Neopian Fancruft Thread

[kittyray]

A few months back (when @(you need an account to see links) and I were working on the Default Petpage Project [(you need an account to see links)] [(you need an account to see links)]), I (we) came across the term (you need an account to see links):

Fancruft is a term sometimes used in Wikipedia to imply that a selection of content is of importance only to a small population of enthusiastic fans of the subject in question. The term is a neologism derived from the older hacker term cruft, describing obsolete code that accumulates in a program.

-Wikipedia

Despite the somewhat judgemental nature of the definition, I love it. I relish in the weird and obscure and inconsequential. I also love neopets. Love the merging of the two. My vision for this thread is to let it be a collection of things that aren't big enough to warrant their own thread, but still cool enough (even if just to one or two people) to want to share, particularly text-based information that would be out of place on a screenie thread (though I have no objections to images).

It's possible I am going to be the only person who cares about any of this, but if you have any fun facts or memories or stories related to any facet of neopets or is neopets-adjacent (including the cheating scene for you veterans), I'd love to hear about it. I'll take any crumbs you've got.

Please log in to view spoilers.

To start off for some inspiration, here are some archives of Neopets Wikipedia Talk section.
(you need an account to see links)
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(you need an account to see links)

[TsUNaMy WaVe]

Thanks for the interesting thread, kittyray!
I actually really like to lose myself in wiki-talk pages from time to time (especially the main ones, not necessarily page-specific ones), so those links are good meal for me
I haven't read everything yet but that talk about the extra founder is really intriguing~

[Da Plushee Boree]

I love (as i also love in pok�mon) to find the most specific real life elements that gave life to the concept (like, pikachu is a mouse or a rabbit? are wockies foxes or cats?), i like to search and search and find interesting things nothing related to the original topic! Like how the Halloween Kacheek looks like Frankenstein that also is a Gothic book making the halloween aspect of Halloween Kacheek a 10/10!

I'd love to find more random knowledge like this! Will check your awesome default petpage archives to see more refferences, i live for them haha
Also thanks for this thread !! What else will see the light here?!

[kittyray]

I've been digging around the wikipedia history and making liberal use of the internet archive, and i found this from the day conversion happened:

Neopets is now run by selfish dung-heads who can't take a hint, and whose only interest is money rather than the opinions of their most loyal fans. Once loved by millions who now detest them, we can only blame money and Viacom for the unpleasantness that now plagues the site.
Damn you, NPT.

(you need an account to see links)


[ID: Wikipedia Revision history log screenshot stating:
20:05, 26 April 2007‎ Bass fishing physicist talk contribs‎ m 44,136 bytes +29,401‎ Reverted 4 edits by Ukaisha identified as vandalism to last revision by Quatreryukami. using TW undo]

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(you need an account to see links)


[late edit: fixed link]

[Erik.]

So I've been philosophizing about characters on Neopets that are human, which is a really strange concept. Why do they exist? (I'm talking about IN Neo lore, Neopets.com is of course just a virtual pet site) Neopets has a lot of layers as a game: it is a tamagotchi site, where us owners have "pets" we have to take care of - and our pets occasionally refer to us as "owners", but not nearly all Neopets have owners, and there's the Neopets lore where owners/humans are (almost - I'll get to it) non-existent - Neopets behave like the dominant anthro species of their own world, with a shared language and a writing system, a shared history and sense of time (for example their categorizing of time into BN/AN (Before Neopia/After Neopia) and the known history from Prehistoric times (Tyrannia) to pharaohs (Coltzan) to Medieval times (Meridell/Darigan), to Gothic/early industrial times (Neovia), to modern times (Neopia) and perhaps into the future (Kreludor/Virtupets), human-like cultures (an "Asian" culture for example, but also a Steampunk one based on real world science-fiction), wars etc. They wear clothing (all though they do not have to - think of UC pets. On the other hand, most, if not all, Neopet characters in plots do wear some sort of clothing, which is very interesting. Would a Neopet that is clothed consider one that is not - naked? Would it be frowned upon? I guess Neopets have... sexual organs cause they can have kids (in plots) so would it be weird for Neopets with no fur to walk around naked? This warrants its own theorizing), they wear makeup. They have things like phones, TV etc. and they have their own pets. So, it would be fair to say that Neopets = the humans in their own world. They are not the only species, since there are magical creatures like the Esophagor and the Brain Tree, but those are not humanoid.

