Fandom Wank has kind of been petering out since the Harry Potter series ended, but they’ve got a nice write-up about Las Pegasus Unicon, a brony convention that imploded because the convention organizers did not know how to organize a convention.
Evidently the promoters realized the con wouldn’t raise enough revenue to pay for its costs. So they started handing out FAKE MONEY, sort of like casino chips for the vendors and attendees to use as currency until they could be redeemed for real money. I heard about these “Unicon bits” and immediately hoped that they would not be simple IOU notes but instead some amateurish attempt to depict banknotes from the fabulous land of Equestria. As you can see above, I was not disappointed.
I’ve been following stories about failed conventions ever since the Tentmoot fiasco, but there’s something uniquely amusing about this one. The whole idea of solving a cash shortfall by making up money sounds like a My Little Pony plot—I can picture the Cutie Mark Crusaders almost making it work before Applejack teaches them a valuable lesson about economics. It’s immediately clear that more effort went into designing the fake money than into budgeting this business venture, which perfectly captures the worst/silliest aspects of brony subculture.
There’s already a grassroots fundraiser trying to rally the fandom to donate (real) money to those swindled at Unicon. This is, after all, a fandom enamored of its own power to change the world with kindness, so its adherents tend to think they can accomplish anything. But that misses the point: If there were enough bronies with enough money to cover the costs of Unicon, then Unicon wouldn’t have failed in the first place. The con organizers created this mess by thinking friendship and harmony would magically make everything work out, so you can’t expect to clean it up with the same reasoning.
