I don’t know why people would find that controversial. Alright, when most people have that operation done they switch out once set of parts for the other. When someone has the other one put in along side of what is already there they should not be upset. 
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Ofc
I love hearing outsider reactions to fluffy stuff! Could you show them Fluffy Lake too? That’s what I consider a legitimately perfect introduction to fluffies!
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Counterpoint: Fluffies should be controversial but aren’t controversial any more since they have been flanderized into stupid, violent, sex mad racists designed to be easier to hit with a shovel that’s just shocking to the outside but pizza cutter edge, no point. Versus the original hive/head of hugs and love, caring and sharing fluffies thrust into a cruel world who are naive rather than stupid. Example, a Pegasus fluffy would be smart enough to build a way to get up to a high place, they just would be naive enough to think they could fly off the high place.
Most headcanons you wouldn’t blink if a fluffy got cratered with a baseball bat because “They had it coming” because they are violent, rapist racists. Controversial is making the fluffy sympathetic while the human mercilessly beats them with a baseball bat.
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Yeah, it’s kinda wild, but so often you need to go to sadbox stories for any of that kinda stuff… not simply because they’re practically the only kind of creations that still feature this oldschool concept of the fluffy pony as an innocent idiot. It’s because they’re the only ones bothering to treat them as living things at all.
I was an abuse-category superfan until people started making the fluffy ponies “deserve” it on some nebulous philosophical level or whatever. The suffering of the innocent! Ah, it is a vanishingly rare treat…
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no argument here.
It’s one of the reasons the original content was shocking and controversial in that you assumed they were all good fluffy ponies just trying to make it. It also didn’t root you against a fluffy immediately. Ferals and Herd Dynamics are probably the biggest change for example.
Smarties in the old head/hive were the “Smartest” fluffy who is the leader. Usually kind, but stubborn. Some have egos and doesn’t understand they can’t just can’t take land. Most will comply with the human and move on because they don’t want trouble for their herd. There was always various shades of good or bad to a smarty and writers and artists could be flexible around that. Nowadays a smarty is just sadistic, egocentric rapists who delight in making other fluffies eat their shit and the problem is almost every smarty is like that. So it’s immediately rooting for the little shit to get hit with a baseball bat.
Toughies are probably the ones who got hit the hardest in being dumbed down from the original head/hive. The original hive/head had “Tough” earthie fluffies who were the protectors of their herd, not the smarty, the whole herd. If there was a threat, they would protect the weaker members of the herd like the mares, foals and nummie finders first. Not the smarty, who was expected to protect the herd too. Some stories had a cowardly smarty hide behind their toughies who would eventually be exposed and the toughies kicking them out of the herd. Now they are just the bodyguards of the smarty and cater to his every sadistic whim, bullying the rest of the herd into compliance. So they are acceptable canon fodder for the obviously superior human to turn into paste.
Other things as well like the pathologizing roles onto fluffies like Nurse mares and poopie nummers Part of the head/hive origin of the mare is that mares were perfectly well capable of taking care of their foals because they were designed to do it by Hasbio and don’t need a “Nurse”. Mares knew everything like how to feed foals and where foals to go to the toilet. It’s also why early mill stories were bleak box. Humans were oblivious to the fact Hasbio made fluffies self sufficient and ripped the foals away from mares as soon as they were born thinking they knew better than a “stupid fluffy”. When they were making things worse as the mare knew everything to teach the foals how to be “Good fluffies” and produce quality foals. The humans were making worse foals who weren’t taught anything. The idea of human fallibility was a big theme in those stories and it’s not really seen now.
And Poopie fluffy is just the obvious martyr fluffy who is abused by the herd and then spared abuse by the human. Even though the whole idea of a fluffy, a creature made of love and hugs, forcing another to eat their shit completely flies against the whole idea (Litter Pals were created by an extremely butthurt abuse poster on the booru who would get incredibly angry when people criticized their art and headcanon)
The whole idea of feral fluffies would be that they would retain their loving nature even without human contact and only resort to violence as a last cause. Now they are just organized rapist gangs trashing everywhere they go only to be met with a violent death by the hero human.
Again, the whole concept of the fluffy pony has been flanderized to make it that they are easy to beat to death and make the human characters totally justified. That’s why it’s no longer controversial.
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If I could make you required reading, I would.
I’m not too sure about your conclusion. Shifting of internal logic as the founding artists leave and new artists who only partially grasp the medium is to be expected, but regardless of whether you think older content was more nuanced or not, you’d probably be treated the same for associating with fluffies in the first place.
Ergo, fluffies are still controversial to people outside of the loop. Being desensitized to their portrayal now is a personal issue.
Tangential anecdote: my first story written about fluffies was a one off for a theme event for the subreddit. As soon as it was posted, a certain idiot decided to cite the lack of context and formative narrative (due to the work being a self-contained story at the time) as fundamental issues with the premise.
IE: This doesn’t fit into my understanding of fluffies, therefore it doesn’t make sense.
This was an early motivator for me to slip straight to the abuse side with disregard for the internal logic and hivecanon.
Always has been.