I suppose not everything I write has to make complete sense. I suppose most of the things I write down doesn’t mean anything to anyone anyways. Based on this information, now I’d like to go on a wild and untamed tangent about how much I love Hello Kitty and other Sanrio mascots. And also how much I hate certain things associated with Hello Kitty. This article shall follow no structure or order, so be warned. You really wouldn’t think that a simple cat mascot could have so much drama surrounding her, but as it seems there is truly a lot to Hello Kitty and her lore. There is just so much stuff that you could probably be a Hello Kitty scholar and make of an entire academic career out of studying every aspect of the phenomenon, it’s a 51 years old franchise anyways.
What gave me an idea to write this entire block of text was the HK baby socks my mom found at home. Even as a teeny tiny baby, I was exposed to quite a lot of Hello Kitty imagery around my life. My favorite toy as a kid alongside my LPS was a Hello Kitty PEZ dispenser. I had like 4 different Hello Kitty PEZ candy dispensers, one of them being a transparent glittery one with gothic details, which I absolutely adored (I broke it while trying to make a parachute out of a plastic grocery bag for it and letting it down 2 stories down). My obsession with Hello Kitty might have started there. Most of my fondest memories of playing with toys is with my Hello Kitty licensed stuff. I had a HK beach set with beach towel that was a hoodie, a beach ball and a cute bag and it had extremely cute hibiscus flower patterns. There was just something outstanding about these items I had as a kid. Not just that Hello Kitty was a comforting and cute figure, but the merchandise they made for her in the early 2010’s was absolutely beautifully made. It was cheap and everywhere, but it outstood other IP’s that were being pushed to girls like poorly made merch of disney channel and nickelodeon series at the time. Of course, the 2010’s were a magical time to be a kid, we had many iconic toy lines and franchises to be obsessed about, with the perhaps most prominent one being MLP:FiM and LPS, but Hello Kitty was one of the few franchises that stood the test of time in that regard. I think it was these reasons that my love for Hello Kitty never yielded despite being a grown adult today ever since I was a baby.I was familiar with her face since I was a newborn baby. I do not recall an occasion in my formative years where I was not enamored with Hello Kitty. I turn 19 very soon and I am very sure that I spent all of these years being obsessed with the entirety of Kawaii phenomenon. My first acknowledgments of Hello Kitty as a character was probably with my first interactions with the English speaking part of the internet. It was very specifically with image sharing websites that was popular among girls at the time that I came to enjoy Hello Kitty as a piece of popular culture than a beach towel or candy dispenser toy. By the time it was 2016, I was already exhibiting the behavior of hoarding any and all Hello Kitty merch within my reach, pairing it with other similarly colored items to put together ‘aesthetic collages’ pinterest style in real life. Once I was old enough to surf the web all by myself, I was already pulling out images of Sanrio characters from pinterest to post on my google plus page. Also by the help of particular youtubers I was exposed to more Sanrio characters and other mascots such as pusheen cat and rillakuma. At the age of 12, I knew exactly what I wanted; to immerse myself with Kawaii items and have a room as pretty as pixielocks’. Probably the peak of my interest hit me once I became a teenager and Hello Kitty got big again. While during the years 2015-2018 the global visibility of Hello Kitty was just under the radar even though you could still see her from time to time, the resurgence of Hello Kitty alongside of alternative fashion began in late 2019. During the pandemic, I suppose everyone got more nerdy because all the hobbies they could continue were the ones that required you to be indoor, so basically everyone got a bit more hikikomorish, we lived lives that were reduced to basic media consumption and tiktok hooked a great audience to its app. With this, all I could see was cottagecore and grunge on pinterest, where both, if not all of the newly surging aesthetics had some sort of Sanrio character attached to it. Kuromi became a huge hit with the whole goth-alt-grunge community getting mainstream. Then it just all went downhill from there.
