After looking at the post linked above, I had a thought. The concept of amnesia has some real underused potential. It can be applied to abuse, sadbox and hugbox. Here are some examples:
In order to psychologically abuse some foals, an abuser injures their mother’s head, causing amnesia. Now she doesn’t recognize her own children, leaving them in anguish.
A mare gets a head injury in an unfortunate accident and gets amnesia. Look through her foal’s or special friend’s POV as they despair trying to make her remember.
A mare gets amnesia and forgets her babbehs and special friend. Watch as she gets to know them again and relearns to love them.
As you can see, the concept of amnesia can be applied in multiple genres of fluffy. If any of you are interested, go ahead and develop and use it to your heart’s content.
That could hit hard in some works since they have an almost magical ability to recognize their own offspring and parents by smell.
Avacado finding his pillow’d Mummah he should not even think existed since he came from a can for example.
Not in all works of course. The Foal who introduces his mother to his milkbag “mother”, the Foals who think they are being kidnapped when reclaimed from a breeder, and so on (maybe explain it as a sudden evolution from the first generation of ferals that survived to go back into rotation as domestics?).
The mindfucky potential if finding each other happy and healthy, but the relationship being forgotten by one party and the other being so crestfallen they can’t bring themselves to start a new one is good, maybe turn a happy ending into a short whispered Wan Die loop every time they see their forgetful family member. Maybe one with memory issues in general, who recalls and forgets things at random which no other Fluffy understands (doesn’t look or smell like a Derp so they aren’t treated as one leaving the others very confused. Hell, Fluffies on medications that fuck with their minds.
Or, Its Such A Beautiful Day. A Fluffy who watched parents and siblings lose their minds, now experiencing it themselves slowly. Not knowing if Daddeh will be understanding and how they cannot explain it. Not knowing how to tell their Special Friend and Foals. Knowing less and less by the day, losing the difference between fantasy and reality, memory and imagination. Chirping while wondering who is chirping instead of answering their owner’s questions because they feel disconnected from their body. Fuck, end it with the audience not knowing if they are being euthanized, tortured, or cared for since they themselves no longer know.
Tasers in a lot of stories “Reset” fluffies if they are applied to the head. Different people play with different success rates and that was more a thing in the past. I don’t know how accepted that is in cannon at the moment.
I think it would take some leg work to set up the conflict. I’ve read stories where adult fluffies forget who they’re siblings are if they’re in a big enough group. If he children were reliant on the mother then either the mother would reject the attempts to nurse and they would die or fall back into the pattern of caring for the children and considering them her own. Fluffies don’t do nuance so well so I don’t think much would happen in that case, though a potential conflict could be in the special friend being kicked out of the family.
It’s an interesting batch of ideas to be sure. I think it would be tricky to write because fluffy memory is bad in most stories.
Oh what about that guy that had a stroke and cant form long term memories anymore. Every day he wakes up thinking it’s still the 90s (The day he had the stroke) and his family has to break it to him that decades have past, and that he can’t remember anything. every. single. day.
-Edit-
I think this is the guy I’m thinking of, if so i misremembered a lot. Clive Wearing - Wikipedia
Headcannon I have adds in to what Ainbur stated; A strong enough electrical impulse to the skull results in the fluffy suffering from something akin to a short-term memory loss/blackout. They can attempt to remember things prior to and after an event in question but certain aspects of the mind are essentially corrupted data that they simply cannot access, doing so usually results in nausea or additional damage such as an aneurysm if they focus too hard to try to access the “Corrupted” memories.
Examples of this would be in a story I’m writing where Fluffies are used as fodder to test animals specifically designed to hunt and kill them. The company is mostly legit and tries not to “Employ” pets which have been snatched off the street, but sometimes it happens. The fluffies have a small portion of their head shaved and are effectively hit with a scaled down version of a cattle prod; This discharge is usually just enough to blank the last seventy-two to eighty-four hours, all but erasing the acquisition of the fluffy, the cleaning process and deployment into the Enclosure. The fluffies retain who and what they are however, they simply have a gap in their memory as to how they arrived in their current predicament.
The higher the voltage, the more damage incurred to the fluffies mental state and memories, with enough juice to just trigger a Factory Reset. Side effects are often common and can vary from loss of equilibrium, migraines, lisping and mild to full on seizures.
Some headcanon have the idea of a “reset” where an electric shock to the right part of the brain wipes the fluffy’s memory and resets it to factory fresh.
“WHEA AM BABBEHS? WHEA AM BABBEHS???HEWP!”
ZZZZZAP
“Hewwo nice mistah. Am fwuffy. Nice tu meechyu!”
And just like that, no memories of babbehs, special friends, previous owners, etc.