Turbine asked me about this story I wrote after he and @anon68543914 unveiled the first Hasbio catalog today. Figured I’d post it for those who never got to read it.
Got a little confused at the ending, did Alana trick Muriel into eating her foals to push her towards suicide?
Otherwise solid story, really nails that sinister undertone for Fluffies, that the ones that work as intended are soulless, consumerist propaganda and were never designed to be anything else
3 Likes
Thank you!
It’s been so long that I forget why Alana did that, so any interpretation would be valid. Off the top of my head, it could be her being so disillusioned with her fluffy that she did something terrible to reconcile the sense of betrayal between them. “Muriel never loved me, have this for wasting my time and money”.
3 Likes
Liked this story. Though the corporatism of fluffies has always been debated since the start on if they should be literal walking advertisements.
One bit of classic hive/headcanon I love and always adopted is that fluffies are actually totally genuine in their love and the need to make their humans happy (As that makes the fluffy happy when they please their human).
It’s humans who think they are corporate tools and make them spend money. I could interpret it as the fluffy just loving the pictures of toys and wanting some because the fluffy would be happy and make the human happy, but the owner, being too clever for their own good thinks it’s a sinister plot to sell more merch and takes malicious “Revenge” just because the fluffy is being continually bratty. It reads more bleakbox that way and that makes it more potent.
3 Likes
This is the big oof.
Time to rearrange some tags…
Why not both. As far as the fluffy knows it’s love is genuine they don’t know they’re a tool of cooperate manipulation with certain ideas pre programmed into their brains making them a sort of trojan psudo-horse for Hasbio. Even if you don’t abide by the programing idea they’re still as intelligent and easily manipulated as a small child which makes them vulnerable to corpo influencing and manipulation. And that’s where the tragedy lies
1 Like
I don’t subscribe to the “Programmed” canon because that gets very close to fluffies acting like the “Fuzzies” from Fall of Cleveland where they will only eat Hasbio approved food and play with approved toys. Fluffies need a bit of an open ended nature to work in stories. I usually go with “Pre-Developed Instincts” over “programming”.
But I can absolutely see manipulation being a huge element of selling things to fluffies and fluffy owners. Like companies specifically design products to be appealing to fluffies and the fluffy would always pick out that product. But humans think it’s Hasbio programing because of what they read on the internet/think “That’s how Hasbio was planning to get us” and that’s where the misunderstandings and tragedies come in.
2 Likes
I was always fond of the subliminal messaging of FLUFF TV turning fluffies into annoyances.
2 Likes
I feel “subliminal messages” is a bit of a cop out to get out of having to write more detailed psychology.
1 Like
Subliminal messages is one of the most complex topics in real psychology though. The very idea of conditioning a person through subtle cues and manipulation has been the backbone of espionage thrillers and mysteries for decades.
No it isn’t, it’s well-known that it’s bullshit.
2 Likes
That was an amazing story, and by far one of the most believable in my opinion (you could debate hasbio’s ability to program fluffies for marketing since they were incomplete but still).
The whole arc of Muriel descending into a shitrat as Alana so eloquently put it and Alana’s patient but increasingly frustrated attitude towards the fluffy just fits so well.
Not to mention you held off on the wan babehs phase which I find is far too often included way too early in a story, almost in a hell gremlin fashion.
2 Likes