What's a Hellgremlin? by:Foxhoarder

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ow come one man don’t blame it just on hellgrim

there is not “just and only” “black and white” there are so many grey shades plus in many many arts, stories, etc. were both existing and interacting with another

pretty much anything can corrupt when given too much power or getting too spoiled

i would recommend you to read THE FLUFFY SINK by Fluffus, that was inspired by science

there has been cruel/egoistic animals before … though most have been manipulated to that or became that way cause of their past (which could also happen to any fluffy)

the community probably will never be free fom hellgremlins but also hellgremlins won’t be the only reason, when things go down in the fluffy community, many vansihed arists mentioned other reasons, when they left or went on a hiatius (most personal reasons, burned out or bored)

demanding a fluffy community without any hellgemlin would also pretty much limit the art and creativity

just let things coexist, there is not just one headcaonen/lore that should be used/followed

plus the fluffy community was never complete) dead or collapsed, we recently just lost a site, that had a lot troubles with moderation

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Please chill bruh. A man’s entitled to his headcanon. And Fox has been around for a looong time to the point where Hellgremlins showed up after he began his fluffy career. The hellgremlin period also brought a lot of trouble to the fandom, to be very fair. But that’s a story for another day.

Please enjoy yourself on this site, and be nice.

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You must be really new here if you think losing the booru was anything but a bump in the road!

The hellgremlin apocalypses happened exactly the same way both times: Newfags started drawing more and more art that makes you angry, because outrage is the easiest way to attract attention. People who didn’t want to spend their time on a site more likely make them angry than happy started leaving, leading to a vicious cycle that made the fluffies more and more evil until making you mad was said to be the entire point of the fandom. Eventually even the hellgremlinists themselves grew sick of the masochistic self-aggravation, declared that fluffies were done, and left the booru a ghost town. If you think it wouldn’t happen a third time, you’d have to give some helluva convincing arguments to prove otherwise!

As for egoistic animals, fluffies aren’t animals. They’re biotoys, purpose-built for kindness. But the in-universe arguments one way or another don’t even matter - them being cute and friendly is the whole point of the fandom! If you like small animals that are just as evil and corruptible as humans, you’re not enjoying fluffies anymore. You’re enjoying hellgremlins. Or more likely, just being triggered into responding to them.

So in a nutshell, no, fluffies and hellgremlins cannot coexist. We’ve seen it before. It’s like allowing an unwashed, incontinent scatophile into a hot tub and then being surprised when only other filthy people want to use it anymore.

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“It’s like allowing an unwashed, incontinent scatophile into a hot tub and then being surprised when only other filthy people want to use it anymore.”

You have an erudite, albeit disgusting, way with words, Fox.

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You can’t except people to ignore or even disagree with science and especially psychology!

They are “smarter creatures” that are even capeable to talk you can’t really think science or psychology wont affect them at all!

There are kind of rabbits, when they encounter another rabbits family offspring unattended, what do they do? → They bite them in their neck, killen or crippeling them instantly! Why do they do this, to give their own offspring a better chance in survival. Transfered logical to fluffies this would end up something like “my babbehs bettah” or “my babbehs shoud suwive”.
And that is just one small example, there is a ton of offspring killing in the nature and other things that when you look at them they kinda seem hellgremlinish. And when fluffies go feral, it is just logical/natural for smarter creatures to adept some of this instincts/habits, to actually to “survive”.

Maybe then you can discuss in “how” the fluffies are made, and there are different approaches in the different headcannons/lores and yours obviousely are made without any animal instincts and perfectly created without any flaws.

And what i wanted to say is, that there was “just” a site lost, by removing a site you don’t/can’t delete the whole community/idea, it will always prevail and wait for other ways to share their “ideas” and this site maybe can be the next big thing for it.

But to be realistic you can’t win the fight for “no hellgremlin at all” everyone will post thei own art on their own thoughts and headcanons, no matter if you like it or not. You also can’t remove “every bad person” from the internet.

Let us just agree, that we disagree and just let other artist do what they want (in the frame of the sites guidelines).

