Web Original / Fluffy Pony

Fluffy ponies in a typical environment. Image by marcusmaximus.

Fluffy Pony is a fandom that sprung out of Friendship is Magic and 4chan. Beginning with the simple concept of "ponies with fluff" (as in having thick, fluffy fur), it quickly gained a communal universe.

The premise is simple: 20 Minutes in the Future, Hasbro creates a genetic engineering wing, Hasbio. To capitalize on the insane success of Friendship is Magic, they create the world's first "biotoy" (a term which is intentionally divisive, referring to the concept of a living thing created and marketed as if it were a toy). This was the Fluffy Pony, a bulldog-sized creature that resembled a G4 My Little Pony with wool-like fluff. Fluffy ponies are bio-programmed; though they have their own minds and can differ drastically, they all start off with the same core information. They innately understand English and can speak their own cutesy dialect, commonly referred to as Fluffspeak. Fluffspeak is mostly an executive's idea of what sounds cute (replacing L and R with W, mispronouncing big words, adding -ies as a plural, etc) combined with a sanitized dictionary (poopies, no-no place.) Fluffy ponies come in 4 races: Earth Fluffies, Unicorns, Pegasi and Alicorns. The differences are mainly cosmetic (pegasi cannot fly, unicorns can make harmless sparks at most), though their personalities are all different.

After hearing of this, PETA ruled Hasbio's actions to be unethical and abominable, and thus infiltrated the lab, freeing all the fluffies being produced at Hasbio. There were three problems with this: the fluffies are still prototypes and flawed, fluffies were never meant to breed outside of Hasbio and fluffies were never meant to live outside of a home or store. The released fluffies have a very high breeding rate; this, along with their cuteness, causes people to begin breeding and selling fluffies across America.

While many fluffies found loving homes and affectionate caretakers, many more wound up on the streets, in the wild, or, even worse (and very frequently in art), end up in the hands of abusive owners. The fluffies on the streets or in the wild become feral, becoming an invasive species akin to feral hogs and being similarly disruptive to ecosystems. The fluffies in abusive households or custodies, however, are subjected to various tortures, being cut up, quadruple-amputated, dismembered, put into breeding mills, trampled under foot, crushed, fed to carnivorous animals, having their foals brutally killed while they are helpless to intervene, and various combinations of the aforementioned abuses that their sadistic caretakers subject them to. Unlike the naturally-occurring animals that humans domesticated (such as dogs, cats, pigs, cows, and real horses), fluffies get relatively little sympathy from those who don't own one, often being derogatorily referred to as "shitrats" (a pejorative derived from their infamous bowel incontinence, the fact that fluffy foals are about the size of a rat and newborn fluffies are about the size of a mouse, and that foals too young to develop speech will squeak and squeal like rats), and will often run afoul of garbage collectors, pest control, and wildlife management officials.

An important point to note is that the fluffy pony fandom has no defined canon. Rather, it encourages the widespread use of "headcanon", a cross-fandom term in which every creator has their own specific rules for The 'Verse (in this case the fluffies). There are concepts that are popular and virtually unchangeable (personalities, speech patterns, love of spaghetti), but much of what makes a fluffy pony is subject to the creator (size, whether certain subspecies exist, what the universe of their story is like). This means that many of the tropes here will vary by author/story.

Almost all fluffy pony works are on Fluffy-community. Go there at your own risk.

Compare Ask Fluffle Puff, who is aesthetically a fluffy pony, but depicted in a much kinder light than most "fluffy pony" stories.

Please do not add tropes for specific small stories; rather, tropes here should be broad tropes that show up in many works.

Fluffy pony works with their own pages:

• The Fall Of Cleveland
• Smarty Party
• Soylent Brown

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Contains examples of:

