Duc Thao woke up late that morning, no time for breakfast not even some Pho in the way to work.
He took his crappy beatup chinese-made electric bike with lithium cells that came from another bike when the old ones died since he couldn’t afford brand-new ones. He drove through the chaotic traffic of Hanoi in Vietnam to his work at the toy factory, which was more of a sweatshop really.
It was a company doing toys to export to the tây ba lô, the yankees.
He could’ve been one of those Vietnamese living “over there” but his grandpa was fighting on the winning side, the north side.
The wrong side, so now his grandkids had to work for a pittance making stuff for the same people who napalm’d his village and took his legs in the war.
Irony is a bitch…
As Duc enters the warehouse of the company he lowers his head and goes behind some pallets to avoid getting some shit from the bald fuck supervisor.
He gets quickly to his “station”, more like a shitty wooden table thats so worn-up there are indentations where all the previous workers rested their arms on.
This company used to make lots of things depending on the market and whatever people is buying at the moment.
Nike shoes on contract, fake leather bags, cheap wristwatches, phone cases, you name it.
Right now they are making stuffed toys.
In the past they used fabric and synthetic wool, got a bunch of people to cut it in shapes to form the stuffed animal.
Then the biggest sellers became these weird tiny horses in bright colors. You would think only girls would buy them but Duc’s friend Tu told him it was actually overweight adult ông tây men who did. They bought hundreds of these things.
Tu even told him they would cut a hole on the back and fuck the things.
“The fuck is wrong with these people?” thought Duc
Anyway, as he got his tools out a girl from breeding brought him a small dirty cage made of steel wire with rust spots.
Inside were 50 fluffy foals in bright colors, none of them older than a week else they would be too big, nor younger else they would be the size of a keychain and too difficult to work with.
No browns or ugly green/yellow ones, those were sold off by the kilo on the streets since they were useless for this.
Some other more experienced guys work with adult fluffies since those are obviously more expensive because you have to feed them longer until they grow up.
Oh did I forgot to mention it? Duc’s factory switched to fluffies. While Japan banned them China did not since they wanted to copy them. What happened is fluffies became a plague much like in the USA and eventually made it to other countries nearby like Vietnam.
“Is not enough that there are still unexploded bombs from the war, now they send us this godless shit plague as well” thought Duc.
However many businesses took advantage of it like street food vendors who couldn’t use dog or cat meat anymore due to international outcry. And one of those business was this factory. So now instead of having to paintakingly assemble a stuffed animal using pieces of fabric and synthetic wool they could take an animal that already looks like a stuffed animal and just well…stuff it.
And so Duc opened a tiny wire door at the top of the cage and fished around for the foals.
He always found it funny how the first fluffy of every batch was happy. In fact all foals inside the cage were happy to see his hand probably because they thought he was taking them out from that cramped wire ‘boxie’ where they were all piled on top of each other like those chickens you see forced inside baskets in south asian markets.
The first to get out was a light-green earthie filly.
YAY BABBEH GIT NYU DADDEH!
Duc could never understand what these foreign hellspawn were trying to say. He did learn some english from youtube, enough to understand when some tourist was asking for directions (or what rusted up warning signs from the war said) but even then he couldn’t tell what language these things were speaking in. All he could tell is that they always said the same shit, the same words and phrases. Like if they had it recorded in their minds…
He looked at the filly, breeding already takes care of looking for birth defects in the fur that would ruin the product but Duc here is checking if the foal is clean and being stuck 50 in a cage that was made for 5 at best meant a lot of foals just shat on top of the others.
The filly of course was filthy, what a surprise for these tiny shit machines.
HEHE WUB UPSIES! WUB DADDEH!
First gotta empty the shitrat, for this Duc grabs a black bin and squishes the foal over it one-handed.
EEEEEEEEE! HUWTIES! HUUUUHUUU!
As the foal kept babbling its strange phrases and making those annoying noises Duc took one of his main tools: a plastic bucket full of cold water and detergent
WUH? NU DADDEH WAWA BAD FO–BLARGGGGGGHHHHFFFF!
Duc just kept plunging the foal in his hand over and over until all the shit washed off of its fluff.
KAF KAF KAF!* "ME-MEANIE DADDEH! FWUFFY SED WAWA BAD!
He simply tossed the filly in the table while he looked for a clean rag to dry her off. All stations have washed rags at the start of the shift but sometimes mistakes are made and a foal gets smeared with dry blood and shit which stains the fur and takes time to remove so policy is to simply discard it in the skinned bucket and move on with the next one.
As Duc roughly dried the filly with the old rag he fished around for his other tool.
The foal holder: a simple piece of wood with a plastic belt that gets tied around the foal’s midsection to keep it from running away, or trying to.