Which brings me to the 3 problematic issues with this. Getting to the one that's slightly less problematic first: Faeries.

Faeries are, at least on the Neo planet, humans with wings (some are mermaids: humans with fish tails). They can be tiny (bottled faeries), but they can also be "human sized", or at least sized larger than Neopets themselves:



Which seems weird in my opinion. Because if they are, also considering the fact they share the Neo language/written word with Neopets, and the fact that they are a lot more powerful, why are they not the dominant species on the planet? Yes, there's few of them, and there aren't actually any male faeries (I do not consider my bb Dr. Sloth to be one) (and perhaps this is the reason that TNT won't release any), so they can't (or won't at least) have offspring. But they know magic, so they could perhaps create more faeries through magic. And when you take all those bottled faeries in account there must be thousands of them. (not so fun side thought: why won't the "big" faeries help free their small counterparts? Do they not care? Is it because the big ones discriminate the small ones? In a way, bottled faeries are like slaves - imprisoned like an animal, until they give out their magic and only then are they released. I don't like this idea :/ ) So - why are faeries not in charge? Sure, you have Queen Fyora, and there are evil faeries that want to take over Neopia, or enslave Neopets, or demand ridiculously expensive items only to give out shit ones in return (except for the last item of course, but who ever reaches that one?) - looking at you Illusen and Jhudorah!, and there was Xandra, who was afraid faeries were getting too powerful and wanted to get rid of them. But Fyora is only queen of Faerieland, and faeries live peacefully besides a lot of powerful Neopets characters.
So they're not in charge, they don't have offspring, and they do not look like Neopets do (cause they're humans with wings): they must come from somewhere else. Where do they come from? (hold that thought)

The second problematic issue (but maybe tied in with the third one, I'll get to that!) is Dr. Sloth:



Dr. Sloth is a humanoid character, he looks like a man. But, his skin is green, he has no ears, weird hair (that sometimes looks more like spikes) and his eyes are red. He also smokes cigars:
- I kid you not. He is known to probably be even older than Neopets or faeries. His first cameo was during Neopets' first plot: the Arrival of Virtupets in 2000, when Dr. Sloth arrived from outer space with his space ship Virtupets to take over Neopia by imprisoning the Space Faerie and mutating Neopets. So again, we have a humanoid character that comes from outside Neopia. From where?

Now, lets look at the most problematic issue: humans. There have been, and there are humans in Neopia. Especially during the first years of the Neopets' site, there were dozens of them. Sacrificers was the first plot where humans were the main characters: The Neopets Team. It started only a few days after the Virtupets plot in 2000, and coincided largely with it. In this plot members of TNT were sacrificed to another human character - Mumbo Pango. The second plot that featured TNT was the Ski Lodge Mystery Murder, where again, TNT members were killed off.



And there have been other humans. The witch Edna (now a Zafara) was originally human:



and the Island Mystic:



and the Tombola Guy still is:



The Neopet Bruce was originally a human, namely Bruce Forsyth, and there was Macy Gray, but I don't really take those in account because they were obvious jokes and were changed rather quickly when Neopets.com became more popular. I'm also not taking TNT that serious - the only plots with them were in the beginning of Neopets, and apart from a few pages on them (Donna and Adam) TNT doesn't really exist in the Neo realm anymore, but only outside of it as developers, animators and creators of new content. But the other humans are a problem, because they are still in the lore, are still canon as it were. Were do they come from, lore-wise? I want to know.

There are a few possibilities. One is that humans, Dr. Sloth, and faeries come from outside of Neopia, from outer space or other realms. This fits in with Dr. Sloth (outer space) and faeries (other, "magic", realm). But I don't see the Tiki guy flying on a space ship to Neo planet. And considering that at the end of the day, Neopets.com is a virtual pet site, the second possibility makes more sense: Neopia is a virtual world, created by humans. It can a fictional universe, which is a universes that exists on its own, and is not influenced by the real world (so not like Tinkerbell - who fades away when people stop believing in her, but more like Middle Earth or an alternate reality universe like a world in which X-Men exist, or the Marvel world).

BUT, Neopia can't be a fictional universe, because fictional universes have a set of rules (created by Don Markstein, a comics historian):

1. If characters A and B have met, then they are in the same universe; if characters B and C have met, then, transitively, A and C are in the same universe.

2. Characters cannot be connected by real people — otherwise, it could be argued that Superman and the Fantastic Four were in the same universe, as Superman met John F. Kennedy, Kennedy met Neil Armstrong, and Armstrong met the Fantastic Four.

