I’ve heard a lot of people mention hell gremlins and I’m wondering are they the same thing as a smarty or something different?
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From what I’ve seen, a hell gremlin is the far end of the spectrum of what a smarty is. Not just selfish and disobedient of humans but actively evil. The worst examples of “broken toy” fluffies.
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From my understanding, a Hell-Gremlin is a Fluffy who will partake in violent acts, namely sexual assault and murder, and be more willing to commit those acts than a typical bratty Fluffy.
All Smarties are Hell-Gremlins, but not all Hell-Gremlins are Smarties.
For example, my OC Crimson is 100% a Hell-Gremlin, but he’s not a Smarty.
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A hellgremlin is basically the worst aspects of smarties combined, condensed, and keyed up to 11. They see a litter of orphaned foals then decide to rape all of them, shit on their corpses, and then brag it was the best thing ever. A smarty will at worst usually…what…shit on the ground and demand spaghetti.
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It’s also worth noting that Hell-Gremlins were and are edgelord bullshit and seem to have fallen to the wayside.
Smarties have been made worse as a result but not to the extent of Hell-Gremlins heyday
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I think hellgremlin is just an oft used term to describe really shitty fluffies that exemplify everything wrong with fluffies but it’s not actually like a classifying thing in-universe. “Smarty” was just a fluffy term for fluffies that are smarter than the average fluffy so they tended to gravitate towards leadership positions. People took that leadership thing and turned them into awful little hellgremlin leaders because people like justifiable excuses to torture and abuse fluffies and later it became a classifying thing and a whole mental condition. A lot of the oldfags aren’t a fan of hellgremlin behavior or the smarty syndrome thing. We seem to go through different periods of “justified” and “unjustified” abuse being popular
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Hellgremlin is a meta term us old hands used to describe fluffy ponies not as they were when invented (loving, stupid, commodified creatures that are so sweet they trigger your cute aggression) but as what they’ve become. Generally, it’s so that people can imagine “justified abuse” scenarios.
You know, excuses like, “They shit everywhere, they rape constantly, they eat each other, they’re rampantly infanticidal!” - that’s a hellgremlin. It used to be the exception, not the rule, but at some point making fluffy ponies cute or innocent was thrown out in favor of making them wretched, so that it was “justified” to hurt them (as if there’s some way to justify torturing the least-dangerous creatures you can imagine to death).
At one point it was transgressive and dark to want to depict fluffy pony abuse. Now a lot of the time it doesn’t really matter because they’re basically all made out to be hellgremlins.
You’ll get other definitions from people who showed up later, but that’s the real one.
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Thank you to everyone who helped explain this. I’m relatively new to this fandom
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At this point we should probably remake the old “what are fluffy ponies” post
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Ok your profile picture is amazing. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen anything referencing rampage .
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Aww thank you
It’s a subset of fluffy content as a whole.
Fluffies love all creatures equally and want to help anyone and everyone wherever they go. They are miserable at every instance where they can’t fix things and betrayed if anyone hurts them.They are the best of humanity personafied.
Hellgremlins rape and eat babies for fun. They regularly partake in racism and xenophobia. They hate everyone and demand their every whim be catered to. They are humanity personafied.
Most fluffies anymore are somewhere in between.
Pretty much this. Hellgremlins were invented and popularized by a lot of people too cowardly to write abuse unless it was “Justified” so they all had to make fluffies into demanding hellions who were psychotic brats who rejected foals for being the “Wrong color” and would just bully and rape. A lot of bad tropes were invented because a lot of users from the /b/ era simply didn’t have the stones to write abuse to fluffies that didn’t deserve it and just wrote Hellgremlin abuse and all fluffies were awful shitting, demanding hellions outside of the sacred Poopie Babbeh (Who was the total opposite in being kind, intelligent and loving). And the fandom hit a creative nadir because it caused creators to leave the fandom and every story was starting to play out the same with hellgremlins.
We’re in a better place now but you’ll get a stink eye from oldfriends if you just made Hellgremlins the default fluffy in your stories and art
This is just about fair to say, and it makes me reflect that the term is descriptive. I don’t think a lot of people set out to write hellgremlins who bore the audience, but it’s what they started being called, derisively.