Seeking ideas: Creepily hard-SF sugarbowl characters

[DataPacRat]

Aka, "How can I genetically engineer a Care Bear?"

I'm working with a hard-SF universe, in which a wheel-shaped space station has low gravity and high air pressure, letting ridiculously oversized critters fly. For various reasons, I want to include as many versions as I can of the various cartoon characters found in cute cartoons and storybooks. I want a bunch of rich, lush subsettings, full of strange forms of life, reminiscent of Dark Crystal or Avatar.

Some examples:

* Fraggles and other generic talking critters. I'll have to come up with some handwaviness about how smart a brain of a given size can be, but this includes smurfs, talking animals (bipedal or otherwise), centaurs (of various sorts - chakats, bariaur, etc), winged folk (small pegasi, fairies, etc), My Singing Monsters, and so on.

* Fairies act something like pollinators, but actively managing various other parts of the station's biomes.

* Care Bears. Use some handwaving about bioluminescence, Hox genes, epigenetics, and immune-system-like shuffling, and that should be enough to explain rainbow-coloured glowing patterns on their tummies. Specific recognizable patterns may need some conscious interventions, such as tattooing or surgically moving pieces of skin around. I can't think of a way to get the "Care Bear Stare", but I can probably include positive-emotion-inducing pheromones, and a home near the station's hub.

* My Little Pony unicorns. I'm thinking of crossing Piers Anthony's unicorns with hollow-ish musical horns, that blue guy from Guardians of the Galaxy who could control a thing with a whistle, and Charles Stross's Equoid parasite. Resulting in a horn-shaped, barnacle-like symbiote which can glue itself to various critters' heads (eventually integrating into their nervous sytems), and which itself contains its own tiny, flying bioluminescent symbiotes that respond to audible cues. (I can even throw in Care Bear style flank-marks on most equines.)

* Frosty the Snowman, the Scarecrow and Tin Man, Pinnochio, and animated toys. I'm thinking of adapting the 'death snakes' from John Varley's "Demon", which in the original work formed small hive-mind collectives that could move a dead body around zombie-style; and letting them collaborate to animate less gruesome host-forms.

* Ghosts. I am still feeling my way around, but I'm hesitantly considering something based around every sapient inhabitant's mind being digitally uploaded to the hub, and generally given amnesia and inserted into new fetuses. I want "death" to still generally involve the loss of most things most humans would consider important about that person, but with enough demonstrable continuity for the locals to have various philosophies based around being close enough to immortal for death to be less worrisome.


Has reading this given you any ideas along similar lines?