This is the last time i will answer to this.

But to have a special ending and something relevant to my point, though it is quite easy to make a “smarter creature” at least “angry”.
Proof:

(cool links are allowed and work here ^^ … though this obviousely shouldn’t be overdone ^^“”")

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Personally speaking, I prefer the approach of treating fluffies as “animals marketed as toys”. I know a few artists and writers who have taken this approach, and doing so allows exploration of the themes of Life being privatized or treated as a corporate product. Its a common theme in cyberpunk/genepunk, and with the level of genetic engineering fluffy ponies suggest, I think making them more animalistic and giving them animal traits allows one to explore natural instincts, whether they’re good or bad.

That said, I am not against a treatment of fluffies as pure biotoys. By pure biotoys I am thinking of the replicant from Blade Runner, which was the approach people like Meh and Ferroter went with. It is an approach that I have explored in Muthu, and I think there is some merit to exploring a canon where fluffies are a synthetic lifeform incapable of negative traits and have to rely on a programming, the type that would need tech support.

The reason why I share Fox’s opinions on hellgremlins, even though I do like to explore “fluffies as animals” is because there was enough instances of people gatekeeping and pushing a certain hivecanon of fluffies “as being the worst aspects of humanity” to the extent that they kept harassing other content creators including hugboxers. Granted, I also blame this on an overabundance of abuse, but I suppose the real problem was a general lack of civility in the culture of the booru.

The way I see Fox’s post here is that it is critique. All too often, and perhaps even now, abusers will post a picture showing how hugboxers are wrong, or why fluffies are really undeserving of any love or sympathy. Thus, Fox’s picture here shows how hellgremlins are a deliberate exaggeration of the negative aspects of fluffies, made to be something genuinely hated. That said, and given a recent discussion I’ve had a discord, I think people are free to have whatever headcanon or preferences they have with fluffies - they just need to be civil about it and not harass others. (And yes, this may apply to both sides, but I’m pretty sure abusers were more likely to harass hugboxers)

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Sorry to butt in, but I don’t see how screeelord’s comment is aggressive in any way. Fox’s comment is more aggressive than screeelord’s. :confused:

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To be fair, after a word with Mister-Shitrat, i edited my comment to less aggressiv and more topic.

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Ah, okay.

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As I only write, I much prefer having the ability to add flaws and personalities to the fluffies rather than have them all be varying shades of sunshine and rainbows. But overall, as long as people aren’t screaming that “your canon is stupid and wrong” at each other I enjoy varying interpretations of the fluffies. In general, though, I believe they are far more good than evil

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I am grateful, thank you.

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This reply section has alot of words that can make a few pages of a fluffy novel if its not arguing .w.

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Amen to this!
People need to let fiction be fiction, and move on in life.

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My issue is more with being told that ”if you don’t write with this specific lore and head canon you are the worst scum and will be the downfall of the community.” I feel like the concept of fluffies take very well to multiple interpretations, and while the hell gremlinists no doubt did ruin things, restricting everything to a single interpretation and canon is likely to do the same

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Truth be told, the hellgremlins are here to stay. That’s just a fact of the fandom now. As long as we treat one another with respect, it’s all good. Everyone’s welcome, as long as one behaves decently on here.

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For me the “REAL” fluffy is somewhere in-between the two. They aren’t all good or all evil, and if we stick only to either of those lists of rules fluffy stories would get boring as hell real fast.

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Yes, indeed.

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The “all fluffies are evil” step comes in at the late stage apocalypse, but it always starts with “some fluffies” and snowballs from there. How many episodes of Columbo raping children would it take before you’d stop viewing him as a good guy? I bet the answer would be much less than ten percent of them.

Every time the fandom has blossomed, it has been thanks to people who enjoy seeing fluffies as innocents in the amoral world we live in. Everyone likes that. And every time the fandom has fallen it has been because of people ruining that core premise until no one likes fluffies anymore. First the hellgremlins drive away people who create likable content, and what’s left of the fandom is so shitty that even the people who ruined it in the first place get bored of it. Sane people don’t want to deliberately subject themselves to things that make them angry - this isn’t rocket science!

