Hive canons are a good thing, no matter how much people seem to dislike them. The hive canon that goes along with them (Cleveland, PETA, etc) is part of the framework that we can use to tell stories about them.
Do these things have to happen for fluffies to be? No. Fluffies are a certain thing. They’re fluffy, they speak Fluffspeak, they’re a bit dim. Everything else is just ancillary. We tell stories about the aberrations because they’re interesting. The violent ferals, the clever alicorns, the hideous cannibal monsters are all story elements because they’re interesting.
Sure we could read about an average feral herd surviving, or the average life of a domestic fluffy. And we do! But those deviations from the norm are what makes a story. “Once upon a time, nothing interesting happened” makes for a terrible story.
Bringing the point back to Hivecanon, these are the stories that already happened and allow us to build upon the world of the fluffies. We’re not Star Trek, Star Wars, or Star vs. The Forces of Evil fans with something we can say “this is definitely true.” We’re essentially writing fanfiction with no canon work to start with, so we’ve created our own. We all exist in our own little AUs since there’s no “real” canon to work with.
I do use “Unfinished” and “Peta break-in” but the stranger bits of my headcannon are that unicorns, pegasai, and alicorns can use magic, weakly fly, and both respectively. I also believe that, beyond the initial batch, more fluffies (usually alicorns) can be created with bio-engineering. and the final strange thing about my setting is that hasbio has created MORE than just fluffies, such as plant-dogs(plogs), and living, cartipace-wearing, alarm bells.
Hivecanon is good in the same way a building’s frame is good: you use it to build on top of. The best and worst part of this fandom has is that its core concept is very malleable. On the plus side, it lets people get very creative with stories and art. On the down side, it encourages the uncreative to be even more lazy with even basic aspects of worldbuilding and continuity.
The fandom balks when major hivecanon is changed in a story, and with good reason. If the most important parts of our collective continuity are treated with the same casual regard and more esoteric things like Jellenheimers, resets, poopy babies, Cleveland, etc, the creative space turns into an anarchy zone. But I’m still not opposed to it in theory, but you better make something entertaining and engaging enough to be worth the major shift.
A story concept I had imagined but never put to paper was a guy trying to solve the mystery of why there seem to be so much contradictory information about Fluffy Ponies. He eventually realizes that fluffy ponies, being artificial creations instead of naturally evolved creatures, are not only genetically unstable, but also cosmically unstable. They break probability all the time purely by existing. This is why they always manage to find themselves in impossible situations. Most fluffy pony lore contradictions can be explained as being different universes with different rules (i.e., different headcanons meant different continuity), but plenty of content creators will break their own rules or introduce new ones all the time. In this hypothetical story I never wrote, the guy figures out that fluffy ponies will accidentally shift into different universes and continuities all the time, and never be aware of it because they’re stupid and die easily in virtually every headcanon. This would also explain how a physically impossible amount of fluffy ponies descended on Cleveland; a lot of them came from other dimensions accidentally. Don’t ask how, it just happened because fluffy ponies are just quantum weird like that. In some people’s universes, Cleveland was a nuclear disaster, in others it was a minor kerfuffle that had little lasting consequence, and in others Cleveland is just a city in Ohio where nothing fluffy happened at all. Never got around to writing it because even in my head it was getting ponderous and not interesting outside of a meta exploration perspective, but that idea definitely stuck around as a rule to help understand this weird little fandom.
I hadn’t been able to read all of Fall of Cleveland and I plan to change this once it is all uploaded. I do embrace how the various interpretations of the Cleveland incident can all be considered canon unto themselves.
There’s many reasons why I wanted you here @LordAnubis , and this is one of them. I feel you have written one of the most important posts within the Fluffy Pony fandom and community, and one that more people need to acknowledge.
I wish you had written that story. Even if it seems ponderous , I do find it interesting. That said, this idea of exploring fluffies as a cosmically unstable creation, as well as its many different contradiction and universes has been one of the key elements of my own Sam Adams Guide. I also attempted to go even more into the idea in nɘbiɒӘ ƨmɒbA mɒƧ = nediaG smadA maS. I hope you give some of it a read some day, as your mentioning of this approach had a latent effect on the guide as I kept writing it.
Another reason I didn’t write it was that I had no real endgame planned. It was mostly this guy talking to his friend about his discoveries and being like “…so yeah that’s kinda crazy right?”
When you write a story, you’re asking people to spend their time reading it. You owe it to them to make something that doesn’t make them feel like they just threw away that time for nothing. The stories that frustrate me the most are stories that just don’t do anything interesting. If you really want me to read 5 chapters of your story, those 5 chapters better goddamn well not waste my time. Don’t write a story you’ve already read, the story already exists! Write a story you’ve never read before!
This applies to hugbox, neutralbox, and abuse, but honestly it’s the abusers that really need to understand that. It’s consistently the abuse content that comes up unfulfilling. Not because it’s distasteful, but because it’s boring. And that’s so much worse. A foal getting microwaved was interesting and horrifying and compelling the first time I read about it. On Ponybooru. In 2012. Make something better.
Well, personally speaking, I think there is a beauty to that kind of story. Its why I would still read it - if there’s one thing I know about writing, is that sometimes you can enjoy a written piece that was written for its own sake. Its a different take, I admit.
