Hello Kitty: Gender Rescue

By Madeline Blondeau | July 28, 2023 | 10:56am

Video Games Features Hello Kitty

I can still smell wood chips. Manufactured cedar, kicked together with red clay dirt and pine straw. Me and the other kids are locked behind black bars—on the other side of us, a small stretch of Clairemont between Scott and North Decatur. A shady enclave of trees and houses in front of the Decatur YMCA playground I took my first licks on. And between the bars—a bright plastic pop of yellow and white, no bigger than my six-year-old hand. A cat in a bee suit from my friend’s Happy Meal. When you pull her string, her wings flutter.

I’ve never seen anything this good in my life.

My relationship with Hello Kitty starts here, in August 2000. It starts when I take the toy out of my own Happy Meal and realize that it’s a Beast Machines. Not a bee-cat, not a cat in a McDonald’s uniform—just a Beast Machine. I feel duped, and try to trade with my friend. But—very gravely, as if she’s disclosing government secrets—she says boys can’t play with the girls toy.

Grown adults in 2005 were very much in agreement. Hello Kitty: Roller Rescue was greeted with a fairly hostile reception when it came out that year, which is fair. That era saw the release of games that would go on to define both that generation and pave the way for the next. Games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Resident Evil 4, and God of War were the big, serious titles I was supposed to be interested in. Hello Kitty, Sonic, and Pac-Man were for babies with bad taste. Was I a baby with bad taste? That insecurity prompted me to hardline all the aforementioned games and then some, building a precarious identity around gory violent bullshit that made me feel nothing.

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That sense of self would—perhaps—be fuller if I was raised with Roller Rescue. If I didn’t feel conscripted into gritty, violent edge because those were “grown-up games,” this one could’ve been a positive and reinforcing playground for gender. It normalizes values worth internalizing, like self-sacrifice and the dangers of homogenized uniformity. The set-up is simple: Hello Kitty’s peaceful world is disrupted by Block-O, an evil alien who wants to turn the earth—along with everything in it—into a cube. Yes: the worst threat to the world of Sanrio isn’t climate death or genocide, but losing your roundness and being square. Fitting in and being convenient are evil; standing out and sticking to your convictions are paramount.

Further, cuteness isn’t limited to gender. Dear Daniel is as cute as My Melody is as cute as Keroppi. This is best engendered (heh) in Little Twin Stars, a pair of celestial infants whose infinite power is sort of terrifying. Kiki and Lala are functionally identical, from their mouths to their gowns. Their only dubious distinguishing sex characteristics are their hair lengths and color. You could be told Kiki is female or that Lala has no gender, and their designs don’t give you enough visual information to disagree. Boy, girl, agender celestial demi-gods… they are ultimately what you let them be. This is the virtue of Sanrio design, which doesn’t limit its male creatures to being stereotypical vectors for masculinity. As a virtual playground, it’s affirming and accepting. No kids in Stone Cold shirts to push you down and call you slurs.

Roller Rescue, too, is just a good game when revisited today. Held up to its contemporaries, it’s on the higher end of licensed mascot platformers thanks to some significant talent at the helm. Levels are straightforward and easily signposted for younger players, but multi-pathed and vertical enough to never bore. Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure lead Lancelot Chu displays a similar canniness for deceptively complex children’s game design here as he would later in his career. And lead artist April Hsu—who would later work on art for Darksiders II and Saints Row The Third—translates Sanrio’s distinctive aesthetic into 3D without sacrificing its hallmark simplicity. Taipei-based XPEC pulled together a small team for Roller Rescue, which was an all too common practice for kids’ games of this era. It’s a tight, consolidated burst of platforming that can be cleared in a handful of hours and doesn’t overstay its welcome. For the resources they were given, the work XPEC pulled off is impressive.

