American McGee's Blog

Where the Plushie Dreadfuls “Controversies” Come From

We’re all living inside a machine that profits from outrage. Social media platforms are built to keep us scrolling, and nothing keeps us scrolling like outrage and fear. The platforms get richer. The rest of us end up angry, anxious, and less able to see each other as people.

That machine is the backdrop to this situation.

If you’ve searched for Plushie Dreadfuls lately, you may have found a video about our “controversies.” It’s approaching 400,000 views. Nearly everything in it traces back to one place: the r/plushies subreddit.

That subreddit is controlled by the owner of Plushies LLC, a competing plush toy company that also produces designs related to mental health. For more than two years, that sub hosted a steady stream of threads about us, where manufactured outrage stories were retold with important context removed. Moderators encouraged the hate – despite rule violations – and removed anything positive related to our brand.

Reddit has since reviewed activity in that community and taken action to stop this behavior. But the massive collection of negative thread still remain. And the “controversy” video compiles those threads and presents them as an unbiased overview of our company.

We’re not asking anyone to like us. We’re asking you to look at both sides of the story. Here’s the other side.

“Do NOT open this email (they’re watching)”: May 2026

The claim: We sent an email designed to trigger paranoia in people with mental illness.

What happened: The subject line set up a comedy story. The email opened with a holiday discount code, came addressed from “Plushie Dreadfuls” like every email we send, and told the tale of two plushies on the run after a botched heist at Santa’s workshop, including an ear lost to Mrs. Claus’s Pomeranian. It went to more than 250,000 subscribers. Our support team received zero complaints, and it outperformed our average email.

In the Reddit outrage thread about it, several commenters said they didn’t understand the problem until they clicked through or had it explained to them. Others pointed out that the email is obvious humor.

Different people deal with their traumas and pains differently. We are Plushie DREADFULS – and the clue to how we and our customers deal is in the name. It’s also in the style of the psychological horror games created by our founder, American McGee.

When the thread appeared, our next email included a P.S. noting that posting about us on Reddit doesn’t unsubscribe anyone; it just drives traffic and sales to our site. After two years of this, we allowed ourselves a joke. It was also true. Our Reddit ad reps told us – these outrage threads drive regular people on Reddit to purchase MORE of our product.

The “AI art” claim: March 2025

The claim: We use AI-generated art in our marketing.

What happened: Our “Apocalypse Crew” email used a header image licensed from Adobe Stock. Our team selected it with the “do not show generative AI” filter turned ON. It turned out to be AI-generated and mislabeled. Four days after the email went out, we explained this publicly: X Post. We’ve said repeatedly: We don’t use AI art in our products or marketing. The AI claim has kept circulating anyway.

The tariff email: April 2025

The claim: We used anxiety to pressure customers into panic buying, and encouraged scalping.

What happened: In April 2025, the U.S. announced a 145% duty on Chinese imports and the end of the de minimis exemption. Our plushies are made in China, so we told customers our prices would rise on April 28 and gave them the chance to buy first. Prices did go up as announced. Many brands sent similar notices that month, as commenters in the Reddit thread itself pointed out.

The email was written in the voice of the Hot Pink Anxiety Bun, one of our characters, and the line about reducing anxiety was hers. It also mentioned that some collectors were planning to buy for resale. Plushie Dreadfuls has a large, active resale community, and that line was written with them in mind.

The refund story: October 2024

The claim: We force customers to destroy plushies to get a replacement.

What happened: A customer received a damaged plush. Our first reply offered a $15 partial refund if it could be repaired, or a replacement with a photo showing the damaged one had been destroyed. That’s common practice for collectibles and electronics, and we’d adopted it after being targeted by refund scams. When the customer objected, we dropped the destruction requirement within days and issued a full refund. The customer’s own later comments in the thread say she thinks she got the policy changed. She did.

The bigger picture

Plushie Dreadfuls serves a large community of people living with physical and mental health conditions. Our Trustpilot rating is 4.9 across more than 1,000 reviews, which we can’t edit, filter, or remove. We don’t see this kind of hostility anywhere except one subreddit, and the video built from the outrage contained there.

Our fans love our products and they love our humor. And if your way of dealing with your traumas and pains includes dark humor and edgy designs, then we’re the brand for you!

Sadly, there are people who have dedicated themselves to intentionally misunderstanding our ways of coping. They’ve turned us into an outrage click farming industry.

The machine we’re all stuck in

The technologist Jaron Lanier has spent years warning about how social media works on us. Engagement-driven platforms reward whatever provokes the strongest reaction, strips what people say out of context, and pull us into a kind of pack behavior where joining the pile-on feels like doing the right thing.

I (American McGee) know this firsthand. A while ago I handed my X account over to our social media team and stepped away from it. The difference in how I felt, and how clearly I could think, was obvious almost immediately. I’m not immune to the machine. Nobody is.

That’s the system this whole story lives in. A video built from stripped-down Reddit threads shows up near the top of search results whenever someone looks up our name, because outrage performs. The corrections don’t register. The accusations do.

There’s a dark irony in that. We’re accused of exploiting anxiety and paranoia, and those accusations spread through platforms engineered to profit from exactly those feelings. We make plush toys meant to comfort people. The machinery carrying the claims against us runs on keeping people afraid and angry.

We reached out to the creator of that video directly. We shared the facts about the stock image and about the Discord comment the video misrepresents – you can read that explaination HERE. We explained that the video was driving harassment against our fans and our team, including death threats.

The video remains up, without corrections. The creator of that video knows the truth – knows the damage being done – and does nothing to correct the record or discourage the hate.

We make things for people who know what it’s like to be anxious, bullied, and piled on. Many of our customers have been on the receiving end of this scold mob when they share our plushies online. They deserve better than a system that profits from it, and so does everyone else caught inside it.

Judge us by the full record. That’s all we ask.