Rarely is the question asked: why is there so much Xtian Sonic fan art?
February 19, 2020 10:55 AM   Subscribe

Dancing right on the border of “extremely online” and “extremely offline,” you will find the Christian Sonic the Hedgehog fandom.
posted by MartinWisse (19 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is close cousins with "praying Calvin" stickers, both children of Christian Rock. Without a pop culture of their own, and a desire to connect with heathens, Christians (Protestants?) have settled on parody (not the funny kind) and pastiche. All contemporary Christian music (CCM in the parlance) apes existing musical forms. Not news to anybody, I'm sure.

The funny irony is how this is used to inject "worldly" stuff into denominations trained to reject such things, I assume as a hook to maintain relevance and increase membership (the opposite of this is Latin Mass). IANATheologian
posted by rhizome at 11:29 AM on February 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


I am confused by what the article was trying to convey, other than there is Christian Sonic fandom. I couldn't parse any significant difference between Sonic and a host of other blandly detailed commercial icons that aren't associated with "bad things", other than the claim of a kind of specificity that reads universally, which I can sorta accept as a concept, but didn't find much to explain why Sonic has this supposed specificity that other characters must lack.

I'm also still trying to figure out where exactly the border between extremely online and extremely offline would be, is that just online in normal amounts or does it circle all the way around?
posted by gusottertrout at 11:30 AM on February 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


The Gamer Bible (voxels and crafting and health bars and a summary of the book of Luke laid out in metaphors of leveling up your dedication to Jesus Christ)

I have no words. Laugh or cry? Maybe both.
posted by Dysk at 12:20 PM on February 19, 2020


"Yet for all the power that the corporate Christian machine has, it always failed in its attempts to be cool."

I'mma need a week to unpack all that.
posted by Horkus at 12:27 PM on February 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


the linked art (except for the "get in front of the troops lefty scum" agitprop) in the article looks like it's from some deviantart kids drawing mashups of things they see in the world.

Just like I did when I was small (except no deviantart, and my things were fire trucks, vipers, and stinging insects)

Seems like pretty natural kids-with-crayons behavior to me.
posted by Sauce Trough at 12:44 PM on February 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


The phenomenon rhizome describes is very real and not even a little bit subtle. I came out of that culture. There are multiple Apologetix albums buried somewhere in my CD collection (a "parody" band that poorly covers pop and rock songs with clumsily Christified lyrics that often include direct scripture quotes and chapter-and-verse references). Christian bookstores used to post tables of the form "if your kid likes [secular band] give them [Christian band]." Most of the good jokes in VeggieTales were stolen.

But while that's related to Sonic Christian fandom, I think there are major differences that are essential to understanding what's going on. The big one is that the dominant form of Christian kid/teen culture is enforced from the top down by pastors and parents who want wholesome entertainment that teaches Biblical lessons (and doesn't tempt kids to doubt what they're told), and above them by publishers who want to grow a captive audience hungry for permitted media. Christian Sonic fandom is a fandom, grown from the bottom up by kids unifying the characters they love with the worldview they were taught.

Spacetwinks explains the appeal in a way that rings true to me, the Christian anxiety over "cool." An aspect I think he brushed over is the actual narrative of Sonic media. Youth-group culture as I remember it could be emotionally stifling. Sonic offers safe melodrama, emotions that are big but not threatening. It's a cartoon world divorced from reality, and it mostly avoids touchy subjects like romance. (Amy's relationship with Sonic is a perpetual cooties joke.) Sonic tends towards save-the-world stories of robot armies and ancient evil beings defeated by the power of friendship, with tragedy and sacrifice in counterpoint. The biggest Sonic fans I've known latched onto the sadder parts of the stories. Like Gamma in Sonic Adventure, the evil robot who learns compassion and decides to atone by hunting down his fellow robots, dying in the process. Or Maria, the Mary figure / adoptive sister whose sacrifice inspires Shadow to save Earth.
posted by skymt at 1:06 PM on February 19, 2020 [23 favorites]


Ctrl-F "horny".

