phenomenon informs the ending of I Saw the TV Glow, where protagonist Owen returns to his beloved Pink Opaque TV show only to find it’s much more childish than what he’d built up in his brain.
While this experience is universal, trans people generally have a unique approach to nostalgia. Cis-het figures constantly yearn for “better” days of yesteryear, hence their pop culture fixtures being predicated on things remaining stagnant. Luke Skywalker, Maverick, He-Man—these must always be static and never evolve. Trans folks, meanwhile, carry a more complicated relationship to the past. Rather than try to calcify Sonic into the form he existed in when we were young, trans weirdos (like me!) recontextualize this chili dog-obsessed warrior and his world to develop new memories.
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This is where SnapCube fan-dubs, outlandish artistic renderings, and other byproducts of Sonic’s trans fanbase come into the picture. Sims was right that the endless exploitation of Shrek turned the series into “emptiness” fast. However, that pales in comparison to the weird rollercoaster of quality Sonic has been on. From kissing a human lady to the time he turned into a werewolf to 2005’s Shadow the Hedgehog’s idea of “provocative” profanity to whatever was going on in Sonic 3D, the Sonic series has been through the quality wringer. You don’t need to reach your 30s or 40s to realize Sonic isn’t the same as your earliest childhood memories.
The preposterousness of these games inspired negative reviews in the 2000s is now a springboard for equally surrealistic 2020s parodies and artistic re-renderings. Processes like creating Sonic-oriented “personae” hinge on crafting something new out of the Sonic starting base. Cis-het folks yearn to see Michael Keaton say “I’m Batman” again. Trans folks, meanwhile, translate Sega Genesis characters that once brought them comfort into new adult-skewing confines that can work on their own artistic merits. That’s easier to do when you’re not treading on sacred creative ground. Who’s going to complain that you’re not getting Espio the Chameleon or Big the Cat just right? You certainly won’t inspire mobs who whine about new visions of Star Trek or DC Comics characters!
Perhaps, though, there is a genuine love (and, in some cases, lust) for Sonic as well. With a world that’s burning through climate change and global governments embracing fascism, who’s to say you can’t embrace genuine affection for “da Devil from Da Bible”?
There’s a lot of complicated material informing the intersection between the Sonic franchise and trans folks. Furries, SnapCube, reconciling your own nostalgia, they’re all at play here. But let’s never forget that Sonic and trans folks being currently inseparable could also simply be because lots of trans people love moving around at the speed of sound while following their rainbow.♦
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