Meta Terms

The following is a list of meta terminology used in the fluffy community to describe tropes and cliches. This is not a list of cliches per say, but rather, terms used to describe recurring themes in stories.

List of Meta Terms

 * Abuse Abuse refers to fluffy art and literature in which the fluffy suffers and/or dies. In the narrow sense, abuse refers to cruelty caused by the willing and outright malicious actions of humans or other fluffies. Stories in which the fluffy suffers due to nature or unavoidable conflicts are typically classified as sadbox.


 * Headcanon The term headcanon properly refers to a fan's personal speculations of a given franchise. In the fluffy pony community, the term refers a given person's theory on how fluffy ponies operate. Because there a community following a relatively defined concept, but no official corpus of work, the term "headcanon" is often used for what would be called, in other contexts, simply the in-universe rules of a given setting.


 * Hivecanon The term hivecanon refers to those [|headcanon]s which are universally or near universally accepted as always applying. An author who violates hivecanon is typically said to be using fluffy ponies incorrectly.


 * Hugbox Hugbox refers art and literature in which the is the fluffy does not suffer. Typically, hugbox consists of cutesy images, or stories which have little to no major conflict, in the sense that the survival of the fluffy is not at stake.


 * Justified Abuse "Justified" abuse refers to abuse done to a bad fluffy, or a fluffy who "deserves" it. Justified abuse is a obvious oxymoron, and refers to extremely disproportionate reactions to fluffy misbehavior, rather than reasonable punishments. Typically, the phrase is used to imply that the author is attempting to portray the villainous human character as an anti-hero of sorts, or that the author is is too much of a closet "hugboxer" to write a story about a good fluffy suffering.


 * Martyr Babbeh A martyr babbeh is foal that is abused by its parents, and is typically saved by a human, often a white knight. Martyr babbehs are typically alicorns, brown foals (called "poopie babbehs" by other fluffies), or "bad babbehs" (runts that have a distinctive odor to fluffies.)


 * Ragebox Ragebox refers to fluffy art or stories designed to anger the reader at the injustice of the story. Typically, in a ragebox story, a good fluffy will suffer for no reason, while a bad fluffy is rewarded for its actions.


 * Sadbox Sadbox refers to tragedy stories. Often, sadbox is contrasted with abuse: in abuse stories, there is an active intentional villain tormenting the fluffy, while in sadbox, the role of the antagonist is minimal, the antagonist is not outright malicious (such as a landowner chasing fluffies from his yard), or the fluffy's suffering is merely a result of natural forces (e.g. a feral family or herd freezing to death in the winter) and/or human indifference. Fluffy abandonment stories are normally classified as sadbox. However, there is some overlap between sadbox and abuse, typically, when the fluffy is intended to be sympathetic.


 * Weirdbox Weirdbox, as the name suggests, refers to absurd and ridiculous fluffy literature or art. Weirdbox will often show fluffies doing impossible things, or in impossible situations. CarnivorousDuck often draws weirdbox.


 * White Knight A white knight is a human who rescues a fluffy from other fluffies, and brings down his holy wrath against the bad fluffies. Typically, the rescued fluffy is a martyr babbeh. By definition, the white knight is either grossly disproportionate is his revenge, or he shows undue favoritism to the rescued fluffy. A person chasing off a feral herd that his attacking his domestic fluffy isn't a white-knight. Rather, a white knight would adopt a brown foal, milk-bag its mother and turn its (still newborn) siblings into litterpals.