Sobgoblins

"Your performance... is disappointing."

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Sobgoblins
Species	Ghosts
Home	Ghost World
Professional Status
Leader	Jinx
Background Information
First episode	"Twin Trouble"
Last episode	"Jinx vs. The Human World"

Sobgoblins are ghosts that feed on misery and sadness.

Appearance

Normally, these kind of ghosts look so adorable that those who don't know about them would mistake one for a baby ghost, and they even coo baby-talk and giggle like toddlers, but once provoked they show their true nature with sharper teeth, jagged dark purple ectoplasm instead of the usual light blue, and they snarl demonically. Without a food source of misery, a sobgoblin usually floats alone looking for a particularly unhappy person, but once a victim is found, it amplifies the sad feelings and uses the extra energy to make duplicates itself, and the copies and the original always stay grouped together.

Trivia

• While they mainly feed off and amplify sadness, they also have the power to drain joy out of someone's very soul by having their target look in their eyes. Normally, this is done with just one of them being irresistibly cute, but when in their monster forms they get around this by circling the joyful spirit at a pace that's difficult to look away until said spirit feels like giving up.
• Their name is a combination of "sob/sobbing" and "hobgoblins".
  • Hobgoblins in English folklore are a type of mythical creature/spirit who, despite their mischievous nature, often help with minor odd jobs like dusting in exchange for food. While they were thought of as helpful long ago, the rise of Christianity exaggerated their mischief in more recent tales. This is easily comparable to how certain kinds of sadness and misery is actually considered helpful in small doses, yet can become problematic if you let it linger too long and don't address the issues.
• When not on the prowl in the Human World, they work as underlings in the Ghost World for joyhunters such as Jinx, who is especially motherly yet commanding to them.
• They seem to have the power of illusion to make sad images even sadder, as demonstrated when they gave a tragic end to the kitten in Molly's "Hang in There, it's Almost Friday" poster.
• Although they can be lured away from their intended victim when another source of misery is close by (a quirk Molly tried and failed to take advantage of with the aforementioned poster), a sobgoblin's main weakness is closure, as they slowly lost their power to hold their duplicates together when Pete stood up against his siblings' bullying and bad influence, and were especially powered down in the presence of displays of affection, most especially a group hug. Another weakness seems to be in the presence of joy from someone who won't look them in the eyes, as they literally turned to sunshine when Scratch and Molly playfully knocked them around, and again when Molly's wraith form (made of pure golden joy energy) turned several of them into cute koalas and caused one to become transfixed by the sight of flowers and rainbows.