We need more fluffies that hurt to look at. I’m going to draw more fluffies that hurt to look at.
62 Likes
Naw that’s pleasant to look at. Now fluffies with big-ass buck teeth or giant lips or something, that’d be hard to look at.
9 Likes
It’s refreshing to see a headcanon where there reason the bad colored foal is being “mistreated” is less to due with intentional malice but more to due with with animaltsic logic. Like they still take care of their “poopy” foal, but if they have a pretty baby among their brood that get priority over them.
10 Likes
In this case, it’s less “animalistic logic” and more “not smart enough to make sure they’re feeding all their foals”. Muted foals born to feral parents often end up malnourished if there are brighter foals in the litter because the mother cares for the brighter colors first and ends up not having enough milk for the rest, not because she instinctively prioritizes which foals to care for but because she’s a fluffy and fluffies pay more attention to neon colors in all contexts. I suppose it works out since the brightly colored ones that do get fed enough are more likely to thrive, which is also why natural selection doesn’t easily favor the camouflage you would otherwise expect to be a boon for them.
Abandoned pet fluffies never get the chance to do this because without guidance, they won’t care for their foals in the first place - again, not out of malice but out of stupidity. High quality pet fluffies in my verse’s “present day” are a different breed with their mating and parental instincts dummied out so that they don’t breed like rabbits the way ferals do.
8 Likes
“animalistic logic” might not been the best phrase to describe it, but the point was that the mistreatment dull colored foals get from their mother isn’t an intentional act on her and more to due with Fluffies in general not being smart and/or good materal instincts.
I feel this still prioritizing a mare’s offsrping, just without any and all thought behind it. If all her offspring were bright colored then it just be first come first served and the same could be said if they were all muted/dull in color.
2 Likes
They definitely pick favorites even if they aren’t actively being mean to foals that they don’t think are pretty. People hate stray fluffies because they often say hurtful things without thinking in the way little kids tend to do, except they also have mature real-world responsibilities and they’re saying those things about their own children, someone who just saved their life, or their friend who they just casually left to die. I can imagine a scenario where someone asks a feral mare to show them her foals and she introduces her “bestes’ babbeh” first while completely forgetting about another visibly neglected foal that she cheerfully refers to as her “nu-pwetty babbeh” when it’s pointed out.
Edit: Come to think of it, saying my fluffies don’t instinctively prioritize which foals they care for was a bit misleading. They do have a big favoritism problem, it’s just that the foals they favor are completely arbitrary and the ones they neglect simply aren’t eye-catching enough for the mother to remember they exist half the time. A feral mother might pour all of her energy into a runt that obviously won’t survive without medical intervention to the detriment of all her other foals just because the runt is the prettiest, or the cutest, or she knows there’s something wrong with it so it’s always on her mind.
6 Likes
I like the colors of all these fluffies over the bright colored ones. Even the clashing colored fluffies are more interesting to look at.
1 Like
Yeah, I always felt that a Fluffy’s hierarchy of good to bad colors was programmed in by HasBio as a way to self-sort the more marketable colors from the least. This was certainly only introduced in the testing phase and only in experiments analyzing how a self-sorting biological assembly line would work as opposed to one needed constant human (ie, paid employee) supervision. And that’s the batch that PETA released.
2 Likes
Personally, I don’t understand canons where it’s a self-sorting thing. I understand fluffies instinctively discarding deformed foals that won’t survive, but if their color inheritance is anything like natural animals, Hasbio should be able to simply remove unmarketable colors from the gene pool for production or have set breeding pairs that they know will produce good colors. This is also assuming they breed fluffies the old-fashioned way instead of growing them in tubes or something.
Still, to each their own. I just like speculating about the way things like that come to be. Maybe I’ll read up on why different plants and animals are colored the way they are and see how it can apply to fluffies.
2 Likes
Man they are all just so cute, especially the ones with the smiling faces.
2 Likes
Honestly, even the clashing ones don’t look so bad. That magenta one with the green mop of moss on its’ head is adorable; it’d name him Coral or Algea.
2 Likes
It’s true that it’s kind of hard to make a fluffy look truly unpleasant when there are only two colors to work with. I’ve found that bad color combos really pop when you add an extra colored pattern or two into the mix, especially when part of the palette is cohesive but not all of it.
1 Like
At first I thought the AI mention in the “poopie” section was referring to real life and that was wack. Once I realized it was in universe I really like it as a source for a poopie myth that was spread by AI slop on the internet. Very creative, and I love that the art that looks good even when the fluffies are supposed to be ugly.
2 Likes
I don’t think AI existed in the early days of the real-world fluffy fandom, but I can sort of see the confusion!
Imagine your average poopie rescue story as a cross between those fake animal rescue videos and the wack-ass shit that comes up when you search “ai cat sad story” on Youtube, and make it ten times more unsettlingly realistic and animated because the year is 2037 and AI content farms have too much power. This is the origin of the “poopie fluffy” myth in my canon.
2 Likes
I love this a lot! I like the thought put into this to separate “poopie” foals into categories. Makes much more sense.
1 Like
Honestly I’d like to see more muddy fluffies in various artworks, my headcanon form them is kinda different. Due to their chimeric genome and being in ‘beta’ phase of development muddy genome is in fact dominant genome, due to that most of the ferals (around 65%) have dull colors, due to that even good looking ferals are widely known for their shitty genome. I personally imagine the dull ones as the standard bad colored fluffy rather than poppies (which are smaller group). Breeders are very careful to properly eliminate dull genomes from their breeding stock
1 Like
If dull colors were a dominant gene, that would actually make them easier to weed out since any fluffy that has the genes for dull colors will have dull colors, and any brightly colored fluffy would definitely not have the gene since they wouldn’t be brightly colored otherwise. Dull colors as a recessive trait means that fluffies with seemingly “good” colors might carry the gene for dull fur, mane, etc. and will produce offspring that have dull colors if they breed with another fluffy that also carries it.
I don’t have a 100% researched headcanon for how fluffy genetics work or what kinds of pigments and structures they have in their fur to make it colored the way it is, but dark and muted colors being recessive (carried) would explain the common trope of fluffies with good colors having one or two bad colored foals among their litter and “shit factory” mares that seem to consistently produce bad colors no matter who they get paired with. The colors for the body, mane, and any tertiary patterns are also completely separate in my canon, leading to the prevalence of unpleasant color contrasts.
Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s entirely possible that different fluffies have different methods of coloring or even multiple color systems clashing with each other for another source of “bad” colors since they’re the result of different prototypes interbreeding. The system depicted here (completely separate colors) was likely meant for maximum control over the fluffy’s colors in the case of people being able to order custom fluffies directly from Hasbio, while depictions of ferals with cohesive palettes are the result of a separate color makeup that might have been intended for lower-grade naturally bred (mass-produced) fluffies. The fluffies in different places might have different color makeups, leading to the mechanics of fluffy breeding being completely different depending on where your stock came from.
2 Likes