THE CONTRADICTORY KIDDIFICATION OF SORBET SHARK COOKIE
Devsisters is lying to you.
Ok, bit of an exaggeration, but I'm not crazy, I promise. Hear me out.
This little thing. We've all been in love since we say them day 1 all the way back in the Tower Of Frozen Waves update for Ovenbreak, all the way back in 2020. After all, the design is pretty damn good and also cute, and they were a really fun character. And I love them too! Otherwise, this blog would not exist. But... A feeling has been creeping up on me. A slow realization, the makings of a weird conspiracy.
We take the fact that they're a child for granted. After all, how could they not be? Look at their size! The sheer cuteness factor! ... Not everything is as it seems. At least, it used not to be.
I realize most of Cookie Run's audience these days inhabits Kingdom, since it's a much more casual-friendly game and the one with the fancier degree of presentation. But, let's not forget, Sorbet wasn't introduced there. And they had not been called a child until Black Pearl Cookie came out. In fact... Let's look at everything one could examine for the possibility of Sorbet being a child before Cookie Run Kingdom came out, why don't we? Let's look at Ovenbreak, and Ovenbreak only.
1. Stature/Proportions
This is what immediately made people think Sorbet Shark is a child. They're incredibly short, and their limbs are stubby, as far as the land form goes. But... Come on, you can't get any more superficial than that. Let's look at 4 examples that deconstruct this notion.
A) Lychee Dragon Cookie: Stubby limbs, incredibly short. This CANNOT be a child, despite Mangosteen Cookie being a disguise used by Lychee, simply because... Look at them. This thing not only takes design cues from succubi, but also has similar abilities. Obviously removed from the more explicit connotations, but they're still there. There is no such thing as a kid-friendly succubus. B) Snow Sugar Cookie: Proportions are about the same as just about everyone else who isn't freakishly tall. Still a child, though, since they were featured in the Junior Cookie Challenge from the LINE game. C) Ice Juggler Cookie: Shockingly, not a child. Incredibly small, definitely has some behaviors that could be considered child-like; fooled me at first! Yet, according to the Lost Holiday event, she's not at all a kid, and outright denies it, and is presumably insulted by the fact Walnut Cookie might have thought she is one. D) Alchemist Cookie: I have seen... So much age discourse around this one over the years. So, so much. And yet, in all these years, with attention being called to cookie age a few times, she's never been included with the ones deemed children. She's just short. Incredibly short. In fact, about as short as Sorbet.
So, proportions are a no-go. Specially because once the shark form comes into play...
Woah there, when did you get so big?! In fact, looking at sprites, Shark form is about 2x as big as Sorbet's base form!
And... Hey look, the arms are a LOT longer too! In both sprite size and proportions between the two main renders! Hell, if you look at other known underwater cookies such as Lobster, Mocha Ray and Electric Eel, all adults, they're either perfectly on par or actually stubbier!
So... Not proportions. Then, maybe, ingame dialogue..?
2. Tower Of Frozen Waves
This is the only event Sorbet actually participates in as far as Ovenbreak goes, to my knowledge. So, let's look through it! Above is a link so that you can check the dialogue yourself if you so desire.
Okay, first scene and- HEY WHAT DO YOU HAVE THERE BUDDY
Ok, let's get something straight here. It's not stated that this is an alcoholic beverage. But come on. Sure buddy, pirates are totally gonna be partying with non-alcoholic beverages. And no, it's not "ohhh it's for kids they're not gonna have ACTUAL alcohol in there" because one, Vampire Cookie is constantly drunk off his ass, two...
We have literally seen cookies get drunk. Yes, this is from Kingdom, but this is about what the brand does and doesn't allow, so this is a good indicator (Besides, getting drunk isn't the worst when you have gotten somewhat comfortable with showing blood- er, strawberry jam.) There is no universe in which you could convince me that Sorbet isn't drinking totally-not-rhum here. Specially because everyone is drinking the same thing, out of what looks like a standard traditional beer mug. So either Pirate Cookie is encouraging underage drinking, or... Well, let's not get too caught up in that now. Let's keep going.
We meet Captain Ice Cookie, captain of a navy ship, who hunts down pirates and takes them into custody. Let's establish something now; Captain Ice Cookie is very, very motherly. It's a core component of her character. She let Peppermint on board simply because the kid thought her ship looked like a whale, and really wanted to get on it. A navy ship. Her weak spot for children seems to be something she can't really control, otherwise, she wouldn't be letting a child on a navy ship full of weapons used to hunt down pirates. Her nature is on display many, many times in various bits of text.
So, if she saw a child on a pirate ship, she would probably be concerned and ruthlessly berate Pirate Cookie for letting a child on board, right?
Nope. Absolutely not. Her soft spot for children is not even remotely on display here. Not for a second. And this endures through all of Tower Of Frozen Waves.
