The all-consuming toy box that is Fortnite just saw the release of one of its more unexpected-but-nevertheless-hotly-anticipated collections of playthings in a long time. The FortniteX Kingdom Hearts collaboration sees Sora, Riku, Kairi, Roxas, and a slew of songs, keyblades, and goodies (the gummi ship!) from the series joining the hyper-popular shooter.
Ever since Fortnite’s first major crossover event, a Marvel collaboration featuring an Infinity Gauntlet item that players could battle over and use to transform into Thanos, the free-to-play juggernaut has become, essentially, a playground where users are encouraged to show off their toys to one another. Cosmetics, skins, items, and even areas of the map are added to pay homage to, well, everything. This completes the game’s playground vibe, to say nothing of the thousands of user-generated maps and games on the platform. You can have David Beckham doing the Miku Miku Beam dance while he’s getting headshotted by Dr. Doofenshmirtz wearing Air Force 1s.
This clip perfectly encapsulates Fortnite
Roxas dropping in with Tails, Kills Ben 10 with the Kingdom Key, Pulls out the Mega Buster, then Spin Dashes, and kills Jax from the Amazing Digital Circus, who spills out Sonic Rings https://t.co/wzTvi74D9q
— Justin (@Justin_Neagle) September 17, 2026
For some people who play and love Fortnite, this has more or less become the point of the game. The breadth of collaborations Epic is able to secure, from well-known to obscure, has changed the game from a battle royale shooter into a platform where the value proposition is, essentially, making Hank Hill do the “All I Want For Christmas is You” dance. I work in marketing and branding, so this shift has been particularly interesting to me because it is, from a branding perspective, fucked.
To say nothing of the fact that Hank Hill would neverdance like Mariah Carey,Fortnite’s collaborations with kid-friendly properties like Spongebob Squarepants, Disney’s Hercules, Phineas and Ferb, Ben 10, Ed, Edd, and Eddy, Scooby-Doo, and countless more add another wrinkle to this branding problem. If you’re a fan of Ben 10, how do you feel about Ben Tennyson using an actual gunthat shoots actual bullets?If you grew up with Spongebob,how do you feel about allowing Sandy Cheeks to beat an opponent to death with Plank?
There’s a clear dissonance here, and it’s only come further into focus with Fortnite’s “Override” event, a massive celebration of gaming writ large, with cameos and collaborations with Mega Man, Tetris, Pac-Man, and Kingdom Hearts.Right now, people on social media are having a field day shitposting about Kingdom Hearts 2’sKairi holding a shotgun. It’s funny, for sure, but if you’re a fan of the series, how do you square that image with the memories of the girl on your CRT offering Sora a paopu fruit? Or, as one X user put it, “what does this mean for the overall Kingdom Hearts lore when Roxas is dabbing on the organisation?”
what does this mean for the overall Kingdom Hearts lore when Roxas is dabbing on the organisation pic.twitter.com/lv4NBV9Cjs
— CloudfanStrife (@CloudfanStrife) September 17, 2026
To answer this question, we have to explore how artists build characters, and how marketers help make them iconic and instantly recognizable.
If you’re on YouTube regularly, the above image is likely familiar to you. It’s one of the famed “no-no sheets” from The Simpsons, essentially a style guide to help animators draw and write the characters consistently and in a way that is in line with their personalities. This guarantees that the characters always look and act the same even in times of staff turnover or changes in design from season to season. There are myriad rules for the Simpson family, and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iqdp77y_3c&ref=aftermath.site” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>video about this is a must-watch for anybody interested in the cement foundation upon which America’s most beloved animated family is built. If you haven’t seen it, the thesis of the video and of the sheets themselves is that it’s important to make sure these characters have consistent identities, because otherwise it’s hard for fans to connect with them.
I have been in the marketing, PR, and branding business for over 15 years. These rules are very relevant to me, and anybody else in the field, specifically because they are deeply intertwined with the rules and regulations I use to help brands build a consistent voice and identity. They’re as much character notes as they are marketing guidelines. And from the perspective of a marketer, they are often difficult to work around, as they severely limit what advertisers can do with characters.
