Are there canon rules about the world setting of neopets that forbid certain things to happen or appear in the site? I think I’ve never seen phones or cars
Or rules when creating the lore of neopets (example: no male faeries)
snarkie
Not a robot... probably.
Yup, of course! It’s a life saver when world-building, especially one as big as Neopia. We had several different “bibles” that dictated those rules, some for the World and some for the Site. (Because some things that existed on both were treated differently depending on which version you were talking about.) The bibles were updated constantly as we continuously built out Neopia. So yeah, you just gave perfect examples of some of those rules!
I can’t really list all of them for you. The bibles are hundreds of pages long! But I can tell you more about the two you mentioned and what they were when I worked there!
So, advanced technology could only exist on Virtupets/Kreludor/in space and even then it had to be of a Sci-Fi nature. So two-way communicators? Lunar rovers? Sure! Actual phones or cars, nope. (Ignore Nigel’s corvette and cell phone. *waves a hand*) Everywhere else had to have “medieval” or “pre-industrial” technology. (Neopia Central was an exception because Sponsors needed movie theatres.) The space tech definitely couldn’t leave Virtupets on the Site. You couldn’t have transporter device show up on the Roo Island map, for example. However, the tech could temporarily leave in World context (so like in a plot). So Sloth could maybe have brought a Transmog Ray down to Tyrannia to zap some Neopets for a storyline, but it couldn’t stay there. I’d have to return to Virtupets or be destroyed, etc.
For faeries, “Single-Gender Race” is a pretty common trope in fantasy and Neopets’ creators really liked fantasy. ? They were also based very heavily on elves. Tall, slender, pointy ears, very graceful, all that. In actual Neopets lore bible terms, the rule was that faeries were created, not born, so the species didn’t require multiple sexes to procreate. There’s just the one, and it’s “female”. So yup, no “males”. And it stayed like that. (But eventually there were things we wanted to do better at like gender role issues and different body types and more skin tones and other things, but the short version of the story is that we’d planned to flesh out a bunch of that stuff and go super deep into their lore in a plot after The Faeries’ Ruin—where we seeded the question of their very existence oohohhhhoho—but we didn’t get to it before JumpStart happened, sadly.)
Again, here’s a disclaimer that this is what it was and what we were planning when I worked there and that doesn’t mean it’s the same now. ?
Hope that helps. Thanks for your question, Bero! Stay safe!
Waaah! Thank you for answering Snarkie!! I’m happy of learning this new things!! I feel like I have to send a new question now. I know this is something you may not know of or that was developed after you no longer worked there.
The idea of a double subversion about the technology rule is really cool actually :p
Managing to question the existence of faeries or their purpose was a great thing…I hope the site can develop such aspects of the lore in a good way in the future ;w;