3. Characters cannot be connected by characters "that do not originate with the publisher" — otherwise it could be argued that Superman and the Fantastic Four were in the same universe, as both met Hercules.

4. Specific fictionalized versions of real people — for instance, the version of Jerry Lewis from DC Comics' The Adventures of Jerry Lewis, who was distinct from the real Jerry Lewis in that he had a housekeeper with magical powers — can be used as connections; this also applies to specific versions of public-domain fictional characters, such as Marvel Comics' version of Hercules or DC Comics' version of Robin Hood.

5. Characters are only considered to have met if they appeared together in a story; therefore, characters who simply appeared on the same front cover are not necessarily in the same universe.

Rule 4 is creating problems here. Because while the TNT members that got killed are obviously fictionalized versions of real people, there is not a sliver of evidence that the Tiki Guy, faeries and Dr. Sloth (yes he's green, so fictional, but there's no real world counterpart). So they are not the original habitants of the Neo world, they are not fictionalized real people, they came from outside, but they also come from outside the Neo universe, since there is no human planet in the Neo realm, or a Faerie one.

Which only leaves the second possibility - they entered the Neo universe from the real world. AKA Neopets is:





















-which is a disturbing discovery, but makes total sense unfortunately. Neopets is the Matrix, and the Neo realm is just a simulated reality, a world created out of coding, a fake world. It explains the faeries - because in a fake world there are no rules, and one can freely insert faeries or other ambiguously humans, as petpets for example (like Lil Frankie or like the April Fools new neopet species Hughman:


Dr. Sloth could also be a simply ambiguously human insert - but I have a cooler theory. One that ties in with the Tiki Guy, and early human forms of Edna, The Island Mystic and others too. I think, that maybe all these.... creatures, were real humans, that decided to leave the real world and enter the Neo matrix, either voluntarily or involuntarily. The Tiki guy simply wanted to live in a place where the sun always shines and where he can sell tacky shit way overpriced and wear a dumb mask all day long without getting judged and asked if it's a fetish. Edna wanted to be a witch. Mumbo Pango wanted to be a God. And Dr. Sloth.... These humans have slowly turned into Neopets over the years. Perhaps you become a Neopet if you simply live too long in the Neo realm. Like Persephone, who ate from the pomegranate in the underworld after being abducted by Hades, and had to stay there because mortals cannot eat from the food of the dead. Or like Pinnochio and the real kids who got turned into jackasses after succumbing to the curse of Pleasure Island.

...which leaves Dr. Sloth. I guess my thesis entry for this thread was really about him all along (makes sense, I'm a huge fan). But Sloth is neither a human nor a Neopet. Is he something in between? Is he still changing? Did he come here on his own to take over the Neo realm after he didn't succeed in the real one? Dr. Sloth, who looks so misplaced in the Neo realm, whose villainy looks more like a role he's playing. Who also likes to "play"/imitate faeries. Or was the reason much darker, and was he perhaps punished for his real life doings? Punished to become a virtual prisoner, to be reduced to a single blip in a desert of coding. Or is it a test, some sort of purgatory, a way to redeem himself before he can pass on to the next life? (not really succeeding though Sloth!) Does he enjoy being here, or does he no longer remember being a real human being? Do the others? More importantly - can they ever come back?

And how do we enter?

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Thanks for reading! Wow this turned out waaaaaaay bigger than I thought. I was originally just brainstorming about humans but it ended up into a fully grown theory about Dr. Sloth and the existence of the Neo universe. I want to know how you guys feel about humans in Neopia?

[kittyray]

@(you need an account to see links)!

Wow, what a read. Definitely appreciate all the thought that went into that.

Funnily enough, if you dig around the site I linked earlier, there's another Neopets-Matrix comparison. Definitely a weird one, but I like weird.

What could these two things have in common? They are representative of the same thing. The code on the right is the text equivalent on the thing on the left, pixels of color, which is what a "baby paint brush" is . . . pixels of color, generated from computer code.

Neopets items aren't real. They are just bits and bytes of data, created, and stored on computers in Los Angeles, California. You don't "own" them, why? Because they aren't really there to begin with.

(you need an account to see links)




ALSO
Did you know they weren't originally opposed to male faeries? Or at least faeries that used he/him pronouns?

