LiveWire

If this catches on in the U.S., CAIR will probably throw a temper tantrum, since Gudetama is often portrayed resting with a “bacon blanket.”

Via WSJ:

Hello Kitty has long inspired the world with her uplifting cartoon cuteness. But when life is hard, inspiration can come from someone who just goes home and snuggles under a blanket of bacon.

So Kitty’s creator, Sanrio Co., now offers a downbeat role model in Gudetama, an egg yolk that doesn’t see life sunnyside-up.

“Can I go home now?” the yolk mutters and lies around moaning, “I don’t feel like doing anything.”

The defeatist cartoon character has been a surprise hit. Gudetama is a dark departure for Sanrio, whose Hello Kitty for more than four decades has charmed humans via lunchboxes, notebooks and thousands of other pieces of merchandise bearing her cheerful visage….

Gudetama (pronounced goo-deh-tah-mah) appears in television cartoons, typically lying on an egg-white bed under a bacon blanket.

“There’s something soothing about Gudetama,” says Chiharu Arai, a 35-year-old Tokyoite who favors the yolk over Hello Kitty, “and how it’s lazy, and how it doesn’t try too hard.”

A book published by Sanrio says Gudetama “has given up living in the competitive society because it is in despair” that, regardless of its talents, “its fate is to be just consumed.”

The yolk resembles a generation of youth, the book posits, who “live lackadaisically at their homes surfing the Web, in despair with the economic stagnation of the modern society, even though they are talented.”

Sanrio thinks Americans, too, might develop a taste for egg with a side of ennui. It has “a distinctive apathetic attitude which appeals to the U.S. market,” says David Marchi, a Sanrio executive in charge of marketing in the U.S., where Gudetama was introduced in November via goods like T-shirts and wristbands….

Unlike Hello Kitty, Gudetama directs its gaze away from the viewer. It hates work and is prone to moan, “I feel weary.”