Heh, I know what you mean, although it tends to go with a lot of animals too. For Halloween, they try to drum up the creepyness of the critter and add things like blood, canines and messed up looks.

I totally understand - I go plushie shopping this time of year, every year. Apparently bats have giant canines as well.

True enough! Maybe they have those little pointy teeth so you know that they're Lugosi-ish vampire bats?

Don't forget after Halloween you get to have all the winter holiday gunk with plenty of Nutcracker paraphenalia. One of my biggest peeves is they always portray the "Mouse King" (or rat king in some versions) as a prancy little bugger with a crown when the true definition of one is a mass or rodents whose tails have entertwined and congealed in a horrid manner. It should look closer to a hydra than what I find behind Burger King. >:(

An actual rat king would certainly be a very different character... and hard to choreograph. I'd go to see that!

(Points to you for knowing about rat kings, too.)

I think that would be an interesting idea for a sketch at a convention Masquerade - find as many rodent fursuiters as you can, join their tails together near their ends, and see if you can choreograph some dance steps that involve a lot of rotation around the point their tails meet.

(I imagine it would look something like the routines you often see in synchronised swimming competitions.)

I've always found the teeth that rodents have to be an exceptionally cute feature. To mistake them for canines does seem a bit amateur.

pretty soon "rat" will become a mythological concept, like "dragon"

Oh, yes. We rats have been building up to this for a long time. Too big to be contained in a single genus, we have grown larger than life!

Man your just like me. I go crazy for Halloween cause its like perfect fursuiter month. X3 Not to mention it means my birthday is just right around the corner from it. X3

I dunno... Ferris has incisors, big ears, and a segmented tail... I think that's already more on model than the Halloween props! :)

But I like the idea of a werewolfrat, too.

I bought a (realistic-looking) rubber rat a few years ago as a Halloween decoration for my office, and I decided to leave it in my office year-round as a joke - there's a mouse problem in the building, and I was hoping to scare people. I get more comments about the rat standing on my printer than anything else in my office. :)

Dragon-Rats? Dratgons?

Meanwhile, I guess it's time to start hunting down decor for my office's cubicle-row decorating contest.

"Drats"!