Valentine Neopets
New sticker sheets in the shop. :>
Neopets introduced Valentine as a new paint brush color this year, a celebrated move among many (many) recent missteps. It’s a fun color, but I dunno why it took them like 20 years to get here lol. Halloween and Christmas were PB colors from basically the beginning.
They had Valentine plushies as game items in 2002, and added more every coupla years before stopping? There are some fun inconsistencies here. The first few years of them were “Valentines [Species] Plushie” plural, but then it changed to “Valentine [Species] Plushie” singular. After 2010 or so, they switched to doing a bunch more Valentines (plural) Petpet plush instead of pets.
In 2015, they added the Valentine Petpet Paint Brush officially, and so came some real Valentine (singular) Petpets. Overall the design aesthetic across the various plush and official Petpets has been pretty consistent (except this Quiggle), but that isn’t hard when you’re just throwing a bunch of hearts on them and making them pink?
Notably though, the design in the 2005 “Valentines Kadoatie Plushie” item doesn’t match the 2017 official Valentine Kadoatie, which also has a weirdly compressed and poor-quality official image:
After the Petpet Paint Brush came out, we got a few more Valentine (singular) regular pet plush. Are these going to end up being mismatched from the designs of eventual official pet designs? After the Valentine Paint Brush came out this year, they added some more Petpets too, and the Faellie design is different from the prior 2014 plush design, though it’s less big of a palette swap than the Kad:
The official Valentine Kacheek is pretty different from the 2005 plushie design:
I liked the plush design better tbh… but I don’t really like Kacheeks much overall so that’s why it isn’t on the sticker sheet. :’)
Anyway, there was no point to this except I think it’s funny to think about how many years and staff artists must have passed between these designs. It’s a mystery if they looked back at the old ones and consciously decided to make them different or not.