This Week in Mascots: September 28, 2026

Every few months someone sends me a photo of a kid’s drawing of Mojo. The head is too big, the headband is on backwards, one arm is much longer than the other, and it is unmistakably him. I drew the first version fifteen years ago. The version that matters now is the one in a seven-year-old’s head. That is what a character becomes once it works. Not the file on my desk, but the picture other people keep of it.

All three things this week are about that picture and who gets to hold it. Meta made a character every user can redraw, so there is no shared picture at all. Balenciaga borrowed a character that already lives in millions of players’ heads and gave her a job title. And JR East is asking Tokyo to let go of a penguin it has touched to a ticket gate twice a day for 25 years.

Jolly has a job, and nothing else.

Meta launched Muse on September 8. It is a personal AI agent, so it books the flight and moves the meeting instead of telling you how. It comes with a character called Jolly. Jolly is the most neutrally designed character I have ever seen. It has no personality at all.

Alex Cornell, the product design lead on Muse, built it to answer a practical question: how do you show someone what an agent is doing in the background? That is a fine reason for a character to exist. The execution is where it falls apart.

I don’t like Jolly. The one thing it does well is that it has a job, and the job is working. A creature that shows you the agent is busy is more useful than a progress bar, and I will give it that.

Everything else is missing. Meta calls it completely customizable. You can rename it, redraw it and rewrite how it behaves. That makes Jolly an avatar for the user, not a character with a self. A character you can overwrite cannot hold a point of view, and it cannot be the same someone on two different phones. The shape is the other problem. That chunky, fuzzy, roly-poly silhouette is everywhere right now, from Apple’s little Finder guy to the Labubu half the press compared it to. Nothing about it says Meta. Advocacy groups have also pointed out that a character this soft is fronting an app that is adults only. Jolly is a cute default. When you want to be noticed or loved, default is the one thing a character should not be.

Axios on how Jolly came to be >

Ambassador, for twenty-five days.

On September 23, Balenciaga named Viper, a character from Riot Games’ shooter VALORANT, its first digital brand ambassador. The deal runs with the VALORANT world championship in Shanghai. There is a pop-up gaming café on Yongyuan Road from September 24 to October 18, and a pair of blue-light gaming glasses called NEO FOCUS that are only on sale while the café is open. Balenciaga dressed four Fortnite characters in 2021. Viper is Riot’s intellectual property in exactly the way those characters were Epic’s, so this is a licensing deal.

The word is what makes it worth talking about. Ambassador is the title Balenciaga gives to actors and musicians. Using it for a character is a luxury house saying, in public, that a drawing has enough of a self to stand in for a person. That is a real signal about where characters are going. Then they stopped. Viper is on the billboards in the glasses, and that is all she does. If this were mine I would push into it. She would show up, take press calls, be at the café in her own voice, and wear the glasses everywhere. There would be cosplayers on every corner of Shanghai for the tournament. On October 18 she goes back to Riot and Balenciaga keeps a pair of glasses. That is the deal they signed.

The longer version of this argument >

Please welcome the squirrel, the rabbit, or the one with the mole.

JR East is retiring the Suica Penguin, the face of Tokyo’s transit card since 2001, on March 31, 2027. It let the public choose the replacement from three candidates: a brown squirrel, a purple rabbit, and an orange creature with a tiny mole in a shoulder bag. Voting closed on September 23. The announcement did 134 million views on X in two days. A good share of the replies said the candidates looked like they were drawn over lunch. A fair few remembered 2018, when JR East asked the public to name a station and then chose Takanawa Gateway, which had come 130th with 36 votes. This time the company has promised in writing that the most votes wins. The winner is announced on November 18 and starts work on April 1.

An open contest gets you engagement, and 134 million views is a lot of it. The downside is that when you ask the public to choose, you also invite them to judge. Most of them looked at three new drawings and decided they preferred the penguin. What gets me is that JR East already had the material. The farewell campaign, Penguin Years, has limited events, merchandise and a handover ceremony. It is pretty huge on its own, and it would have been a great foundation for something else. If this were my character I would have developed the penguin instead of replacing it. Suica is becoming what the company calls a device for daily life. Let the penguin grow up with it. Give it a job in the app, a wider cast, and a new look if you need a launch moment. Keep the affection twenty-five years of commuters already have. A vote can tell you which of three strangers people mind least. It cannot move the penguin out of anyone’s head. On April 1 a lot of people in Tokyo are going to tap a squirrel to a gate and think about a bird.

Unseen Japan on why nobody trusts the vote >

I direct brand characters for companies and keep developing them for years. If you have a character that deserves more, talk to me.