• Adopt the Dog: Many a story has been built on the premise of a not-so-great person adopting a fluffy, or letting a herd rest on his land rather than chasing them away.
• Adults Are Useless: Adult fluffy ponies aren't that much smarter than their foals. Averted with human adults, who can usually sort out fluffy problems easily.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Mares with foals will exercise what little maternal protective instinct they have by pleading for their foals to be spared from death/separation/mutilation by pleading (and they may often be unable to do anything else) with instinctively recited phrases such as:
  • "Pwease nu huwt babbehs!"
  • "Gif back babbehs!"
  • "Nu huwtie babbehs!"
  • "Babbehs am gud!"
  • "Am gud Mummah!"
• All Crimes Are Equal: Who's delivering the punishment usually matters a lot more than whatever the fluffy did.
  • Hugboxer: Pooped on the floor, threw a tantrum, broke a priceless heirloom? Spanking, time in the Sorry Box, loss of toys. Rarely more than that.
  • Abuser: Turning into a brat? Death. Poop on the ground? Death. Don't finish your food? Amputation (or death if you can't amputate any more.)
  • Shelter worker: As fluffy shelters are for-profit, you'll probably be killed if you're not sellable.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Alicorns are hated and viewed as monsters by other fluffies. The reason for this is that fluffies have difficulty understanding that another fluffy can have wings and a horn at the same time, and thus label alicorns as monsters ("munstahs"), their catch-all term for any kind of creature that is not a fluffy pony.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Fluffies with brighter fur colors are more valued and easier to sell, but can become easier targets for predators in the wild. Some feral mothers will kill brightly colored foals to prevent the rest of the litter from "going forever sleepies."
• Ambition Is Evil: Good fluffies are generally complacent, and the ambitious ones tend to become brats or Smarty Friends.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Pillowfluffs, fluffies that have had all their legs removed, usually by abusers, and thus can't move. They often go into the "wan die" loop in short order, even when well cared for.
  • "Milkbags" have it even worse, being fluffy mares that are used in fluffy mills to feed the many, many foals that said mills produce. They're pillowed, strapped in place, and fed through tubes with hormones to keep them perpetually lactating. Depending on the writer/artist, their eyes may also be removed. However, some fluffy mills are more merciful and use drugs to render their milkbags comatose so they don't have to be conscious for it.
• Animal Nemesis: Fluffies in general, or a specific Fluffy or herd, could be this to specific abusers.
• Animals Fear Neutering: Fluffies can be neutered or spayed like other pets. It is recommended for fluffy owners to neuter fluffies in the first few days of their life when they're too young to remember it, as an older fluffy who gets neutered may become very sad over losing their "no-noes" and not being able to have "gud feews" any more—possibly to the point of becoming suicidal.
• An Arm and a Leg: Amputation is a method used by particularly cruel owners to punish fluffies. Fluffies that have lost all of their limbs are called "pillowfluffs".
• Artificial Stupidity: Generally agreed to be the source of the fluffy pony's mindset is a sort of "natural programming" designed by Hasbio to intentionally limit fluffy minds to what a living toy would need to be a cute pet.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Fluffy herds are usually the victims of abuse, and many are annoying and deserve what comes to them. But it's hard to sympathize with the guy who gets his yard wrecked and his shoes pooped on when he proceeds to torture and mutilate the fluffies.
  • Smarties are typically selfish Jerkasses with little to no redeeming qualities. Many people who otherwise don't like normal fluffy abuse stories will happily condone smarty abuse.
  • A trend throughout the fandom is for Fluffies to represent the most negative traits of humanity. They are gluttonous (wan sketties!), lustful (will often rape others, even infants, and females will have babies even when it's a terrible idea), cowardly (will often abandon their own babies if threatened), racist (will almost universally discriminate against bad colors or alicorns), and even cannibalistic (eating their least favorite foals), all while being too stupid to be taught that these things are wrong. While these traits are exaggerated in Smarties, in most cases they exist even in relatively normal fluffies, leading to many fluffies being killed in retribution.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Choosing to have pillowfluffs as pets rather than as litter pals, breeding mares, or milk bags. For immobile creatures, they can require even more maintenance than regular fluffies due to being unable to get anywhere on their own and needing to be provided a lot of mental stimulation on the part of their owners lest they become too depressed to even eat. All that for the benefit of having a pet that's easy to keep track off and put away.
• Ax-Crazy: Many abusers will gleefully torture and slaughter fluffies.
• Batman Gambit: Certain abusers like to play the long game by adopting fluffies and giving them seemingly reasonable rules that they're almost certain to screw up so they can have the high ground when they severely punish them for doing so. They may take in an incontinent foal and tell it that if it ever does "bad poopies" outside its litter box, then it will be pillowed and abandoned. Or they could allow a mare to have babies so long as she keeps them quiet, which is almost impossible due to how foals instinctively chirp and peep to signal hunger, discomfort, and enthusiasm.
• Big Brother Bully: Fluffy foals will readily pick on the designated "dummeh babbeh" in their litter, who is usually a runt, dull-colored fluffy, alicorn, or "enfie babbeh" (a victim of sexual abuse by an adult fluffy). A "dummeh babbeh" may get lucky and be adopted by a sympathetic human, but a sympathetic and vengeful human may rescue the "dummeh babbeh" while slaughtering the rest of its family as punishment.
• Bewildering Punishment:
  • Fluffies are pretty dumb, have short attention spans and forget things easily. This combination means that many punished fluffies end up unaware of why they're being punished at all.
  • Fluffies popularly interpret anything bad that happens to them as some kind of punishment, so a fluffy might bump into a wall and ask it "why huwt fwuffy?!"
• The Big Guy: "Toughie/tuffy friends," the strongest fluffies in a feral herd, usually earth fluffies, that act as a smarty's bodyguards and henchfluffies. When attached to an evil smarty, they can become The Brute.
• Black Bead Eyes: Jellenheimers, odd fluffy(-like?) creatures covered in red fur whose faces consist of two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, making them resemble a Ditto.
• Black Comedy: Often necessary to make abuse - especially graphic depictions thereof - palatable to viewers.
• Black Comedy Rape: Most commonly depicted as "smarty" or "hellgremlin" fluffies raping other fluffies, but sometimes a human abuser will rape a fluffy. It's usually still drawn in the same types of cartoony styles and accompanied by cries of "nu wan bad enfies!" so it's hard to take seriously.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce:
  • Fluffies don't react all that well to spicy food, so abusers will sometimes spike the Fluffies' spaghetti with hot sauce, whether as punishment or as unprovoked torture.
  • One abuser served a mare spaghetti with Carolina Reaper sauce, and witheld water until she sang the 'mummah song' to her foals. When she was too consumed by pain to sing, he fed some of the sauce to a foal.
• Blessed with Suck: Alicorn fluffies are extremely rare and prized by humans, and thought to be smarter and less physically fragile than most other fluffies. However, other fluffies hate them so much that most fluffy mothers will kill any alicorn foals they give birth to.
• Boisterous Weakling: Because biting and "sowwy hoofsies" work so well against their fellows, fluffies assume they can be used as deterrents or threats against other creatures, not understanding that their weak jaw strength and soft leather padded feet are really bad at backing up their trash talk.
• Brainwashed:
  • Fluffies are dumb, trusting creatures and can be easily manipulated, even to the point of convincing them that rocks are food or that they never had an owner with one conversation (even when that very owner is within eyesight.) Even smarter fluffies can be subject to indoctrination over long periods of time.
