Neopets: Plummet From Grace or Just A Really Small Hop?

You don’t expect to get many genuine “death of my childhood” moments in your 20’s, or at least not often; the closest I’ve come was trying to cope with reboots of shows like Powerpuff Girls, My Little Pony, and even Sailor Moon (I’ll let Maya tell you all about Crystal). So when I read this article in Kernel  about the collapse of the Neopets empire you could say I was a little unprepared. I mean, Neopets can’t die. That’d be like our moon up and deciding, “Nah, bruh, f these tides, I’m gonna go chill at Mars’ place for a minute.” Before I delve into my virtual pet reality nostalgia, I should confess here that the only gaming console I grew up with was an Atari that my mother’s coworker bought her as a gag gift, and even that was played maybe twice. It’s easy to see then how Neopets served to fill the Gameboy/Playstation/whatever it was that kids my age were supposed to be playing in the late 90’s void in a way that constant trips to the library and artistic endeavors simply could not. I still remember sitting next to my mother as a third grader setting up my first and only account, struggling to come up with a password close enough to my AOL email that I’d remember it (RIP, Lauren4Spinach@aol.com). As mentioned above I was a bit of a MLP fan, so almost immediately I was attracted to the equestrian Neopets of Peophins, a kind of literal take on a seahorse, and Unis, which were basically pegacorns. Since my favorite color at the time was yellow, I decided my very first pet wou…