Click to view/download various sizes (Flickr)
Information
Gender: Cisgender female
Race/Ethnicity/Nationality: Caucasian; German/European descent; American
Profession: Trench Mice sergeant
Brief Profile
She was a mouse, probably a ruddy color though the specifics are uncertain.
Reddy Mouse was a character from an early version of the Trench Rats storyline, dating roughly to the late 1980s/early 1990s. She never appeared in any written works, but I remember my then-best friend roleplaying her while I roleplayed Pinky Mouse in the junior high school gymnasium, so they were still considered canon circa 1989-91. She was never given an official name, only her codename.
At the time of Reddy's creation, I knew very little about Nazi Germany, and the series had a rather more slapstick/comedic tone; I had likely heard of the Holocaust yet was largely ignorant of the details (it was not taught about in early school, I remember watching a TV movie about it only later, in a high school history class), and so this did not play a role in the earliest versions of the series. Reddy began to be relegated to the background shortly after when the series began to take a more serious tone, and had disappeared completely by the time of the 2002 reboot. By then she no longer fit into the storyline, so I now consider her a "retired" character.
In this earlier iteration of The Trench Rats, I decided to create an all-female battalion called the Trench Mice. Same as the Trench Rats, most of them were codenamed after colors, except I added "-(e)y" to the end of the names, to distinguish them from their male counterparts. However, the male and female versions of the characters did not align other than that--the Trench Mouse sergeant, for example, was not named "Blacky" or "Camoey." The only two Trench Mice I recall were Sergeant Reddy Mouse and Corporal Pinky Mouse; I remember choosing to play Pinky while making my friend play Reddy, and came up with a horoscope correlation, which would have made Pinky a Libra and Reddy a Virgo. In retrospect, what I know of their personalities did not match our signs at all, so I don't know why I came up with this. Reddy's personality was much more akin to that of one of her male counterparts, Camo Rat (who came along slightly later); she was reserved, serious, and a bit aloof and distrusting. (Camo Rat is a Capricorn, though I'm not sure if Reddy would have been.) At the time I had a pair of homemade necklaces with heart-shaped acrylic rhinestone pendants; one was light pink, and one was red. I lent the red one to my friend and used the pink one for myself in our play, so this was likely why I decided on Pinky and Reddy as the primary Trench Mice characters.
I was unaware at the time of the general prohibition on women in the German military (see still-active yet heavily retconned character Senta Werner), though I almost certainly was aware that women were rare in the American military, and didn't serve in combat roles. The Trench Mice were thus a purely imaginary concept that intentionally took many liberties. (Notice, however, that as time went on and the series developed, the Trench Rats' primary activities and motivation have shifted from active combat to defense/refugee rescue to primarily intelligence gathering.) I can't recall if the Trench Mice were intended to go into combat alongside their male counterparts, or if they were intended to play a more auxiliary role. I was going to guess that it was the latter; however, given the existence of a few female members or auxiliaries of the Trench Rats such as Anna Julian, Mam Rat, and Nurse Janette (the last since retconned into a non-Trench Rat character) (Lyndsey Skye was created only somewhat later), I wonder if the difference between these characters and the Trench Mice was that the Mice were meant to take part in active combat, spying, and sabotage like the Rats. In any event, the Trench Mice battalion barely progressed past the concept stage, and this idea had been abandoned by the time of the first reboot (2002).
I don't recall spending much time on the design of the Trench Mice. Back then, the Trench Rat "uniform" consisted solely of combination Stahlhelm/Pickelhaube, color-coded cape, and color-coded armband with rank insignia. These were anthro characters who, with a few exceptions like Doomsday, Drake (a slightly later character), Mam, Julian, Janette, and Skye (ditto with Drake), wore no other clothes. (The canine characters, on the other hand, wore clothing the same as humans.) As you can see, all the female characters among the Trench Rats were depicted as fully clothed; however, I'm fairly certain that the Trench Mice, despite being female, dressed much the same as the male Rats, in helmet, cape, and armband only. I have no explanation for this discrepancy, though I know it's not unique to my work; for example, there's an adult-themed online comic featuring anthro mice, entitled Murinae: After Midnight, which features a female protagonist who as I recall wears only a sort of cloak--her chest is simply fur--while another female mouse character wears a sort of corset which, when she pulls it down, reveals humanlike breasts (nudity). (EDIT, I just checked this comic after it hadn't been updated in a long while and found that this has since been explained, but in my own universe, like I said, I can't explain it. In any case, this distinction no longer applies to my characters--when they're nude, they're nude.)
I don't have any description anywhere of Pinky or Reddy, and I have nothing on which to base this other than my own flawed impressions, but I'd like to say Reddy had a medium fur color, likely a ruddy or rust color (similar to her name--many Rats have a fur or eye color similar to their codename, though not all). Her relationship with Pinky also paralleled that between Gold and Black, with Pinky being more sociable and unserious while Reddy was more reserved and didn't joke around. I can't remember if there was intended to be any romantic connection between Black and Reddy or not, though it was highly unlikely. The more emotionally similar Camo Rat entered the storyline slightly later, so Reddy was likely semi-retired by then and I don't believe their characters interacted in any way.
Click to view/download various sizes (Flickr)