ON FLUFFIES by bbthatguy
SECTION 1: THE HISTORY OF FLUFFIES
CHAPTER 2: THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLUFFIES (PART 1)
No sooner had fluffies been cleared for release that people began profiting off of them. The allure of a pet that could talk to you was too much to ignore, and people clamored to have their own fluffy, despite the obvious downsides. The next decade was seen as a golden age, where fluffy sales were at their highest, campaigns to afford them more rights had significant support, and most fluffies, feral or not, could live in relative peace.
FLUFFY BREEDING BEGINS
Originally, Hasbro/Hasbio had planned to sell only neutered/spayed and chipped ponies with official printed codes on their flanks to ensure a monopoly on the market. PETA’s attack changed that. People began plucking the escapees from the forest and breeding them by the hundreds. These backyard breeders attempted to push out fluffies resembling the Mane Six and Princesses Celestia and Luna, to very limited success. To keep up with competition, many breeders began creating their own “breeds” of fluffies, selectively breeding those with “favorable” traits until their entire stock exhibited it. This process led to the creation of microfluffies and designers.
In their attempts to create these new breeds, breeders created a surplus of fluffies which the public eagerly bought. This caused a sizable decrease in price. While a brown earthie would be sold for $150 just a year before, the same one would struggle to break $30 in the current market, and the price would continue to lower as the years went on. Initially, Hasbro tried to file copyright infringement cases against the breeders, but failed to adequately track them down and decided to simply license the Fluffy Pony name to them. To this day, every registered fluffy breeding business pays a small royalty to the company to avoid legal action.
THE RISE OF BOXES
“Boxes”, referring to a category or “box” in which fluffy owners identify themselves in, find their roots in the golden age of fluffies. Having begun as simple nicknames, some such as “hugboxer” have seen an increasingly negative connotation in the succeeding years.
The official designation of fluffies as biotoys meant they are not covered by cruelty laws, and it did not take long for some less-than-savory characters to begin enacting dark fantasies against fluffies. The amount of power a human could wield over a fluffy was too strong a temptation to ignore for some. Fluffies were bought and runaways were picked up for the sole purpose of abusing them to the point of death or the infamous “wan die” stage. Abuse forums began forming on the internet, and while many attempts were made to take them down, they were put right back up since what they were doing to fluffies was perfectly legal in the eyes of the law.
In the days before fluffy owner help blogs, inexperienced owners tended to overindulge their fluffies, causing many to develop smarty syndrome, leading to as many as two thousand fluffies being abandoned a day throughout the country. Those that were kept met a much more gruesome fate, and contributed to fluffy abuse becoming widespread. Even now, fluffies afflicted with smarty syndrome are the top victims of fluffy abuse.
Meanwhile, PETA began lobbying to lawmakers for fluffies to be recognized as animals. A group calling themselves the “Hugboxer League”, for their belief that fluffies are for “hugs and love”, led the effort. Significant headway was made and a bill even reached discussions on the floor of the House, though it failed to reach the required number of votes to pass to the Senate. The more radical members of PETA, however, began attacking large-scale breeders, freeing several thousand fluffies. While most were recovered, many fluffies had to survive the elements. Natural selection began its work, and the evolution of the feral breed of fluffies was underway.
In the early years of fluffies, it was not uncommon for actual physical fights to break out between hugboxers and abusers in public, such was the hatred of one for the other. Hugboxers believed that a fluffy should be cared for and its every indulgence should be taken care of, while abusers saw fluffies only as a source of catharsis and power. Rebelling against the excesses of abuse and hugboxing, “neutralboxers” began to make their presence known. Those who identified as neutralboxers believed in marrying the best of abuse and hugboxing. They would tend to their fluffy’s needs while imposing strict discipline. While a hugboxer would cringe at the thought of using a sorry stick and an abuser would hit a fluffy with it until it bled, neutralboxers may simply hit with enough force to hurt but not enough to bruise. Since then, neutralboxers have tended to act as a mediating presence between abusers and hugboxers.
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