Bupkis.

This article about why Sonic fandom in particular might be attractive to sexually repressed teens is incomplete.
posted by howfar at 1:24 PM on February 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


I'd be lying if I said Sonic and his related girlfriends didn't play a pivotal role in my sexual awakening as a repressed fundamentalist early teen in 1997.

I'd be oversharing if I said that, but I wouldn't be lying.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:31 PM on February 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


The Manga Bible

Jesus Christ!
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:33 PM on February 19, 2020 [5 favorites]


Trying to get nourishment from "christian art" makes you feel like your soul is starving. Everything is surface and predictable (because that's safe). Which is why even the most commonplace low-level bit of actual creativity (like, yeah, Sonic, or a Journey album, or something else most people would find very mainstream) becomes a rebellion. Its very blandness makes it easier to hide from your parents. And because you are starving for anything at all resembling a real story or song or emotion, you grab at it.

Being a human being, you are not surface and predictable. You are confused and full of deep feelings and passions and forbidden thoughts and fears. You're never going to be ok with safe stories because being human isn't safe and you need stories about that. And you'll keep looking till you find them.
posted by emjaybee at 2:08 PM on February 19, 2020 [18 favorites]


Trying to get nourishment from "christian art" makes you feel like your soul is starving.

Maybe it's because of the topic overlap, but that reminds me of the description of Famine's work in Good Omens:
Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW™. CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn’t matter how much you ate, you lost weight.
The irony is delicious, but still unsatisfying.
posted by Riki tiki at 2:49 PM on February 19, 2020 [7 favorites]


Trying to get nourishment from "christian art"
Which is what, before the market developed the niche, everyone in Christian societies just called 'art'. This is what baffles me about the cultural aspects of US evangelist Christianity—I can't grasp the level of philistinism that rejects modern American pop culture, profoundly itself Christian in form and outlook, for worldliness. As if rock and roll weren't, at heart, just uptempo gospel music.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:18 PM on February 19, 2020 [11 favorites]


As if rock and roll weren't, at heart, just uptempo gospel music.

I’d wager not a lot of kids doing the horizontal nasty to the strains of The Old Rugged Cross though.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:11 PM on February 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


Trying to get nourishment from "christian art" makes you feel like your soul is starving.

Fiasco da Gama makes an excellent point. Much of the greatest European art ever created is explicitly Christian art - not just paintings and sculpture, but the passion plays, vocal and instrumental music, architecture ... all created to passionately worship and celebrate the Christian God.

I'd argue that much of what is missing from today's "christian art" is actually true, passionate love for ones religion. So much of modern "christian" worship is about control, denial, or profit - no wonder the art is vapid and uninspired.
posted by anastasiav at 4:34 PM on February 19, 2020 [12 favorites]


all created to passionately worship and celebrate the Christian God.

Or rather, the only way to be a successful artist and have a patron was to portray Christian (or maybe classical) themes.
posted by emjaybee at 4:49 PM on February 19, 2020 [5 favorites]




Ah, so. I don't think the person who wrote this article is actually in the fandom.

The reason there is a huge Christian Sonic the Hedgehog fandom is because one of the first fans to create a really popular, active Sonic forum--perhaps the forum in the fandom at the time--was NetRaptor. Her Sonic fanfiction and art was always explicitly Christian, and her faith was always a big part of her online presence and the community she built. I'm not and have never been Christian but I lurked on her site quite a bit in my Sonic fandom days, circa 2002-03ish. She really did invest so much time and patience and empathy in building that community--in a way that created the foundation for what the fandom presumably still is now.

Fandom doesn't just spring up out of nowhere or by chance; it's cultivated by people. And the people that spend the time and the effort and the emotional energy to cultivate a fandom play a big part in what it becomes.
posted by capricorn at 7:20 PM on February 19, 2020 [29 favorites]


*Cough*
posted by fallingbadgers at 1:57 AM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


Capricorn's comment is way better than the linked story. Nice comment, Capricorn.
posted by Sauce Trough at 10:54 AM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]


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