Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Huggles- I understand the "they're our pets" argument, I was only responding directly to the post above me...! The degree to which one loses oneself in Neopia varies from person to person, and so I doubt there's a way to please everyone all at once; some people would be royally miffed to see humans showing up in Neopia, whilst others would be thrilled. Some see their pets as subservient, well, pets, while others- like myself- see them as their "babies" of sorts, or even fully acknowledge the distinction ebtween the website and the lore therein involving anthros.

I'm going in circles, I think I should probably break off from this.
-C

What Huggles said. Like I've said a couple times in this thread, I think of the Neopets in plots as being like Disney's Robin Hood fox and living in a world where there are no humans (besides the humanoid faeries and that Tombola man, of course). They're playing the parts humans would play if it was a real-life-type plot. What bothers me are the anthro pets we can own -- mostly the Royal pets, many of which are standing upright, wearing elaborate outfits, and have basically human bodies, with human-esque elbows and knees and whatnot.



Pets like pirates are more in line with what I like to see: they're wearing clothes, but they still look like normal Neopets; they don't look like humans in fur suits. The Halloween pets and some of the Royals also fit this category, because they're still posing and looking like a normal pet.



I definitely think there's room for the two styles on the site: anthro pets in plots, as the stars of some games, and on the trading cards; and normal pets we can own. I just don't like when the two get mixed up.

That's my beef. All of the lore therein excludes the part about Neopets I love the most and for no singular apparent reason why. I bring it up again and again, but if Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, etc. can have humans running around without total anarchy, then why not Neopets? Put the shoe on the other foot, would people who see their pets as anthro only even blink if Neopets didn't draw them that way? Aside from Royals and a few colors like the Halloween lupe, none of the pets we can own are drawn in that manner yet there's tons of people who see their pets that way. Throw me a bone or something. Call it the magical anthro faerie blessing or something and it'll make my brain happy.

There we go Cranberry.

I think after a couple hours in the Ragefire Chasm my brain has taken a leave of absence.

I will end my part in this debate by saying that there needs to be more jubjubs in everything. More armless, legless, boddyless, furrballs in every part of Neopia. Maybe their own world or at least a nice day spa.

Another short note: to the people who think of their Neopets not as actual pets, but as "companions" or "babies," I understand that. But the site itself makes it pretty clear that we are pet owners. On the front page of the site, it says "with your help, we have built a community of over 70 million virtual pet owners across the world!" On quick ref, it says "here you can see all the Neopets you own." So I've always thought of my Neopets as just that -- pets I can own, albeit ones with enough intelligence to talk and man my shop.

(It would be nice if someone would explain why some pets, even in a specific paintbrush category, are anthro while some are not. Why is the royal eyrie basically a man while the royal uni is a horse? Is the eyrie somehow more evolved? Wouldn't it be weird to own one man in a griffin suit and one horse? Yes, I know I'm taking this too seriously, but I like a little bit of sense in my stories, and every time I see an anthro royal -- or a snot, ice, clay, sketch, sponge or jelly pet, for that matter -- it kind of knocks me out of the illusion, if you know what I mean.)

Hmm, I can honestly say that to the greater extent the anthro/pet (what's the opposite of anthro? quadrupeds? no idea, hehe) divide does not bother me.

What does bother me a little is how far the anthro goes, for example I love this little guy and gal:


Who are both quite obviously anthro, walking on two legs and wearing clothes. But at the same time they're still quite cartoon like. Still anthro though and I like that there are pets like that for people to have who like a more anthro style of pet/companion. If I don't want an anthro pet then I'll choose one of the many more pet like creatures. A nice choice for everyone. Unlike the royal eyrie somewhere above that looks like a human with a bird head, not so cool

In plots too I like seeing robin hood style creatures sword fighting and killing usuls. Okay that last part may be wishful thinking but hey x) What I'm not so keen on is needless anthropomorphism in other places on the site, like in caption contests. If those CCs feature already anthro pets then fine, if they give a wocky a shirt and trousers and he stands on two legs? That's still within the realms of possibility so it's still fine to me. This thing though:
Ick!

I don't mind stuff like Mipsy, Talinia, Velm and Rohan. Mipsy isn't wearing a wonderbra nor is she wearing a mini skirt and Rohan doesn't have bulging biceps walking around topless so that's fine. Something for everyone. But I'd really rather neopets didn't cater for the people who want big boobs on their pets or characters the same species as their pets, or give them rippling muscles or crash diets. Because I'm fairly sure those people don't exist and if they are then they're kinda in the minority I would think. Having cute cuddly pets is fine, giving them very adult attributes doesn't sit well with me.

