Himari's heart was in the right place, even if her stitching wasn't.
Girls Love Stuffed Animals, and Textile Work Is Feminine.
So, what happens when girls decide to make their own stuffed animals?
Well, in some cases, you get adorable, cute, fluffy creations that are the pride and joy of the creator.
And then you have these things over here. They may not look like any recognizable animal on this earth, but the person who put them together will insist that they're mundane creatures. Or perhaps they will reveal that the creator is a Cloud Cuckoolander with very bizarre taste. Or it could be used to highlight a heroine's utter lack of traditionally "feminine" skills.
In either case, be prepared for something abnormal and bizarre. In some cases they may even be mosaicked out for the safety and sanity of the viewing audience.
While most of the examples are likely to be homemade items of questionable quality and/or taste, commercially made or magically summoned plushies also count, provided that they are considered bizarre in-universe. The item may exist as a Shoddy Knockoff Product version of a more popular and less horrifying toy. An otherwise bizarre plushie that is, nevertheless the hot toy to have in-universe does not qualify, unless it is meant to show something off about the world in question.
May overlap with Ugly Cute...if the audience is lucky. In some cases there will be overlap with Creepy Doll.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Azumanga Daioh: Played in two different ways in the same episode. The class is doing a stuffed animal exhibit for their culture fest. Sakaki has stitched together some rather unrecognizable things that look rather...sad. Meanwhile, Osaka has put together some rather...abstract...interpretations of various things. For example, she claims an oblong cylinder is Tsutenkaku
.
- BanG Dream!: Inspired by Hello Happy World's Michelle, Himari decided that Afterglow needed their own mascot. She made one. A Frankensteinian patchwork bear is the best possible description. Oddly, while the other members of Afterglow are initially repulsed by the bear, it does grow on them, over time.
- Heaven's Design Team: Pluto often carries around a plush Anomalocaris. The overall effect is demonstrate simultaneously her girlish personality alongside her unusual interests.
- Kämpfer has the Entrail Animals, stuffed animals who are, as the name suggests, designed with their intestines leaking (complete with realistic-looking fake guts) as if they committed Seppuku. And they turn into sentient beings called Messengers who serve as creepy Mentor Mascots to the Kampferinnen. The original novels lampshade their grotesque nature by explaining that the company who made them is in a bad state.
- Ranma ½: That Akane is helpless at any activity that might be considered remotely feminine is a given. Her efforts at making plushies for a school event in a later season episode can only be described as...a mess. Certainly, no one would be able to recognize any animal that she claims them to be. Certainly, Ranma can't.
- Re-Kan!: Makoto Ogawa makes a horde of zombie dolls for her friends, because she thinks they're cute.
- Wasteful Days of High School Girls: In episode 7, Yamai tries to win an isopod plushie from a UFO Catcher. She's unceremoniously shoved out of the way by a couple, the girlfriend begging her bewildered boyfriend to win it for her, which he does. The plushie is replaced by the clerk, and Yamai tries again, only to fail. Another couple tries to push her out of the way, only for Majime to step in and win the plushie for Yamai, all while the girlfriend of the second couple swoons over the boyish Majime, to her boyfriend's consternation.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: Sora Shiun'in/Perse uses a deck consisting of stuffed toy-like monsters called Furnimals/Fluffals, which he fuses with Edge Imps to create the Des-Toys/Frightfurs, which resemble plush toys that were broken and reassembled with weapons inside them, giving them a more demonic and demented look.
Film — Animated
- Coraline opens with the beldam unmaking an old doll, filled with beans as stuffing, and remaking it into a new fresh replica of our titular heroine, complete with plush filling. It's also very much a Creepy Doll.
- Lilo & Stitch: Lilo owns a ragdoll named Scrump that she made herself. She's a humanoid figure made from green fabric with stick-up hair, an oversized head, button eyes, and Mouth Stitched Shut.
- The movie UglyDolls focuses on the titular dolls, a group of factory rejects hidden away from the real world. With various flaws that kept them from mass production, the dolls have created their own world celebrating their uniqueness. At the end of the movie, it's this uniqueness that gets them in the "Big World" and chosen by children, due to their imperfections connecting with their new owners.
Film — Live Action
- Addams Family Values: When Gomez and Morticia bring Pubert home from the hospital, they give him a truly hideous teddy bear with a demonic face and fangs, that also growls when you pull a string in its back.
- Ant-Man: Scott, fresh out of jail, pays a visit to his daughter Cassie's birthday party and gives her an ugly stuffed rabbit doll. Cassie loves it.
Live Action TV
- The Goldbergs: In "Happy Mom Happy Life", Beverly misplaces the Cabbage Patch Kids doll that Adam and Dana had to take care of. She replaces it with a Shoddy Knockoff Product of the doll with a hideous-looking face. When it's shown to the health teacher, they even comment that it looks haunted and like the sort of thing which could terrorize a lake.
- One Foot in the Grave: In "Beware the Trickster on the Roof", Victor tries to create a stuffed toy using parts from other stuffed animals. The results are never shown to the audience, but Margaret is horrified by it and asks him to put it in the bin, where a young boy finds it and is sent screaming.
Video Games
- Neopets: The plushies that you can obtain from the Deserted Fairground in the Haunted Woods are this, with most of them being mishmashes of two or more plushies sewn together. Examples include the Koibat (Koi + Korbat) and Scorcie (Scorchio + Eyrie) plushies.
- The World Ends with You: Downplayed with Shiki's companion/weapon, a hand-made plush cat she calls Mr. Mew. While somewhat abstract, it's at least recognizable as a cat (though Neku repeatedly mistakes it for a pig).
Web Animation
- Loo Loo Land in Helluva Boss has the plush "thing" as a carnival prize. It's a fat purple creature with imp horns and what looks like a duck's bill, literally labelled just "THING".
Western Animation
- Amphibia: The episode "The Domino Effect" has Sprig making Anne a rather ugly plush toy of Domino 2 out of said creature's hairballs after Anne had to get rid of her. While Sprig eventually tries to take it back out of the belief Anne hates it, she instead hugs it closely and cries that she loves it.
- Clarence: "Lil' Buddy" is about the titular stuffed doll Clarence brings to school, similar to Cabbage Patch Dolls straight from the Uncanny Valley. All of his friends find it creepy, especially once it starts falling apart from rough play.
- Phineas and Ferb: In "The Chronicles of Meap", Candace orders a custom made plush called a Bangaroo, a cow/frog hybrid she'd planned to name Sr. Frowg. When it arrives, she's unimpressed by the grotesque results, to say the least.
Candace: Stacy, I just discovered why cows and frogs don't date.
Real Life
- Fugglers are grotesque stuffies of various shapes, notable for their mouthful of human-looking teeth that make them VERY off-putting. Even their own web page doesn't think highly of them.
- Some of the Plushie Dreadfuls look pretty bizarre as they're meant to represent various mental illnesses and disabilities. The standout so far is the Sensory Processing Disorder toy, which is a rabbit's face on a jellyfish body.
- UglyDolls is an entire line of weird monster-like dolls with blank faces, lopsided teeth and fangs, odd amounts of eyes, and weird limb options. The whole goal of the brand is that "ugly" shouldn't be labeled as something bad, rather as something unique.