As for good fluffies getting boring, at that point you should just find more hobbies outside fluffies in general. If you want to get angry there are plenty of things to hate around the internet, but fluffies were never meant for that. If you feel the only way to get enjoyment of the fandom is to set it on fire and watch it burn, just save yourself a year and move on without ruining it for absolutely everyone.

I wish I could say “I told you so” to the people who caused the last collapse by claiming evil fluffies would just spice things up. But I can’t because even they themselves left the fandom when they drove it to hell.

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Foxhoarder, I will have to disagree. And I’m going to do so because I want to assert a point that I had reached after researching the history of the booru, and seeing its highs and lows. I know you and a number of others have been against hellgremlins, but I refuse to say that this idea of showing “bad fluffies” or “letting there be evil fluffies to spice things up” was what caused the collapse of the fandom twice, or drove the booru down. No, I remain strongly of the opinion that it was drama, and an overall culture of negativity that led to that decline. I don’t deny that hellgremlins are part of the problem, but I won’t consider them the primary cause.

I don’t want to dredge up the past. But it’s there, if people want to find it in the archives. Like the one time Bawsnia did hate art of an OC, despite LordAnubis’s assertion that no one should do it. Or the time Jein1234 did hate art of Carpdime’s Avocado, because Carpdime wasn’t focusing only on abuse as Jein expected him to (as well as Jein’s irrational hatred for any fluffy being happy) Or the abuse ending Great_White_Nope did of Roach Queen’s Marble, which reinforced RQ’s opinion that the booru was mostly schadenfreude and made much of her later art darker and more mean-spirited. Or the time that CarnivorousDuck turned Donut into a pillowfluff, as he did to two other OCs.

You mentioned Renaissance doing good for the fandom, but I also know that Renaissance left because people kept trying to push a specific view on fluffies. I remember the last post she made was on this picture by Mangoalie, and her gripe was that the commentators on the picture were saying “this shouldn’t be possible, fluffies are too stupid.” In fact, I’ll reproduce @Renaissance 's own final comment here.

hurmm
hurmm1702×937 102 KB

Its drama. The real problem is drama. It’s the very thing LordAnubis said on this page.

Do I think “all fluffies are evil or are stupid and only capable of shitting”? Of course not, as I am a hugboxer. But do I think there shouldn’t be evil fluffies? Here’s the thing - I think there is a merit to exploring fluffies that are flawed. I think that, if a creator wants to humanize fluffies, and make them violent, or angry, or spoilt, I think there can be a merit to it, just as there is a merit to a headcanon where a fluffy is 100% perfectly innocent in an amoral world.

But we have to learn to respect each other. That was the real problem with the booru - that people didn’t do that. And I’m not sure if we can really achieve that.

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I love your work, but I can’t agree with you. It was the range of fluffy behavior and human responses to it that kept me pulled in to this fandom when I found it. Sure the idea of all fluffies are evil is flawed beyond measure, but your metaphor doesn’t work. Fluffies are individuals, so if one particular fluffy is a monster 10 percent of the time, that fluffy might well not be a good guy…(depending on circumstances) but might still be an entertaining protagonist. But you could have monstrous people on a show every episode without making the heros monsters. you can have assholes on the hero’s team without tainting his story, you can make some of the villagers unlikable without invalidating the hero’s choice to save them. Nuance is what makes a story great.
It wasn’t maroon or the horrible nameless smarties or grandma killing invading herds that drove me away and kept me from raising my head when I came back the first time. It was the jerks in the comments, telling me what i wanted from my story wasn’t good enough. Telling me the way I was enjoying fluffies was wrong, that only their view was valid.
Abuse or hugbox, that’s what ruined it for me, the people that insisted on gatekeeping my headcanons. The Drama, as Oculus said.
I love your work, Foxhoarder, but your lectures in these threads are starting to verge on that again for me. I don’t want to be driven from the fandom for having the wrong way to do fluffies.
Please just let people enjoy things?

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