Iâm not a fan of this trend of pairing kawaii characters such as Hello Kitty or those from Animal Crossing and fandom characters with left-wing political slogans (e.g., ACAB, trans rights, BLM, anti-ICE). It looks like a superficial virtue signal used mostly to follow popular social media trends and aesthetics before moving on to the next topic. Itâs even more cringeworthy when they use slogans such as âeat the rich,â because Animal Crossing and Hello Kitty belong to Nintendo and Sanrio, respectively, both multibillion dollar companies.
This isnât a new phenomenon, either. âHello Kitty ACABâ edits were already being written about back in 2020, and people were calling the trend out as performative even then.
The interesting part is that combining the image of mass consumerism with social commentary is far from being new. In avant-garde political and art movements like the Situationist International or even Pop Art, they reappropriated the symbols of consumer culture and turned them against itself, a concept called âdĂ©tournement.â But this trend is none of that. The original point of dĂ©tournement was to subvert. Here itâs just using kawaii characters as a way of making complex social problems and political ideas look âaestheticâ and palatable for social media, a way of saying âIâm such a great personâ before moving onto whatever gets you the most likes and followers.
You could argue that putting a protest sign in a mascotâs hands is "subversive," but the mascot stays cute and on-brand, so nothing is actually disrupted. There is no subversion of the corporate image, itâs just a multibillion dollar character (Hello Kitty's value is roughly worth $80-89 billion) holding an âeat the richâ sign. The Situationists had a word for this: recuperation), when subversive imagery gets absorbed back into the system it was meant to attack. Sanrio loses nothing, and it may even gain from the association.
You can see this in how interchangeable the format is: swap out the text and the same Hello Kitty works for âeat the rich,â âBLM,â or âcops ainât cute.â In 2020, it was BLM, in 2026, itâs ICE. The slogan changes, but the template always stays the same.
To be clear, Iâm not against BLM, trans rights, or any of these causes, or that you can somehow not enjoy a popular intellectual property while disliking the rich and wealth inequality. My issue is with the format. Turning serious issues into a cute and shareable aesthetic pretty much trivializes them. The people most affected, like Black Americans facing police brutality and transgender people fighting for their rights in many US states, the UK, etc., get their struggles repackaged into something "cute" and easy to scroll past. It makes the issue more palatable for people who donât have to deal with it, and it lets sharing a pink Hello Kitty edit feel like doing something rather than... I don't know, taking real action? Even just a small monthly donation could make all the difference.