I don't mind the mix of anthro and quadrupeds, it is after all not a real world and I would HATE for humans to be a part of it unless it was done very complexly as would a fair amount of people so I can see why that hasn't been implemented (I like each user being able to use their imagination as to where they come in rather than having their role dictated and that I imagine would take a lot of work). But show me a wocky in a mini skirt with boobs and I'm outta here

Faeries, IMHO, should be the closest thing we have to "humans" on the site. I don't think I'd want to see people on the site, interacting with the pets. Whether there are male faeries is, as Shroomy pointed out (and I've thought myself) could be a dicey thing given the sense of "humor" some members on the site have. Obvious one? Queen Fyora = Michael Jackson.

Anthro pets. Well, for plots I would think it would be necessary to have those pets be much more than our "normal" pets. Otherwise you'd be seeing pirates holding swords in their teeth trying to battle each other.

I do agree that our pets (I call them my pets, my kids, my companions ... I'm their "mom", I like that more than owner but then I don't feel like I own my rl pets) are sentient to a point. That they can "talk", give opinions "Yuck, I'm not eating one of those!", and enjoy playing games (a shame on side accounts when you get the RE about playing kacheek seek or something -- I sit there talking to the screen saying sorry to them). I do have to say here that with many of the recent redraws there is a conflict. Alot of the redraws/revamped pets are just too cutesy/kiddie looking (obviously I don't like that too much, but being a minority - an adult, well we are not being catered to in this regard). Which only makes the anthro/plot pets and faeries really stand out as being so different.

Some of the anthro pets have been around for awhile, the aisha Sisters on Krawk Island, etc. The site's not just for kids. I understand that. Some of the drawings do go a bit far. When you see boards with people saying Illusen's "hot", etc., well ...

As I said earlier, I don't like how many anthro pets there are in the BC. I do respect the amount of work that goes into drawing them and many are quite good if not excellent. But sometimes it's just too much.

At the end of the day though, I think there are bigger issues to deal with than whether a pet is drawn with some human-like features/abilities.

Like people being frozen because someone else cheated and either sold or gave that person an item (and the recipient being unaware that the sender/seller IS cheating -- that is if they actually even are).

That the T&C is still way too vague. Otherwise there wouldn't be the same questions and many different answers to those questions all the time on the boards. And we wouldn't have to worry quite so much about being frozen for something we didn't know or were given wrong information from Support (because they don't know).

The fact that AOL is completely blocking Neopets IP, thus stopping anyone using that ISP from being able to get their password or communicate with support or even get a notice that their pets are leaving the neolodge. And that it looks like something that could be easily fixed.

The weird glitches in the premium referral page/referral prize page that are causing people to lose referrals, find that they have the same prize again (and no, most people aren't clicking on the prize again).

The games glitches that cause people to be frozen for cheating on flash games -- the games that have been around a long time and Neopets knows there's a problem with them or doesn't take peoples' computer speed into consideration.

Multiple players sharing a Computer (not accounts, just a computer) being frozen for multi'ing. Heaven forbid people sharing a computer should send an item to a family or household member. Great, let's punish people for not being able to have a separate computer/IP for each person in their household.

Well, I certainly agree that there are more important issues on the site than anthro pets. Unless my Aisha is revamped to walk on two legs, of course...

Again, I don't object to anthro art in general, even sexy anthro art. (Although I do prefer more animal-like anthro art to art that basically looks like a human with cat ears.)

While Neo may be fantasy, even fantasy needs to be internally consistent. Like I said before: when some Aishas walk on all fours and basically look like cats, and other Aishas have hair and breasts and basically look like a woman (note they're always women) with 4 sets of ears, that's not internally consistent.

Characters that are just a bit anthro, that basically look like my pets would look if they stood on their hind legs, I don't obtect to so much (like Kass or the NQ II characters.) That may just be because I personally prefer that style of art, though.

So in the shower I had an epiphany while cleaning my ears. Wait, don't go! It's good. Bgryph explains my problems much better than I ever could, but I'll try to at least give you some sense of my frustration.

