Depends on the writer and whether or not they’re lazy or just in it for a circle jerk
I don’t think adoptables lower creativity. If anything, I’d say they foster them. That said, I don’t go for many adoptable posts because I already have a lot of my own ideas I need to work on, and I can’t immediately think of an idea to work for a fluffy even if I like the design of the fluffy.
I’d say this makes sense. Its also why I haven’t gone for a lot of adoptables just yet. For instance, I adopted an aquafluffy because there was a stories I could tell with an aquafluffy. But that doesn’t mean I can come up with stories for all kins of other fluffies.
I’d like to get @Gal-with-pastels thoughts on the matter, as she has made a lot of adoptables.
I don’t think there has or should be any one particular way fluffies should be viewed and/or enjoyed. As somebody who did research into how the whole fandom started, and how its evolved over the time, fluffies started out as funny meme. Yes, I agree that fluffies made for a good parody/satire of the MLP fandom that spawned it, but some people also just enjoy fluffies for being silly things. And there are also people who just enjoy fluffies purely for the sake of being cute and doing cute things.
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I simply make adopts as a way to come up with interesting designs. and yes i do think they are adorable, cute and can light up someones day
The only real reason i added a certain rule was actually due to me making my first batch of adopts and a majority of them being taken by lurkers that i don’t think have even made anything yet. I mean imagine you make something , only for someone to toss it into a fire.
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If that’s the restriction you want to put on someone claiming your adoptables, for whatever that claim is worth between you and the adopter, I wish you good luck.
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I guess if you want another opinion thrown to the pile is that these “plug-and-play” wouldn’t be the first thing that come in my mind that “lower overall creativity”
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There is a way to insure the usage. Meet Ragequit
As you can see, she isn’t a simple adoptable. She is a prise, which was won by @ArisenLeaf and since then were used in quite a lot of his works. By finding someone who among all others could use the tool he was provided with in the most creative way, the chance of her usage skyrocketed. Obviously you can’t hold a competition for every single adoptable, which means that all @Gal-with-pastels need to do, is ask “what story do you plan to write with it?”, and give it to the first guy who doesn’t say “i don’t know yet”
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Elaborate?
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Was just thinking: ultimately the benefit of adoptables could be viewed as encouraging participation. Yes, someone might just get the thing and do nothing with it. But hopefully it at least gets them thinking. And ultimately acting.
Everyone starts somewhere. I guess I’m not super concerned with the creative aspect so much as participating. When I did that contest with a gift certificate to @infraredturbine as a prize, I made it “you make stuff and you get an entry” versus judging. That way folks would have a chance of winning regardless of their ability. They just had to participate.
I got the idea after seeing a few theme weeks go by and some folks saying “oh artist X is participating might as well not bother.”
I think adoptables are a nice and low stakes way to at least try doing something. And that helps some folks.
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I came to the conclusion that it’s much better for me and for the community if I do something like I did on Selfish choices.
It’s kinda adopting too, but the person who buys and ending for the foals can select what to see, what happens to the foal, get it for herself etc etc…
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Much more enjoyable than adoptables imo.
I might do some one day or other, but meh, It’s not on the plans at least not for now xD
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Had to check if I did win or not:
I didn’t win RageQuit @NekuChan did. I just really enjoyed using the character, so much so I kept making posts of her.
Something about her personality and backstory resonated with me and the contest gave me the idea to share my own childhood nostalgia, God of War.
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I’m intrigued now. What did you have in mind?
the fuck happened to the font size in that post
There’s only one Mutagen’s Munchkin contest that has happened so far, right? I’m not sure it would be a good example because of the small sample
And if you look to the predecessor of Mutagen’s Munchkin, Funk’s Foals, there’s a lot of them that didn’t get further any further usage by the winners of the contest. In fact most of them are just like ArisenLeaf said, the one that used the adoptables are someone else other than the winners
[feel like this is something that I want to go on more detail just so it doesnt seemed that im talking out of my ass, i’m a bit tired currently]
This isn’t just specifically creativity problem but the first thing in my (currently exhausted) mind is that the lack of new blood because of lack of “marketing” of the community as a whole. Beside this site we only exists in reddit, and it seems like the activity in subreddit is getting slower than before.
