The Male Hysteric

When I was little, I was obsessed with Sanrio. I mean I still love Sanrio but I used to, too. But much of the merchandise you find these days is pretty different than what you would find back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sanrio has two different product schemes, products they produce themselves versus selling the license to other retailers to produce goods with their characters. When I was a bit older I noticed they started selling Hello Kitty items at Target and Hot Topic and I thought they were fake, though really it's strange that I thought that way because it would be difficult for these large retailers to sell obvious bootlegs. However I was right that the quality of the merchandise is noticeably different, in that items that are licensed to Target, Hot Topic, and now Miniso, Joytop, Alibaba, etc seem to be lower quality than items produced directly from Sanrio... and also that at least where I am in the United States, items directly from Sanrio are somehow even more difficult to find than they were twenty years ago.

One of the trends of this licensing scheme has been to match up characters with specific colors in a way that the original merchandise did not and tends not to do. In this scheme, Hello Kitty is red/pink, My Melody is pink, Kuromi is purple, Cinnamoroll is blue, Pochacco is green, and Pompompurin is yellow. It used to be that it wasn't difficult to find, say, blue Hello Kitty merchandise, but finding a licensed blue Hello Kitty item is pretty much impossible and it's almost all licensed merchandise. Anyway, since 2015, Cinnamoroll has been in the top 3 of Sanrio's character rankings, and has won first 7 of those years, and it makes me wonder, is it because he's wildly popular and adorable, or... is it because everyone likes blue? He's cute, don't get me wrong, but also, he's not really playing fair if he's taken over the entire color blue, is he?

I dunno. I think my favorite is Chococat, probably because when I was like 8 years old and I first decided I was going to write a novel I started in a Chococat notebook. What's interesting about him though is that while he's consistently ranked highly in Western countries (#3 in the US!), he does poorly elsewhere, ranking 46 overall. I'm not really sure why that is? Possibly in the West a black cat character is seen as edgier and therefore more interesting, or maybe in Eastern countries they think he's just a Jiji knockoff.