  • A taser or another electrical shock can, in some stories, "reset" a fluffy and make it believe whatever you tell it for a few seconds after the shock.
• Broken Bird:
  • Fluffies who survive abuse, especially if they are broken to the point of going into the "wan die" loop (only being able to say that).
  • Subverted in this story where due to the Fluffies having preprogrammed behaviours and a lot of customers getting angry about their Fluffies acting that way Hasbio opened a Customer Service center where you can get advice on how to "reboot" a Fluffy's brain.
• Bratty Food Demand: Some fluffies refuse to eat kibble and will demand sketties (spaghetti) instead. A reasonable owner will simply refuse to give into their fluffies' demand, while an abusive owner will mutilate or outright kill them for such behavior.
• Breeding Slave: Many fluffy mares are used as these by breeders and foal mills, particularly mares with desirable traits like brightly colored fur or curly manes.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Fluffies often poop when scared, which they refer to as "scaredy poopies".
• Brown Note Being: Alicorns are this to other fluffies. The average fluffy pony's brain can not comprehend the fact that a fluffy pony has unicorn and pegasus features at the same time, making them scream and shit uncontrollable in their presence. Even the most strong-willed fluffies are only able to control one bodily function. Parents will call them "munstas" and outright murder their own alicorn babies should they spot them among their litter or if able to rationalise that they are harmless, put them straight at the bottom of the hierarchy and keep them around as an emergency snack.
• Bullying a Dragon: Smarty friends are almost always Fearless Fools when it comes to this. They'll take their herd and invade a human's backyard, where they not only openly insult the human, but also threaten to beat up and/or kill them if they don't leave. This of course ends up leading to the smarty's brutal comeuppance — and often the entire herd's as well.
• Bullying the Disabled: Foals suffering from "Sensitive Baby Syndrome" rarely get a chance to grow into adults as they're either singled out by abusers to torment mothers who love them, or are disposed of by regular owners when their frequent chirping and lack of comprehending obedience pushes them too far. Among fluffies, such foals are usually taken cared of quite well so long as they have good colors and aren't alicorns, though their siblings will grumble about the extra attention they receive and understanding parents will acknowledge that they're "sensitive".
• Calling Your Attacks: "Sowwy poopies" have the potential to be a valid natural defense for fluffies, as sudden fluid discharge has been used by other animals to notable effect for a multitude of purposes. All the possibilities for a blinding (or at least, extremely smelly) blast as a deterrent and facilitator of escape are wasted as fluffies always announce they're about to do them, giving predators extra time to sink their claws into them, or humans to get out of the way or strike them before they let them out.
• Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: Fluffies take a while to learn that the television doesn't really have fluffies in it. They will also believe in fictional stories and figments of their own imagination. One imagines a monster, and the imaginary monster kills it.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': The terrible lying skills of fluffies and the culture of harsh fluffy discipline means that domestic fluffies can rarely do anything wrong without some form of punishment.
• Cats Hate Water: Due to the feline DNA in their genetic makeup, all fluffies are terrified of water and can drown very easily.
• Character Development: It is extremely rare for a fluffy to live a full year in the wild. If not for predators and abusers, the harsh winter will usually do them in. Those ferals who do survive it though have a higher chance of doing it again. Their character and appearance undergoes stark changes, becoming rougher. Females lose their single-mindedness concerning babies and can become the smarty of their herd. Survivor smarties in general are way less egomanical and greedy and tend to have the well being of the herd in mind, but can also be ruthlessly pragmatic about it, especially when the next winter is coming. In the end every fluffy in the fluffpile counts, yet it is another stomach that has to be fed.
• Child Eater: As they're even more helpless than adults, poorly protected and have less hair, most carnivorous animals will attack and eat fluffy foals. Sometimes even other fluffies will eat fluffy foals, though they usually only do this when extremely desperate for food.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The fate of many, many fluffy ponies at the hands of abusers.
• Color Me Black: A brightly-colored fluffy who is mean to a "poopeh fluffy" can be punished by having their fur dyed brown, causing all other fluffies to treat them as a poopeh fluffy.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong: Common in hugbox, where a newly adopted fluffy or new foal will make a fuss and the other fluffies/owner have to teach it a lesson.
• Constantly Curious: Fluffies asking a lot of questions is pretty typical. Usually harmless, though curiousity can kill the fluffy.
• Crack is Cheaper: Some abusers buy fluffies from legitimate stores at retail prices, which can cost hundreds of dollars, rather than wait for last day discounts or pluck a feral fluffy off the street.
• Crapsaccharine World: Very common, as fluffies expect the world to be a Sugar Bowl and most stories tend to depict it as the real world, if not worse. FluffTV and Spaghetti Land are two specific instances of this.
• Crossover: Several pieces of Fluffy Pony crossover fanart exist.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Many fluffies are the victim of this fate, whether it be at the hand of abusers or nature simply working against them.
• Cuddle Bug: Fluffies love hugs (or "huggies") and will often demand "hugs nao!" In the wild, this becomes a survival tactic, with feral fluffies sleeping in a "fluffpile" for warmth. A herd's smarty decides which fluffies are allowed to join the pile; a herd member not allowed into the fluffpile during winter is likely to freeze to death.
• Curtains Match the Window: Like in Friendship is Magic, this may or may not happen depending on the fluffy.
• Deadly Euphemism: Despite the childlike manner that fluffies speak in, they have their own words for bad things. For example, "sowwy hoofsies" means attacking with the hooves, "buwny wawa" refers to boiling water (commonly used to torture or kill fluffies), "bad enfies" means rape, and "foweba sweepies" means death.
• Death by Despair: Fluffies can endure a surprising amount of hardship, but once they hit a certain breaking point, they'll be hard pressed to move or even eat. This can come as the result of sustained misery or a sudden spike of it.
• Death by Falling Over: Fluffies die easily, especially in comedic works.
• Death Seeker: After enduring too much abuse, a fluffy will cross the Despair Event Horizon and only be able to say the words, "Wan die."
• Depending on the Artist: While they're almost always identifiable as such, fluffies can vary drastically in anatomy, quality, cuteness, level of detail, and degree of realism, depending on who's drawing them. Some artists' fluffies closely resemble their My Little Pony forebears, while others may look more like pigs, hamsters, bovines, or even Pokémon — and that's just the four standard fluffy races. Overlaps with Depending on the Writer, as some authors my have headcanon justifications for these differences.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • HIGHLY. Fluffy capabilities, society's view of them, how established characters behave and even the nature of major world events may vary depending on the creator. The mentality, thought processes and motivations of the same Smarty Friend may range from kindly but dumb to sociopathic monster depending on who's writing.
  • Just what are jellenheimers? Early fluffy prototypes that were never meant to see the light of day? A bizarre, but otherwise mundane, fluffy subspecies or mutation? Eldritch abominations with strange powers that may or may not have a reason for vaguely resembling fluffies? A Fluffybooru in-joke that is simply used as The Cameo?
• The Determinator: Considering that they were born to be dependent on humans and have no natural defense mechanisms, feral fluffies have to be this in order to survive.
• Delayed Reaction: Gardenfluffs are famous for this. Gardenfluff crosses road, is hit by car. Gardenfluff is buried by driver. Gardenfluff notices car.