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This is something @PeppermintParchment mentioned quite a while back (I believe it was in 2019) about the difficulty of marketing for the community, and how the community sometimes finds it difficult to get new content creators. Its also a reason why I don’t believe in too much gatekeeping, as trying to expect people to follow a specific hivecanon/headcanon about fluffies may only drive them away.
I know people make a big deal about the Click, and how the Click brought in a lot of kids, and also the redditheimers. But one thing that the Click did was unintentionally marketed fluffies, and exposed an entirely new audience to it. A lot of the newer content creators we got in mid 2020 onwards was thanks to the Click.
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That seems like an administrative issue to tackle, rather than anything I can do to help kindle new ideas.
We are currently in the slump of the aftermath of a bunch of people leaving.
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Guilty as charged.
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I’d be one of those.
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I liked those Click videos, his voices so instinctively keyed into all this.
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I’d like to think that, in a broad sense, these things are good for the community. It’s not like we’ve constantly been churning out the same stories over the years, fluffies got to where we are by exploring the medium and progressively developed by multiple smaller iterations. We’ve come a long way from MLP knock-offs, even though that’s the original inspiration. Anything from the love for spaghettis, to the existence of hellgremlins is content that gradually developed into an overarching fanon we consider to be true, and we certainly wouldn’t have gotten there if people didn’t randomly insert headcanon into their stories.
That being said, there’s an issue with quality over quantity. The main problem many of the newer ideas suffer from is that, rather than doing a slow headcanon expansion, they have loads of new ideas at once which is overwhelming and ultimately off-putting. These things take time and oftentimes they aren’t given the time to properly integrate themselves, hence leading to the idea that they may be ultimately bad, when in reality there’s good things to come from them.
I agree with this sentiment, in essence adoptables are not much different from user collabs, you are essentially using someone’s creative design process to write a story around it. The issue many users were having, I believe, is with how skewed the ratio was. We had a 5:1 ratio of adoptables vs. content using adopted creatures, which is honestly a very sensible ratio when you look at the history of how trends and fads develop on this site. We’re a close-knit community, so when someone has a new idea, many people often jump on the bandwagon and do their own spin on it because they feel inspired, which then leads to a bunch of content being the same for a while.
I truly don’t think this will continue to be the case, in fact arguing that it’s already slowed down to a far more healthy ratio again, people were just upset about an (in my opinion) temporary issue.
Someone claiming an adoptable and not using them is not equivalent to tossing it into the fire (ignoring the fact that technically they could write a story about that), if anything it means they haven’t found a good use for them yet. By complaining about that, it’s my belief you simply alienate people from trying in the first place, because it breeds hostility and pushes people to create content when they have writer’s block, for instance, or just simply lack the time to do it.
The activity slowed down because we had multiple server outages, lost several days worth of content and followed up by migrating to a new domain with even more outages. It’s far too early to tell if these are true symptoms or merely placebo.
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Im one of them and I’m not ashamed to say it. 
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Since Oculus pinged me, I thought I’d put my opinion here. I somehow missed this topic!
I joined the whole fluffy thing back in 2016. As far as I remember, there weren’t many adoptables back in the Booru days.
However, I think adoptables are a good thing! I think they have the ability to “breathe life” into some art/stories. Many people struggle to create characters for their works, whether it be actual character design, or something as simple as a name that fits. Or perhaps they have a story “in the works”, but they need that missing something to bring it all together. Perhaps that something is a fluffy they adopted. For example, AMDk7’s “Pushing the Sky Away” was made with a fluffy that he adopted, but he already had a pretty loose plot before the fluffy came along. Once he had the fluffy adopted, he was able to apply her to the story he was writing, and able to finally complete his story.
I also think adoptables help make the community “closer”, because we generally have to communicate more as to how we’re going to use the fluffy, why we chose to use it that way, etc. With a community that tends to be as niche as ours, talking to one another can really help keep people “in” the community.
So overall, I think adoptables are beneficial for the community, as long as they stay out of fluffy NFT material (Same fluffy pose, same hair, just different coat/mane/eye colors, for example).
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