Hot Topic Makes 40 Tees & I Get Salty About It

This post has a higher than usual salt content! (Whee)

This week's update sees another 'big brand collab'.
This time, it's with "Xlarge", which I guess wasn't much heard of outside of Japan. There are some 'shop Japan' type websites world-wide that'll get you their stuff and ship it, but always for a price. Which, I guess is ok because whoever gets it already doesn't mind paying for designer things. Xlarge itself did a good job with what merch I've been able to find so far, it's all stylish enough as well as various. The page probably isn't done...more items I would think could turn up--but they are hard to search for because the brand has called itself something so generic. It's likely not generic in Japan though because their word for "Large" is something else and they don't have the letter X. So, you can see why somebody would make that up as their company name and not worry about it.

Jet the Hawk Tech Deck = Strange Sports
If you went into like the 1980s or something and started saying about what kind of strange sports people would do in 2020 they'd be like 'yeah rock on future wacky people'. Cause now we've got fingerboarding (you pretend your fingers are legs/feet and they ride the skateboard and do real tricks that are actually difficult to master) we've got dice-stacking (can you stack these dice by shaking them in a cup just-so?), there's cup-stacking (how fast can you stack and unstack the cups the answer may surprise you) and speed-cubing (solve the Rubix Cube, but not faster than that 1 robot that guy built) plus probably more. So far, Sonic's only on the fingerboard scene though. Strange Sports? Sure, go for it, the whole thing's interesting.

Chili Dogs in the Opinion Zone:
The Opinion Zone returns to the blog after not being on it for a while. I have never liked Sonic liking chili dogs. It never sat well with me and the origin is kind of stupid too. If you don't know it, it's that the TMNT loved pizza so Sonic had to like something too but they couldn't do cliche of 'hamburgers' because it would be so boring so what's related to the burger? The hotdog. So they just put that. They didn't think about what goes well with speed, or what's cool, or what would be 'awesome' to have him like. They just got jealous of the Turtles and threw something at the wall. (Of course, irl hedgehogs are pretty gross they poop themselves on purpose and eat bugs and nasty stuff so you couldn't use that to start with) 

If you're so smart...
What should he have liked? Fruit shakes! Fruit and veg in the blender! Why? The food SPINS! The food GOES FAST! It's all sorts of wacky cartoony colors to play with! You blend it fast, you drink it fast, it gives you health.....fast! Blenders are spinny and sharp, Sonic is spinny and sharp...it's the perfect super obvious match. If kids want to imitate him then, so much the better: make them drink a whole salad worth of spinach because it tasted like strawberry banana. Literally any toony color can be used to have him holding his 'fast food' just say it's whatever flavor. It would have been the easiest thing to think of! ARGH how did they miss that!
Don't grind up someone's facial flesh and cram it into their own intestine and eat that! That's WRONG! Put the fruit into the spinny fun machine and drink it, that's RIGHT!* 

So, when things try to base Sonic all around Chili Dogs like this week's tee did, it's kind of annoying. Like he'd ever be some delivery boy* or open a restaurant to settle down.
*Delivery food people are important and good. However, if you can travel at world-saving speeds you probably should use your talent for that instead.

*The 'right' up there is not coming from a place of veganism or vegetarianism, or the morality police, it is not about having or not having a meat-eating mascot, he could've had hoagies, or CalZONEs, ice pops, burgers, steaks, (but not spaghetti meatballs because Mario), or any of a number of other things it's just sausage is disgusting/has a terrible origin and there are better more fun things to give him than the greasy health disaster that is the chili dog. Seriously don't look up sausages or hot dogs origin if you actually like them and want to continue to do so. The cellular meat-matrix printer isn't here yet but it's on the way. (No, it seriously is, you can read about Ian the Chicken & his nuggets or have fun on the reddit board for future meat.) 

Onto the topic of the post title:
Hot Topic Makes 40 Tees & I get Salty About It
Yeah ok, so HT is jumping back onto the Sonic bandwagon but they're doing it in a really spammy style. They've whipped up something like 40 all new shirts but the theme is generally pretty crummy and they're low-effort. It's mostly "Valentines Day" for whatever reason too??? Like why? Who wears Valentine-specific tees? Like...when? Do you do it all week? Have 5 tees to wear 1 day of the year? They literally say things like "Be My Valentine" and "Happy Valentines Day" on them too so it's not like you can just....wear them all the time or something. It's really bizarre that that there have been multiple efforts (Sega Shop too) to turn Sonic characters into some kind of Valentines icons and getting super creepily obsessed over that 1 holiday. At least Christmas is a month long geez.

More is not better:
Spamming out low effort shirts that no one will buy is not the way to success with Sonic. Most of the tees have non-appropriate stuff too like Sonic saying "Love is his game", and Amy writing "Sonic & Amy Forever" on everything. There's "Amy Rose Love" and Sonic carry Amy "You're my favorite" where it's like they're trying to make this big romance of the two of them that was never there. That whole topic is a whole 'nother can of worms though for another post.
It's from the whole book of "A boy and a girl in a franchise can't exist without them getting marrrrrriiieeeeed!" sickly sappy cliche junk that grownups make up because all they can do is think of marriage. (You saw this with Sally too, and with Antoine and Bunny Rabbot in the comic, the SatAM show had him kissing Sally becoming bf/gf and the comic married Antoine/Bunny because there "were boys and girls in the same franchise so they have to marry each other!!!!!!!" Except the fat one. (Fat dragon Dulcy, fat walrus Rotor) No marriage for unattractive animal characters. 

So anyway yeah one of these next updates is going to have to have some giant image with 40 lil' tiles in it each with another of these annoying shirts so that I gotta waste up a batch of time thanks to their spamming. Buuuuuuut it's all a part of SonicGear: to catalog the good and the bad and then make fun of it. But it IS going to slim down my ability to add the variety that people like. 

Next Week:
Probably Hot Topic. Oy. Also what to do with hats. It seems every single thing in Accessories these days is always a hat. I spent a lot of work breaking Socks off out of accessories general but it looks like I'm going to have to do the same with just hats. Really do wish Jakks Pacific figure distribution was better too...there's a reason the site's not caught up with the releases and it's that fans (and me too) just aren't finding them. I can't decide if its scalpers or something else. Also expect a floating post at some point (blog post...that is) about Amy.