Hana Hyperfixates

VIRTUAL DashCon 2026 | Simpli Events What is VirtualDash? Virtual DashCon 2, or "VirtualDash" is the digital home of DashCon 2, a full virtual convention with exclusive online-only panels, and VirtualDash–most importantly–brings DashCon ...

(2/2)
Tickets go live NOW (12 p.m. ET, March 1) but supplies will NOT last🎟️: simpli.events/e/virtualdas...
If you miss out on tickets, don't worry, tickets for Virtual Dashcon 2 are up tomorrow.

More info on Dashcon 2: dashcontwo.com

🥳🥳🥳BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!!🥳🥳🥳
I’m hosting a panel at DASHCON 2!🎉See me Sunday, Aug. 2, and hear me talk about Shadow the Hedgehog's gay lil mobile game skins (yes, including that cheetah print outfit).

Hope to see some of you there!! Link below!! (1/2)

YouTube video by Hana Hyperfixates Gravity Falls, 10 years later | What it gave me

NEW VIDEO!
(Or a couple of days old, but I had the flu and forgot to promote)
Maybe the real decade-long hyperfixation was the friends we made along the way: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUfD...

I did, and I also forgot to advertise on Bluesky lmaooo thanks for the reminder

thank you so much for shouting out this vid! Definitely one of my favorite projects ever.

YouTube video by Hana Hyperfixates Shadow the Hedgehog and the War on Terror | A Video Essay

A good year for Sonic the Hedgehog and personal reflections as @hanahyperfixates.bsky.social looks at how Shadow the Hedgehog (the game and possibly the hedgehog?) were shaped by the reaction to 9/11 and how this impacted them growing up Arab in that climate

thank you aaaaaaaaaaa

A dark gray bunny lies on a soft, white surface. Four different hands point towards it, creating a star shape.

Every few weeks we gotta make posts like this”call your dem reps to tell them to not vote to allow Lord Killdude to shove people into a volcano” and then the dem reps go “we’ve made an amazing deal where Lord Killdude can have his volcano so long as he promises not to shove people into it”

An illustration of Shadow the Hedgehog, looking up at a shattered full moon in a forest, surrounded by blue flowers. The sky is colored with nebulae and stars, and the perspective of the piece is a worm's eye view.

Things aren't always looking up for him. #ShadowTheHedgehog #SonicTheHedgehog

WAIT INCORPORATING THE DOOM WINGS INTO THE CAPE IS SO COOL, thanks for sharing this!!!

THIS IS RAD

Get in, losers. We're watching The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) to overanalyze the Halloween-event Sonic skin that has ruined my life.

This isn't just a deep dive. It's a love letter.
Link: youtu.be/7Z7AUfW4Ap8

She can't keep getting away with this.

Aw shucks! (Glad you enjoyed it!)

HEY HOLY SHIT
To celebrate 30K subs, I am planning a Q+A video (to come out at some point after a couple of other vids). If you have any behind-the-scenes questions for me, let me know below!

A review for a Little Caesar’s somewhere by Kevin S: Stopped into this Little Caesars just trying to get a $6 pizza and ended up in a full on action movie. Just as I grabbed my order, this furious dude barges in yelling about how I cut him off in traffic earlier. Before I can even respond, he throws a punch but then out of nowhere the guy behind the counter jumps over it like he's been waiting for this moment his whole life and just beats the living hell out of the guy. The guy ran off and the cashier just dusted himself off. I said "are you ok man" and he looked me dead in the eye and said "B*tch, this is Little Caesars. We always hot and ready." Five stars. Will absolutely return.

I AM SHRIEKING 💀🤣

Forget the statue at City Hall, this guy is the *real* Spirit of Detroit. 🫡

Hard to believe it's been a year already. The Book of Bill was the first new #GravityFalls book in 6 years. It was a long wait but so worth it. Summer 2024 was unforgettable and a chapter in this show's life I'm so grateful to have been here to not only see but be a part of. 🔺👁️

a digital painting of a bathroom mirror surrounded by rust-stained yellow tiles.

You live like this?
(Background illustration I've been tinkering with for a couple of days. Also, I do background art commissions: ko-fi.com/hanahyperfix...)

