Alternate reasoning for "poopie color" bias

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So, the reasoning for “Bad Colors” and “Poopie Colors” tend to run along aesthetic reasons. That Hasbio programmed fluffies to favor brightly colored foals over not for sales reasons. If the dam and stud do quality control, you don’t need to, right?

Trick is, thinking about it? I’m not so sure. I look at cats and dogs plus other animals and brown is a common, accepted color. Even looked for in some breeds. I don’t see green being a problem either. A dark green. If anything, the bright greens seen as “good” are more obnoxious to me but then I’m not a tropical bird lover.

Another reason is fluffies like pretty things. Not sure I quite buy that either. Now, as a child I probably was NOT subtle, so I can’t entirely write it off either. But frankly those are still pretty, if not beautiful colors.

So, what other reasons could there be? I think I have one: Intentionally sabotaging strays/ferals.

No, I don’t think Hasbio looked into the future to see what would happen. Rather, I think the idea that fluffies could get out of human care, form colonies (cats) or packs (dogs), and be a problem was likely an eventuality from their perspective. Admittedly, they probably expected a very different reproductive cycle, but regardless…

So, to reduce the odds of survival outside human care, placing a bias against colors that would have an advantage in a feral scenario makes sense.

“I’ve never paid for a cat” is a phrase I’ve heard a number of times. And I’ve said it myself. Its true. Feral/neighborhood cats where I grew up greatly devalued the price of cats. If I wanted one, one would eventually show up at the house. AT MOST going to a shelter and paying the fees. Which is still less than you’d pay to a breeder/pet store in most cases. Readily available fluffies devalues their retail price.

As seen in many pieces of fiction, there’s an informal agreement that brown and dark greens (natural colors, less neon) may offer an advantage to feral survivability. The louder the fluffy’s colors, the more likely they are to be the successful targets of predation. Predation stops “free” fluffies. Doesn’t matter if its from animals or abusers or animal control.

Also, a lost fluffy is more easily found by concerned pet-parents. Its also harder to replace with a “normal” pet.

This makes more sense to me than simple sales of colors. Frankly, the more colors the better for sales. Colors go in and out of fashiohn, after all. At least the “classics” (seen in normal animals) would have a steady demand I think. I saw one person call gray “an ugly color” for a fluffy, whereas I about lost my mind seeing someone draw a gray one because… well… I’ve got a Siamese cat, and most of my cats have been gray. There’s a market for it.

But making the bias about reducing independent long-term survivability? That makes a lot more sense for a cynical view of Hasbio.

What about you?

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I just prefer not to have poopie colour bias, period.

https://fluffy-community.com/t/fluffy-ponies-with-natural-horse-colours-artist-waggytail-fluffybooru-id-26594/8815

I can imagine fluffies that recently escaped would inherit a poopie coloured bias from their human owners but, and over time, natural colours win out in the wild.

That, and I think Waggytail had a great idea.

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I don’t personally think fluffies start with a bias. My headcanon begins with the backdrop of fluffies not being programmed at all, merely given training by researchers initially before developing their own culture as ferals.

My perspective too is that they tend towards personal bias, meaning that if they see themselves in their foals they’re more likely to find affinity with them. That, combined with being drawn to brighter colours means they don’t really care as much for ones that have bad colour associations like with poop, piss, or vomit.

But the real pressure comes from herds and humans where in herds, fluffies with worse attitudes dominate the group and pass on bad behaviour, ostracising fluffies they don’t like. Humans also have a preference for what they view as marketable or interesting, so natural or neutral colours don’t do well in their eyes. When many of them berate fluffies for birthing bad colours, they react by hating the ‘bad’ colours for giving them trouble, thus perpetuating the cycle.

I should note that not all herds are led poorly (as I see it), but in the ones I view having bad leadership, they often have a superiority skew and are less welcoming or supportive of the herd as a whole, especially with regard to fluffies which are easier to pick on.

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I like it, but I’m personally treating it as a learned behavior from Hasbio because of the harsh punishments that “shit factories” got. This gave the fluffies a negative association with colors like brown. Future generations lost this bias for the most part.

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I don’t see the color bias as an innate thing to a fluffy, to me it would be a learned trait taught originally by people (breeders) and then passed down from fluffy to foals.

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Since my preferences go along natural colors I’d ignore it myself. The learned behavior ideas are good ones and I do find it to be reasonable.

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I like this take on it. It checks out that there would be at least some market for “natural” colors. Lost fluffies with bright colors being easier to find sounds sensible.

I also like the idea I’ve seen in some headcanons that this phenomenon is primarily about runt rejection, not aesthetic bias.

And in that case, perhaps darker fur actually correlates with increased expression of recessive genes, or perhaps a darker foal is just more likely to be mistook for a runt, etc.

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Seen that too. Stress can change hair colors too, right? I was thinking of a possibility where high stress can trigger it too. Almost a fail-safe… High stress during pregnancy means bad times, pump out a more survivable Foal color. But… Hard to make a rational for that.

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I actually had the opposite impression with regard to genetics. My take would be that natural colours, not the bright obnoxious ones, would be the dominant ones. Recessive genetics I do expect would have drawbacks in terms of overall health, but I would expect it to lead to more problems in the preferred expressed traits as generally breeding for what people are trying to achieve will take more inbreeding which lets multiple copies of the same thing express themselves.

