Hedgehogs

In Sonic Fanon, Hedgehogs are the main species, considering that they are the most common race seen in the games. They are used the most widely due to their versatility in comparison with their closest competitors, cats, foxes, rabbits and echidnas.
==Biology==
Scientific Classification	Scientific Classification
Kingdom 	Animalia
Phylum 	Chordata
Class 	Mammalia
Order 	Erinaceomorpha
Family 	Erinaceidae
Genus 	Erinaceus
===Physical Traits===
Due to Sonic the Hedgehog having these, large quills at the back and/or back of head are common in Sonic fanon. Because they are the mose common creature in the offical Sonic series (four members, Sonic, Amy, Shadow, and Silver), they are the most common creatures in Sonic fan characters.
== Sega, Archie and other ==
Sega created Sonic the Hedgehog, and at first, he was the only hedgehog in existence. Following him was Amy, the slightly crazy fangirl who followed him everywhere. Following them were Metal Sonic (a robot I'm not going to detail here due to him being a robot) and Shadow the Hedgehog: the ultimate lifeform and an amnesiac. The most recent addition to the list of hedgehogs is Silver: a time-traveling hedgehog with only one thing on his mind: kill the Iblis Trigger. Archie and the others took these four hedgehogs and started increasing the list of hedgehogs without a second thought. First came Breezie, a robotic hedgehog designed to make Sonic fall in love with her. Then Sonia and Manic: Sonic's siblings in Sonic Underground. Archie added his parents Jules and Bernice, as well as his Uncle Chuck and Amy's cousin Rob O' The Hedge. They also made the Anti-verse, in which resides Scourge (Anti-Sonic) and Rosy (Anti-Amy), as well as the Universal Highway and it's guardian: Zonic.
== Fanon ==
Instead of writing why I think everyone uses hedgehogs, I thought I'd let people edit at their own leisure why they like using hedgehogs. Feel free to add your opinion, but trolling answers will be removed. Also, please leave out comments about characters with the -hog suffix, i.e. Shadowhog, Darkhog, etc. There will be another page on that later.
Flashfire212: Well, from a fanfic writer's perspective, I can't really talk about why I use hedgehogs so much, considering I normally work with the children of Canon characters, and my main character is an echidna, so that stalls that out. However, as a spriter working with Tails a lot, I realized why spriters prefer cats and hedgehogs over echidnas, foxes and the rest, and even then they prefer hedgehogs to cats. They're versatile. For example, aside for the many thousands of fanon forms and characters around, there is Sonic, Shadow, Silver, Amy, Scourge, Super Sonic, Super Shadow, Super Silver, Super Amy, Super Scourge, Hyper Sonic, Ultra Sonic, Solar Sonic, Eco Sonic, some water based form of Sonic (it's on Sonic News Network) Darkspine Sonic, Excalibur-Sonic, Dark Sonic, Dark Super Sonic and Sonic the Werehog. Sure, not all of them have been sprited, but those that have, plus all the fanfiction hedgehog sprites out there, gives hedgehogs the most options for a base and the most options for modifications. If doing custom hair, then the hair can be as long and as big and weird looking as the spriter wants, without destroying the fact that they're still a hedgehog. By comparison, have you ever seen Tails with a tonne of hair? I have to do that for some of my Tails forms, and it's not pretty.
Grinder The Hedgehog: I'm a spriter, and my main character is a hedgehog. But why? Because you hear 'Sonic Fan Character' and you think 'HEDGEHOG!' just because it is Sonic. There are also SO many hedgehog sprites to edit, as mentioned above. And, also as above, you can give them LOADS of custom hair, and it doesn't wreck the fact they are a hedgehog. Plus, hedgehog's are the most basic, and usally what people go for when making their first fan character.
--Grinder The Hedgehog-HogdoukenStudios 09:49, September 5, 2009 (UTC)
Shima the Hedgehog: Even though my first fan character wasn't a fulll-fledged hedgehog, it had hedgehog haracteristics. Every other species doesn't have the ability to make the hair as weird, spikey, or long as you want. Examples? Echidnas. They all have dreadlocks, no matter what. Hedgehogs, to me, are the easiest characters to start out with, next being echidnas and cats. The main reason my charactre is a hedgehog is because, well, Sonic and Shadow are hedgehogs. They are also very easy to draw.
KP UC Incorperated: "Josh's Character is a Hedgehog who's name is Darkneon, however all of us had different characters. Fire-stripes with my Cory, Shahooter with me, Starclaw with my sister, and so on.. (Whilist the 30 years later characters are not dedicated to someone I know in Real Life.....) Still more characters come, it's just that characters from KP UC is based on Favorite Character and Color [mine being Blue and Owl, Cory's being Red and Tiger.]"
