Jeez, did I miss another day? Sorry about that — guess we’ll have to pull double duty again at some point. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe some other day. Time will tell. Again, apologies to anyone who spent yesterday waiting in vain!
SO, more repaints. Piper here is a repaint of Hamlin, the result of a role-switching experiment in which the part of the Pied Piper was instead played by a rat. As with most of the repaints we’ve seen thus far, this one is superior to the original, but here for a more interesting reason than usual: whereas Hamlin was your common black rat, Piper is an albino rat.
Considering that albino rats are frequently used in laboratory research, this suggests some intriguing possibilities for his origins. Perhaps Piper is a product of a scientific experiment intended to locate and manipulate a gene responsible for musical inclination but that also caused him to suffer several unexpected side effects… among them an altered physical structure and a taste for the flesh of human children. Or perhaps not. In any case, giant albino rats with beady red eyes look pretty darned creepy and freaky, so Piper lives up to the name of the line.
Ugh. We’ve wondered whether the repaints in this line constitute new characters or evolved incarnations of older ones before, but the ramifications of either origin are enough to make one gag in the case of Crusty the Snotman. He could be Frosty the Snotman after sitting out for a while, drying out a bit, and thus losing his formerly slimy (frosty?) texture — ugh — or he could be the brother of Frosty from a society of reproducing snot monsters — ugh again.
I’m not sure that it matters a whole lot, though. This is probably the least inspired repaint yet — Frosty is a deeper forest green, but otherwise the characters look almost identical — and honestly a snotman is pretty fucking gross regardless of his texture. Still, even though he’s theoretically crustier than Frosty, his disgusting impact has been softened a bit by our familiarity with that very similar Creepy Freak — which makes for a certain irony here.