Meanies

Meanies
First appearance:	LittleBigPlanet 2 (2011)
Latest appearance:	LittleBigPlanet 2 Move Pack (2011)

“	Ha ha! Your stupid friends are dead meat and dead...calendars!	„
— Sackbot Meanie, "Full Metal Rabbit"

The meanies are evil, gelatinous creatures, and the main antagonistic faction of LittleBigPlanet 2, serving under the Negativitron and acting as its main offensive force during its attack on Craftworld.

History

LittleBigPlanet 2

A Sackbot meanie in the Cosmos.

The Meanies made their first and only true appearance in LittleBigPlanet 2, where they were dispatched across Craftworld following the Negativitron's arrival. Due to their widespread, reproductive, and possessive nature, the Meanies were quickly able to cause destruction to LittleBigPlanet's creations, while bringing madness to those they infected. As the Alliance attempts to fight back against the Meanies, they are continuously outpaced by the Negativitron as the Meanies possess and mutate the Sackbot army, flood the Factory Of A Better Tomorrow, besiege Avalonia, and nearly burn down Eve's Asylum, where those infected by the Meanies had previously been looked after. Creator curator and inventor Dr. Herbert Higginbotham falls victim to a Meanie infection, and Sackboy ventures inside Dr. Higginbotham's body to clear the hordes inhabiting his body.

During the finale of LittleBigPlanet 2, the Meanies make their last stand in their home world on the Negativitron's surface. Possessing machines, Sackbots, and weaponry stolen away from Craftworld, they launch an all-out attack on the Alliance to impede their progress towards the Negativitron's heart. With the heart's destruction, the Meanies are vanquished, and their attacks on Craftworld cease.

LittleBigPlanet 2 Move Pack

Though most of the Meanies were destroyed by the Alliance following the Negativitron's destruction, a cake-like Meanie leftover in Victoria's Laboratory is kept in a glass jar sometime after the events of LittleBigPlanet 2. While testing out an experimental brain crane device, the Meanie knocked itself into the testing field, fusing with the device and growing to a massive size, birthing the Cakeling.

Development

The Meanies date back to the earliest known prototypes for LittleBigPlanet 2 and its story, where they were then referred to as the Popovs. While visually similar to the Meanies, the Popovs took on a more consistent look as tendril-like beings with bulbous heads, beady white eyes, and black eyelashes. The Popovs served relatively the same role as the Meanies in LittleBigPlanet 2's plot, acting as the main antagonist, albeit with some major differences. In certain revisions of LittleBigPlanet 2's storyline, the Popovs were meant to work under Avalon Centrifuge, who at that point was the primary antagonist in place of the Negativitron. The Popovs would have resided inside the Negativitron's predecessor, the Sucker, where their home world would have comprised LittleBigPlanet 2's final theme, the Popov's Domain. Unlike the Meanies, the Popovs were capable of possessing and swarming the bodies of sackpeople, disfiguring them in the process; concept art and early story scripts suggest that Popovs could have been administered via injection, like in the case of Dr. Herbert Higginbotham. These sorts of transformations remained exclusive to Sackbots and machinery in the final game.

The Popov Dog was presumably one of multiple Popov-themed outfits created for LittleBigPlanet 2, being modeled after concept art depicting the aforementioned transformations. These outfits seemingly existed very early on in LittleBigPlanet 2's development, with only one having been currently recovered from the Deploy Build archiving some of LittleBigPlanet 2's earliest content.

General information

Physical appearance

Meanies are commonly depicted as pink, gelatinous, goo-like creatures with evil eyes, though some sport limbs, horns, and other appendages formed from a similar pink substance. Meanies are shown to be capable of reshaping themselves to a variety of different forms, which they commonly use to possess creations that serve as armour to their otherwise vulnerable bodies. Creations possessed by meanies sport their features and transform to fit the meanies' needs. Certain meanies resemble pathogenic microorganisms, using their size to enter the minds of victims and induce madness.

Gallery

Main article: Meanies/Gallery.