gotta become fast

In that location's a Lot of Sonic the Hedgehog Fetish Art Online. Why?

A screenshot from the fan-made video game Sonic Inflation Risk. Photo: Newgrounds

Hither is what I know to be true as a lifelong internet user and only occasional watcher of boys playing Sonic games on Segas in basements: Sonic is a hedgehog, which is cute. Sonic is bluish, which is cool. Sonic has friends, who are also sometimes hedgehogs (cute!) merely not blue (lame!) And to a higher place all: Sonic. Goes. Fast.

Sonic arrived on the Sega Genesis in 1991, in time to lead '90s kids into the new millennium, where things moved faster and farther than what we could have possibly imagined in our wee 16-fleck brains. Mario was an lowest, holding down the skilful, sturdy chore of plumber. Sonic was the next generation, with the made-up cyber-job of ring collection, a spiky-haired rude dude with attitude.

And then came DeviantArt in 2000, the apprentice art-sharing website on which different fandoms could develop and share in deeply specific kinks and proclivities, using trademarked characters as the building blocks for their own budding interests. The Sonic franchise is patient zilch for this. Sonic was already positioned as the counterculture option to Nintendo'due south roster of goody two-shoes, so it fabricated sense that he'd become the graphic symbol to decadent and debase. Likewise, and this is key, the Sonic style is fairly like shooting fish in a barrel to draw, automatically lowering the barrier to entry for creating strange, illustrated erotica.

The Sonic franchise also benefited from its adjacency to furry culture — he and his pals are anthropomorphic animals with big, cartoony expressive features. Equally furry blogger Patch O'Furr said to me for Vulture in 2019, "having crushes on cartoons is where all furries come from." For a subset of millennial furries, the Sonic universe was the same sort of gateway that Disney's animated picture show Robin Hood was to others: the basis of childhood affinities and crushes that led to more agile online participation. One key feature of both the hirsuite and Sonic fandoms is the creation and cultivation of an anthropomorphic cartoon fauna alter ego. Furries often committee artwork of their fursonas and elaborate custom fursuits from artists in the community, and their fursonas are treated as projections of their innermost or idealized selves. In dissimilarity, ane of the more amusing features of Sonic OCs ("original characters") is in just how many earnest, scribbly self-made attempts can exist found with a simple Google search of your ain proper name. The fursona-ish idea of embodying one'south ain hedgehog variant is so cardinal to Sonic fandom that information technology is widely parodied with ironic creations like Coldsteel the Hedgeheg and in 2017, a character creator chemical element was introduced in the official game Sonic Forces.

Stemming from the hyper-personal nature of both furry culture and the Sonic fandom is a electric current of farthermost (and often extremely creative) horniness. While furries have grown more than mainstream and welcoming to kids and families over the past few years, sexuality is still a core component of furrydom. Equally Patch explained, crushes and sexual fantasies are oftentimes key to adopting furry affinity. Regarding The Masked Singer, he told me: "1 thing I was thinking is, this show is kind of tamed down from what could exist if you gave it to a agglomeration of furries. Because celebrities, you lot know, they've got to play safe. And they're not going to have sexual awakenings with their new selves." Elements of furry overlap with the pup play subsection of leather and BDSM kink, where people adopt puppy and master personas, act as dogs, and wear leather canine masks. There are servers for Discord (a Slack-like chat app) devoted to "Diaperfur" and "Babyfur" kinks. Embodying an beast, alternate identity allows furries to engage in artistic sexual fantasy and roleplay, and enact it online in cartoon pornography. This extends to Sonic fans, both with their Sonic OCs and through fan art and ships of their favorite characters.

Of all the subsets of Sonic kink out there, one of the well-nigh well-represented is illustrations and videos wherein Sonic and his friends gain impossible amounts of weight in an undeniably sexual way. At that place's feeder art (where a character is fed too much and grows massive), vore art (where a grapheme or sometimes the artist gets eaten by Sonic or friends), inflation art (think Willy Wonka's Violet Beauregarde) and, of form, mpreg ("male person pregnancy"). These works tiresome him downwardly a peg, and soften his spiky edges.

Only as the Virgin Mary and the immaculate conception are the ground of then much of the last millennia's Western art, so too is mpreg Sonic a central text of the internet canon. Mpreg is a fantastical torso mod extension of slashfic (fan fiction concerning same-sex activity relationships), depicted with characters ranging from Draco Malfoy to Louis Tomlinson from the boy band One Direction. Mpreg fan art, though, makes the latent Blastoff/Beta/Omega dynamics in those ships physical and transformative, and too more than circuitous. Fans who imagine pregnant Sonic characters often fixate on the power dynamics of pregnancy: a third-trimester Sonic is helpless in some means, but can likewise create impossible life. These ships deed as a commentary on how the ensemble casts of franchises like Sonic are woefully defective in gender parity. Information technology falls to characters similar Knuckles to shoulder the brunt of childbearing in the Sonic Universe.