• Despair Event Horizon: Fluffies who cross this enter a stage where they will repeat the phrase "wan die".
• Diabolical Dogcatcher: Animal Control involving Fluffies is a crapshoot as to the Fluffy being put in a shelter or a store (more common in Hugboxer fics or as a prelude to Abuse), or the Fluffies being exterminated as vermin by Pest Control (more common in Abuse stories)
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • In spades. Making "bad poopies" (not in the litterbox, generally by accident) can get a fluffy beaten or physically/mentally tortured. Invading a human's land is at the kindest an invitation to be abused and at worst a death sentence for every fluffy involved.
  • Even people who are normally (or ostensibly) hugboxers may dip into this due to the culture around the punishment of fluffies. Some will kill entire fluffy families or condemn them to suffering for rejecting a runt, while taking in the runt.
• Dung Fu: One of the few methods for fluffies to defend themselves is to shit on the target in question. Of course, most of the time it doesn't work and if attempted on a human, it usually gets them straight-up killed.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Lucky fluffies might go right from happy life with mummah to happy life with an owner or one of the rare good feral herds, but the majority need to go through more trials and suffering than a cuddly childlike biotoy was ever meant to if they want a good life.
• Eat the Evidence: Fluffies usually use this as their go-to method for hiding evidence, as they have few other options. Occasionally enforced by owners or abusers, in the case of "bad poopies".
• Electric Torture: In addition to general torture, electricity at certain levels can 'reset' a fluffy's brain, causing it to forget things or obey a suggestion made during the post-shock period.
• Elmuh Fudd Syndwome: When fwuffies tawk, dey awways wepwace dew "r's" and "l's" with "w's", and dew "th" sounds with "d", wike dis. Dis is wefewwed to as "fluffspeak."
• Entitled Bastard: Reasonable fluffies will ask for basic necessities and kindness from humans (housing, food, hugs, etc), at times even requesting them on behalf of their families who they will reluctantly separate from if it means the rest will be adopted. Others not only want all that for themselves but have the gall to ask for additional luxuries like sketties, toys, and even sexual partners.
• Empty Shell: Fluffies who are traumatized to the point of going into the "wan die" loop.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: There are many horrible smarties out there that still love their families. Horrible abusers may still have a great social life, their evil limited only to fluffies.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Many card-carrying Abusers will find certain Fluffy behaviors deplorable even by their standards, such as mares rejecting alicorn foals and "Poopie Babbehs". It's not unknown for some of them to take in and start Hugboxing those Fluffies while neglecting, abandoning, or Abusing the Mare and the other foals.
  • In some cases, certain types of Abuse can be too extreme even for other Abusers.
  • Unless sufficiently angered or irreversibly sadistic, Abusers will often spare Alicorns to sell or breed them for monetary value.
  • Beyond potential legal repercussions, Abusers typically don't go after fluffies that having loving owners. While they'll buy victims from stores or pick some off of the street, they tend to consider it extremely poor form to go after a person's pet.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Humans of every age, animals of every species, machines, inanimate objects, other fluffies, yourself...there is nothing that can't kill you when you're a fluffy pony.
• Exalted Torturer: Abusers in abuse-focused stories are often this.
• Excrement Statement: Fluffies may poop on someone (called "sorry poopies", with the idea that they're trying to make the other person apologise) as a weapon.
• Explosive Breeder: OH YES. The generally accepted headcanon is that a fluffy pregnancy lasts three weeks, and that the newborn foals are fullgrown adult fluffies in one month, and that fluffies have an insanely high chance of conceiving from one session of "special hugs". You don't have to do the math to know that's a buttload of fluffies. Exploited by foal mills, which breed fluffies like crazy in order to make as much money as possible, actual welfare of the mares and foals be damned. Balanced of course by them dying in droves even through harmless means like drowning in shallow puddles (and by neutering).
• Express Delivery: As noted above, a fluffy mare's pregnancy lasts only three weeks.
• False Rape Accusation: Smart female domestics who want babies will let feral fluffies mate with them and then invoke this trope. As most fluffies are bad liars and both humans and fluffies will rarely harass a rape victim, the mare usually pulls it off. Occasionally used by feral mares to advance their position (accusing the Smarty of raping them and letting the herd attack.)
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Some writers depict fluffies as having a color hierarchy, with bright-colored fluffies looking down on fluffies with less exciting colors (often brown or dull green). This often manifests in mothers rejecting or neglecting dull-colored foals, or feral herds putting dull-colored fluffies at the bottom of the pecking order and mistreating them in various ways.
  • Alicorns are hated and feared by other fluffies because they're so dumb their brains can't comprehend the idea of a fluffy having both wings and a horn, and so other fluffies call them "munstahs" (monsters). They rarely survive to adulthood in the wild because fluffy parents will usually murder any alicorn foals they have.
  • Some humans hate fluffies and see them as vermin, which is often why they abuse them.
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • People that hate fluffies refer to them as "shitrats", due to their poor bowel control and high breeding rate that causes them to be pest-like in high numbers. Similarly, they may refer to baby fluffies as "crap chicks" due to the aforementioned incontinence and the fact that they start off cheeping like chicks.
  • Alicorns are called "munstahs" by other fluffies, as are disabled fluffies. It can also refer to certain animals, as in "meowy munstah" (cat), "bawkie munstah" (dog), "birdie munstah" (any bird of prey), "stwiped taiw munstah" (raccoon), and "buzzy munstah" (stinging insect).
  • Brown or otherwise dull-colored foals are called "poopeh babbehs" by other fluffies.
  • "Special huggies mare" is a gendered slur for promiscuous mares, similar to "slut" and "whore".
  • "Dummeh babbeh" is an insult used against ostracized foals and is what fluffy mothers call their least favorite foal.
• Fed to the Beast: A common occurrence, happens with dogs, cats, snakes, black-throated monitor lizards, alligators, lions, bears, even Dinosaurs...
• Fix Fic: People popularly remake other creators' stories/pictures or make sequels to show what they believe happened afterwards. Of course, whether it's a happy ending or not varies greatly.
• Flawed Prototype: The fluffy species is an entire race of those, as they were freed and released into the wild by PETA before Hasbio was finished working out the kinks in their genetic makeup. They're Made of Plasticine, have weak bones and muscles, drown very easily, reproduce ridiculously fast, are really, really stupid, and their digestive systems process food and water quickly while only absorbing half the nutrients, excreting abnormally large amounts of waste as a result.
• Forced to Watch:
  • Can be as simple as making an evil mother watch her children eating a warm spaghetti meal or as malicious as crippling a Smarty and making him watch the destruction of his herd.
  • Foals are often abused in front of their mothers, with the mare pleading impotently the entire time. A favorite tactic of abusers is torturing and killing a fluffy mother's foals in front of her while she's helpless to intervene.
• Forgot About His Powers: A strange case where this applies in canon as well as in meta. Canonically, fluffies can eat and digest grass, yet in some works, fluffies are starving on top of grassy hills. Meta-wise, it is probable that artists simply overlooked it and made the hills green because it just looked better that way. Canonically, fluffies are just that stupid to actually forget what is edible to them, so it's not that big of a deal. Sometimes it's just plain weird for a herd to start a lawn invasion that is surrounded by a rich green meadow.
