Fluffy Questions (Coming from a newbie)

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The others have been well covered by other users. But this one probably needs more detailed. Originally Fluffies were never racist or looked down on others. They just saw disabled fluffies that needs more hugs and love and the smarter fluffies would twig that the bad colored ones were headed to grizzly fates and would give them hugs and love. Mares would frequently proclaim “Aww babbehs awe bestest babbehs”. The only exception was Alicorns where they were scared or angry because they simply could not parse both having horns and a wing on one fluffy (As it was a “Glitch” Hasbio were trying to fix). Fluffy racism came in later when the Fluffy threads on 4chan were kicked from /mlp/ to /b/ and the newer, edgier users decided to write fluffies as racist hellgremlins to “Justify” abuse.

You can write or draw racist fluffies but you’ll get a stink eye from some of the older members of the community who have seen hundreds of “Poopie babbeh” stories that all play out the same.

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So I’m not the only one who dislikes that poopie baby ‘classic’ storyline? Thank god

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The 4chan mene that blew up when dustykatt went ham on the guys at that convention :joy:

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That’s a fair point. I do think it’s important to point out that there’s no cannon though. There’s no singular post out there about the creation of fluffies that we use as our Bible. It really is all headcannons, they’re just ones that we all accept as a group.

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There is some hard and fast rules about flufflies;

They have their own way of talking.
They’re dumb as hell and often fall for simple tricks.
They’re pretty much stuck as this bootleg state.

I’ve seen a number of folks trying to ‘fix’ fluffies which basically turn them into MLP, which is why there’s some hard and fast rules that everyone basically agree to with them. Everything else is up to the person.

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  1. Fluffies are racist in a lot of stories but I think it makes for lazy content so I don’t include it in mine. I think it’s funnier when they get into conflict for different reasons. Really it’s just a matter of whatever you prefer but I think it bottlenecks you into a very specific form of content which has been done to death

  2. You will likely get laughed at if your headcanon involves way too smart fluffies or they’re just super special.

  3. Because it’s funny

  4. Because it’s funny

  5. What Za said

  6. Only a few dudes here care about MLP as far as I know

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Yeah but speaking in an authoritative form about individual traits like fluffy ponies all being racist - a thing some of us have been here long enough to remember NOT being present, let alone standard - positions you as an authority. Same as the little shield icon. So maybe avoid it.

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Loooooot of stories about not liking brown fluffs. Many have and do ignore that trend. Hell gremlins and justice abusers pushed it way up.

Yes. Short lore fluffs were made by hasbio, released by peta, devastate gardens, shit miracle fertilizer, have a serious speech impediment(read the primer), and love sketti. The rest is a little up in the air.

Because it’s terrible and that’s what matters. If you’re not into it you probably won’t have fun here.

They eat it for you so it doesn’t spill out of your pockets. Chan holdover that’s cute as hell. Uphold it or die.

Start with an all loving all helping animal with a first grade education and zero practical knowledge. Then put them through the meat grinder and ask what they’d want to do moment to moment. You’ll figure it out.

Lesser. The ties will never break but they have rusted a bit. Don’t expect new blood to be a fan.

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Other than cleveland

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1: Even some of the people who write racist fluffies also have non-racist fluffies, depicting it as a thing bad fluffies do instead of something all fluffies do. So it is rarely if ever a universal constant, even for those who write it. As others have implied, it’s usually just used as a justification to say “it’s okay to torture and murder this one because this one hates others over something as small as fur color”.

2: There is no well-defined lore or backstory, so we all rely on headcanons. The most accepted we’ve got in regards to canon is “Hasbio made them to be living MLPs, and they were supposed to be rare and expensive and pre-fixed, but an animal rights group (sometimes PETA sometimes undefined) found out and broke the fluffies out before they were actually finished or neutered”. Changing this specifically can get you a few weird looks, but anything else, from the public’s reaction to the creatures, to how wide-spread they are, to what happened to Hasbio afterward, to how Hasbio even did this, is different for every creator. I’m pretty sure one of our old classic users even cut out the animal rights group part.

There is also a story called “Fall of Cleveland” which many users treat as canon, but honestly I’ve never read the thing so it’s not canon for me.

This is why you’re sometimes told “all canons are headcanon”. All of us have different ideas for the fluffies’ size, weight, environmental danger, poop, lifespan, racism levels, blood functionality, exact intelligence, etc. The only constants is that the fluffy has to be comparatively squat, fat and horse-like, naive/stupid, and speaking in fluffspeak (just imagine uwu-speak and you basically got it). If someone complains about your fluffy not being fragile enough or stupid enough or racist enough, they’re forgetting about this and demanding others adhere to their headcanon, so you can easily ignore such a person. But if multiple users agree that something feels wrong, please be open to the idea that you might have actually strayed a bit too far. We have a very blurry and smeared line so it can be hard to tell what’s wrong, but we do have a line nonetheless.