Well, the resurgence of Hello Kitty franchise in Covid was both a blessing and a curse. I suppose that was circa the time when the western rebranding of Hello Kitty and Friends also debuted, where it was possible to find HK merchandise, like EVERYWHERE. They were smart and knew their audience well. I think the whole ugliness and blandlessness was on purpose to make production easier and cheaper. So, compared to the old merch, which was still pretty wide spread and but more pricey, now we had much more merch that you had to very carefully cherry pick to find anything slightly decent. But all is not lost, of course, with the audience growing larger in numbers, the voices those who are veteran in the fandom also got to be more amplified since newer fans emerged to listen in. The resurgence of Hello Kitty was also a resurgence of nostalgia, that’s their biggest selling point. What Sanrio sold to the audiences was a nostalgic past and joyful items like our childhood used to be. This brought people together into the search of what was truly vintage and thus Hello Kitty fans became more eager to buy vintage pieces of merch. This phenomenon today has evolved into the overconsumption problem of blind bags and “trinkets” fashion, which I also have very mixed opinions of. Of course that is to say that not all fans of the franchise acted this way. Now there is probably way more merch than I could ask for. Maybe there even was a charm in having to hunt for Sanrio merch in the olden days because what I found was really worth it, I still feel excited to write in my Hello Kitty hardcover notebook I bought back in 2015, but I feel weird about wearing from my pile of ugly Hello Kitty tshirts. Now it’s absolutely everywhere and it’s extremely cheaply made stuff which reduces my enjoyment to zero, I do not get good merchandise and neither can I ask for it because there is already tons of HK merch. What I’m left with today as a Sanrio fan in the western world is a dystopian overconsumerist nightmare depiction of my dear girl Hello Kitty and her friends printed on basically everything – I know, this is not a new scenario, but it’s a worsened one. I can count like 6 brands/stores at my nearest mall that is currently selling Sanrio products from the top of my head and I can’t count a single product out of those which is decent enough to give you more joy than a temporary rush.
Similarly to the overconsumption problem caused by cheap merchandise there is also an incredible amount of digital content which I believe Sanrio company owes their 2020 boom for. Since Sanrio characters are those who we are all familiar from our childhoods and that we feel nostalgic for, it became an essential part of newly surging internet subcultures known as aesthetics. Popular aesthetics like Traumacore uses Sanrio characters, especially my sweet piano and My Melody, and at its core is about traumatic childhood and the characters are used in that sense to portray innocence of childhood which was ruined. In cottagecore, there is yearning for nature and again, characters like My Melody and Hello Kitty are popular in that regard. I don’t know how these things go, but I’m completely sure that just as there is cheap Sanrio merch, there is also cheap Sanrio content on the internet. The fan made self-care pictures on pinterest could literally be a turning point in my life where it helped me get through tough days, but seeing overly saturated, extremely corporate version of Hello Kitty telling me to do a coloring book and call a friend is not really helping. Well, I shouldn’t lie, I love those images as well. But just after a while, it starts becoming garfield all over again. There is just too many of cheaply made Sanrio illustrations of that new Hello Kitty and Friends brand which feel totally soulless, even something as infinitely cute and loveable as Hello Kitty becomes repetative in a way I’m not enjoying. I love the part of Hello Kitty where she is kind and accepting of everyone, but I hate the part that she also comes with an overconsumption problem when you stan her. This is surely a common experience in quite a lot of fandoms. After all, merchandise is what funds franchises. But this doesn’t mean we can forget about this completely since it’s just a part of the norm.