An apple is not an orange. Everyone can pretty much agree that while they're both fruit they aren't the same thing. A potato isn't the same as a chainsaw. You could try really hard to chop down a tree with one, but you're probably not getting very far. That's not to say potatoes aren't great in their own right. I'm pretty sure we can also agree that kikos aren't the same as lupes. I don't like either, but I'm fairly certain that if every other color for lupes was replaced with a kiko people would complain. An aisha walking on four legs isn't the same as an aisha walking on two with breasts wearing a wig. The message I get from TNT and many other people is that they are while it seems fairly obvious that you can look at each one and see that they aren't. You can't smother a chainsaw in ketchup and say it's giant french fry. I'm just not buying it. They're not the same, yet TNT treats them if they are.

Neopets has to make money. If male faeries showed up in Neopia, chances are they'd lose some younger players due to parents getting upset, older players who feel it's inappropriate, etc. And I don't blame Neopets--you don't go there because of your moral or sociopolitical(okay, I just had to slip that word in here because it's awesome) opinions, and really, I don't think there's any reason to make Neopets controversial.



Because then you run into a hierarchy problem--humans can "own" neopets, so if human characters start running around Neopia, you have the question, do these humans you see "own" the pets in plots? Our pets aren't supposed to be quite human enough to live like we would if they were left on their own, but anthro pets are. Someone's pet Aisha, if released "into the wilds" or whatever, would live like a cat would. An anthro Aisha, however, hangs out in places like Neopia Central and eats at MacDonalds.


I think Neopets is sort of confused as to what they're trying to do now. As long as OUR pets remain non-anthro(which that Royal Eyrie does raise some questions, not to mention it makes me think of me of those weird people who dress up their dogs and teach them to walk on their hind legs, toilet-train their cats, and other generally odd/unnatural things), I don't particularly mind if the characters in plots wear clothes and develop breasts--if the clothes cover the breasts, I'm happy.

The explanation my mind has come up with to get around having anthro and non-anthro pets is, somewhere along the line Sloth got ahold of a radiation gun and used it on a bunch of pets, who morphed into anthros. That's why the Sloth plot got cancelled--TNT found they liked the end result

I don't think those are problems that couldn't easily be explained. If Neocolours was up I could point you to the thread, but there's plenty of ways you can come up with why some Neopets choose to hang around people and have "owners". I'trying not to get too hung up on the term because my problem would still exist if we were called trainers or gaurdians. For me at least, the term owner is as much as a misnomer as species. If we really did have Neopets species, then they wouldn't be able to to have children of another species. In this next plot, I'm betting that the aisha princess's parents aren't both aisha and I'm pretty darn sure that a moehog like Morguss couldn't have an the Aisha court dancer as her daughter if they were different species in the true sense of the word. Like species, I take it for granted that we aren't owners in the literal sense of the word.

I like that the owners are never actually acknowledged in the "universe" or neopets, and I grew to like the lack of humans over time, though I prefer the human Edna.

And really, there's nothing wrong with making the faeries "sexy". I don't think being that thin is even remotely sexy, but humanoid fairies in mythology are described as thin too.

Male Faeries . . .

<img src="http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/Lorcanwolf/greyelf.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">
<img src="http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/Lorcanwolf/Link.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

Ta-da! I don't think that they look gay, unless you squint or something. And these are sexier:

<img src="http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/Lorcanwolf/259_darkfaerie.gif" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">
<img src="http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y37/Lorcanwolf/cookingpotkeeper.gif" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

I *hated* Treasure Planet. The dreadful animation and plotline made me cringe. Please don't tell me that you want Neopets to look like the worst of Disney! And yes, I do find Mrs. Piggy frightening

I think you guys are just thinking about it too hard. :P

There's a reason the images are suffixed "baby" - at one point, the original intent of the site was to let your pets age and 'grow up'. That's not really feasible now with how big Neopets has gotten, but like Moongewl said, what about all the pets that aren't "owned"? It helps I think if you a) don't think about it so hard :P and b) think of it more as a sponsorship thing; your pets are your gateway into the world of Neopia, which has its own lore and its own stories. Whether the more anthro pets are actually older, or it's just a style choice, the point I think is that it lets you tell stories in a lot more detail. You're taking care of your pets and interacting with Neopia that way, but with the plots you're really experiencing that action first-hand, and it's a lot easier to relate to the characters if they can express a higher level of 'human' emotion. :] I know that I don't try to draw the pets more or less anthro - they're just given the right amount of character and emotion to tell the story properly.

