"The Fall of Cleveland" is a long collaborative web story set in the Fluffy Pony setting, created by posters on the Image Booru Derpybooru, although most of the writing is by lordanubis, giant neckbeard, and vanner. It was intended to show the full potential of the setting, which had developed a terrible reputation for badly-written Torture Porn with no redeeming features. Following the temporary banning of fluffy content from Derpybooru, the story was archived on a different image board, twibooru, where it can be found by searching on the index terms "Spaghetti land" or "fall of Cleveland"
.The story deals with the construction and opening of Spaghettiland, a theme park on the outskirts of the city of Cleveland, Ohio, designed specifically for fluffy pony owners to enjoy along with their fluffies. Unfortunately, a combination of miscalculations by the park's marketing team, the secret malevolent objectives of the park's owners, and the general stupidity and eccentricity of the fluffies, leads to catastrophe.
This work contains the following tropes:
- Amusement Park of Doom: Zig-zagged. The ride designers were trying to make the rides safe, but given the Made of Plasticine nature of fluffies they could only get them down to a fatality rate of 0.4%. The park ends up having a fluffy shop to replace fluffies who accidentally died in the park. On the other hand, Biopets were planning to blow the place up eventually.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Murdoch's psychopathic Dragon Arthur is motivated solely by a sexualised love of killing and torturing animals.
- Big Disaster Plot: As the title implies, Cleveland gets destroyed.
- Bittersweet Ending: Loads of fluffies and quite a few humans died, and Cleveland was destroyed, but the villains ended up dead or in jail, most of the sympathetic humans lived, and all the dead fluffies ended up in a genuine heaven.
- Brown Note: The latrines in Spaghettiland have a literal brown note to ensure that fluffies taken into them defecate.
- Chekhov's Gun: The BAD stick, which is the only thing fuzzies are programmed to be scared of.
- Complexity Addiction: Murdoch's and Biopets' actual plan:
- Blow up Spaghettiland with explosives and blame it on some kind of fluffy-caused disaster, causing fluffies to be banned.
- Distribute fuzzies throughout the USA and have them wipe out the fluffies.
- Get all other engineered "biopets" banned and make fuzzies the only ones on the market.
- Make huge profits by selling fuzzies.
- Dark Is Not Evil: After Death rebuilds Mercury's corporeal body to allow him to act as a Psychopomp for fluffies, he ends up with a fuligin leg and bat wings.
- Did Not Think This Through: The marketing campaign for Spaghettiland being directed at pet fluffies themselves rather than their owners caused feral fluffies, when they saw the adverts through the windows of shops or houses, to believe that it was a mythological-style The Promised Land, leading them to invade the park in massive numbers.
- Disaster Dominoes: The series of events that cause the destruction of not just the park but the whole city of Cleveland.
- The static electricity created by thousands of mating fluffies discharges in a huge burst of current through the Spaghetti Tower lightning conductor, detonating the explosives in the hidden chamber below that were meant to destroy the park.
- The explosion then detonates the gas filling the sewer system as a result of the large numbers of decomposing fluffy corpses due to improper disposal by the park of accident victims, fluffies falling down sewer inlets, and the bizarre sewer feral death cult.
- The explosion in the sewer system devastates the city and allows Lake Erie to flood the wreckage.
- The invasion of the Perry nuclear power station by hoards of fluffies leads to a serious nuclear accident.
- Don't Fear the Reaper: Death is a nice guy and sets up a real heaven for the spirits of all dead fluffies.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Biopets' plan would never have worked, because the robotic demeanor, lack of personality, and total obedience of fuzzies means that they are uninteresting to anybody who wants a real animal as a pet.
- Full-Conversion Cyborg: Dale's pet Robofluffy is a fluffy brain in an entirely mechanical body, created For Science!.
- Giant Wall of Watery Doom: Mercury's death scene has him coming face to face with a large portion of Lake Erie.
- Go Through Me: Archer and his Toughy Friends are last seen suicidally attempting to fight a pair of fuzzies to allow the other members of their herd to have a chance to escape.
- Gone Horribly Right: The villains' plan causes destruction on a scale an order of magnitude larger than they had intended.
- It Has Been an Honor: Archer's last words before his and his toughies' Go Through Me.
Fwends... yuu is aww good fwuffies. Good fwiends. Am happy to be yuu smawty fwend
- Karmic Death:
- It is implied that most of the human civilians still in the city at the time of the final disaster were sadists who had stayed in or come to the city in order to torture fluffies.
