The fluffy fandom started in the pony threads at /co/, when people started drawing drawing ponies with parodically fluffy coats. This is when the term fluffy pony first emerged, but the dumb, fluffy ponies still lived in Equestria among regular fim ponies.
After the story My Little Dashie, people started writing similar stories about fluffy ponies as pets in the human world. The fandom was mainly hugbox and weirdbox, with most of the stories being about humans trying to keep their ridiculously fragile fluffy ponies from dying in all sorts of silly ways. The meme “fluffy pony drowns” was born, with fluffies potentially drowning from just thinking about water.
Eventually, intentional abuse started rising its head. Fluffies in tragic accidents had always been half of the content, and the early intentional abuse stories treated fluffies ending up in the hands of psychopaths as just another kind of accident. The stories made it clear that the abusers were mentally deranged individuals, but many still thought this was straying from funny accidents into plain gore for its own sake. The terms hugbox and hugboxer were born as insults used by the new fans who wanted for nothing but abuse.
Still, this was known as the Golden Age of fluffies. Some artists were disgusted by the intentional abuse, but it was easy enough to avoid thanks to tags and the abusers wanting to make sure their stories would be immediately recognizable as such.
After a few years, the birth of justified abuse created the next big controversy in the fandom. The lawn invasion trope was created as a means of getting smarties and their herds into conflicts with humans, leading to ordinary people punishing fluffies out of necessity. The smarty syndrome was invented as a bizarre mental condition where a fluffy starts getting more and more belligerent, leading to owners reading up about it and having to break the fluffy out of it through abuse, or just kill it if it turns out to be incurable. Many old artists left, as fluffies picking fights and causing confrontations was going against the spirit of them being the innocent victims of circumstances. I’m ashamed to admit that at the time I found justified abuse just as good as any other fluffy content, but I didn’t yet have any idea what it would lead to.
The fandom was at its strongest, but there was one guy who was absolutely convinced that the fandom couldn’t survive without spreading into /b/. And he happened to be a huge fan of the new and controversial justified abuse trope. There weren’t many images of it yet, but he kept making threads with the same set of pictures every single day, sometimes several times a day. As expected, only the people who also liked justified abuse got interested, while anyone who could have liked the main part of the fandom never learned such a thing even existed. Thinking that fluffy abuse was all about hatred, the /b/ fandom started coming up with more ideas and headcanons to make them even easier to hate. Fluffies tendency to praise babies as “bestest babbehs” turned into fluffies having a bestest baby, followed by a whole hierarchy down to the poopy baby they abused just for fun. Smarties went from well-intentioned but often incompetent leaders to full on sadists with baby-raping enforcers at their command. Sorry poopies originally existed only in a one-off story about a smarty sprayed by skunk learning to rule its herd with an iron colon, but were now praised as an universal thing that all fluffies did whenever they didn’t like something. Anyone asking what fluffies are was quickly taught that they were all the worst parts of humanity combined, while any pictures showing them in positive light were derided as fluffies either merely pretending to be good, or only behaving well as long as they had everything they needed.
Eventually, the new fandom that had spawned in the /b/ threads moved to the booru and everything went to hell. With their vigor of just having discovered the fandom, the posts depicting fluffies as heinous monsters vastly outnumbered the regular posts. Old artists were insulted and despised for showing fluffies in a sympathetic light, driving the vast majority of them to abandon what the fandom had become. Around this time the term hellgremlin was born to set the new fandom apart from the original fandom, but the hellgremlinists hated it. Not because it was derisive, but because they demanded that their fandom was the one and only fandom and what the fluffies had always been about.
The hellgremlins subversion of fluffies was complete. Most newcomers thought smarty was simply what all male fluffies were called. Some suggested that fluffies should enjoy wallowing in shit, with others suggesting that they should set traps for humans so they could shit right in their faces. There were discussions about whether it would be possible for a mare to have consensual sex. Nearly all new content was about fluffies abusing each other, and the rest about fluffies destroying things and shitting on humans. Ironically, the hellgremlinists still claimed that the fandom was all about justice even when virtually none of the pictures showed evil fluffies getting what they deserved, and there were actually less pictures of fluffies getting punished than even in the early hugbox days of the fandom!
I stuck with the fandom longer than most, trying to create good content until I was literally referred to as “the last ember of a once great flame.” But I had to give up - there was no way anyone was going to sift through pages of seething hatred just to find a nice picture once in a while.
For the next two years, I checked the booru every few months to see how it was going. After fluffies were banned from /b/ there were no more new hellgremlinists to replace the ones leaving out of boredom, leading to a sharp decline in their numbers. Many even said they wished the fandom to die so they could be free from it, and over the next two years the trickle of new content waned down to nothing.
With the hellgremlins gone, an user called Renaissance started the old fandom’s revival in the booru, leading to old artists slowly returning and new fans discovering the fandom, surprised that it wasn’t all hellgremlins after all. This age lasted several months, but as the fandom grew stronger the old hellgremlinists were equally pleased to hear that fluffies were back again. They were less numerous, but they wore Renaissance down and forced him to quit, leading the fandom to go down the exact same path that had destroyed it years ago. This time even I didn’t stick around, knowing that good content would only slow down the inevitable collapse.
Just as expected, one and half years later the booru was once again a ghost town. The last discussions had been about how the fandom had run its course and there was nothing new left to do with fluffies, and the booru moderators were seriously discussing pulling the plug to let the site out of its misery. Someone made a fluffy thread on /trash/, and this time I started posting about the rebirth of the classic fandom and how the booru was ours again. It was a miracle how many of the old artists returned once again, and in a few months the fandom that was on its deathbed was once again as active as it had been at the peak of its Renaissance period.
This is now the third age of fluffies, and I wish from the bottom of my heart that we won’t repeat the same mistakes ever again. If the hellgremlin fandom hadn’t been set apart from the original, everything we now enjoy would have been dragged to hell with it. The line had to be drawn somewhere. Hateable fluffies inevitably lead to an unlikable fandom, so for the fandom’s sake keep your fluffies likable!
