My Sonicsona is named Cleo the Kitten. She has pure white fur and blue eyes, though when the light catches her fur then parts of it begin to reflect with a pinkish, rose gold hue. She wears a cyan jacket and a dark miniskirt.
look i swear i’m going somewhere with this.
for years now i’ve been searching for some semblance of community. i got a taste of it once, back in my late teens, when a few friends and i commandeered a gamedev circle and turned it into an “art collective” proper. for a time it was nice, until it became clear that the others were more interested in bringing on new talent to bolster their reputation than nurturing what was already there, and i soon began to distance myself from them.
though it was fleeting, for a moment, i had a place that i called home. which also means that, in its absence, i now have the privilege to perceive myself as unmoored – as having had a place, once.
i know that this is part of growing up: your parents downsize into a new house that you no longer know every secret to, your family and friends move off to distant places that you know you’ll never find the time to visit, and soon all you’re left with is what you’ve managed to cobble together for yourself. still, i feel as though i’ve failed at that last step. i’m too shy, too skittish, too inclined to run away the instant that anyone notices me. i had a place once, and while i’ve made peace with the fact that i can never get it back, every other place now feels hostile.
near the end of 2019, i started playing “sonic robo blast 2 kart,” or srb2kart.1 but really most people just call it “kart,” after a series of meme-drenched youtube videos that brought a lot of people (myself included) into the game.2
even though i’ve been playing now for well over a year, for the longest time my way of engaging with the game differed from most others. see, srb2kart is meant to be played online with others. the only real singleplayer content it has is a barebones time trial mode with some staff ghosts that show by example how you’re supposed to play the different tracks. or, i guess you could always just start an offline race and play all by yourself, but this is the saddest thing.
i was too shy to play online – too worried about embarrassing myself in front of others. so i just played offline, working my way through and beating every single staff ghost. forty hours. then beat them all again on another file. ten more. then spent a dozen hours or so driving around the tracks all by myself. it felt comfy, it felt safe, and were there any outside observers it probably looked really sad and pathetic. but i feared what would happen if i took the leap online, to the point where i started having anxiety dreams about how racing online would go.
i’m not sure how i managed to start playing online. it took a lot of encouragement and months to emotionally prepare myself. yet once i took the plunge this fall – under a pseudonym stolen from a song i’d relistened to a few days prior – i found the experience to be like getting jacked into a font of pure adrenaline. whenever i play my face gets flushed, time gets weird, the room starts spinning if i look away, and i usually end up with a headache by the end of the night. it’s too much to bear, yet i don’t want it to stop.
because so many people got into srb2kart through memey kart videos, it led to more than a handful of them deciding to make videos of their own. among those aspiring creators is TransCanadaLimited, a.k.a. mocha.
when she advertised her discord community last august, i decided to join it on a whim,3 and browsed through it for a bit before muting it after one too many @everyones. this was before i started playing online, mind you, and so the only thing i took away from it was that she was in the process of hosting a kart server. still, even once it was up and once i started playing online, it was almost never populated.4
it took a couple months, but one day i noticed people playing on mocha’s community kart server. i joined in for a bit, made it to the top of the leaderboards, then looked over at discord and saw that a voice call was going with the people i’d been playing against. i was too hyped up, i wasn’t thinking straight, i joined in too, and somehow i had a really nice time. and my experience of being with these people inspired me to want to be a bigger part of that community.
i’d say that mocha’s community is unlike anything i’d ever seen, but that’s a blatant lie. i can say that i haven’t seen anything like it for over ten years, but that could just be because i haven’t been looking in the right places… because until recently i wouldn’t have been caught dead in those places.
there’s a channel for posting about your favorite cars.
there’s a channel for posting about your favorite trains.
there’s a channel for posting original characters (read: sonic ocs).
there’s a channel for posting about problems you’re having with school or work or parents, and everyone else gathers around you to give you support and encouragement.
and as a member of the something awful generation, part of me can’t help but bristle at all this. throughout my formative years it was instilled in me that this is cringe.5 furries are embarrassing. sonic fans are especially embarrassing. showing genuine passion for things in general is embarrassing, honestly, and if you knew better then you would stop.
we used to make fun of people like this.
we used to act like this ironically too.
and then we all moved on (i hope).
so now, upon seeing this relic of a bygone internet era reflected back to me in utmost sincerity, it strikes me as entirely baffling. yet at the same time, they all seem really happy. i don’t want them to get hurt by people like me. i want to encase them all in an amber dome, safe from harm, so they can make characters they love and stay happy together.6
not too long ago i got a discord dm from a member of this community asking how i would like to be represented in a drawing. i entirely wasn’t expecting this, since i mostly just show up to play kart with them every so often, and it put me in a position where i had to figure out real quick what i should look like:
for a while i’d joked with various relationship partners that my fursona would be “a cat, i guess,” so that gives me something to work from.and i’ve always been attracted to those white cats with blue eyes, whose genetic issues make their beauty slightly tragic, so we can work that in too.
decently floofy.
a bit taller than average.
or maybe average height but thin so i look taller than i really am.
oh, can i have my fur shimmer in different colors when the light hits it?
and somewhere in the process i came to the realization that i was making a sonic oc version of myself. i had become the very person that i would’ve scoffed at ten years ago. yet i didn’t care anymore. i had already crossed that threshold of depravity sometime last year when i started writing an erotic sonic fanfic, and as much as i want to convince myself that i wanted to explore its central theme of the complex traumas that arise from harboring unrealistic expectations… the whole thing started because i wanted to make tails and amy fuck.7
so i was never better. i was just afraid of what would happen if other people realized it too.
all that said, i can’t help but feel like i’m performing the digital equivalent of slumming it. like, i do have a doctorate and stuff, and yet i’m hanging out in voice chat with a bunch of kids playing a meme sonic kart racer. aren’t people my age supposed be out networking and stuff? or hanging out in fancy bars (the kind that call themselves “distilleries” or something) and talking about global politics? yet i’ve been in those circles, and it never quite clicked. i can’t say it fully clicks here either, however in this server i see something genuine and maybe noble that is worth contributing to, even if the most i can do is contribute a minor presence.
i know that this can’t be my home, but i know without a doubt that many of the people that i come in contact with here will one day see this community as having been their home. and i’m happy for them, truly. we all deserve to have had a place.
Footnotes
-
sonic robo blast 2 kart is a kart racing mod of a sonic the hedgehog fangame which is itself a mod of doom. and yes, there is a sizable modding community for it too. ↩
-
there are also people who call it “waku waku sonic patrol car,” after a 1991 arcade game that video creators and streamers tag their game with in the absence of there being a proper srb2kart entry. ↩
-
i suspected the “trans” in her username was because she’s trans, although there was always the chance that she’s just really into transport. turns out it’s both! ↩
-
typically there are only between 50 to 100 people playing online at any given time, with most of those clustered into a few different servers. ↩
-
we used another word for this, actually: it’s gay. ↩
-
by all accounts, mocha’s discord community is a rarity among srb2kart communities. even though i don’t actively keep up with any of the others i know about, i’ve heard that they’re more like ordinary gamer communities, complete with various amounts of toxicity. ↩
-
i have no plans to post this one in mochaserver, or even make anybody there aware of its existence. ↩