- Murdoch gets tortured to death by the Russian arms dealer that he bought the explosives from for failing to pay him and getting him unknowingly mixed up in a very high-profile disaster.
- Live Mink Coat: The Russian arms dealer Smirnoff wears his beloved all-black fluffy Little Bear on his head like a living ushanka.
- Made of Plasticine: Fluffies are. Notably, when one of the ferris wheel cabins underwent a final test for waterproofing by briefly submerging it in a ten-foot-deep swimming pool with fluffies inside, the fluffies got earache from the pressure. Of ten feet of water.
- Mercy Kill: Given by Marshall to the fluffy that Arthur was torturing in his office.
- Moses Archetype: Mercury, the feral fluffy who spreads news of Spaghettiland far and wide through the USA.
- Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: The spaghetti created by Marshall's industrial-scale automated pasta mixing, extruding, and cooking machine is this to humans. Fluffies don't notice any difference.
- Pantomime Animal: The fluffy "goddess" Uni is actually two actresses in a unicorn costume.
- Psychic Nosebleed: Rogue gets a nosebleed and migraine whenever he thinks really hard.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The US President who appears, and the main Smarty Friends Archer and Rogue, are all well-intentioned and sympathetic.
- Reconstruction: The work was deliberately intended to show that the setting had the potential to tell complex and entertaining stories, and as a result intentionally subverts, averts, or completely avoids some of the more negative cliches of edgelordy works in the setting:
- Severe violence is only occasional in the story, and more implied than depicted, with sexual violence even rarer.
- Humans who harm fluffies out of deliberate cruelty, rather than obliviousness or provocation, are depicted with disdain as very unpleasant villains who are also highly dishonest and willing to kill other humans in large numbers as well.
- The Smarty Friends of feral herds that get the most depiction in the story, Archer and Rogue, are both conscientious, well-intentioned, and by fluffy standards sensible.
- Pet fluffies are depicted as generally lovable and innocent, explaining why normal people would actually want to own them.
- Robo Speak: Fuzzy ponies communicate in this manner.
- Russian Reversal: The climax to Murdoch's fate, as he is implied to be tortured to death by a Russian arms dealer's pet toughie fluffy. "In Soviet Russia, fluffy abuse you".
- Scare 'Em Straight: The "Good Fluffy Ride" at the entrance to the park is intended to make sure fluffies behave in there, by showing bad things happening to bad fluffies, with optional levels of scariness depending on the fluffy's existing levels of training and/or obedience.
- Shout-Out:
- Archer and the other named fluffies in his herd are named after major characters in the adult-cartoon series Archer.
- Rogue's herd's trap for the fuzzies and the resulting battle are full of resemblances to battles between humans and Terminators in The Terminator.
- It's not blatant enough for it to be certainly deliberate, but Mercury's relationship with Death at the end of the story is reminiscent of the Death of Rats in Discworld.
- Order 109, the secret programming of fuzzies to exterminate fluffies, is a shout-out to Order 66, Palpatine's order to kill all Jedi in Star Wars.
- Special Guest: The President of the USA in the story, who has a discussion with Mercury about the Spaghettiland chaos, is real-world eccentric and satirical political candidate Vermin Supreme.
- Switching P.O.V.: The various chapters are from the perspectives of different characters in the story. The major P.O.V. characters are:
- Mercury: Lone feral fluffy who spreads word of Spaghettiland to all the ferals in the USA.
- Marshall Conagher: chief engineer of Spaghettiland, designer of rides and specialised catering machinery. Owner of rescue fluffy Sweetheart.
- Dwayne: Head of maintenance at Spaghettiland.
- Isaac Cain: Spaghettiland opening weekend customer. Owner of pet fluffy Marigold.
- Archer: Feral fluffy, Smarty Friend of a herd from California.
- Richard "Moloch" Murdoch: Owner of Spaghettiland.
- Ultimate Final Exam: The sewer feral fluffy herd has a lethal initiation test involving being able to cross a shallow stream of sewer water without drowning. Very few neophytes make it.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Dale the scientist has probably caused more fluffy deaths than anyone living, due to his determined intentions to improve fluffies and make them more able to survive.
- White Hair, Black Heart: The fuzzy ponies, robotic beings with white fur created by Biotoys as an "improved" replacement for fluffies and secretly programmed to exterminate them.