Merely as mpreg opens Sonic upwards to actual impossibilities, so too does information technology allow for cross-franchise pairings that could never be seen outside of fan imaginings. Have, for example, the common transport of Shadow the Hedgehog and Shrek, sometimes with Spongebob as a third. On the surface, these works seem similar trolling, eroticizing what are traditionally sexless children's characters. It tin can sometimes be hard to know to what degree these works are ironic parodies of fan fine art, or sincere erotica. Either i assumes a deep knowledge of the characters and requires a nifty bargain of fourth dimension and effort on the part of the artist, but it's hard to imagine the Spongebob throuple, in particular, as anything but a trolly joke about Rule 34, principle that "if information technology exists, there is porn of it." Roleplay Tumblr accounts similar askmpregsonic, on the other paw, seem sincere in their affinities.

In a similar vein, feeder is one of the most prevalent and variable types of fat Sonic hentai. Part of this is built right into Sonic's lore: the guy loves chili dogs. Like Popeye'southward spinach, chili dogs power him up. Only this fan art takes information technology to the extreme, punishing the characters for their gluttony like Homer Simpson in donut-hell. In the Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers accept suggested that the feeder/feedee dynamic is just a weight-focused variation of sadomasochism, centering around physical penalty, humiliation, and power. Unlike the fantasies of vore or mpreg or inflation, feederism is a fetish that many in the community enact in real life. In a work like "Mattress" past Nemo-hana, which depicts a big Tails, however, the artist and the viewer can shift between those dom and sub positions, depending on where they identify. Artworks similar the kind found in the fat-sonicgirls-gild grouping prove characters and then big that they are rendered immobile. They make Sonic characters like Big the Cat look downright … small.

I of the preeminent works of Sonic crackfic (deliberately nonsensical fan fiction), is the 2014 Flash game Sonic Inflation Take chances by the mysterious Jimberly-Cluttered, and it functions as an elaborate troll of the exact sort of kinky Sonic fine art nosotros've outlined hither. Character names are misspelled and approved designations are thrown out the wind (Tails, here, is Sonic's son). It's fabricated with such specificity and mid-aughts detail that it belies a genuinely fanatical and intense engagement with inflation kink. In this interactive cocky-insert porno-game, y'all wake up as Sonic the Hedgehog and enter a point-and-click nightmare globe in which Duke rails against the Bush administration and court is presided over past Shadow the Judgehog. The game skirts a few genres: at first, it'south a dating sim, where you can hook upwards with low-res JPEGs of Rouge the Bat and Amy Rose, and if the date goes well (which it does considering, as nosotros've established, Sonic is sexually irresistible) they'll want to engage in some lite inflation-play. This means, of course, getting pumped with air until they blow upwardly like uncomfortably large balloons.

When Amy Rose inflates up then large that she pops and Sonic is charged in her death, the game shifts into a playable courtroom drama (loosely based on the Phoenix Wright series). Eventually, the game becomes a prison escape room, catastrophe with Sonic's liberation through self-inflation. The game's homespun aesthetic evokes the childlike amateurism seen in countless works of Sonic fan art, but repurposes that sensibility for an aggressively mature story. It'southward either a crude cartoon masterpiece in the vein of the films of Ralph Bakshi — or a reason why the Showtime Amendment was a mistake.

Then at that place are the works of the Sonic soft vore community, which basically means one character gets swallowed whole by another. To a vore fan, a piece of work like "Vore vs. Cream Wins" by MidNightOwlArt is the highest form of eroticism, like an Ingres odalisque. The root of Sonic vore once over again overlaps with furrydom: the same cartoons that are seen equally foundational furry texts or canon also feature the trope of a predator hunting prey, or getting eaten by another, Looney Tunes style. It'southward worth noting that the showtime Kirby game dropped a year after the beginning Sonic; themes like inflation, feeding, and eating other characters were written straight into the gameplay. Soft vore is also, in certain ways, a counterpart to mpreg, shifting the power dynamic of who's inside of who.

All of the above works are Sonic or a pal — eroticized as larger-than-life. In these images, they are against SEGA, against speed, confronting God. Furry-adjacent and anime-lite, horny Sonic art persists because it offers a recognizable face up and visual language for people to apply in their exploration. Sonic is a one-size-fits-all franchise, although I approximate that size is e'er in flux.

In that location's a Lot of Sonic the Hedgehog Fetish Fine art Online. Why?