EFFORTPOST WARNING, TL:DR: more positive humanity in fluffies = easier to not want to see dead, probably
It’s only until I had to try and think of nominations for the User Choice Rewards (and then forgot to submit any lol) that I went and trawled through my bookmarks to find that I have very, very few purely hugbox stories for later reading.
This struck me as odd because I’ve always considered myself pretty balanced when it comes to liking fluffies as silly little guys and then wanting to see everything they love be slowly dragged away from them.
This sort of thing has been brought up in thought experiments posed to the community, like “If fluffies were real, what would you do?” and my answer is that I’d probably love the little bastards, shit and piss and all. They’re just dumb animals who happen to have been given the wretched ability to talk and show emotion and even if you adhere to the canon that it’s all artificial, it’d still work very well on me. I get sad at seeing old discarded items like stuffed toys and machinery out on the streets let alone things like stray cats and dogs, I’d probably suffer an aneurysm if I had to deal with seeing animals starving and pleading for help in our own language.
But this is the joy of fluffies: They’re cartoons. They’re intentionally made to be as horribly saccharine and intolerable as possible. This is what makes it so easy and so fun to see the little fuckers tortured, tormented and torn apart: They are made for it, they are begging for it, and we are entertained by it.
This is where I find a huge well of respect for hugbox writers and artists, because their job is to take these traits that have been exaggerated to their most intolerable degree and rein them back in to something we can get behind, underdogs we can root for and actually feel sorry for, all the while retaining what makes a fluffy so uniquely themselves.
Probably my most memorable favourite (and apt for this time of the year!) is Sugarplum (by Booperino), a simple and short comic that nevertheless really resonates with me. It pretty much covers what makes me melt: Taking the gimmicky nature of a fluffy as a disposable toy, showing that there’s a real warmth underneath that candyfloss sweet facade, so revealing that they can make someones’ life happier like all loved pets will. I just love how it ends with someone passing their story on. Anyone who’s ever experienced the pain of losing a pet and the love you feel talking about them will find something to like there.
Of course, it’s usually straight back into the suffering mines with me afterwards. The fluffies you don’t want to roadkill are rarer than the ones that make you want to invest in a monster truck, several acres of open fields, and stock in Hasbio.