My husband brought my shadow plush to keep me company after my surgery (I had a massive kidney stone and my body is in hell)

He stole a TABLE Rev

This is a really good video!! I am impressed and a little concerned that this is one of the most evenhanded and sensitive discussions of American culture post-9/11 I've ever read including, like... Actual historical and anthropological analysis

digital fanart of sonic the hedgehog doing a midair split with one hand pointing at the viewer. he has a smile on his face, and the scene is depicted in shades of magenta and blue

anyways, happy birthday to sonic the hedgehog

Guys my next video is so fucking weird but I'm having so much fun

this is a fantastic video that i would recommend you watch even if you don't know a lot about sonic as a franchise tbh. loved every bit of it

Love that you made this. I was actually planning a video about the portrayal & relationship between disability/militarism in the Sonic series & you touch on many of the same points. Because of that, I have a bunch of additional context that can help give more support to your read of the games. Alien invasion plots functionally serve the same purpose that "weapons of mass destruction" did for the US. It constructs a simple situation in which the US military is framed on the defensive against an unambiguous evil & because of the enemy's overwhelming power justifies the escalation of weaponry surveillance. It's why a lot of propaganda isn't "the police/military can do no wrong" it's "they can do things that are bad but it's ultimately a necessary evil for the greater good." I would suggest "National Security Cinema" because it talks about the way that many of the films, including several of the ones you mentioned or referenced in this video are straight up military or government funded & influenced. It's not really a new thing as I'm sure you're aware. I'd even make the argument that SA2 is not anti-military. At worst, they're obstacles, but never framed as explicitly villainous even if I agree with you that they're the root cause. Looking at the game through a perspective of disability instead, the main conflict is set into motion by Gerald's insanity. The game relies on madness & constructs a disabled villain that ends up simplifying the narrative so that even though GUN is really responsible for this, the game instead relies on madness to explain why Gerald & by extension the biolizard are real threats. The biolizard is a disabled villain. The most obvious detail is that it wears a life support system, but in the context of the game it's imagined as an inherently violent, dangerous creature that also is symbolic of Gerald's grief & loss of sanity.

You can also look at cop/military movies in the 80s (that were also military & government funded/influenced) like say the Dirty Harry movies that were produced in reaction to military spending & the war on drugs in the early 1970s. In one of the later films they do a similar argument where any kind of questioning or attempts at critique to the police are undermined by the introduction of a mentally disabled & thus inherently violent & mad villain. In the war on terror, madness was one of the main ways they would help portray those labeled terrorists as evil. It wasn't just that we're dangerous but inherently irrational & thus must be contained & controlled. A lot of the author Jaspir Puar's work talks about this at length. So while it pains me to say, I think especially given how closely Shadow's character is tied to disability, that Sonic Adventure 2 focuses more on madness & saneism than anti-policing & military, which is how so much of the rest of the series can also be so sympathetic to GUN as an institution. It doesn't then surprise me that the Paramount Sonic films, (the same institution that donated a million dollars to Israel) not only had everything that went down in the trilogy films, but took the time to sit Knuckles down with a Krav Maga instructor, a FBI agent, & a cop to sympathize with them as people who train strong warriors. This comment is going way too long, but Knuckles & his racialization going back as far as the first Sonic Adventure game ends up contributing a lot to GUN's military sympathies in the series as well. The first Sonic Adventure is essentially the vanishing myth & changes the lore of the chaos emeralds like that. Specifically the game changes the context where the chaos emeralds are now seized resources of the US military from a race of Afro-Maya Echidna who are framed as having brought their own genocide on themselves and proving themselves irresponsible wielders of their resources that in SA2 are now held by the US military.

In short, a lot of these media are a lot less neutral when you consider the decades of military funding & influence in the industry that helps shape these narratives & how further blurred it becomes when multiple politicians at the time would openly reference Jack Bauers as if he's a real person. Your entire last section about the inherent suspicion toward Shadow also is something you might find valuable by reading the work of "The good Arab/Muslim" by Evelyn Alsultany. She writes about how a lot of propaganda media would use this trope where to counter the evil terrorist stereotype, they instead had a "good" Arab that still justified the inherent suspicion toward them like they did Shadow, but instead shows their sympathy is contingent on their serving the state. Shadow is still suspicious & that suspicion is framed as reasonable, but he can only express his heroism in serving the US military as a result. Alsultany would call it a simplified complex representation. I deeply appreciate you sharing your experience at the end. I hate how common it is–I grew up in a similar environment–but it still means a lot to hear it shared and talked about.

@hanahyperfixates.bsky.social

YouTube kept auto-deleting my comments. Thank you again for all the work and vulnerability you displayed in putting together a great discussion about Shadow the Hedgehog. I figured you might find it cool to have more lit that covers what you did.

(3) But thank you again for watching and for taking the time to write out such a great comment. I'm actually in the middle of your Sonic Prime video.

(2) ... source of conflict. (If I do call it anti-military in my vid, then I misspoke, oops). The conversation about disability is A VERY fascinating one, but admittedly outside of the wheelhouse of a vid like mine centering islamophobia. I look forward to anything you put out on the subject!...

Oh my gosh, i thought i saw this comment earlier but when i went to reply, it was gone! Thank you so much. I agree with everything here, and would like to clarify that I agree that SA2 isn't inherently anti-military, but COMPARED to SH05, it doesn't pussyfoot around the military being a (1)