It’s not just Hello Kitty that I love though, I love the entirety of Sanrio franchise. To be very fair, it’s not completely how cute Hello Kitty looks on her own, but everything that constitutes the Sanrio art style and philosophy that made me her number one, life long fan. The overly joyful, mindful and optimistic narrative that comes with Sanrio is what lures me into the fandom. I was recently watching Kuromi & My Melody – I haven’t completely seen it yet but I think I’ve seen enough of it – and I think that My Melody represents social anxiety disorder and the concept of “growing up shy” extremely well. I am also a very shy person myself and I spent most of my time doing my own thing or trying to help others in a way I understand but because I always try avoid confrontation or getting into others way, I end up hurting myself or others. In that regard, My Melody is an extremely relatable character to me. Her mannerisms such as trying to calm down with some tea whenever life gets though reminds me of my own solo tea parties for when life gets overwhelming. For some reason I can’t really understand the hype behind Kuromi though, I really do not like her. I feel like she is a cool character and at some point she used to be my favorite too, however she is simply overrated. It’s quite unnecessary for her to have so much merch and have garnered so much attention. It’s like she is the new Hello Kitty. Everyone fell in love with the idea of a cute character that has a dark side, she’s an icon for alternative fashion and anyone who falls outside the norm of girlhood. The idea behind her character is novel, yet the Hello Kitty-ification of Kuromi something I’m not very happy about. Now, I’m just some lifeless Hello Kitty mega fan on the internet, but despite how much I love how pretty Kuromi is with her black & pink style, I am just so tired of seeing her everywhere. She’s a trend like AI, Labubu and dubai chocolate, which are 3 words I hate the most and are not in the bible. But this is the reality we live in, I bought a sanrio characters sticker book the other day and out of 10 pages it was like 6 Kuromi dedicated pages, my boy pompompurin was just a background character in 2-3 stickers and cinnamoroll was lucky to get his page. Even Hello Kitty, the OG sanrio character had like 2 pages maximum. I do understand the attempts of Sanrio corporation to get the most out of an audience that fell in love with Kuromi, as they have once done with Hello Kitty, but for gods sake, she took up more than half the entire sticker book, and the stickers were the SAME. At least give her more unique illustrations and add more to her character through updates in the franchise. Now to speak more on some other Sanrio characters, to be fair I don’t even really care about under appreciated Sanrio characters. The friends of Hello Kitty have enough cuteness to last me a lifetime. It is sort of saddening to see that some well designed and beloved characters fall outside of Hello Kitty and friends franchise and thus do not get as much recognition from the company. Characters like My Sweet Piano are background characters to the universe in which Kuromi and My Melo lives so she only appears if there is specifically something about them. Besides the “Main cast” and other popular characters like pochacco and Little Twin Stars (who are also underrated in my opinion!!) there are some Sanrio characters who are absolute cuties that have to be recognized. First of all Charmy Kitty is a beautiful feline who I can only describe as the sweet smell of my childhood Barbie body mist, following her is the cute, childish and comforting characters of sugar bunnies. The sugar bunnies are extremely cute and have a nice color palette, which makes them perfect for Sanrio themed stationary. The last underrated character I’d like to mention is Lloromannic – which is just cinnamoroll spelled backwards, since they’re the villian from that universe. They are duo of two characters and they are just the cutest!
To be honest, by the end of this long rant, I still have no concrete idea on what exactly sanrio is. It is a company sure, but what exactly is it that do they do and what part of the Franchise is the starting point – like how star wars is a movie that has toys and games about it – I would guess toys, but Sanrio is not a toy company, they are a mascot/character company? They also seem to make half, if not most of their merch marketed towards teens and adults who don’t play with toys anymore like a kid would but could collect them. Maybe this is it. Hello Kitty is just whatever you want her to be. The first Hello Kitty merch is a coin purse, so I suppose this is what Sanrio is. They make merchandise of their characters because they are cute and people buy it. Lately, I’ve started to justify my interest in the character by saying that I am not obsessed with Hello Kitty, it’s just my favorite color. I like it to imagine her as not something I worship, I don’t wake up to live another day that I can see Hello Kitty but if I’m buying myself a new notebook, I’d rather get it in my favorite color if it’s available and that would be a Sanrio themed print.
Closing notesThere is nothing I can do about this text but accept that I have gone full schizoposting with this one. I really have no idea what is going on with my brain recently, I just can’t form cohesive sentences anymore, I’ve lost my entire attention span but that part of me that wants to write something astonishing is still within me. The result is a 2500 word cryptic text file about Hello Kitty and Sanrio. I hope to regain my sense of time and be able to type something meaningful one day. For now this is what I’m choosing to put on the internet.