• For the Evulz: Many abusers have abusing fluffies for no reason as their M.O.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Fluffy race stereotypes and herd dynamics fit under this:
  • Sanguine: Unicorns, Smarty Friends (unicorn fluffs have a higher chance to be Smarties over other races)
  • Choleric: Earth Fluffies, Toughie Friends
  • Phlegmatic: Pegasi, Herd Members
  • Melancholic: Alicorns, Mummas (though both share similar characteristics, alicorns rarely get pregnant as most fluffies hate them.)
• Flanderization: Some stories exaggerate the fluffies' negative traits to the point where no reasonable person would want one as a pet, in order to better justify abuse. This is known as the "Hellgremlin" cliché.
• Friendly Enemy: Good-natured homeowners and feral fluffies will occasionally form this sort of bond.
• Good Animals, Evil Animals: Mostly averted: a wide variety of animals have been shown to prey upon or be aggressive to fluffies in stories.
• Gone Horribly Right: A lot of Fluffy behavior can be seen as the result of programming them to work as a toy running into the reality of needing to treat them like an actual pet.
  • The average pet has happy and sad days. As Fluffies are designed to be happy all the time, they are very energetic and need constant attention.
  • The Fluffy was designed to be dependent on humans for survival. as a result, they demand any human they encounter to be their caretaker.
• Gorn: Some of the abuse stories can get more bloody than your average Slasher Movie.
• The Grand Hunt: A Canned Hunt is presented in this manner. The hunting grounds are stocked with Fluffy foals in the spring, they are left to populate the area, and then are hunted for sport through the summer and fall in a large public spectacle.
• Groin Attack: Castration is a frequent occurrence, both in abuse stories and in cases where an owner does not want their Fluffies to have foals; many Fluffies (especially stallions) will become depressed over their inability to procreate, in some cases going into the Wan-Die loop. Even some Hugboxers are willing to spay or neuter their Fluffies, for the same reasons real-life pet owners would to their pets.
• Grotesque Cute: One of the hallmarks of fluffy ponies is the mix of adorable cartoony creatures with all sorts of horrific things.
• Happiness Is Mandatory: In many sales environments, fluffies are "persuaded" to be happy for the customers. Also occurs in feral herds, where unhappy fluffies may be ostracised.
• Hate Sink: Smarties are frequently written to be like this, as they're often selfish, cowardly, greedy, smug, and prone to physically and/or sexually abusing their own kind. Naturally, this makes them prone to abuse by humans.
• Horn Attack: A feral unicorn fluffy can sharpen its horn to use as a weapon.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Abusers obviously. But the fluffies only manage to survive and spread as much as they do because people picked them up to breed and sell them, sometimes smuggling them internationally. Had they not done this, the escaped fluffies would have been recaptured at best or died off in the wilderness at worst, sparing many of the various settings for stories from a new invasive species. Even that aside, people seem to be too lazy or ambivalent to actively curb feral populations in any meaningful way.
• Idiot Hero: The majority of fluffies that are main characters in stories.
• Image Booru: Once included on Ponibooru and later Derpibooru. However, Derpibooru's moderators decided to take action against fluffy art, as satirized here. The backlash caused a member of the fandom to start Fluffybooru, which has grown to become the hub of the fandom. Incidentally, after a fan poll and some internal debate, Derpibooru actually allowed fluffy pony art back on the site, albeit filtered by default (fluffy pony stories are generally not allowed, though this is because of the site's ban on text-only work).
• I'm a Humanitarian: When there is no other food source, starving feral fluffies may eat each other out of desperation.
• Imperiled in Pregnancy: Even if they aren't pillowfluffed, pregnant mares are extremely vulnerable, as not only are fluffies delicate (foals and fetuses especially so), but in some cases a pregnant mare will be left immobile by the size of her own womb. An immobile mare is at the mercy of her caretakers, and dependent on others for food, water, and shelter; a mare with a human owner must hope she isn't abused, whereas a feral mare faces starvation (or worse, having to eat her own foals) if her Special Friend doesn't come home one day.
• Industrialized Evil: Fluffy Mills are mass-breeding facilities of Fluffies (based on real-life puppy mills) which exist to churn out large numbers of foals for pet stores. Mares will often be Pillowed for use as living incubators or made into Milkbags, while foals will often be stuffed into cans and sold in vending machines. "Industrial Abuse" and "Industrial Sadbox" are even categories.
• Ineffectual Death Threats: Declarations of hatred and threats of violence by fluffy ponies only work on their fellow fluffies. Humans just either ignore them or are provoked into attacking the loud fluffy in question, or more cruelly if they were going to do that anyway.
• Interspecies Adoption: Very rarely open minded feral mamas or herds manage to adopt abandoned baby animals, like puppies or kittens. Needles to say that this genuine act of kindness pays huge dividends later on. But open mindedness is a very rare trait among Fluffies, who usually love playing favourites even with their own offspring and have difficulties sharing food and milk adequately with the lesser favoured foals already.
• Introduced Species Calamity: Feral Fluffies were released into the wild, both in PETA's initial raid and in subsequent releases and escapes. Despite being loud, brightly colored, an easy meal for even modestly-sized carnivores, and weren't even intended to live in the wild, Fluffies somehow managed to become this Trope almost entirely due to their Explosive Breeder nature.
• It Amused Me: Many people help, harm or mess with stray fluffies not because they're dedicated hugboxers/abusers, but just on a whim.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: Fluffies highly value friendship, making this very effective. Fluffy retailers will do this, keeping unsalable fluffies as friends for the merchandise and punishing them to avoid damaging the goods.
  • This is a way of disciplining fluffy mothers: as they tend to have many foals and most owners don't want many adult fluffies as pets, the foals may be harmed of killed for the mother's actions.
  • On a lighter note, fluffies consider inanimate objects to be friends. Hugboxers can take advantage of this and punish their fluffies by "punishing" a plastic ball or other toy.
  • In one story, the owner of a yard invaded by a feral herd manages to trick them into leaving (not that it's hard to trick fluffies) by punishing his fence for letting them in.
• Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life:
  • Be a fluffy and do ANYTHING that a human in the area does not like. Eating a pretty flower, pooping on their grass, playing loudly. The justice inflicted on you will range from a ruined life to death to all of the above, inflicted on all your friends and family.
  • A fluffy that disobeys their Smarty Friend's rules will get a lesser version of this.
• Killer Rabbit: The few fluffies that aren't helpless are naturally killers.
• Kill the Cutie: A common fate of abused fluffies, especially foals, is death.
• Knight Templar: Quite a few abusers are adamant in believing fluffy abuse is justified, since fluffies aren't a natural animal and because they're an invasive species.
• Lamarck Was Right: Nobody has any clue how fluffy genes work; the experiments and documentation were lost during the accident that freed them. What's known is that it's possible to alter their genes pretty easily. For example, cutting the horns off two unicorn fluffies and attaching them to an earth fluffy led to the creation of twin-horned "fluffalo".
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Or taser-guided, in this case. Zapping a fluffy hard enough can wipe its memory completely. Of course, don't over do it.
• Lethally Stupid: A fluffy pony may not be very strong, but it will find a way to destroy anything by accident. Safe rooms are partially for their benefit and partially for the owner's.
• Lilliputians: Microfluffs are the Fluffy/Equine equivalent, the size of insects and frequently kept in ant-farm-like habitats.
• Loser Protagonist: Abusers are often depicted as reprehensible malcontents who are too weak or cowardly to take out their frustrations and darker impulses on anything less helpless than a fluffy. This is little comfort to their equine victims though.