Adam Sessler (or Morgan Webb, I can’t remember) spent several on-air minutes stripping that work down for millions. Like most X-Play reviews, the assessment of Roller Rescue was myopic, simplistic, and guided by casual cruelty. “If you can’t go anywhere without your Chococat pencil case,” he (or she) ragged, “we’re sure you’ll manage to delude yourself into thinking it’s great.” The review—now seemingly lost on public platforms—was filled with similar reductive barbs that talked down to anyone that might enjoy it. Back then, I watched X-Play almost every single day. For a time, it shaped my tastes and perspectives—along with plenty of other shit-kicker tweens in the mid-aughts.

Wanting to have Sanrio stuff, as it turned out, was a little fruity. And even if I thought the game was fun, I’d only be “deluding myself”—a phrase that holds weight considering my family’s history of mental illness. These barbs from not only X-Play, but their contemporaries in that era of gaming press, made me feel a deep sense of shame for what I wanted. How I wanted to play, the ways I wanted to present myself, the type of things I wanted to own—they were wrong. When you’re an impressionable 11-year-old, this sort of hyperbole gets etched into you in ways that can take years to chisel out.

But chisel them out I did—into a path out of traditional masculinity. My mom gave me my first two Sanrio goods three years later: a Hello Kitty notebook and Kuromi coffee tumbler. Dad was baffled, but I used them all the time. Through high school, into college, I caught constant shit for liking Sanrio as much as I did. You know how teenage boys in the aughts were. (Maybe you don’t—lucky.) But like a good brat, oppression only made me want to resist harder. More notebooks. More cups. Then plushes. Dolls. Anything and everything you could put a Hello Kitty on, I did. My mom supported me the entire time. Until I found people who didn’t make fun of me for it and surrounded myself with them.

In that safety, I eventually found myself. Sanrio always spoke more to me than Barbie, Strawberry Shortcake, or Bratz because of that agender cuteness. It took almost half a decade on hormones to realize I didn’t want to be a woman. That “womanhood” is as alien to me as “manhood” is. Gender is not only a spectrum, but an aesthetic ideal. Ways that we give, take away, hide, reveal our truest selves. These selves are built around the divine masculine, feminine, or a mixture/rejection of the two. Over 450 creatures fill out Sanrio’s roster, and each brings some sort of challenge to the gender binary. Can a cloud of flour be a girl? Can an egg be a little guy? Can something be a cat and a person at once? Why not! There are no absolutes, only the claims we stake for ourselves. This is as true of mascots as it is us.

Certain corners of our house feel like Roller Rescue levels. Clusters and enclaves of Kitty, Melody, Daniel, scattered throughout. Some purchased at retail, others liberated from block-y Goodwill purgatory. A cloister of Kitties sits in front of me, in fact—just below my I Spit On Your Grave posters. There isn’t a single room in our home that doesn’t have Sanrio in it in some way, shape, or form. For all my pagan trappings and edgy taste in film, that will likely be all the case. In a way, filling a home with Sanrio goods is shrine work for me. Turning my inner sanctum into a tribute to omnigender cuteness.

Purified and unified under my matron Kitty—so mote it be.

Outside, I can smell mulch. The rose bush my girlfriend pruned on Monday. Pine trees in front, behind, above, around. A few houses down, our neighbor listens to right-wing talk radio again. Crows call down from above. There are no bars. If I want to follow a bird’s song, to trace the treeline, in a gown or a button-down? I can. My lack of gender doesn’t dictate my beauty or how I can present it to the world.

In my hand is Hello Kitty in a bee suit, purchased at long last from eBay last year. Twenty-three years later, she’s as bright and sweet as I remember. Her worn-down gears creak as I pull her string and finally—at last—let Kitty’s wings flap. She’s free. I am, too.

I’ve never felt anything this good in my life.

Madeline “Mads” Blondeau is a writer, editor, and podcaster. Their words can be found on Anime News Network, Anime Herald, and Anime Feminist. They have also been featured in [lock-on] and A Handheld History. You can follow them on Letterboxd, and support their writing on Substack; they’re also on BlueSky @ mads.haus and Twitter @ VHSVVitch.