Sonic the Hedgehog is owned by Sega and Sonic Team.My highly introverted high school story, exactly as told word-for-word in the description for Shy Bi Hedgehog 2: Love, Sonic on June 9, 2020:Yep, we’ve now got a sequel to Shy Bi Hedgehog, which I released last October for National Coming Out Day (even though I already came out as bisexual almost exactly five years ago from today, and already revealed Sonic the Hedgehog [and Gumball Watterson from The Amazing World of Gumball] to be bi exactly four years later). And as you can probably guess, I based the title for this drawing off of the movie Love, Simon, which also revolved around an LGBT teenager. I wanted to make a sequel to that drawing as one of my LGBT Pride Month releases this year after I saw a drawing of Gumball dropping out of college by furikatsuma where he wrote a really long description describing why his college life was so terrible, which itself was written after his viewing of the episode Don’t You Fore-Get About Me from The Loud House. I happen to run a mega crossover fan group called Sonic-Gumball-FC that accepts Sonic and Gumball fan work and even fan works for other games and other cartoons that are related to those two (Sega, Cartoon Network, Atlus, [adult swim], Super Smash Bros. [and other games by Nintendo like Astral Chain and Eternal Darkess: Sanity’s Requiem], Warner Bros. Animation, just to name a few, all of which were added as I was inspired by fellow crossover fan group Somari-Kirby-Heaven), and looking at new submissions for that group was where I found that drawing he made and his college life story.The biggest difference between that drawing and this, outside of the IP usage, is the fact that this drawing is based on my high school life rather than my college life, because my college life was actually pretty good. I got to take classes based on set design, acting, graphic design, and creative writing, which all have at least something to do with my future goal of one day being an animator, and it was hands down the most social I’ve ever been in any school setting, getting to talk about favorite shows and movies (most of which is animated, but of course also live-action works like Back to the Future and Whose Line Is It Anyway?), and also video games as well like Pokémon and Sonic the Hedgehog. I even got to introduce most of the gamers I hung out with to Puyo Puyo around the same time Puyo Puyo Tetris finally got localized outside of Japan on the Nintendo Switch, and I was even considered the Puyo Puyo King there! :D That is a vastly, vastly different story from my high school life. I even left a comment on furikatsuma’s drawing saying that his feelings towards college is kind of similar to whenever I see someone tell a younger person that their high school years are going to be the best, most fun years of their lives. I cannot agree any less with any other educational life statement, and given the premise of the drawing above and that I was a teenager in the early 2010s, it actually isn’t very hard at all for anyone to guess that it’s mostly to do with the real life social anxiety I had that I’m about to go into right now.The only people I’d really talk to back then, outside of online friends obviously, were my family members (because of course), my closest friend ever Alley (who co-wrote my Sonic and My Little Pony fanfic Sonic the Hedgehog: Attack in Equestria! from December 2012 through April 2013), some of her best friends that we were in the same grade with, and some of the friends of my older brother that I was mostly with after a Wednesday in school was over (sometimes other days) when we’d be at our local Carl’s Jr. or our local comic shop where they’d often play stuff like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons (meanwhile I’d spend the entire day eating food I or my brother ordered [during our Carl’s Jr. days], reading Nintendo Power magazines and Sonic & Mega Man comic books I would store in my backpack, and playing my Nintendo 3DS and the DS/3DS games I’d always bring with it, and even watch episodes of Gumball that I used to record directly from the living room TV using the 3DS’s camera feature [yes, I actually did that, doing so with The Dress, The Picnic, The Party, The Ghost, The Refund, and The Pressure before I got a phone that I could watch stuff on]). And even then, I would rarely converse with people on my own terms because my anxiety levels were really high, a good chunk of it coming from my awful ex-stepfamily that I described in Have I Ever Told You? three-and-a-half years ago. My family would always assume that me being autistic was the major player in me not being very talkative, and although that did play some part in my anxiety given how well-known autistic people are for having more social difficulty than others, the biggest player was actually me being scared to come forward to anyone with the fact that I’m bisexual.This was before same-sex marriage was fully legalized here in the U.S. in 2015, having made this bit of self-discovery when I was 14 years old after having feelings for boys and also girls when I was 10 years old but not quite knowing what it meant or if it was even possible to have attraction to both of them. This is why I cannot agree with anyone who says that kids are too young to know what being straight, gay, bi, pan, or anything else means, and especially what being cisgender or transgender means; it would’ve saved pre-teen me from so much self-confusion, and acceptance would’ve saved me from so much anti-socialization and self-hatred. The social climate I was in where bullying into suicide among LGBT youth was tragically common (which even got punk rock band Rise Against to make a song called Make It Stop (September’s Children), which I will be basing an SMG-3000 drawing off of in remembrance ten years after the notorious September’s Children suicidal event that included gay teenagers like Tyler Clementi and Seth Walsh, among others) made me afraid to ever be fully open with myself, and I didn’t want to risk being one of the many kids who’d get bullied into suicide by the very people they trusted. This, of course, made other people talking to me first or an adult telling me I should talk to one or a few specific people the only times I’d ever really socialize back in those days, meanwhile the rest of my day would always be spent playing a lot of the video games I loved like Sonic Generations and LittleBigPlanet 2 and Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure, watching a lot of the shows I loved like Whose Line Is It Anyway? and The Amazing World of Gumball and Classic Game Room (yes, I’m counting YouTube shows), listening to a lot of the music I loved like Crush 40 and Linkin Park and Kenny Loggins, and also making fanfictions and drawings based on a lot of my interests.But then, the miracle finally happened; in 2015, when I was seventeen years old, I actually made the decision to finally come forward to my then-small Deviant Art audience and reveal that I’m bisexual! I did this when I posted a drawing of a rainbow-colored set of Kirbys that I drew ten days prior (I also could not have picked a better day to come forward as that just so happened to have been the exact day when same-sex marriage became legal across the entire U.S.), and after that, I would slowly but surely come forward to the closest friends and family members in my real life, and all across the board, I was welcomed with arms way more open than I had ever imagined! My mom even told me that she actually would’ve been a lot more mad at me if I hadn’t come out to her before dating anyone! Makes me especially glad that I came forward to her, the most accepting of everyone I came out to alongside my dad!And just like that, my anxiety levels were lowered drastically, as I’d become noticeably much more social, much more wanting to go to certain events, and I’d talk much more about other aspects of my life like my biggest entertainment interests (which I have of course talked about to others in real life before then and I obviously did online as well, but most certainly not to the extent that I would after). I was living the life I wish I had when I was younger, having so much fun with other people in real life about cartoons and video games and the like without any fear of receiving any homophobic or biphobic attacks from any single one of them! What I was doing almost exclusively with my online friends because I just so happened to want to share art and writings with people, I would finally get to do in real life! The Sonic Sez moral of this story: Acceptance is key to helping many others fight off their biggest fears in life, especially if they are LGBTQ+, have some sort of heavily unrightfully stigmatized disability like autism, or what have you! And the more they’re accepted sooner rather than later, the better off their lives will be in the long run! :D, Explore Nene's thrilling adventures in this captivating animated story on Newgrounds., We need you on the team, too. Support Newgrounds and get tons of perks for just $2.99!.