Female Sonic Character's Hair

[Ivogoji]

Drop everything you're doing right now, this is important.

So, when Sonic fans design female Sonic fancharacters, they give them hair.

But not just any kind of hair. Long, gorgeous, wavy hair. Voluminous, glamorous, jealousy inducing hair fit for shampoo models.

Needless to say, actual Sonic girls do not have such hair. They have really short, really stiff hair that doesn't move around a whole lot. This is consistently true of playable Sonic girls and most non-human NPCs. The only exception is Vanilla, who has a tuff of realistic brown hair between her ears and a soft looking shoulder length extension to her fur just behind her neck.

But other than her, all of the other Sonic ladies have hair that looks like it's made of plastic.

I mean seriously, look at Rouge. She's supposed to be the epitome of sex appeal and she's got tiny stubs on the back of her head that's supposed to pass for hair. Come on man.

So, why is this the case?

It appears to have something to do with the transition to 3D. Amy's basically the only pre-3D Sonic girl and classic design has stiff quills like Sonic. All the others were designed with movement in 3D in mind, and their hair seems to reflect what was most practical for ingame models. This is supported by Vanilla sporting her unique hairstyle, as she was created for Sonic X and has never appeared in 3D Sonic game. So I'm thinking realistic hair may have been considered too cumbersome to animate on non-human characters.

Which brings me to another consideration: when designing anthropomorphic animal characters, realistic looking hair is perhaps avoided to ensure that they still resemble animals. In the case of hedgehogs and echidnas, their hair is definitely what makes them recognizable as members of their species (without it they're just Blue Mouse and Red Mouse). Too much wavy hair might render a female's species ambiguous.

This phenomenon could also explain the whole 'all NPCs must be human' phase that Next Gen through Black Knight had going. We got lots of human or human like characters with pretty hair, but no new funny animal characters. Think about it- Elise, Shahra, Merlina- why weren't they talking hedgehogs/birds/chinchillas? It's the HAIR.

But yeah. This is the kind of stuff I think about when I'm drawing Soinc fancharacters.

Obviously this is a very deep, layered topic to discuss. I'd like to hear others' thoughts on the subject.

[chaoadventures]

No, I will not drop this cup of cranberry juice on the floor. Instead, I will drink it while typing this.

On the topic of "was the 3D transition the reason": Is it hard to animate hair? YES. But did they but the effort to make Sonic's quills move in SA1 and 2? Also yes.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's something else. Besides, the story book characters were drawn during most of the cutscenes.

[Ivogoji]

If it's not because of the jump to 3D than I'm leaning towards the species recognition theory.

I still think this is slightly related to the 'all NPCs must be human' thing. For some reason Sonic games are extremely reluctant to introduce talking animal characters unless they are fully playable.

[chaoadventures]

But then Lost World added 6 talking characters with animals that don't even exist. Coincidentally, Zeena has hair longer than any other Sonic character ever made. I think.

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

@Didn't Vanilla appear in the ending of Advance 2, which came out long before Sonic X premiered in Japan, and wasn't her first appearance in X around episode 40? Was the development time for Sonic X really that long that a character created for it actually appeared before it premiered?

Though, now that you mention it, most of the SegaSonic anthros are practically bald regardless of gender unless they're a hedgehog or echidna(Cream and Vanilla's ears seem intended to invoke the look of giant twin tails, but their ears couldn't be mistaken for actual hair). Then again, even their body fur is usually depicted in a way that makes it look like plastic, exotically colored skin, or velvet as opposed to actual fur.

Still, I can think of an in-fandom reason for Sonic fanchars with more human-like hairstyles: SatAM/Archie. Sally is the most prominent example, but Sally's Mother, Mina Mongoose, several of the females from other Freedom Fighter cells, and probably others I can't think of off top of my head, all have more realistic hair, and in general, the SatAM/Archie characters seem to be drawn with more fur texture than the characters originating from SegaSonic, at least best I can remember. Doesn't make such designs any more in-line with SegaSonic/Sonic x aesthetics, but how many people making fanchars that better fit the SatAM/Archie aesthetic actually understand that Archie and SegaSonic are distinct and unrelated continuities or that characters shared between them differ wildly in characterization?