While I’m using marketing-speak here, these rules can also be considered the pillars that make up any franchise’s “canon,” the intractable truths of the characters and the universes in which they reside. Anyone with an emotional attachment to media (so, presumably, you, if you’re an Aftermath subscriber) knows that stepping outside the canon necessarily makes characters feel less like themselves. And likewise, agency lifers know that, in much grosser words, breaking these rules ‘dilutes the IP.’ This is, at least in part, why Bill Watterson was so vehemently against licensing Calvin and Hobbes’ likenesses, saying to The Comics Journal’s Richard West in 1989, “The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it.”
Bart, Sonic, Mario, Sora, and Iron Man aren’t just characters. If we’re honest with ourselves, we should be able to admit that they never were. They are mascots, advertising icons, and brands unto themselves. But branding rules have changed a lot since the creation of those The Simpsonssheets. The simultaneous proliferation of AI, social media, and the massive success of unlikely brand collaborations have blurred the lines of how characters are portrayed, and how the characters’ brands portray themselves in turn.
The most galling example of this can be found in the 2025 version of the annual Coca-Cola holiday ad, a prestigious project for advertisers that not only gave us the iconic Coke Polar Bear mascots, but is also, arguably, responsible for our collective image of Santa Claus given the 1931 ads commissioned from Haddon Sundblom. For this reason, it is incredibly surprising that for the 2025 entry in this storied collection that branding freaks like me unfortunately care a lot about, Coca-Cola chose, for the second year in a row, to use generative AI. Beyond the moral issues with the technology, this is a nightmare for people who care about branding, as AI has trouble keeping visual elements consistent. Multiple times in the ad, as you can see in the image above, the Coke logo–arguably the most iconic, historic logo ever created–appears mangled and wrong.
This is the kind of thing people used to lose their jobs for, because in the world of branding and marketing, messing up like this risked making the brand less recognizable. If every other Coke logo you saw looked slightly different, how long would it take you to forget what the original looked like? Would you be able to instantly tell it apart from a competitor with similar branding? Would you continue to associate the logo, the brand, and the drink with that iconic polar bear, or would that bear in your head morph into an AI-generated monster?
I’ve previously written for Polygon about <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/31/20748490/nintendo-switch-iwata-lifestyle-legacy/?ref=aftermath.site” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Nintendo’s effort to become a lifestyle brand. The branding effort there is to associate Nintendo with fun, healthful and fulfilling activities. It’s an easy way to make people smile when they think about what is, at the end of the day, a faceless and monolithic brand. If other faceless and monolithic brands don’t keep that iron grip on their characters and how they act, those positive associations will be muddied and lost—a nightmare for marketers, and a slap in the face of fans who want the companies that own these characters to be good stewards of them.
This is the marketing equivalent of ludonarrative dissonance, and it forms cracks in the kinds of memories great art can leave you with. Now, when I think about Kairi, I don’t just think about a moving coming-of-age story. It’s been cheapened by her inclusion in a game that doesn’t fit her character.
This dissonance is most notable in Fortnite‘s Sonic the Hedgehogcollaboration. Once you get your Sonic skin, you’ll notice something… off. You’re not actually Sonic, or Knuckles, or Shadow.
All of the Sonic collaboration skins are canonically androids, created by Dr. Eggman and repurposed by Tails in a FortniteX Sonic collaboration comic.This stands in contrast to Tails’ appearance as a sidekick character; Tails gets to appear as himself because the player is not able to control sidekicks, so Tails can always appear on-model and on-brand. That’s not the case for the Sonic, Knuckles, and Shadow skins, of course. In an interview with IGN, Sonic Team’s Takashi Iizuka said that the reason was that “Sonic will never hold a gun.” In essence, this deft bit of canon manipulation is an attempt for SEGA to have it both ways. The android move allows SEGA to participate in a lucrative collaboration event, but simultaneously attempt to prevent any damage to its characters’ images that would result from them doing out-of-character things like shooting guns. SEGA has plenty of experience with the damage that kind of thing can cause to a brand, after all.