WA? WHY FWUFFY NU CAN MOVE?
The incision is made through the ass-end of the foal since nobody wants a plushie toy with genitals…well almost nobody. Doing it on any other part of the foal would leave a more noticeable incision and one advantage of fluffy plushies over regular fabric plush toys is that there are no stitch marks anywhere…except for the bottom one.
Duc cuts a hole in the shape of a triangle to remove the patch of skin containing the anus and genitals of the foal.
Wha nyu daddeh doin-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! SPESHUL PWACE! WOWEST HUWTIES!
This piece gets discarded with the rest of the foal. He knows about a small shop down the street that makes sexual fluffy plushies instead and even they remove the genitals since they would rot away. Instead they add plastic ones using parts of sex toys they import from China.
The foal is alive through the whole process, killing it with a pneumatic gun would stain the fluff with brains and leave a hole in its head that would be difficult to stitch shut. And electroshock could ignite the highly flamable fluff. There are workarounds to this but they are expensive, its much cheaper to just skin the fluffy alive, and the blood washes off easily if not dry.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
…and off comes the skin, he has to do it slow, rolling it throw the hole he cut behind the filly to prevent the skin from breaking.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Animation by egor alexeev
Of course this means the whole process is extremely painful for the foal, but that isn’t a problem for anybody.
The foal doesn’t matters, only its pelt does.
Huuuhuuuuu! d-daddeh pwace gib- says the skinned filly on the table but its voice is cut off by Duc simply tossing it on another bucket that’s marked “leftovers”. He washes the fluffy pelt with another bucket to get all the blood out.
Duc then turns the skin of the foal inside out and coats the interior with sodium tetraborate powder to keep the skin from getting fungus and reeking. The powder also comes with some pleasant scents to cover any fluffy odors.
He then grabs a piece of foam shaped as a foal from a box containing many such units in different poses like ‘gif huggies’, ‘dancie babbeh’, a curled ‘sleeping’ foal, etc. He fits the foam through the hole making sure every part of the pelt fits the foam else the plushie will look weird. He then grabs a couple of purple eyes from a drawer and uses a hot glue gun to stick them on the holes where the real eyes of the foal used to be.
Finally he stitches the lips shut in the shape of a smile, a polar opposite from the face deformed by horror and pain from only a couple minutes ago.
As he drops the finished fluffy into a box Duc sees the same girl who brought the cage of foals carrying buckets full of foals in different shades of brown and ugly shades or yellow or green among other undesirable foals.
The buckets are labelled “bỏ”, rejects.
You would think the factory could simply dye poopie foals as bright colored ones after all they are going to get gutted alive and then die, but the thing is first dyes unlike the genetically-encoded pigments in fluffy fibers isn’t permanent and can wash off.
And second but more importantly dyes are expensive: it’s actually cheaper for the factory to just sell off badly colored foals to other companies than waste money and time dyeing them. Breeding fluffies is so cheap when there are no environmental or sanitary concerns that its also cheaper to keep only the nice colored ones and discard the rest selling them for close to nothing, and the factory still makes a profit from those rejects!.
At the end of the process all skinned colts, fillies, mares and stallions are taken back in buckets. Most dead but some still alive they are all thrown into grinders where they are mixed with rancid brown rice and whatever trash vegetables are around. It all gets turned into a mush which is the only food the fluffies in the breeding area get, from dams and stallions to weaned foals that will soon become plushies. The skinned fluffies make the bulk of their nutrition, then they get skinned and become mush for other foals or their own mothers and fathers.
Meanwhile in stores across the ocean kids buy these stuffed fluffy plushie toys and walk out through the doors of the malls as filthy stray and abandoned live fluffies beg them for a new home, love and “nummies” in the parking lot, only to be ignored, kicked or just run over by the cars whose drivers don’t even bother to look down to avoid them. Other fluffies run away back to the dumpsters where they are barely able to scrape any food while they risk being devoured by animals or even other fluffies. If somehow they survive long enough the mall will hire exterminators and kill any that remain.
You really can’t blame the kids for their choice as the fluffy plushies are clean, smell good, only come in the best prettiest colors and are always smiling. Meanwhile the stray fluffies are starved, most of them in the colors petshops can’t sell and discard, hence their current stray condition. Their growth stunted due to malnutrition, their fur is uneven after sleeping on pavement, turf fights, stained because they never had a bath. Teeth missing, scars on their hoofs with damaged Hasbio logos and ribs showing from living in near starvation.
But the biggest turn off, the thing that drives potential owners away, its that they seem to be in a permanent state of sadness and despair, all of them with miserable faces that just make them depressing to look at.
And as the sign on the toy store says: “Plushie Fluffies are Happy Fluffies!”