Unpaintable Petpets
Neopets and Petpets (pets for your pet) can be "painted," typically using a magical Paint Brush (PB) that changes the pet(pet)'s physical appearance to varying degrees.
for the purpose of this project, each species of pet or petpet is considered a unique species -- but painted pets and petpets are considered morphs or breeds, even if there are significant anatomical variations between the colors. my logic is, if pets can move between PB colors throughout their lifespan, then there is likely no genetic difference between colors, or any genetic variation that does exist is mutable throughout the pet's lifetime. an Aisha can be Blue or Snot or Eventide, but it's still an Aisha, and "Aisha" is the species
that said, there are unpaintable petpets -- petpets that are ostensibly of the species of their overall line, except there is no way for them to become a different PB color OR for any other petpet of their kind to become the PB color they are.
for example,
the Checkered Cadro is an unpaintable petpet. it looks like this:
and here is a Blue Cadro
the Blue Cadro can be obtained by painting any paintable Cadro with a Blue Petpet Paint Brush. so you can take a Green Cadro, paint it Blue, and the item turns into a Blue Cadro.
(the "default" Cadro can also be obtained by taking a Cadro of any paintable color and painting it with a Yellow Petpet Paint Brush, so it is technically Yellow but simply called a Cadro)
HOWEVER, unlike the other Cadros, a Checkered Cadro can only be obtained as a Checkered Cadro -- no Cadro can be painted Checkered, and no Checkered Cadro can be painted at all
so, as far as this project goes, we'll consider unpaintable petpets to be their own species as well, as they are separate and distinct from all other petpets, and immutably so, even for petpets of the same name.
these petpets are usually obtained through special events -- for example, a Birthday line was released in honor of Neopets' 17th anniversary that can only be obtained from a goody bag. we'll have to go through each unpaintable petpet individually to determine whether their origins and appearance are grounds for them qualifying as species
I think we'll be starting with the unpaintable petpets that come from Trudy's Surprise, because there are some interesting things to discuss about what Trudy's Surprise even... is?
but yeah the next few specimens will be the default versions of the Trudy's Surprise petpets, so we can use those as a baseline for discussion of their unpaintable brethren, and the eventual Trudy's Surprise post can focus more on where Trudy's Surprise comes from and what that means for Kingdom and Habitat of these candidates
