#i know it ain't that deep but hearing things like they aren't a real cybunny or their name is bad/weird never sat right with me

[passionpluto]

so there's this census thing on neopets that attempts to calculate the most popular pets and it's always bothered me for some reason that i was never able to fully put my finger on until today. even as a child, i always felt like something was wrong about it.

i have a cybunny. she was created as a lenny but i used a morphing potion to turn her into a cybunny. i don't remember when, but i remember she's been a cybunny for way longer than she was ever a lenny. it took me five minutes to even remember what she used to be, because to me, what matters is that she is a cybunny. so case closed, baelia_1 is a cybunny.

except the census doesn't agree. according to the census, a cybunny can't be a cybunny unless it was always a cybunny. morphing or zapping it into one doesn't count. and "real" cybunnies are rare, only available one day out of the year. if you don't have the right birthday, the right origin story, it doesn't matter if you walk like a cybunny and quack like a cybunny, you aren't.

and you'll never be.

from a coding perspective, i get why the devs can't keep constant track of who gets morphed and who doesn't. it's an impossible task! but from a worldbuilding perspective, it shows how completely arbitrary censuses like this would be if everyone could change their form at will. the only reason it would matter in a world like neopets is if, say, a lenny could get a disease that a cybunny couldn't, so you'd need your doctor to know what species you were born as. but otherwise, no one gives a shit if you were alab (assigned lenny at birth) except for elitist assholes who think your way of being a cybunny puts their way of being a cybunny at risk!

and that's how neopets accidentally radicalized me at age 12 by making me wonder "who cares what some census says you are" and made me realize how ridiculous transphobia is by using pound chat logic!