About

Shadow Loves Latinas refers to a series of memes and fan art that imagine Sonic the Hedgehog character Shadow the Hedgehog being attracted to Latina women. Spawned by two TikTok animations in May 2023, the meme achieved virality online in August and September 2024.

Origin

On May 7th, 2023, TikTok^[1] user @tyller._ posted a fan animation of Sonic the Hedgehog character giving a shoutout to "all the latinas," with Shadow voiced by voice actor @odetari. The video (shown below) received over 5.9 million views and 771,000 likes in one year.

Shoutout to all the Latinas! The goth ones, the cowboy boot wearing ones, to crazy ones, I don't care. I see a Latina bitch with white or black toes, and I start acting like a damn dog.

Prior to May 18th, 2023, @tyller._ posted another animation based on the premise of Shadow being enamored by Latina women, with the character again voiced by @odetari. On May 18th, 2023, TikTok^[2] user @il.adonis reposted the video, with the reupload (shown below) gaining over 341,000 views and 19,000 likes in one year.

Spread

On July 4th, 2023, X^[3] user @KookieStar_22 posted an image of Shadow the Hedgehog captioned, "I just love Latinas, Sonic." The image macro (shown below) received over 1,100 reposts and 8,000 likes in one year.

On July 14th, 2023, voice actor Jehtt posted an edit of a scene from the Sonic Prime animated series based on the joke, with Sonic asking Shadow about the purpose of his trip to Mexico. The video (shown below) accumulated over 4.3 million views on YouTube^[4] and 3.1 million views on X^[5] / Twitter in one year.

The meme achieved significant popularity online in late August 2024 following the Brazilian Miku fan art trend, which imagined vocaloid Hatsune Miku as a Latina woman.

For example, on August 30th, 2024, X^[6] user @AbstractPurple posted an image of an imagined Discord interaction between the two that received over 24,000 reposts and 267,000 likes in one week (shown below).

The meme maintained viral popularity on X / Twitter in early September 2024.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References