• Made of Iron: While fluffies die easily, they can also sustain quite the abuse, to the point of being cooked alive and still being coscious while being eaten.
• Made of Plasticine: Fluffies can be killed by practically anything.
• Madness Mantra: "Wan die" is what fluffies who are suicidal say over and over.
• Mama Bear:
  • Downplayed. Mares may abandon "bad babbehs" and "dummeh babbehs", and may even admit they are "bad mummahs" under duress, but will make at least a feeble attempt to protect their foals if they are able; if they are physically unable to protect their foals due to amputations, paralysis, or separation from foals by a transparent object, mummahs will resort to pleading to spare their foals with instinctively recited phrases like "pwease nu huwt babbehs!"
  • Averted once they realise their live is in direct danger. It's not always that clear cut for them at least, since usually most abusers go for foals first for the sake of mental and psychological abuse. If they go for the mummah directly, she will attempt to trade of all of her babies (even the bestest) for her own skin. If that inevitably won't work out, she will demand from her babies to save her. How to perform this heroic task is left for the babies to figure out.
• Master of None: Their DNA mix was formulated to create appealing and safe talking pets/toys, but in terms of physical constitution, fluffies are inferior to the individual strands put into them. They have the innate temperament of dogs but none of the strength or agility, they have the dexterity of cats but their soft leather hooves prevent them from properly gripping things, unicorns and alicorns have horns that are much more fragile than those of goats, their bird wings are useless for flight, they don't have the endurance of horses, and while they breed much better than rabbits, they lack their incredible speed and ability to burrow. The human DNA that presumably contributes to their intelligence and ability to speak gives them a unique ability to communicate with people, but it can also make them more frustrating than traditional pets, as those same features give them the capacity to knowingly whine, argue, disobey, and voice gross, ignorant thoughts.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Not that either gender is safe from death, but many breeders and herds value mares over stallions for breeding. Since males are also generally more aggressive, this leads to a lot of male death.
• Mercy Kill: Sometimes, this has to be done to a sick or injured fluffy to end its suffering. Here is a fluffy mother giving one to her terminally ill foal.
  Seabreeze: Am su sowwy, wittow sickie pointie babbeh. Mummah wub yoo... (closes her eyes) ...mummah wub yoo fowebbah...
  (SPLORTCH)
• Mind-Control Device: Tasers, which can be used to "reset" fluffy memories.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal:
  • While Fluffies are too small and weak to fight back against human abusers, it's entirely possible for Fluffies to gang up on an abusive Smarty or his Toughie friends.
  • One comic depicts a herd of former "poopie babbehs" (black, brown, or otherwise dull or natural-colored foals) who go around attacking pastel-colored Fluffies and adopting the latter's "poopie babbehs" as their own.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The complex genetic code of fluffy ponies includes bits of dog, cat, horse, human, bird, goat, and rabbit DNA. This results in an animal with the overall appearance of a toy pony, pigmentation like those of birds, the fragility and reproductive cycle of a rabbit, being born blind and deaf like cats, being omnivorous like humans, horns like goats (if they're unicorns), and the intelligence between a human child and an adult dog.
• Most Writers Are Human: Despite the focus being ostensibly on fluffy ponies, many stories have prominent human or humanlike characters as focuses rather than the fluffies.
• Nature Is Not Nice: It is entirely possible for "Abuse" stories to not feature any human antagonists, and instead show feral Fluffies being preyed on by wild animals, or violence between competing Fluffy herds. "Fluffies vs Nature" is even a category.
• Negative Continuity: The entire fandom. Actual ongoing stories tend not to do this, however.
• Necessarily Evil: It's hard for exterminators to kill hundreds of childlike animals that are designed to be cute and helpless and still think that they're doing a good thing. Conflicted feelings will usually disappear if a fluffy is caught red-hoofed causing environmental damage or harming native wildlife.
• Never Say "Die": Downplayed.
  • Fluffies will only ever say "die" when a fluffy's mind is irreparably broken by an incredible act of physical, mental or emotional damage. In this case, the fluffy will lose all personality and repeat "wan die", a stark contrast to its ordinary mind. However, if a fluffy has not yet reached the point of repeating "wan die", they will only refer to it as "forever sleepies."
  • Feral herds tend to avert this; contact with humans and the harsher realities of their existence eventually make it clear what exactly death is, and so an angry feral can be heard screaming "FWUFFY KIWW YOU!"
  • Averted completely with humans.
• Naïve Newcomer: By their nature, fluffies are excellent for this. Usually takes the form of a curious fluffy having its questions answered by a human. New human employees are generally used for this in settings that are less personable to fluffies.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Domestic Fluffies opening their doors to ferals seldom pans out well as they may do so with a violent smarty, or allow an outright herd through. Rarely does their owner vindicate their naive presumption that they'd be open to adopting additional fluffies, especially if they did this without their permission.
• Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: Fluffy kibble is the standard diet for domestic fluffies. While it doesn't taste particularly bad, some fluffies will refuse to eat it and demand sketties instead.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Hungry fluffies can eventually realize that other fluffies can be "nummies." Especially common with foals, by stray fluffies or their own parents.
• No Sympathy: "Enfie babbehs", foal victims of sexual abuse by older fluffies (named for the "enf enf" sound fluffies make while having sex), are often socially ostracized by other foals and called "dummeh babbehs".
• Offing the Offspring: Fluffy mothers will readily kill alicorn foals, dull-colored foals, or "runts", the weakest foals in their litters.
• Our Hippocamps Are Different: Sea Fluffies are basically the Fluffy equivalent, being aquatic Fluffies who can breathe underwater. Unlike their terrestrial cousins, they are almost always feral.
• Out of Focus: Most stories about ferals are focused on dysfunctional herds. Functional herds do indeed exist and the roles Smarties and Toughies have in them play out quite differently
  • Smarties in functional herds behave quite differently from their evil counterparts. They recognise patterns in traffic lights and even weather. They know where to find food and also know when they are overstaying their welcome. These skills help them navigate their friends through the concrete jungle and wilderness and they also determine where the best safe places for the herd would be. Other fluffies are glad to have them around, since they do the thinking for them (something that gives them headaches). In those herds a smarty is determined by ad-hoc intelligence tests like who can count to the highest number, and that is assuming it is some sort of a position that needs to be occupied at all, meaning that multiple smarties per herd are quite possible. They don't even have to be leaders, they are just friends that are smart.
  • Toughies in functional herds are merely fluffies that can shrug off some damage better than others. Way more common than smarties, and rarely their enforcers and more like peace makers, they are the ones who break up fights between herd members and look out for the herd's weaker members and foals. Just friends that happen to be tough and to whom a fluffy can ask for help if outhugging the problem is not the solution.
• Pædo Hunt: Some of the more disturbing abuse stories feature fluffies (typically a smarty) raping foals.
• Papa Wolf: Smarties and stallions are often this to their foals.
• Parental Abandonment: Some fluffies will reject their weakest foals, or "runts", as well as dull-colored foals, or "poopeh babbehs". Alicorns are also abandoned by fluffy parents, as they're viewed as monsters.
