Now that I’m going to school across the country from where I grew up, not very many people know this about me, but I had a huge Sonic the Hedgehog phase in middle school. I had all the games that were available on the Wii, which was the only console I had at the time (except Sonic and the Secret Rings, because that game sucked), I watched the Sonic X anime every Saturday morning for years (at 8 AM, no less!), and I even read the comics whenever I could get my hands on them. I still have a huge Sonic Colors poster on my bedroom door back home.
Is it embarrassing to talk about now? Of course, it is. I’m embarrassed about everything I did in middle school. (Except switching from violin to viola, that’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.)
But if there’s one thing about these games that still holds up, they have REALLY good music. And I have a Spotify playlist of just Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks that I still listen to while I’m doing homework or laundry or just walking to class. I’m actually listening to it while writing this article!
Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash
One song on that playlist is “Jungle Joyride (Night)” from Sonic Unleashed, which is a track I can honestly say changed my life. It jump-started my love for video game music that continues to this day, and it was one of the first video game songs that made me say “I want to do that!” and sent me on the path to being a music composition major. Plus, it’s just a beautiful song.
But that’s not all! A little more than a year ago, Penny “SnapCube” Parker posted a video on her YouTube channel called “Sonic Adventure 2 (Hero Story) | Real-Time Fandub Games.” I’m not going to link it here because it’s far too inappropriate for Her Campus, but it (and its successors, covering the Sonic Adventure 2 Dark Story and the entirety of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)) are some of the funniest and most quotable things I’ve ever seen. Would I appreciate it as thoroughly as I do now if I wasn’t a little #cringe in middle school? Probably not.
I’m starting to rediscover a lot of the things I liked in middle school and early high school, whether that’s because they’re coming back into the public eye again or just because I happened to stumble upon them, and honestly? There’s nothing bad about them.
Code Geass, the first anime I ever watched (besides the aforementioned Sonic X, which I watched without knowing what anime is), is on Netflix now and it’s still good. Haikyuu!! Is coming back in January after a three-year hiatus, and it’s also still good. YouTuber SiIvaGunner regularly posts mashups and memes of the music from all the video games I played growing up, and they’re hilarious. Brain Scratch Commentaries, my absolute favorite YouTube channel when I was in eighth/ninth grade, turned ten years old earlier this year, and going back this summer to catch up on all the videos I didn’t watch between then and now was an absolute joy.
Photo by Afif Kusuma on Unsplash
There’s this notion that once you “grow out” of something, you can’t go back to it and you have to feel like you’re going to melt into the ground from embarrassment every time they’re so much as mentioned in conversation, but sometimes, that’s just not true. Some of my more cringey interests from when I was growing up ended up leading me to some of my best friends, and there are always going to be fond memories right along with the borderline humiliating ones. And at the end of the day, being passionate about something that makes you happy is a good thing ninety-nine times out of a hundred, no matter how weird it may be.