BloodSonic1: I use hedgehogs more than echidnas, foxes or cats coz 1: its easier coz you need a tail for a fox or a cat and in the case of the echidna, editting them is just too much work with the dreads. 2: I guess I want to make my character look like Sonic... im not too sure. There are things going on in my mind im not even aware of. 3: Some people are getting tired of seeing hedgehogs all the time, so i piss them off by making more. Yes, i like being against people. Its just fun getting people mad. Why i like making people mad is beyond me. Maybe i want to experience full aspie rage as me and my friends call it. 4: If you watch the series or play the games, you only ever see HEDGEHOGS use Chaos attacks. Sonic uses Chaos Control in SA2B, Shadow uses Chaos Control/Blast/Spear in almost EVERY game he's in and almost every episode. 5: Out of all the species, the hedgehogs also have the most forms, fanmade or otherwise. I mean, in all the series, Tails, Blaze and Knuckles are the only characters that aren't hedgehogs that have any extra forms (as far as I know) and even then, its not much! Come on. People seem to want there characters to have all those forms as well.
All in all, Hedgehogs are the biggest species ever.
Digipower22 To me, everyone will just get a pic of Sonic, put it on MS Paint, slap a new color on it, then be finished with it. What the flip are you people thinking? First, tons of hedgehogs flood YouTube, then DeviantART, and Sonic fan communities like this one. Sonic characters require hours of preparation and designing. Or else you'll end up like poor Matt the Hedgehog. I may be 10, but I've had many months of experience and research. I research to learn the design of a character's body or form. I listen to Sonic songs just about everyday. I have a lot of Sonic games, a few of them the most famous of all Sonic games. After all that research, I use those designs, tamper with them and use them on my characters. I have made many characters, such as Radar the Salamander, or Scorch the Weasel. I use a lot of desings for them, and they end up a success. Digipower out.
Guyviroth: I started drawing the Sonic cast when i was 8 years old, and have been drawing them in my own style since then. However, because the original cast only consisted of Sonic, a hedgehog, and Tails, a fox, as well as Eggman, my character would be based off od a Hedgehog, not because he's a hedgehog, but because of his overall personality and characters would not fit the body of a Fox, but more along the lines of an Echidna or Hedgehog. This is also coupled with the fact that I will not create a character if i cannot draw them; I wont let anyone else draw my characters for me, or even use tools like doll makers (which weren't around at that time, obviously) to make them, and i was only versatile at drawing hedgehogs. Summers would not come into fruition until when Sonic Adventure debuted, and from there remained a hedgehog for several years, and at one time, had a concept design as an Echidna, but this is just in the Sonic universe; there are tons of other parrallel Summers' made for different franchises; infact, Summers was originally a Saiyan, but that's a whole other story altogether. However, when Shadow was introduced, Summers was then seen as a mixture of Shadow's seriousness balanced with Sonic's happy-go-lucky and carefree attitude, and thus Summers sits between the two. However, a couple of years ago i began to practice drawing other species, like Cats, Foxes, Birds and even never-before seen species like Mice and Dragons, some of which you may find on here in the not so far-off future.
Phoenix_Saturn: I mainly use hedgehogs because they're quite versatile, plus they're pretty easy to draw. Before my 15th, I tended to shy away from using them because I wanted my characters to stand out, however, I no longer have that uncertainty in my work. Besides, I enjoy the challenge of creating hedgehogs that don't look like the main cast.
Hyper the Hedgehog: My first character actually wasn't a hedgehog. It was a fox, albeit a bad tails recolor. I didn't make my first hedgehog character(Hyper the Hedgehog) until later, and he was also a recolor. This was long ago, though, and I made characters of any species that was already present so I could easily recolor them. Needless to say, I had few hedgehog characters.
As of today, I have only two hedgehog characters, one of them still being Hyper, who has grown out of a recolor and has developed on his own. A lot of hedgehog characters I once had are now scrapped. About 5 of my hedgehog characters had been scrapped. I do not plan on making any more hedgehog characters, as they are far too common already.
Sunny the Hedgehog/CelestialSun I dont create hedgehog characters that much anymore, but I must say, they're just simple and easy to draw. They're fun and easy to create, and sure, they're overused, but lots of others agree that they're a great species to use for a first character. By making hedgehog characters, you get much practice in drawing the Sonic characters, and you can eventually move up to harder species' to draw (such as dragons, wolves, thylacines, ect.) You can also design your hedgehog character however you like. An example is drawing their spikes in a unique fashion and giving them a unique color scheme. I cant explain it much more.
E-113:Xi: Since the franchise in general is labeled Sonic the Hedgehog, the idea of hedgehogs is immediately placed in the heads of fans. When I began developing characters, even I got caught up in it with several hedgehogs including Topaz, Eclipse, Techno, Vendeta, Burst, Onix, Arc, Demon... to name a few. Lately I've been trying to change around some species in order to keep things differen, unique, however you want to put it. Whether or not it gets old, however, hedgehogs are an important part of the franchise so they just have to stay around. Other than that, they are easy to draw like everybody says. They're a great starting point and good to branch off from, in order to make characters into other species and develop them in any way possible. They may be incredibly overdone, but I'll never stop using them. I may even make another some day, just for nostalgia.
Feel free to add your own opinion
Lamp the hedgehog: Wow, this is my first time on a fan website
== Typical Traits and Abilities ==
Nearly all hedgehogs have the ability to curl into a ball in order to protect themselves from attack, using their sharp quills to fend off intruders. They can also pull off loose quills and throw them like darts. Some hedgehogs cannot really curl into a ball, and so they rely on other methods of attack.
Category:Species
Category:Hedgehogs
Category:Mammals
Category:Characters