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I agree.

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bady facts. by (angry19)

as my thoughts of matter.

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I think the “poopie bias” is 100% learned behavior from escaped pets. They’re beautiful, their friends are beautiful, all the fluffies they see on TV are beautiful, why shouldn’t their babies be beautiful? Grey, Pinto, Roan, Palomino, and other natural horse coloration are seen as beautiful, while the sickly green, bile yellow, and feces brown fluffies experience a lifetime of rejection by owners and domestics. Who wants a fluffy that looks like puddle of sick?

The discrimination works the opposite way for those herds in rural environments. Natural colors survive in the wild because it’s easier for them to hide. They might not be ostracized, but brightly colored fluffies often end up as look outs, bait, and sacrificial offerings to protect the herd.

On the other hand, the alicorn bias is 100% a programed quality control issue that works the same for runts and other malformed foals. Self replicating system without quality controls quickly leads to a grey goo scenario, and while Hasbio was short sighted, they weren’t stupid.

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I subscribe to the idea that fertile Fluffies were never meant to escape, and it was believed that if they did then they’d be easy to round up.

I also go with the idea that they weren’t made by like ten whitecoats in a basement, they were produced in different facilities across the country.

The bodies were refined not just with the intention of creating horse animals, but other things as well from “bathtoy” talking fish to living GI Joes and Power Rangers and more.
Fluffies being the first creature, and fastest breeding that was planned, were used to test more than one thing at once.

Programming was handled like video game production, where you split one large team into subteams. Issues arise when poor leadership and communication take place, such as two teams ending up working on the same element while leaving something else unfinished or creating systems that clash or undercut each other. They were also working on whatever the body teams sent them, so each programming team had different generations of Fluffy bodies to work on.

Think the clusterfuck that was vanilla World of Warcraft, or modern Bioware. Or Overwatch production.

PETA attacked the programming site, since Hasbio wasn’t fully separated from the rest of Hassenbros (I go with Hassensis for easy copyright name avoidance) so they were in Hasmed buildings, and PETA thought it was full of lab animals. Both PETA and Hassis get off with no penalties because of insane laws protecting corporations and batshit insane militias, because political satire.

The glitchy Fluffies who escaped were of different physical breeds, all the early artist styles basically, with different physical traits. The programming is even more fucky, with some truly not being mentally a living creature and just consisting of preprogrammed algorithms and responses (which was further developed into the Fuzzies), some being sapient like humans and the programming just broadcasts information into their mind but is unfinished.

The biggest issue is the archetype system. Its what Simple Creatures is partially about. Bestest babies are basically told “you are a major character”, and in the presence of one the other Fluffies submit as their programming guides them to act like NPCs. At that point the environmental stimuli tell them what kind of a character they are, with Smarties being the main characters. But most of the archetypes return Bull results since they were barebones if anything. Sk the usually default to what was being tested by that team at the time which was…villain. Hellgremlin. When testing something in a video game you debug straight to it in order to speed up testing, so most archetypes default to Hellgremlin due to lack of data.
Most builds of Fluffies that survived can willingly overcome Hellgremlining, or were of a build where enough barebones of another archetype survived to not default.
Yellow Smarty in Simple Creatures as a Lancer Smarty, blue Mare got a null back when running an archetype scan but her breed was hybridized by breeders so there is a corruption in Hellgremlin data which made her just a grumpy Bestest.

As for Poopies? Various bugs. One team was building up Fluffy color recognition as a way to ensure mothers programmed certain archetypes into certain colors (so never a blue villain, never a red primary protagonist, and so on) and dingy colors are always designated as minor characters, but all questions default to Hellgremlin so they get abused. Another team was using them as designated victims to test how far a Hellgremlin would go, trying to make bullies who acted far more cruel than they were; but this work was still in the early stages, so they produced the nastiest possible Hellgremlins. Another group was trying to produce an archetype that was the Eeyore type depressed character, and designated the browns. One test was associating colors, which to a Fluffy of course meant brown=feces and dull green=muddy grass, where shits should be taken. Another, protagonist reaction to villains. Browns and dingy colors were the ones sent over most often, so they were targeted for any and all testing happening, so they hot

As for why Alicorns are treated like shit? Not programmed in fully since the programming team was sent over so few to work with. So the default to another living creature they don’t recognize is either fear, or the villain archetype Hellgremlin.

Again, different Fluffy builds react different ways. The smarter ones who survive best and can override their programming fairly easily are the common “I’ve never paid for a cat” kind. But the original breeds that survive only through breeders, or are selected for by virtue of which Abusers can lure or just prefer to target, are varying degrees of mechanical including a variant thats so artificial it can’t really be abused because it has no mind beyond programming and things like complex grief, pain, and anger were never entered in.

I’m trying to squeeze all of this into my stories best I can. Simple Creatures 2 and 3 dealt with some of this, 4 is ballooning with everything I cut from 3, but some I’ll have to find new ways to dump.

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My headcanon is:

  1. They were made as kid’s toys, and brown sells poorly with kids. There’s a reason they replaced brown Bionicles with orange. Whether the behavior was programmed in or learned can depend on your headcanon.
  2. They have really shitty (lol) eyesight, so “poopie babies” literally look like walking turds to them.
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