21st June [2000]
New Competition! Can you design a new faerie? He or she can be of any design you wish. You just need to send us you ideas including a pic and what powers or special abilities they will have. Send your entries to (you need an account to see links). You don't need to be a brilliant artist as long as the idea is there. The most imaginitive entry will be chosen as the winner and will be the next faerie to be discovered on Neopia.

[(you need an account to see links)]

[Erik.]

@(you need an account to see links)!

Wow, what a read. Definitely appreciate all the thought that went into that.

Funnily enough, if you dig around the site I linked earlier, there's another Neopets-Matrix comparison. Definitely a weird one, but I like weird.

(you need an account to see links)




ALSO
Did you know they weren't originally opposed to male faeries? Or at least faeries that used he/him pronouns?


[(you need an account to see links)]

Yeah I saw some male faerie designs while writing my piece! I also vaguely remember a very ugly male "faerie" with blue eyes and a huge nose, kinda looked like Quasimodo - I think it was a Advent Calendar character or prize perhaps but I can't recall the name and I also can't find it... annoying

Edit: oh lol I found it. Was an April fools joke:

[Nyanobyte]

This is a bit obscure, but I think it fits into the fancruft territory!

Found this during the Halloween season, and unfortunately have not had time to dig in as much as I'd of liked. The Neopets AC theme is in a movie!
Or maybe the movies musical choice is in the AC theme? Anyway, it was trippy because it was one of those things that catches you totally off guard.
I had to rewind it and make sure that I was hearing it correctly.

Its called WNUF Halloween Special, it was on Shudder streaming service, but im not sure if its still there as I don't have access to it right now.


This has led to a brief search for other music on Neopets used in other places!
So far nothing has turned up, but again I haven't been able to really deep dive into it.

[kittyray]

@(you need an account to see links) neat! It makes sense that they use stock sounds and royalty free stuff, but still interesting to see things in the wild!

[Da Plushee Boree]

Thanks for reading! Wow this turned out waaaaaaay bigger than I thought. I was originally just brainstorming about humans but it ended up into a fully grown theory about Dr. Sloth and the existence of the Neo universe. I want to know how you guys feel about humans in Neopia?

I'm so amazed by this theory and feel brave enough to dig deeper and deeper!
Came here because i'm pretty interested, not only in the real concept, but also in Neopia evolution, out of humans, your specialty, also a curious aspect of Neo Life.

I remembered i read something (you need an account to see links)

As fas as it is known in Neopia in that article, Sloth comes from some place and tried to create mutants using the poisonous cloud that covered Neopia, then a ray of light brought life forms, first a Scorchio; what if the ray of light are the faeries coming into Neopia in a crusade to heal the poisonous gases?; it looks like a very small group of them arrived (honestly, i think only the ones with names) and as time passed new smaller faeries arrived / were born. The article says something about 2000 years passed, maybe monster like life forms, as Esophagor, Brain Tree or Terask, even the Claymaker that seems to be humaoid too, are ancient creatures/humans into a neohuman stage of mutation due to the poisonous gases and faerie magic. I can't find real neopian human's origins, still, both options are accepted in contests, the 'owners' way, and the 'world ruled by antrho pets' way.

That makes me wonder... are free pets better than pet pets? Is like when Goofy interacts with Pluto? Maybe humanoid pets are more advanced in evolution than the pet pets, and are selective in their evolution so they move from place to place? This is because we can say that Tyrania is a prehistoric land, but it occurs at the same time with Meridel and Virtupets; it reminds me of the native sanctuary of Brave New World or Shingeki's Paradis; they're stuck in time due to intelligence, genetics or resources limitations (that i doubt since they leave all in the same world without walls).

So as pets population grows, instead of changing the comunity they live on, the new more-evolved offspring travels. This might explain, also, why Tyrania doesn't have caveman politics, but instead a tribal hierarchy, same as Mystic Island; and why the Governor in Krawk Island acts as a democratical king kind of governor, same with Darigan; specially 'cos even if we can say that darigan and pirate pets are chaotic, anyone can say that some darigan species looks way more dumb (Korbat) and way more inteligent (Kougra) than pirate pets, that have a pretty static characterization; that also makes me wonder - back to evolution - if pirate, desert, christmas, royal, are just jobs or social status, and can be separated than full body changes, like water, darigan and faerie; are food pets edible? If a jelly pet stays too long under the sun it melts? If a water pet visits Terror Mountain it freezes? Is the brain and other organs affected by the changes? Do chocolate pets have meat hearts? Are transparent and invisible pets blind?

My heart's beating fast