Sonic Original Characters — Sonic character designer tool with Sonic.exe creation

Sonic Original Characters

2000fandom / fan artclassic

Published September 28, 2026

Sonic Original Characters, or Sonic OCs, are fan-made anthropomorphic animal characters designed to fit into the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. Cranked out by the thousands on DeviantArt since the early 2000s, they became a running joke online for their edgelord attitudes and rainbow-hedgehog designs, eventually going semi-canon when Sega added a character creator to Sonic Forces in 2017.

sonic memes deviantart memes fan art memes character design memes cringe memes

Overview

Sonic Original Characters, usually shortened to Sonic OCs, are fan-designed anthropomorphic animals slotted into the world of Sonic the Hedgehog. The template is easy to copy: pick a hedgehog, fox, echidna or bat, swap the palette to hot pink or jet black, pile on chains, wings, or a katana, and write a backstory positioning the character as Sonic's long-lost sibling or edgier rival3. The sheer volume of these characters made them a defining strand of the Sonic fandom and, elsewhere online, a punchline about fandom excess3.

The joke version of the format leans into recolored sprites, character-creator dolls and typo-ridden bios that read like preteen power fantasies. Blogs like Tumblr's FYeahBadSonicArt and Terrible Sonic the Hedgehog OCs curated the worst offenders for laughs, while Newgrounds and DeviantArt hosted the doll-makers that let anyone stamp out a new hedgehog in minutes3. The tone splits down the middle: earnest fan creations coexist with parody OCs designed from the start to mock the format1.

Origin & Background

Platform
DeviantArt / Tumblr (mockery spread)
Date
2000

Sonic the Hedgehog debuted in 1991, and as Sega expanded the roster with Tails, Knuckles, Amy and others, fans started drawing their own anthropomorphic animals in the same style3. Online communities dedicated to Sonic fan characters were active by the early 2000s, and DeviantArt became the central hub, with groups such as Sonic OC Universe, FanCharactersOfSonic and Sonic OC Riot collecting submissions3. The Sonic Fanon Wiki launched on June 6th, 2008, and accumulated more than 9,600 pages of fan lore and OC profiles over the next decade3.

No single creator invented the Sonic OC template. Instead, the format grew out of thousands of independent fan pages, sprite recolors, and character-creator tools like the Sonic Character Designer hosted on Newgrounds3. As of May 2017, a DeviantArt search for "sonic oc" returned over 129,000 results3.

How It Spread

Outside the fandom, Sonic OCs mostly spread as material for mockery. Forum games challenged players to google their name plus "the Hedgehog" and post the horrors that came back, and curator blogs on Tumblr archived the roughest DeviantArt submissions3. The most famous parody OC, Coldsteel the Hedgeheg, was posted to Twitter by user Laxoongarfl in May 2013 as a typo-riddled character sheet listing loves (Nine Inch Nails, death) and hates (his dad, happiness, Trent "Razner")1. Dramatic readings of the Coldsteel bio on YouTube pulled in over 100,000 views, and a fan-made E3 2014 trailer introduced him as a full character1.

Things escalated on May 16th, 2017, when GameSpot uploaded the trailer for Sonic Forces, revealing that the game would let players build their own custom hero from seven species including hedgehog, cat and bird2. Redditors on r/Games immediately tied the feature to years of OC culture3, while Twitter user @TheLazyShyGuy edited Coldsteel into the trailer, racking up more than 1,000 likes and 700 retweets within a day3. Polygon covered the reaction the same day under the headline "Sonic fans celebrate original characters, and memes, becoming canon in Sonic Forces"1.

The biggest single Sonic OC is arguably Sonichu, the Sonic-Pikachu hybrid webcomic created by Chris-Chan starting in 2000, which turned into its own long-running internet saga separate from mainstream Sonic fandom3. Coldsteel, meanwhile, kept a foothold as shorthand for edgelord OC parody, with the official Sonic Twitter account winking at the character in the runup to Sonic Forces1.

Timeline

1991

Sega releases Sonic the Hedgehog, introducing the character that fans would later spin into thousands of OCs.

2000

Christine Weston Chandler begins publishing Sonichu, a Sonic and Pikachu hybrid webcomic that becomes one of the most notorious Sonic OCs.

2008-06-06

The Sonic Fanon Wiki launches, eventually hosting more than 9,600 pages of fan lore.

2013-05

Twitter user Laxoongarfl posts the Coldsteel the Hedgeheg character sheet, which becomes the defining parody Sonic OC.

2014-06

A fan-made Coldsteel trailer for E3 2014 pushes the character into wider circulation, and dramatic readings on YouTube pass 100,000 views.

2017-05-16

GameSpot uploads the Sonic Forces custom-hero trailer; @TheLazyShyGuy edits Coldsteel into it, and Polygon publishes a piece on OCs going canon.

Frequently Asked Questions