And if you do end up straying too far - don’t worry. That’s fine, we’ve all messed up like that. So nothing to feel bad about.

3: Everyone has different reasons. Some use it as vent art, others find it funny ala Happy Tree Friends. My reason is specifically that they are cute and innocent, and get upset and cry really easy, and cute things crying/being scared makes me want to cuddle them real bad. Hurt/comfort reaction. (I mainly do moronbox content though.)

4: This has been covered pretty well.

5: A good metric is “the story should not be able to work without fluffies”. If it’s about someone picking up and adopting a fluffy, make sure said fluffy does things that can’t be done by, say, a dog. If it’s abuse, make sure it doesn’t come off as beating up a regular child. Make sure the fluffies behave like fluffies, instead of Warrior Cats characters. Etc.

But also, please remember to give the fluffy some kind of personality. We have dozens upon dozens of stories where it’s just some dude finding a yard invasion with a racist evil smarty and killing every living thing in the vicinity - but because none of the fluffies have personality, it ends up reading like a dude stomping out a bunch of dog toys. Find something to make your story unique, instead of copy-pasting someone else’s plot.

6: Fluffies have evolved into their own thing, but there’s still some people that draw MLP fluffs so they’re not completely separate either. Fluffsplosion does some adorable Pinkie Pie fluffy stuff. So if you want to use MLP, go for it! If you don’t, that’s fine too!

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1.) sort of; they dislike “poopy babies” which are brown in color because they look like crap. They hate alicorns for no real reason beyond being stupid. To what extent and why is normally up to the writer and their headcannon.
2.) Yes. I found the glossary to be quite helpful when I first started.
3.) There are a few reasons; in my opinion it’s a combination of cathartic cuteness aggression mixed with dark humor. I find it’s a good outlet for blowing off steam as well as super hilarious. There’s just something about abusing these cute, dumb creatures that cracks me up, like Happy Tree Friends.
4.) It’s from an old meme from 4chan about people trying to do something but instead trip and fall and spaghetti falls out of their pockets. This leaked into the fluffy section on 4chan and somehow became canon.
5.) Just write a story and include fluffies, the sky is the limit.
6.) Avoid at all costs unless used for humor. Fluffies are not part of the mlp world and people who think otherwise are usually received poorly.

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  1. Many people have them disliking brown fluffies and alicorns, but it’s not universal. Depending on who you ask, fluffies are too nice and naïve to be truly bigoted and it mostly comes from a preference of what are traditionally pretty colors versus what aren’t. As for alicorns, fluffies tend to be afraid of them for a reason that varies based on who you ask, from ingrained knowledge that an alicorn is more valuable than they are, to the fluffy version of The Uncanney Valley.

2.It has become a buzzword at this point and it ruffles a lot of feathers, despite the fact that everyone has their own headcanon, yes. But it’s important to know that there is a foundation that people built said headcanon on. What matters the most/least will again, vary person to person, but fluffies tend to be
*Genetically engineered/artificially made and referred to as biotoys
*horse-like in some manner(even if it’s simply one feature such as hooves,mane,muzzle)
*Rotund, with chubby bodies and short legs.
*Lack of intelligence and naivety to some degree( learning/intellectual growth is fine)
*Fluff-Speak(they should have an odd cadence to speech)
*Easily excitable(to an annoying degree in some examples)
*Awkward and fragile(Easily hurt,but not necessarily to a cartoonish degree)
*Affectionate and overly reliant on love, physical contact, and attention
*Loves Spaghetti(or pasta in general)

That’s just my metric but it seems to do the job fine for most. Some might say that they need not be artificial, or others might wonder why there’s no mention of the infamous waste that fluffies are sometimes known for. Again, everyone’s metric will be different, but the key is to build your foundation from the key elements. As Squeaky put it, at least one person is going to disagree with you just because of the law of averages. But if you have multiple people saying something is off, especially the same issue, then you need to take a look at your foundation.

  1. In universe will vary wildly, but the main themes tends to be punishing something innocent, justice abuse for those that make fluffies the villain, and cuteness aggression. Metatextually, I believe it was a meme against MLP fans at the time. And over the top violence can be very funny and cathartic.

  2. In universe that tends to be up to the author/artist. It was a meme that started it out of universe.

5.Same way as you would any story, save for the fact that it has fluffies in it, which should be your focus. It can be about an owner, an abuser, someone who finds a fluffy, or even a fluffy itself, but the general rule is that fluffies should be central to the story.