So either A) Sorbet IS a child, and Captain Ice is... Stupid, I guess? And couldn't recognize that? B) Sorbet is a child, but more importantly a pirate, and in Ice's eyes, any and all forms of basic human respect is something a pirate is not deserving of, no matter their age (Which, although funny, is... Absolutely batshit insane.) C) Sorbet wasn't written as a child during this event, at all.
The closest Captain Ice ever gets to showing any sort of concern for Sorbet is this moment, and even then...
For just about the entirety of the event, Peppermint is FREQUENTLY referred to as "little one" by Captain Ice, something Sorbet never once gets.
They're also a constant reason for Captain Ice to remind Peppermint to never trust a pirate, which would be... Really, really weird for her to insist upon if this was just a kid.
So, Sorbet and Peppermint go to Sugarteara, no one once addresses Sorbet as anything but an equal, or in any way imply that they could be a kid, they get Sea Fairy out of there, etc. Sorbet and Captain Ice never interact during the last few cutscenes. So not once, not even a single time, has Captain Ice demonstrated any sort of motherly nature towards Sorbet, not even the most basic one, past, you know, trying to get them not to die. Which is in her best interest, and probably part of her general moral compass. She only wants to arrest pirates, not kill them.
And... To my knowledge, Sorbet never gets any dialogue anywhere else in OB events or story bits! So... In the text, there's no implication as to Sorbet being a kid or at all young. They're just kind of inexperienced at being a pirate, because for most of their life, they were a shark, not a cookie. Speaking of...
Sorbet's Story card! This was later reused for Kingdom, which as we'll later see might have been a mistake, but either way... Phrasing here is very, very important. There might be hyperbole, but "Once upon a time" implies that this tale happened a decently long time ago, supported by the line "Saddened, the shark disappeared into the sea for ages.", which implies a decent chunk of passage of time. Not once is any indicator of youth ever stated here, and in fact, depending on your interpretation of the text, it's very easy to see the text indicating the exact opposite.
This isn't really related to Tower Of Frozen Waves specifically, but I felt it was worth noting.
3. Lightning round
Ok, this is just where I put miscellaneous things that may add to my point. Let's look at Sorbet's costumes real quick.
Pirate Overlord and Noctilucent Vigilante Apprentice!
One is Sorbet Shark in what's presumably the future, having made a name for themself as a Pirate Lord, commanding the seas and striking fear into those who hear their name. Pretty well decorated! Yet, despite the passage of time that would have taken place for Sorbet to get to this position, the proportions remain the same. They're even rocking some shiny black eyeshadow or something of the sort! Hmm... The other is Sorbet having joined Electric Eel Cookie's Noctilucent Vigilantes, a hypothetical group that cleans up trash from the oceans. It looks like a nightclub outfit. That's probably the point. They're even shirtless, and get an ear piercing. Would be real weird to do this with a child, not gonna lie.
Secondly, I wanna address something that probably furthered the notion that Sorbet Shark is a child.
On land, they're just about entirely non-verbal. People online seem to have... A bit of a problem, when it comes to even partially non-verbal characters. They're often babified, treated like children even if they're not. I've seen this happen countless times; non-verbal characters either get treated as "Ooooh so cool and mysterious" or "Awww babyyyy i wanna protect themmm" no matter the author's intent. Not a callout on anyone in particular, of course, but there's a pattern there.
Next, the concept art.
So... At some point, Sorbet was meant to be taller. And, although hard to tell, it's possible they may never have been intended to wear a shirt at all, just... Ever. If so, that would be really weird to put on a character meant to be a child from the start. Oh, and the shark form got slightly bigger between the concept phase and finalized design. Interesting, isn't it?
Now, for the crux of this whole thing. If you look at Ovenbreak, there is no proper, logical reason to believe Sorbet is a child. It's fine as a headcanon, it's whatever, but there's more to indicate that they're not one than there is for them being one.
And then the other game came out.
Kingdom has taken the series in... New directions. Some good, some bad, some... Interesting. Some blatant ripoffs of other more successful mobile games! Such as one with a 2-word title, with the initials GI, made by a company whose name ends in "hoyo". Either way, Kingdom makes... A lot of changes. A new backstory entirely for Dark Enchantress, the existence of kingdoms once implied to be left in complete ruin, etc.
I think you see where I'm going with this.
Eventually, Sorbet Shark came to Kingdom. There were no indicators of being a child, other than... Frankly, being woobified quite often by the characters around them. They kinda just existed to sit there and look cute and do absolutely nothing important. They save some people near the end offscreen, and that's about it. And, oh hey, costumes made their return, I wonder what Sorbet Shark g-
... Interesting. From Pirate Overlord to... Little sailor outfit. Quite the difference, right? Though it almost checks out, with how they were treated beforehand.
Oh yeah, Soda Islands also directly contradicts the Story card they reused from Ovenbreak. Fun!