How can Tomos hold a scimitar without a thumb? How can JubJubs hold a sword at all? :P Like Shroomy said, there's no reason the art styles can't co-exist, and I think we try to stick to that.

And Huggles: You're spending too long in Ragefire Chasm! Get out and on to Wailing Caverns already! :P

I've always thought of my pets more as children then pets. And it seems, in some ways, like TNT considers them that way, too. After all, the image urls all say something like lupe_blue_baby or something, and my Shoyru plushie sounds more like a cute little kid than a pet. So I'd tend to agree with Huggles' assessment, that the word 'owner' should be taken with a grain of salt.

So, I don't mind anthro all that much. But, it seems to be going farther and farther each plot...

Think of the Brucey B. plot- most of the Neopets they chose to be as stars/cameos stood on two legs to begin with (or didn't stand on legs at all, but weren't changed much), and weren't overly anthropomorphized. Princess Fernypoo was the notable exeption, but she didn't seem to go beyond what our Royal Acaras do (and which don't seem to be as much of a problem).

Then, you have Champions of Meridell. That's where a larger number of anthros come in- Jeran, Lisha, (though, Aishas have a large tendency to be anthropomorphized even in their 'pet' forms, like the Red Aisha card) Skarl, and Darigan (though, he was quite far from a normal Korbat anyway) were examples of this, though there was still an attempt to use two-legged Neopets- Kayla (Zafara), Boris (Blumaroo), and Morris (Quiggle, though arguable), Master Vex, Galgarrath, and all the Draik Guards were all examples of this. The characters who were anthropomorphized also walked digitigrade when it was logical (for example, Jeran), which seems preferrable.

Battle for Meridell had an entirely anthro cast, though they did keep the digitigrade characters, and as the leads, as well (Jeran and Kass). Even the Court Dancer (who sparked 'how can they do that?!' reactions from a lot of people) didn't have the type of figure that most of their current anthros do, and in the Darigan crowd scenes, TNT did a good job of making characters obviously female without anything in that regard. Clothes were still just a fashion accessory, and that wasn't really a problem- several characters went around wearing only a shirt, and Jeran's armor in several recent Caption Contests (p. 445 and p. 477) would be problematic otherwise.

Hannah and the Ice Caves gets rid of the digitigrade element entirely (I can't really blame TNT for that... digitigrade seems harder to draw.) Though, there have been recent digitigrade characters (Pirate Helmswoman comes to mind), most main characters since the beginning of HatIC have been plantigrade. And that's where the anthros start changing from pets that can stand and wield swords to people in fursuits, at least in my opinion.

The change in the anthros for Curse of Maraqua is summed up by the Ships Cook. And that's all I really need to say about that.

Even the BfM characters are more anthro than our pets should be, though... because like people said, the idea of owning (or even taking care of like a child) a pet like a Royal Eyrie/ Royalgirl Aisha doesn't quite seem right. It would be kind of like owning Jeran or Kass (though, I suppose, there would be some who would like that option...) They just don't fit in, even if you assume that we're taking care of our pets because they're young, and not because they're semi-intellegent animals. Royal Eyries/ Royalgirl Aishas look to be far too old for that, simply due to proportions.

So, the Lupe Close Attack pose/ Royal Acaras are about as far as anthro should be taken, when it comes to our pets. Plots should stay at the BfM level; a little farther is fine, though I don't want any more Ships Cooks and Aishas like the Caption Contest one.


As for male faeries, we already have one... the Happiness Faerie. And really, the name alone makes the 'male faerie' jokes even more obvious. So I really don't see the problem with having a faerie that just happens to be a guy. Especially if he's the opposite of what the jokes would say. Even Nickelodeon does that (that musclebound Fairly Odd Parents fairy...). Not to say I want one like that...not at all.

I can see both sides of the argument... one one hand, Neopets are supposed to be "pets" owned by us... but on the other hand, that would make it near impossible to create a plot.

For this, I offer a solution... plots that directly involve the owners (well, somewhat). Say, Dr. Sloth is trying to kidnap all the Neopets, or a mad scientist is trying to use the Lab Ray to turn random pets in Neopia into different types or colors. Each would have their own army of Neopets, and we wouldn't have to see any anthros. If anything, new and unique Anthro-Pets can be create to play the enemies.

I also would like to see something mentioned in the thread... kind of a reversion to primordial Neopian mindsets, when the Neopets weren't all domesticized (is that a word?). Packs of Lupe, a Kougra stalking a Meerca, etc.