What are Sweetshifters?
Sweetshifters are a magical species from outerspace. They have the ability to 'shift' between their natural, feral form—called a sweetling—and a humanoid form to blend in on earth. Some have completely integrated with human society, while others are only temporary visitors - but one things for certain, there's nothing they love more than sugar! So much so, that they travel to our planet just to have a taste.
They have much greater energy requirements than humans, so they need to take in as much sugar as possible to replenish it - but, because they're shapeshifters, their DNA is unstable and the sweets they eat effect their appearance. From their hair to their eyes to their clothes and more, different treats will change the way they look.
They're generally friendly and conflict averse. Their species is a peaceful one. Most of them just want to have fun and, of course, eat!
Noteable traits:
HUMANOIDS
Maintaining a humanoid form takes more energy and therefore more sugar. They can hide their ears, tails, and even antenna if necessary, but this is exhausting to do for long periods and therefore impractical.
SWEETLINGS
Sweetlings are soft, squishy, and fit in the palm of your hand like plush toys. In this form, they not only conserve energy by staying small, but they look cute while doing it, too!
MIRRORING
Because they're shapeshifters, they may take on traits resembling those they're close to, such as height or hair length. They don't notice they're doing this, so it's embarrassing to have pointed out.
IMPRINTING
Sweetshifters are social creatures that can make friends with ease, but most have one person they're closest to—typically whoever fed them first. They imprint onto them and seek them out when stressed.
COLORATION
Sweetshifters can come in any color! Their skin can be human or non-human tones, their hair can come in bright unnatural colors, and they can even have patterns and markings all over their body.
MUTATION
Sometimes, sweets corrupt their DNA, causing a body part to be replaced by sweets entirely—or just partially, changing the texture to something akin to syrup. This isn't common, nor does it hurt.
Anatomy of a Sweetshifter:
1.) Hair, eyes, and skin can be any color, including nonhuman.
2.) Dessert traits from all the sweets they eat, the look of which affects their unstable DNA.
3.) Animal ears & tail, usually but not always matching (IE, cat ears with a dog tail is perfectly acceptable)
4.) Alien antenna, can be any shape at the end. They have a slightly squishy, gummy texture and are incredibly sensitive. Crushing them between your fingers would be tantamount to torture.
5.) They don't have fingernails in their humanoid form OR paw pads in their sweetling form, but some may wear press-on nails or have colorful markings to emulate them.
6.) Optionally, they can have halo-like rings around their tail or other body parts which come in a variety of shapes.
Other information:
This original species concept was created by virtubear and weather. We're not too defensive of it - we don't own the concept of dessert designs or kemonomimis, this is just our spin on it. So...
Anyone can make their own Sweetshifter! There are no rare or off-limits traits, and you can theme them around any sweet or animal. Typically, they're only themed around a small number of sweets and just one animal, but you can do whatever you feel compelled to! We encourage creativity when designing your own - MYO tickets won't be necessary, and you don't need to ask for permission.
We use the term "semi-open" when describing them because there will be a masterlist for official adopts, additional perks to owning one, and we'd appreciate it if you didn't sell your own Sweetshifter adopts - you can design one for your friends, of course, but we'd like to do the adopt part ourselves! Please respect this. We're currently working on a way to make customizable adopts with an interactive element in their creation, and we're very excited about it.
But there will be free perks, too! We don't want to lock everything behind a paywall. (In fact we want to lock as few things behind one as possible, we'd just like compensation for our labor sometimes.) We have free to use bases for sweetling forms, and custom code for character profiles that anyone can use.
Ideally, we'd like to foster a friendly, creative, and active community! By making your own or buying an adopt, you can help us out and be a part of it. We'd like to have drawing prompts, host raffles, and maybe some other things... so hopefully that all works out!