They try to imply that Sorbet simply just went underwater for, idk, 20 minutes, and popped right back out as a cookie! Even though that makes no sense, as the Story card says that they disappeared for a long time.
And, to make things even more inconsistent...
Black Pearl. Buddy. You don't live in the Soda Islands. You live in the Duskgloom Sea. Hell, you have your own set of islands named after you. So either Sorbet went mach speed to the Duskgloom Sea, entered the cave, got the wish, and swum back to the Soda Islands, all in about an hour or so tops, or that makes absolutely no sense. Nonsense on top of nonsense! How incredibly fun!
You're seeing what I'm seeing right. Everything about Sorbet's age coheres in Ovenbreak, but then Kingdom... Yeah, it's a mess. Kingdom is trying to sell to you that Sorbet is a child, when plenty of information from Ovenbreak contradicts it; hell, it contradicts itself, since they reused the Story card from Ovenbreak, instead of making a new one that fit this canon. Said canon wouldn't even make sense if they did, since Sorbet would have had to make an incredibly fast trip from one sea to the other in order to participate in the Soda Islands story at all. And these two know each other! They have dialogue together! You can't even say Black Pearl is talking about someone else, because they have unique dialogue that calls back to this!
So... Here's what I'm trying to say;
Sorbet's current age is a retcon.
To those of you who don't know, a retcon is when a story makes an addition that either contradicts or alters pre-existing material. For example, Dark Enchantress actually being White Lily was a retcon. Not all retcons are bad! But if they contradict previous material enough, it becomes hard to take them seriously, and it calls into question the consistency and/or quality of the source material.
Sorbet Shark, by all accounts, is NOT implied at all to be a child in the source material, or at all young, is suddenly a child in Kingdom. And all the means used to imply that are direct contradictions of pre-established material.
But... Why? Why exactly would this be done?
Now's when the conspiracy theorist hats come on.
MONEY
I sincerely, thoroughly believe that the reason Sorbet was turned into a child with Kingdom despite previous contradictions, is because it made them more marketable. I'm not kidding. See, the thing that's made Sorbet so popular is their cuteness factor. The people at Devsisters knew this damn well. So here they have their new game, absolutely booming with players, full of opportunity for people to sink money into their favorite cookies. And that's not even accounting for possible merch revenue!
So, they have this character who sells well due to cuteness factor. Obviously, if they want it to sell even more, they need to do something. And so they did! They leaned into the cuteness factor as much as possible. That's like, their primary purpose now. They're only in shark form for about 2 cutscenes, and 1 small one that you need to find on the map itself. Most of the time they exist, it's in land form, the small, cute, marketable one. So they give them a cute little sailor outfit, and... Hm, what else could they do?
Well... People already see them as a child in the larger fanbase, right? And people find children cute! They want to hold and protect and care for them, and it instills that feeling of wanting to keep said child close to them. So...
Why not birth fanon into canon?
Many modern writers fall into this trap. After all, if the audience sees something a certain way, that must be because they prefer it that way. And if you wanna please an audience or sucker money out of them, why not change a character to be more the way they like? We've seen it happen countless, countless times in many pieces of media. Cinema, anime, comics, games, the works. As a Dragon Ball fan, I'd know! They turned my main man Goku into a complete bumbling idiot in Dragon Ball Super! He's never been book smart, sure, but he's experienced, has emotional tact, and can get really good reads on people. He's not stupid, just smart in his own way. Super just makes him an idiot. Because people kept making jokes and parodies where he's depicted as such, so Toei wanted in on the joke. And it backfired. Hard.
This, to me, is what happened to Sorbet. Much like Goku was turned into a complete idiot because the fanbase seemingly saw him that way, Sorbet was turned into a child because the fanbase largely saw them as one, and because it'd potentially help drive up sales related to the character.
This is all speculation, of course; you could argue endlessly about the why of the matter. But the fact is; Sorbet's age in Kingdom is, undeniably, as proven above;
A retcon.
... You know, assuming Kingdom and Ovenbreak are even the same timeline. Which, considering we've seen Gingerbrave escape from the Witch's Kitchen about 4 times now, all through different means and framed differently... Yeah, there's a good chance they're not really the same timeline anymore. So there's a possibility that OB Sorbet is not a child, while Kingdom Sorbet is a child, despite the designs and personalities (mostly design) being the same. So, either retcon, or split timelines. Pick your poison.
So, what I'm getting at is...
If you see Sorbet as not a child, and would prefer to keep it that way, you're damn well within your right. I know I never did, and I never liked the notion of them being one in the first place. Take it from me, an exhausted writer and (sort of?) fic creator, who loves overanalyzing media.
Peace out. Don't fight people over this little thing's age, because really, it's pointless.
Not even the creators of the character know what they're doing, after all.
See you all later.