• Parental Favoritism: Mother fluffies are liable to choose a "bestest baby" (often picked as the one that is most similar to the mother in coloration and/or type) to lavish extra milk and attention on. In many writers' headcanons, "bestest babies" are liable to end up developing smarty syndrome unless the mother's behavior is quickly corrected.
• Parental Love Song: Fluffy mothers often sing a simple lullaby that goes "mummah wuv babbehs, babbehs wuv mummah" while pregnant or nursing their foals.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Some abusers target only evil and vicious fluffies, although in some cases it veers into Disproportionate Retribution.
• Pet the Dog: A common subversion of the general "everyone hates fluffies" thing is to have some of the hardest, scariest people in a setting care for a fluffy.
• Ping Pong Naïveté: The intelligence of fluffies seems to have a high floor and low ceiling as even foals are capable of speaking in complete sentences while having an almost innate knowledge of topics like death and "bad enfies", but they're otherwise largely witless.
• Planimal: Garden Fluffies are some sort of Fluffy/Plant hybrids, depending on the author they were either bioengineered that way or the result of a plant growing over a Fluffy corpse bringing it back to life a la the Cordyceps Fungus in The Last of Us, notably they seem smarter than regular Fluffies, if a lot slower.
• Potty Failure: Fluffies have notoriously bad bowel control. Many stories depict them as defecating at the drop of a hat.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Some abusers spare fluffies only because the fluffy in question would be worth a fair amount of money or good for breeding.
• Pregnant Hostage: Pregnant mares are not spared from abuse, but will be spared direct physical torture unless the abuser is explicitly intending to induce a miscarriage.
• Properly Paranoid: With all the horrible things that happen to fluffies, a paranoid fluffy is rarely incorrect in its paranoia.
• Pushed at the Monster: Few fluffies have the mental capacity - if lacking the scruples to choose otherwise - to do this deliberately, but one of the species' few bonafide defense mechanisms is breeding numerously enough that there's usually a few fluffies in the rear for predators or other pursuers to fall upon while the rest (or just one) get away. With large herds, pregnant mares (if any) are usually the ones too slow to escape an attack.
• The Quisling: Some fluffies despise their own race and will turn on their species, while working for an abuser.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil:
  • Fluffies that rape other fluffies are held in extremely low regard. This makes them a popular Asshole Victim of choice.
  • Often averted for abusers. Many of them consider rape, or other forms of sexual assault, as simply another weapon to be used against fluffies.
• Revenge by Proxy: Highly effective due to the bonds of friendship that fluffies form.
• Revenge Through Corruption:
  • As fluffy foals only take about a month or less to fully mature, a dedicated abuser can quickly raise a victim's child with whatever corruption is desired.
  • Hugboxers can invert this in a sense, taking in a bad fluffy's foal(s) and raising them to be much better than their parents.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Or rather, Hasbio's attempt at creating such a creature, with the pitfalls that would follow such a creature in real life. Art and stories may play it straight or not.
• Sadistic Choice: An abuser will sometimes force a fluffy into one For the Evulz. This often involves some sort of Saw-esque Death Trap where their parent/child/friend is in imminient danger of dying (like drowning in a tub of water) and the fluffy is rigged to something that will harm or kill them if they try do something, so they have to choose between either letting a loved one die to save their own skin or saving them at the cost of life and limb.
• Sadist Show: Abuse art and stories, naturally.
• The Scream: Fluffy screaming is usually written as "SCREE!" or some variation thereof with varying numbers of E's.
• Sealed Cast in a Multipack: A "foal in a can" is a Fluffy foal bred in a Mill that was put in a can at birth, with a limited milk supply at one end of the can and a waste receptacle at the other, and these canned foals are sold in vending machines as a cheap way for people to buy a pet.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Many fluffy pony stories are either this or Shoot the Shaggy Dog, spending a long time with a fluffy only for it to drown at the very end.
• Share Phrase: Due to their cookie-cutter genetic programming, totally different fluffies will "come up with" the same catchphrases.
  • "Hewwo, new fwend?" - to anything, including inanimate objects and clearly dangerous people.
  • "Nyu mummah/daddeh?" - what an ownerless fluffy will say to any approaching human, wanting them to be its caretaker.
  • "How time tiww weggies?" - fluffies who lose all their limbs fancy this. This happens more than one would think.
  • "Wan die" - when a fluffy no long wants to live, it will enter a loop and continuously say this.
  • For smarty friends, any variation of "Dummeh hoomin! Dis smawty wand now! Weave ow get biggest owchies!"
  • "Sketties!" - Fluffies will go into a bit of a frenzy over the mention of spaghetti.
  • "Huu huu huu!" - the sound made when crying.
• Shoot the Dog: Many people do terrible things to fluffies not because they want to, but because it's honestly the best option for either that fluffy or other fluffies at the time. Exterminators and Smarties are the most prolific examples.
• Shout-Out: With no editors or restrictions, creators can reference whatever they'd like (and they do). Friendship is Magic is popularly referenced, as the Hasbio backstory is reliant on it and many fluffy fandom members are fans of the show.
• Sickeningly Sweet: FluffTV shows like Ball or Babies! are this, along with anything targeted towards fluffies. Hugbox can also induces this reaction.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Many fluffies that completely lose their innocence end up like this.
• Sins of Our Fathers: As fluffies breed and die quickly, a human or fluffy pony looking for vengeance might find that their foe is long dead but has many descendants...
• Spoiled Brat: A fluffy foal spoiled too much by its owner or mummah may grow up to be a smarty, and be rude, selfish and demanding. This frequently happens with foals who are their mummahs' "bestest babbehs."
• Straying Baby: Very common with fluffy foals, who end up in all sorts of peril once they can leave their mothers.
• Struggling Single Mother: Because fluffies are too dumb to realize that "special huggies" and "gud feews" lead to pregnancy, stray fluffy mares frequently end up with litters of foals they can't adequately care for due to a harsh surrounding environment and lack of food. It is common for a fluffy mother to beg any human she comes across to take her and her foals in, which can be disastrous if said human happens to be in the mood for some fluffy torture.
• Sugar Bowl: How newborn fluffies see the world. Very rarely turns out to truly be the case.
• Super Drowning Skills: A fluffy will drown in the bath, in its water bowl, in the ocean, next to the ocean, looking at the ocean. So omnipresent that even more "realistic" stories recommend using less than an inch of water in a fluffy bath and using hamster bottles for drinking.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills:
  • Sea Fluffies are aquatic mammals, capable of swimming in bodies of water.
  • Bowl Fluffies are semi-aquatic fluffies evolved from a substantial amount of generations dying horribly as they attempted to traverse water. They have waterproof hides and a concave "bowl" of fur on their bellies used to hold their young as they float on water. Semi-aquatic is the key term here as they'll drown just like any other fluffy if they're ever flipped over or if their "bowl" takes on too much water. Their tails are also nigh-useless at steering or propelling them, so it's not unheard of for a bowl fluffy to drift over the course of an hour across a pond that they could have walked around in mere minutes.
• Surprise Pregnancy: It's obvious for an onlooker when a fluffy mare is pregnant (they swell up into balls and often need to be rolled from place to place), but the mare herself may be surprised to find that there are babies inside of her.
• Sympathetic Murderer: As horrible as some abusers' acts are, it's hard to not side with them when the fluffies they harm are an Asshole Victim. When there's no justification, it falls right into Kick the Dog
• Take That!:
  • The instinctive fluffy hatred of alicorns is probably a reference to the hostile reaction of elements of the audience to Twilight Sparkle becoming an alicorn at the climax of Friendship is Magic Season Three.