Likewise, you can zoom in on the Keyblade pickaxe skin and find that instead of that iconic Mickey Mouse charm dangling from the handle, there’s a Fortnite llama head instead. Despite Disney being okay with Hercules in the game, they and Square Enix appear to feel that having Mickey Mouse, or at least his logo, associated with this chaotic box of toys in this way is a, well, no-no, instead opting for a much less prominent placement in a design for vehicle wheels. (Aftermath reached out to Square Enix for more information, but did not hear back in time for publication.)
This could be why we have not seen any official Nintendo or Pokémon collaborations with Fortnite; these companies have an iron grip on their characters. They are notorious for shutting down free fan works, giving the Watterson-on-steroids justification that any non-official portrayal of these characters damages their identity. If that’s how they feel about fan games a couple thousand people play, it’s likely they feel even more strongly about their characters’ appearances in Fortnite,where they would necessarily be able to shoot guns, play songs, and perform every single emote ever added to the game, including the Stone Cold celebration where your character imitates the iconic turnbuckle beer chug.
As I wrote above, control over how characters are portrayed is integral to a company’s brand and how it is perceived. But in a game like Fortnite, players could essentially make those beloved characters do whatever they want in a public server of up to 100 people, through a near-endless combination of emotes, weapons, and voice chat. The value and potential damage a Fortnite collaboration can bring to a brand depends fully on the brand strategy of the collaborator involved. Nintendo, Nickelodeon, and Disney all have different brand considerations and strategies than Warframe and Borderlands do. If Wendy’s Twitter account and Denny’s Tumblr have taught us anything, it’s that there’s a lot to be gained from breaking through long-established brand restrictions and embracing chaos. But we’re a long way from the 2012 era of brands learning it’s okay to be horny on main. Hell, we’re a long way from the ritualistic killing and rebirth of Mr. Peanut. Seeing the Duolingo owl flirt with Dua Lipa doesn’t really read as clever or cute anymore, it reads as desperate. The same could be said for these Fortnite collaborations, especially in the case of more obscure collaborations like the newly added Screamer skin, Hiroshi Jackson. It was a great racing game, sure, but was anyone reallyasking for a Fortnitecollaboration? Conversely, the Mega Manand Spyrocollaborations seem purpose-built to spark a hype cycle for recently-announced games in their respective series.
If you care about these characters, if you care about the canon, either as a fan or as a marketer trying to find an audience, there’s a real drawback here. I love King of the Hill, but now, given my go-to Fortniteloadout, I’ll always kind of think of Hank as a Hatsune Miku fan who carries a magical girl scepter and wears Heelies. And as funny as it is, for me, it kind of sucks. The fourth wall has been shattered, and the character is being sold to me now as a literal skin, an empty shell for me to purchase and customize. The control no longer belongs to the people who gave birth to it, created its personality, and worked to make it iconic, it belongs to Epic, and is being used and sold specifically to get me to buy V-bucks. Something important dies in that process, no matter how much fun you’re having with your new toys. When these characters are hollowed out to become skins, it’s impossible not to think of that hollowed-out version whenever you see them outside of Fortniteas well. It’s the inevitable effect of having these characters sold back to you as, it must be said, an advertisement for something else–in this case, getting you onboarded into Fortniteand spending money.
It’s really striking to look back on those original Simpsons no-no sheets to view how seriously people took brand guidelines decades ago, whether they were animators, marketers, or brand managers. Nobody, whether their goal was to create art or market it, wanted to do anything that would make these characters less special and iconic, because the goal was for an audience to buy into the stories they were telling. Now, the goal is to sell our own nostalgia back to us at an inflated rate, warped and twisted and stripped of its original context and, indeed, meaning. After all, the entire Simpson family is playable in Fortnite.
