ADDENDUMS:

BABE STRIDER is a stage name, his legal name would have been DeFrog but he changed it to Hopper to honor his frog family's cultural past.

we never find out what kind of celebrity Babe even has that he would need a stage name for, except maybe his social media but even that he uses his legal name on (his own personal journalism, not monetized). We will see him introduce himself as Strider to mammals and mundanes (human characters), and Hopper to reptiles and birds, and coose Strider when in mixed company, presumably for his safety if not just for his comfort.

THIRD FLASHBACK will follow miss piggy's harrowing ordeal of working as a secretary to a local politician, when Babe is starting gradeschool. i know this story by heart. you don't have to hear about it before the comic, but the end result is that Babe and his most Piggiest older sister get into a physical fight with the politician, during which Babe lands wrong on a piece of fencing and his thin froggy skin can't stop him from getting slightly, uh, impaled.

he doesn't lose a life because he hasn't entered THE GAME yet, these are memories from a pre-game world, possibly low tech like sixties era? forties? 1800s xmas carroll micheal caine cameo? they had canon children in that muppet movie, did the DeFrogs.

i like the idea of 1800s juxtaposed to modern gamescapes, but don't want to lose the thread of how these problems in the flashbacks are actually very present and modern and not a racism or sexism of the past. maybe the defrogs drive a minivan because the price of horse and buggy is in the millions (the horses are unionised).

anyway, babe is injured near his spine and thus lands him in a 'trauma ward' in the big city hospital an entire state over, with other kids with injuries to their spine, and this is where Babe meets the carapacian we had previously seen as the laughsassin, who is in the ward for a MUCH WORSE injury, from child assassin training.

this is also where Babe meets [redacted], whose injuries are too grim to discuss (but [redacted] discusses them anyway, because he's angry and doesn't want to suffer alone). redacted is a scrawny baby rooster, and he and his father had been attacked by a bigger and unrelated rooster on their farm. dis a metaphor for cop on cop violence.

Babe, having high CHARISMA base stat, befriends the rooster kid, but rooster monopolizes Babe's time and attention away from others who wanted to be his friend too, like the carapacian. rooster doesn't weaponize pity on purpose, and babe doesn't intend to neglect the other kids, they just share the same kind of ferocious loyalty that the constantly bullied can form together, a precursor to the radicalised incel violence that rooster will grow into.

when rooster soils himself in the play area, a medical issue that he's so ashamed of he starts crying, Babe loudly claims that he himself did shit his own pants, and begs rooster to escort him to the showers on a fictional excuse that he can't walk very far on his own. when rooster asks why Babe did that, Babe explains that it's no big deal for a pig to roll in shit, inadvertently reinforcing the racism with which others had taunted him, because he didn't really understand the idiom except that maybe his mom, a pig, had to change a lot of poopy baby diapers over the years (and this was something to be proud of, pigs being able to caretake in ways that maybe other animals found beneath them).

when the nurse chases Babe from the shower room to help rooster wash, rooster is DEVASTATED to learn that Babe can't stay because Babe is medically assigned female.