Wrapping up the 20th anniversary bonanza with a mysterious shadow goblin and a literal janitor!
The Rumor is another character who hasn't really shifted that much from his legacy design, though obviously I ended up adding a mouth for shit-eating grin purposes. What has changed since 2004 is his general characterization and relationship with the main characters (and especially the twins), and I'm excited to continue to explore that with y'all as the story progresses. Also, as aluded to in the last retrospective, he is the only character besides Blender whose name has not changed at all over the course of twenty years.
Eli is interesting amongst all of these to me because he's the only one who lacks a true 2004 origin. Or, more specifically, his character origin in 2014 was such a radical compression/synthesis of several 2004-original main and side characters that I consider him to be a wholly separate character from his origins from twenty years back.
Well, that plus if I actually showed you his 2004 equivalent character, it'd probably be a decently large spoiler for character stuff that I have not yet gotten to in this chapter and beyond.
