I’m just wondering why it’s so often assumed in headcanon that fluffies have an incest taboo, when few animals other than humans show any sign of it. You could argue that it was because fluffies were engineered to be child-friendly, except that there are a lot of more obvious sexual elements of their behaviour that definitely aren’t (complete lack of modesty about engaging in the sexual act in front of humans or fluffies, shaky grasp of consent ethics unless they are specifically taught by owners).
It’s not that I want to see or write loads of stories about fluffies randomly shagging their relatives, it’s more that I’m a bit thrown out of the story when I see, eg, fluffies disapproving of other fluffies committing incest (not related to foal abuse) or stories where a fluffy is traumatised to the “wan die” point or close to it because an abuser forced or tricked them into having sex with an adult relative. I would expect something more like:
enfenfenfenfGUD FEELS!
[abuser switches the light on]
BWA HA HA HA! You fucked your momma, shitrat!
Mommah? Eddee-pus thought you had foweveh sweepies! WUB MOMMAH! [dances with joy]
Hm I never seen a taboo for family enfies? I’ve seen owners separating siblings because after they mature they’ll go after each other. Ofc as this site always says,
It depends on your canon.
Fluffies are engineered, that’s the point to remember. It was programmed into them not to hump relatives by humans because humans don’t (or shouldn’t depending on where you are) hump their relatives and humans have passed their values onto Fluffies.
You could go one step further and suggest that Hasbio programmed Fluffies not to hump their relatives so that humans looking to breed Fluffies would have to make a second purchase rather than just using the one family over and over.
Plus depending on head-canon, incest Fluffies are usually heavily mutated to the point of being incompatible with life. Personally this is what I used since my H.C. considers the chimeric origins of Fluffies to be too fucked up to be tied that closesly together.
Not everything stuck, Fluffies were still in beta phase when they were released so there’s a lot they should and shouldn’t do but the kinks didn’t have the time to be ironed out.
In my humble opinion, it stems from both experience or discipline.
Incest (usually) leads to more runts/derped foals in a litter. It stands to reason it would quickly become a taboo to fluffies because:
in a herd, less babies means less fluffies to take the place of those who run into abusers, monsters or natural dangers, even worse with foals that would not only be more demanding of mummahs’ attentions, they’d also be even more prone to deadly accidents than a regular floofer.
in a domestic setting, this would likely get hammered into their noggin’ (sometimes literally) by their human caretakers. It would take little to convince a fluffy not to have enfies with a sibling if they knew just how horribly painful and short their babies’ lives would be. Fluffies love babies. The mere concept of special huggies hurting a babbeh would likely be more than enough to keep them from going at it.
This would then become ingrained into the fluffy population via word of talkie-place, TV spots, or simply natural instincts (or programming, whatever you want to call it. I don’t see fluffies as robots, so I use instinct).
I mean, feckin’ EELS travel half the globe from freshwater rivers and lakes to the Sargasso Sea because their instinct tells them to.
Honestly, I’d say it’s because they’re made for humans and as such are given human values. If you adopt a pair of cat siblings, you probably don’t want them to start shagging each other no matter if they think it’s fine or not, so fluffies are more tuned toward human wants instead of raw survival.
Having human-adjacent values also helps them empathize with people who have gone through trauma. Fluffies have a strong sense of right and wrong and will comfort anyone who has suffered wrong-doing. So can you imagine someone hugging her fluffy, sobbing about her dad giving her Special Huggies, and the fluffy goes “nu be sad, yu am soon-mummah nao! Yay!!” ? It would be a disaster.
It’s so often assumed in headcanon that fluffies have an incest taboo
Nobody’s assumed this except you. Moreover, incest is far from the most depraved thing that people depict fluffies engaging in on this website. Nobody is going to bat an eye at some good old Alabama-style special huggies.
I most often see fluffies depicted with essentially no moral values whatsoever until they’re given some (via owner, mother, Fluff TV, etc). Progammed-in instincts, yes, and maybe over MANY years they’d evolve species-wide taboos but that’s not happening in feral herds in the short term.
In effect fluffies are a couple of philosophical thought experiments made fictional flesh (talking about tabula rasa and p-zombies, depending on your canon regarding the ‘biotoy’ classification), which I find interesting in terms of the more thoughtful stories you could write. (One day, if I find the time among my non-fluffy writing projects…)
Aaaanyway, basically very little canon’s set in stone, unless you choose to follow the canon of some of the more popular story series on here, and you don’t have to do that. So go ahead and whack it to “step-bwuddah whut oo doin’?” as much as you like.
IIRC, there is a psychological element to this - most animals will reject mating with someone they grew up with, and the more social the animal the stronger this is.
Likely this is the source of the taboo, and is likely born from an evolutionary selection against inbreeding.
I my head cannon at least, fluffies would have some degree of this, though likely less than a human typically would, more of an instinct that some ‘special hugs’ are wrong. Socially they would see another fluffy doing this as bad, even though they wouldn’t have much of a concept of WHY.
Likewise a fluffy that was engaged in this would not be able to understand why others were mad about it.
In much of the canon Fluffies can recognize family members by smell alone. Always assumed this was a built-in feature to avoid bad product as a result of incest between breeding fluffies. But like everything else fluffies were intended to be this feature is easily broken.
I’ve seen fluffies distinguishing based on scent in some stories. In one of wolfram’s stories, a fluffy does end up impregnating his sister because even though they can tell each other apart based on smell, he’s never met any fluffies besides his sister and doesn’t have any point of comparison, so it doesn’t work. Makes sense, probably a mechanism to prevent human rejection and make better products. They also have a number other of built in instincts and trademark lines like “wawa bad fow fwuffy” and such that are obviously not natural, so it makes sense that they would have an anti-incest feature.
”Son of a fucking bitch! A white fucking pegasus? That would have been two hundred bucks worth of foal!”
You walk over to get the trash can, since you fully expect Sunflower to get stomped into fluffy goo.
Sarah glances back and raises her hand. ”No. I have a better idea.”
She takes Sunflower’s paperwork and looks for the sire of this litter. “Willow, huh? Okay.”
Sunflower babbles nervously as Sarah reaches in and grabs her.
”Go ahead and move another fluffy down here. When Sunflower is ready again in a week, I want Willow’s cock in her during their every waking moment, understand?”
Sellers would be breeders, & would want to keep an eye on things. Buyers would get the sterilized stage of the product. Iron control was one of Hasbios motives for making their own species.
Well, that was the plan, anyway.
Also, originally the fluffies sold to the public would be sterile, only the problem units in Hasbio breeding centers would be intact. So they didn’t program them not to hump them in front of people because it originally wasn’t going to be an issue.