  1. I didn’t even know about the connection when I first joined. Fluffy Pony has been shortened to Fluffy for so long now that I assume many don’t realize it either unless they go looking for answers (like you) or see some of the closer MLP parody comics (like me).
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  1. Technically everything is headcanon since there’s no official canon. Though many people write stories where fluffies hate fluffies with bad colours (usually brown) to create a simple conflict.
  2. There are a few general rules: such as fluffies loving spaghetti, being made by Hasbio, and speaking in a babyish/cute way. If you read a few comics you should pick up on the common ones.
    Though there isn’t a punishment for ignoring them.
  3. Cuteness aggression and some people like violent stories.
  4. Fans decided it would be funny.
  5. Basically add a talking animal that isn’t very smart. Try reading some stories to understand how to best write fluffies.
  6. It was originally a fluffier version of MLP, specifically flufflepuff, but has since become its own thing. Though there are some stories about fluffies that resemble MLP characters.
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I never said all fluffies are racist or bigoted. I said many of them are, and provided specific examples. I’m honestly not certain you fully grasped what I was trying to say with my first point.

Many fluffies are bigoted against alicorns, poopies, and dummehs. That’s just how it is. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember, going back pretty much ten years. Sure it got way more prevalent when hellgremlin culture came around, but I’m not going to go into the damage hellgremlins did to the state of fluffies as that’s not the point of the post.

Really, I’m not trying to be authoritative. Someone new to the community asked questions and I’m offering my input.

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  1. There’s very little if any solid canon, although a lot of things are semi-solid, like the spaghetti thing. Some contributors have all fluffies in their headcanon be racist/colorist/otherwise bigoted, others have none and others split the difference.
  2. Everything starts out as headcanon, some things just become hivecanon over time. Headcanons that subvert the hivecanon or put a fresh twist on it are usually welcome, but be careful, and if you’re unsure, ask.
  3. I don’t know why fluffy abuse is a thing, I much prefer the cuter and happier stuff, unless abuse serves an important plot or worldbuilding point. Abuse for its own sake is not my thing.
  4. The “sketti” thing started as a joke in the early days but became a meme/hivecanon pretty fast. It’s kind of a staple of the fandom now, but twists and subversions can be fun.
  5. Take a fluffy, write a story around it. Fluffies are the core.
  6. I found fluffies through MLP, and I’m still a proud brony, but most of the fandom isn’t AFAIK.
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Not to be argumentative, but the poopie babbeh thing, common though it is now, almost certainly doesn’t go back ten years.

I’d be interested to know when it did start, because it almost completely replaced the standard of runt rejection - although it was definitely well into the existence of fluffybooru, and after its most productive era.

It’s to be expected, but in a big way a lot these hellgremlin-era tropes keep going as “canon” through inertia. “It was like that when I got here, so it is inherently the case.” And through people being discouraged from straying from them because it has “always” been that way, even though of course nothing has always been any way. Everyone is just fucking around. Discouraging people from recognizing the “there is no canon” thing turns lists of answers into lists of rules. You can find entire books worth of fights over this subject on places like the SCP wiki.

Anyway, OP, the only way to get familiar with fluffy pony content is to check out fluffy pony content. New, old, etc. Maybe you can improve on it, just don’t feel like you have to do what everybody else has done. At worst, you make something only you are happy with, which is still a pretty good thing to do.

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Stuff’s only as canon as you want it to be, that’s the fun part. There are some generally accepted guidelines such as the way fluffies speak and the Hasbio origin story but there’s no hard rules. As others have stated, I’d recommend checking out a variety of fluffy content on the site. Explore a range of content from hugbox to abuse, art to stories, and you’ll see the similar themes pretty quickly. Build on the ones you like, and leave out the parts you don’t.

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As far as anything cannon goes the only thing wildly accepted as “close to cannon” would be the Fall of Cleveland series. It’s a massive writing project from the earliest days and contains most of the stories where the majority of accepted fluffy traits and behaviors were originally introduced.

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It came mostly mostly after the fluffy threads were exiled to /b/ after a lot of “Off topic” threads were kicked off /mlp/ and a lot of those users on /b/ thought “Shit=Funny” and they wanted a canon where they had “Justified” reasons to really hate on fluffies. There was some art and stories that particularly bratty mares would reject foals that didn’t have “Pretty colors” before but it was mostly isolated stories. The most likely theory would be that /b/ users went back and read “Runt redemption” stories, decided to make the fluffies racist to make them more “hateable” and because there was a surge of low quality “Justified abuse” content it ended up sticking because most of the content was using that canon that the mods never really did anything about because they didn’t want to police content too much.

Why there’s a general side eye on people trying to be overly edge lord abusers on FC from the oldfriends around the place as well as the overuse of Hellgremlin tropes. It was an era on the booru where the fandom was at it’s worst creatively.

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