  • A running motif in the community is a strong "pets are not presents" mentality, citing how such animals are huge responsibilities and not to be gifted so casually or unexpectedly. If they're not being neglected a few weeks after being received, or getting tossed out for stinking up the containers they're placed in, they're being sold as "accessory" fluffies that have their orifices glued shut so that they don't defecate or urinate as they're packaged with engagement rings, singing telegrams, cakes, and the like. They die soon after from getting their Nethers sealed in such a fashion.
• Third-Person Person: Fluffies always refer to themselves in third person. If they don't have names, they'll refer to themselves with descriptors like "mummah", "babbeh", or "smawty".
• Threw My Bike on the Roof: How many people mess with fluffies, taking or damaging their toys. Sometimes the fluffy is the bike and the fluffy's owner or herdmates are the victim.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Fluffy life is suffering. But sometimes, a feral gets adopted by a loving owner and both sides are happy.
  • As much of the fluffy fandom's content is fluffies in various stages of suffering, the very existence of stories or pictures with happy fluffies and no drawbacks could be considered "throwing a bone" to the species.
• Time to Step Up, Commander: In stories that involve an abusive and/or incompetent Smarty Friend getting their comeuppance and the whole herd not dying, it is common for a PoV pony character to find themselves suddenly declared to be the Smarty Friend by the herd against their will. The implication is that the stress of being a Smarty Friend for a feral pony who isn't completely psychopathic or egomaniacal is such that anyone who wants the role shouldn't have it.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Intentionally invoked outside of the hugbox. A fluffy's life doesn't mean much, no matter how sympathetic it is. Do not cheer for it, you will just get your heart inevitably broken.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: In urban areas, starving feral fluffies sometimes have to resort to eating garbage to survive, often with lamentations of "Nummies nu taste pwetty...nummies nu smeww pwetty..." If they get even more desperate, they may resort to cannibalism, and parents may even eat their foals.
• Too Dumb to Live: A fluffy pony will kill itself in all sorts of ways.
  • Covering their eyes with hooves is their idea of hiding. Smarter fluffies who actually manage to properly hide themselves usually give themselves away by loudly muttering self-praise and how the "dummeh" whatever will never be able to find them.
  • Fluffies will do ANYTHING for "sketties". Thus it is effectively used as bait. Even the smarter fluffies who recognise the trap will willingly spring it anyways, albeit in tears, if the spaghetti has i.e. their favourite sauce.
  • Giving non-fluffy animals with natural brown fur (like bear cubs or wild boar piglets) the poopie babbeh treatment.
  • Their need to breed and lack of traditional animal instincts will cause some ferals to mate during wintertime where food and heat are scarce.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Fluffy ponies invariably love spaghetti, or "sketties" as they call it. They also like cookies.
• Tragic Stillbirth: Abusers often have no qualms with inflicting physical violence against pregnant mares, with this trope being the result, leaving the mare weeping and grieving.
• Translation Train Wreck:
  • Some fluffy artists do not have English as a first language, and can result in the hilarious situation where their fluffspeak is well-written, but normal human speech is butchered.
  • In some stories that play outside of English speaking countries, fluffies still speak their mangled English (since they were intended to be released in the US market first), so if they interact with locals, a hilarious mangled English battle ensues, since the locals and foreigners in those stories not only have difficulties understanding fluffspeak, but also speak Polandball English, which in turn confuses the fluffies to no end.
• Uncanny Valley: Fluffies intentionally fall right into it, being surprisingly human in some ways while also being unmistakably animalistic in other ways and, depending on the writer, even mechanical at times.
• The Unfavorite: Feral fluffy mothers will reject dull-colored or alicorn foals and deny them milk, leaving them to starve to death. Domestic fluffy mothers will initially do the same, but they can be trained by patient and caring owners to tolerate and love their dull-colored and alicorn foals instead.
• Unusual Euphemism: Fluffy speech is mostly comprised of these. "Nummies" for food, "gud feews" for sex, and "special friend" for lover/mate stand out in particular.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Marcus' and Spoons' games don't give much personality to the fluffs, but their nature makes you want to keep them happy.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Every fluffy videogame has this, at least on a mild level.
• Villain Protagonist: Depending on the story, this can range from evil and/or selfish Smarties to abusers whose exploits in Fluffy Pony abuse are explored.
• Villains Want Mercy: Fluffies will plead for their lives when abused (whenever they aren't just letting out an inarticulate "SCREEEEE!"), and mummas will plead for their foals lives with phrases like "Nu huwt Babbeh!" and "Am gud babbehs!".
• Villainous Rescue: Some abusers regularly save alicorn foals or other rejected fluffies that are worth money. Others save them because they want to do the killing.
• We Have Reserves: How many Smarties of big herds treat their herd members in fights against other herds or humans.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Smarty Friends just want the best for themselves. Some want the best for their herds too. Either way, they tend to cause terrible things to happen to their herds and other fluffies without any ill intent.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: The default setting for fluffies.
• Wings Do Nothing: Pegasi and Alicorns both have wings but can't fly. Though it like everything else with fluffies it varies from writer to writer what they can do with their wings (such as gliding short distances, lifting themselves off the ground by flapping hard enough, or only being able to just buzz their wings without anything happening).
• What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Heavily played with. Fluffies are intended to be incredibly cute. Depictions range from pretty anime ponies to poop-covered chimeras with weird hair.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Fluffies are legally classified as biotoys rather than animals, and thus aren't protected by anti-animal cruelty laws.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: There are three things fluffies fear above all else: the sorry stick (any stick used to spank a fluffy as punishment), the sorry box (any box used to put a fluffy in time out, again as punishment) and water.
• Winter of Starvation: When winter comes, feral fluffies have a difficult time finding enough food to survive, especially mothers with foals. They may resort to eating garbage, and if desperate enough may cannibalize each other.
• Would Hurt a Child: Fluffy foals are very vulnerable to being abused, either by adult fluffies or humans. Foals that are sexually abused by adult fluffies are called "enfie babbehs".
• Yank the Dog's Chain: A lot of stories and art sequences that start off nice and cuddly do not end that way.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Domestic fluffies that get taken, wander off, or run away from their homes rarely ever find their way back due to being bad with directions. Strangely enough, feral fluffies seem to be better at going back to their current nesties as needed.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Abusive breeders and foal mills will toss out fluffies that are no longer useful—badly colored foals, mares who have had too many miscarriages, and stallions who can't "perform" any longer.
• Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: Fluffies are usually very young, taking only a month in most headcanons to go from newborn to adult. They rarely live to their first birthday without human aid.

---

It is then you see its face and behind the cuddly look you helped create, behind the hardcoded dialog created by PR experts, behind those cartoony eyes full of tears that you can see that this faulty chimera, this fake creature with its voice that sounds like a parrot trying to imitate a guinea pig, its suffering. Its pain is real, its sadness is real.

— The Hubris Series by Gardel.