Blue Moon Nursery is a Smurfs fanfiction written by Smurf in Hand for the website "BlueBuddies", based on The Smurfs franchise by Peyo. Unlike most fanfiction, instead of being published on a website purposely designed for uploading stories, the fanfic is told through multiple posts in a thread, interjected by other users throughout. It has gained somewhat of an infamous cult following thanks to Youtuber/Twitch streamer DeadwingDork
as well as a few others.
The story starts out innocently enough, with the narrator detailing how he has had the pleasure of taking in a baby smurf to love and care for. Things quickly change, however, when he finds another baby smurf in an abandoned warehouse, forgotten by an animal smuggler. This would be the beginning of the story detailing the horrible pain these baby smurfs endure. The story makes it out like the narrator is just a titular Blue Moon Nursery patron, asking them for advice, getting proper care from the facility to working for them and acting as a leader out of nowhere.
The story is fairly slice-of-life based, but wastes no time telling the reader about all of the terrible things humans do to these creatures, such as leaving them in a dryer on accident, nearly scalding them to death, kidnapping them from their human owners and sending them videos of the torture the kidnapper forces them to endure, taking the babies from their smurf parents to sell off as pets and killing them as a form of threat. The story ends with the babies (which are now at a head count of 4, by the way) snuggling together and restoring their broken hearts from the torture they've been through at the hands of cruel humans... aside from the incompetence of the narrator and the Blue Moon Nursery, of course.
The work has gained notoriety for being regarded as thinly veiled fetish content, with many critics pointing out the questionable way the injuring of its infant characters is written, with a heavy focus on portraying their pain and only slight notions to their joy or recovery.
Blue Moon Nursery contains examples of:
- Abandoned Pet in a Box: The story begins with the narrator coming home to a wooden box containing a baby Smurf inside. He decides to adopt him almost immediately.
- Author Appeal: There are many moments where the narrator primarily fixates on Smurf tails, primarily poking and prodding them.
- Bloodier and Gorier: Unlike the original Smurfs franchise, this story contains subject matter including but not limited to burns from a laundry dryer on the Smurf Runt, various torture-inflicted bruises on Pom-Pom and Strawberry, and the long-withered skeleton of Snickers.
- Broken Angel: One of the babies, Pom-Pom, has his tail taken from him which the story describes as being one of the most important features of a smurf they can hardly live without.
- Cerebus Syndrome: The posts start out lighthearted, albeit with a couple of uncomfortable moments, but slowly devolve into much darker territory involving, among other things, the graphic torture of innocent babies.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: The kidnapper of the baby smurfs (or “smurfnapper” as the story calls it, because of course it does) does exactly this to his victims.
- Crapsack World: From the view of the smurfs, at least. In this world, smurfs are essentially treated like a slave race where their children can be taken and sold for the entertainment of humans, and their villages from the source material are implied to have all been destroyed.
- Dark Fic: Gradually escalates from a My Little Dashie-esque adoption story into a series of grim events such as rescues from disturbing smuggling rings, getting into gruesome accidents, and witnessing graphically-detailed torture and cruelty.
- Description Porn: In the beginning, when the narrator first receives a baby smurf, he seems to be fixated on their tails, calling them "bulbous". It could be easily tossed aside as a mere quirk, but as the story moves into darker territory, there are paragraphs upon paragraphs describing the Cold-Blooded Torture of baby smurfs.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Unlike the other baby Smurfs, who are given names such as Blueberry, Dewdrop, Strawberry, and Pom-Pom, the Smurf Runt is only ever called "the Runt".
- From Bad to Worse: While initially the babies are hurt on accident, the injuring (and eventual murder) of these babies gets more twisted and intentional as time goes on.
- Guilt Complex: The narrator, sometimes through his own mistakes and sometimes not, leads to the babies constantly being hurt and almost killed. He reminisces on this frequently.
- Karma Houdini: The smurfnapper escapes before authorities can catch him, though the victims are left behind to be retrieved.
- Kick the Dog: The smurfnapper is shown in gratuitous detail to harm the babies to the brink of death, even over that brink once with baby Snickers.
- Mood Whiplash: One post will be about the babies getting bathtime, while the next is one of them being burned alive in a laundry dryer.
- Police Are Useless: Either the narrator or an organization called S.M.U.R.F. are always the ones to save the baby smurfs in peril. Law enforcement seems to care very little about the children of these sapient beings that are known to exist with the same feelings and thoughts as humans.
- Torture Cellar: While the descriptions of the smurfnapper’s work station are few (due in part to the author not being the most technical artist), it is implied he has an entire area scoped out with devices to hurt the small blue creatures.
- Torture Porn: Rightly so, with baby smurfs as its main target, no less.