I.e. the reason such fanchars exist might be related to the reason Sonic/Amy vs Sonic/Sally shipping wars exist: fans who don't know how to keep different continuities separate.

Though, thinking about it more, it might be an east vs. west thing.
Examples of anthros in Western media I can think of:
Animal-like hair: Mickey Mouse, Looney Toons.
Human like hair: ThunderCats, Road Rovers(at least for the one female of the team), SatAM/ARchie Sonic, Alvin and the Chipmunks(at least for the Chipettes).
Examples of anthros in Japanese media i can think of:
Animal-like hair: Dragonball, Pokemon(or at least, human-like hair seems reserved for mons that are more human than animal in appearance), Digimon(see pokemon), SegaSonic/Sonic X.
Human-like hair: Can't think of any unless you want to count human characters with some animal bits.

[Ivogoji]

@Didn't Vanilla appear in the ending of Advance 2, which came out long before Sonic X premiered in Japan, and wasn't her first appearance in X around episode 40? Was the development time for Sonic X really that long that a character created for it actually appeared before it?

As I understand it, yes, that is what happened. Cream and her mother were created for Sonic X, then early on it was decided to introduce Cream as Amy's partner in Sonic Heroes, only for Sonic Advance 2 to beat both Heroes and the anime to the punch. My information could be wrong however; those days are long passed now.

You make an excellent observation about how SatAM's influence may have effected how fans design characters, and that is very likely to be true, but it doesn't actually explain why SEGA's characters have specifically avoided this look.

Though, thinking about it more, it might be an east vs. west thing.
Examples of anthros in Western media I can think of:
Animal-like hair: Mickey Mouse, Looney Toons.
Human like hair: ThunderCats, Road Rovers(at least for the one female of the team), SatAM/ARchie Sonic, Alvin and the Chipmunks(at least for the Chipettes).
Examples of anthros in Japanese media i can think of:
Animal-like hair: Dragonball, Pokemon(or at least, human-like hair seems reserved for mons that are more human than animal in appearance), Digimon(see pokemon), SegaSonic/Sonic X.
Human-like hair: Can't think of any unless you want to count human characters with some animal bits.

Can't believe I didn't think about that. That's highly plausible. We know for sure funny animals like Mickey Mouse inspired Sonic's appearance, but I never thought about how Japanese artists as a whole view such characters. You know I can't think of any anime anthropes with Sally Acorn esque hair either. It may very well be a western phenomenon.

Now I'm thinking about female Disney funny animals with hair. Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, the earliest examples, have no hair. Neither do any of the males. But after a certain point in time we start seeing hair on female funny animals in the comics and tv shows. I think Darkwing Duck was the biggest example, as that show gave every female character and some male characters human like hair. The more traditional Ducktales avoided this.

[Crash32]

Didn't Sonia or whatever the sister's name in Sonic Underground was have actual hair?

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

^Yeah, and I considered mentioning her, but Underground is probably the least talked about Sonic continuity.

Also, I did manage to think of a Japanese example of an anthro with human like hair. Grimmjowl(probably butchered the spelling) of Bleach fame, while physically human in his sealed state except for a tail and his jawbone-like mask fragment, if I remember correctly, his released state gains a feline-like muzzle, grows fur, and his legs gain a more feline bone structure, but his hair remains human-like if you ignore its unnatural coloring. Might be other examples among the hollows, though most are either human-looking or monstrous in appearance.

[Ivogoji]

Sonia's still a made-for-2D character from outside the games though. We don't know the story behind regular SEGA Sonic girls' hair avoiding that style.

[Bubblebeam]

I've always been rather fond of Sega girls' hair. It's well blended to look like fur but also styled to resemble hair. I especially like Rouge's flicks of fur.