All Amigos Are Welcome!That Means Everyone

WE FOUND IIIIIIIIIT OMG Me and some people have been searching for this image for a couple months now xD Woke up to see someone found it and told me! So happy! Thanks @naariel!

Hmh?? Oh I thought so.

I mean, apparently Buttercup just sticks her hand to things to pick them up (S03E29 Criss Cross Crisis)

And in Oops, I Did it Again (s06E04B) the girls, when made without Chemical X, come out “normal” and do have fingers, feet, noses, and normal faces.

So like…when everyone in the show calls them “bug-eyed freaks,” “pumpkin heads,” etc, they legit mean the girls have big round heads, giant eyeballs, and stump limbs.

at first i thought maybe they could have tiny hooks at the end of the stumps that would snag onto surfaces, similar to cats tongues ( and yeah alright spiderman ) but the issue is that they probably wouldnt be effective for smoother surfaces

they could also have wrinkled pads like geckos feet that could cling to smoother things no problem, but then the problem is maintaining enough suction to actually lift and carry an object

i fear the solution may be something even Worse

Passerby: “ARE YOU OKAY?”

Me: “Please… I need my… phone”

*opens TUMBLR*

So I see this

and all I can think is 

Thanks both of you :)

I might’ve gotten a bit defensive early on because I just thought the dust had settled on this topic, but I can see now that people are still very passionate about it.

Passion isn’t a bad thing, but sometimes you’ve got to lay it aside if it’s not actually getting you closer to a solution.

Like, if someone’s angry, that tells us that it’s important to them – but when they’re continuously angry, it stops being helpful and starts bogging things down until we’re like; “Look, you’re angry, I get it, but what are we actually going to do to stop this happening again?”

You can follow passion down the path of revenge, or a vendetta, or demanding some kind of apology – but it’s a moral victory that doesn’t achieve anything other than to make you feel justified.

Who are you trying to convince, Anon? Me or you?

For reals… You’re bashing out this long explanation to justify disliking people you haven’t met, because some other people you’ve seen did or said something crappy.

“I don’t know all the fans of MLP… I don’t know who they are or what kind of people they are… I don’t know if they know that someone else who likes the same TV show as they do did something bad… but it’s a lot easier for me to handle if I assume that they do know, and their lack of action to stop these strangers must mean that they don’t mind or don’t care. Yes… that must be the case. I am justified in disliking these people I have never met.”

That’s what you sound like. You’re looking for an air-tight formula that enables you to assume that people who like miniature cartoon horses and fan-made content thereof are bad. And you’re coming to me to tell me about this formula, so you can rest assured that you know that I know that you have this formula to justify your irrational dislike of strangers.

If you wish to take part in any fandom, you need to accept and respect these three laws.

If you aren’t able to do that, then you need to realise that your actions are making fandom unsafe for creators. That you are stifling creativity.

Like vaccination, fandom only works if everyone respects these rules. Creators need to be free to make their fanart, fanfics and all other content without fear of being harassed or concern-trolled for their creative choices, no matter whether you happen to like that content or not.

The First Law of Fandom

Don’t Like; Don’t Read (DL;DR)

It is up to you what you see online. It is not anyone else’s place to tell you what you should or should not consume in terms of content; it is not up to anyone else to police the internet so that you do not see things you do not like. At the same time, it is not up to YOU to police fandom to protect yourself or anyone else, real or hypothetical.

There are tools out there to help protect you if you have triggers or squicks. Learn to use them, and to take care of your own mental health. If you are consuming fan-made content and you find that you are disliking it - STOP.

The Second Law of Fandom

Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK)

Simply put, this means that everyone likes different things. It’s not up to you to determine what creators are allowed to create. It’s not up to you to police fandom. 

If you don’t like something, you can post meta about it or create contrarian content yourself, seek to convert other fans to your way of thinking.  

But you have no right to say to any creator “I do not like this, therefore you should not create it. Nobody should like this. It should not exist.”

It’s not up to you to decide what other people are allowed to like or not like, to create or not to create. That’s censorship. Don’t do it.

The Third Law of Fandom

Ship And Let Ship (SALS)

Much (though not all) fandom is about shipping. There are as many possible ships as there are fans, maybe more. You may have an OTP (One True Pairing), you may have a NOTP, that pairing that makes you want to barf at the very thought of its existence.

It’s not up to you to police ships or to determine what other people are allowed to ship. Just because you find that one particular ship problematic or disgusting, does not mean that other people are not allowed to explore its possibilities in their fanworks.

You are free to create contrarian content, to write meta about why a particular ship is repulsive, to discuss it endlessly on your private blog with like-minded persons.

It is not appropriate to harass creators about their ships, it is not appropriate to demand they do not create any more fanworks about those ships, or that they create fanwork only in a manner that you deem appropriate.

These three laws add up to the following:

You are not paying for fanworks content, and you have no rights to it other than to choose to consume it, or not consume it. If you do choose to consume it, do not then attack the creator if it wasn’t to your taste. That’s the height of bad manners.

I think that’s a bit of a loaded statement… and I don’t mean that in a nasty way, I think it’s just approaching it from the wrong angle. Now, bear with me for this answer, because this is a tricky subject and I don’t pretend to be an expert in it, this is just my assessment…

Statistics show that the brony fandom is overwhelmingly White/Caucasian, and while I take the Herd Census with a pinch of salt, even with a massive margin of error we can still see that the active community is most likely White/Caucasian.

Generally speaking, the majority of people generally head-canon stuff in their own race. This isn’t racist or anything like that, it’s just natural that we visualise people to be whatever you yourself are most familiar with…

So from here we can see most bronies generally gravitate toward a White Mane 6 and away from a PoC Mane 6. This isn’t anti-black sentiment, it’s just a natural preference based on the fact that most of us are white.

THAT BEING SAID, this does not excuse people who say “SHES NOT BLACK” or other such obnoxious responses. Fanart and head-canon is freedom of expression, the characters can be whatever you want them to be- even if there were Canon stating otherwise, which there isn’t. Some of the best fanworks of anything are ones where the fans reimagine characters and ideas into something new or unexpected.

Drama usually sparks up because a couple of people act like dicks, and then many more find themselves pigeonholed because while they don’t support the obnoxious response, they do hold the same preferences. We see this all the time in internet drama where good people end up on the same team as morons without meaning to, just because they hold a far less extreme version of the same opinion or preference, and the internet only sees in black & white.

So in conclusion, I don’t think it’s fair to say that there’s an anti-black/PoC sentiment, it’s just that the whites have much strong numbers, so their preferences are reflected in the rankings. However, there is an obnoxious vocal minority who hates on something just because they don’t like someone else’s head-canon. They can;

Based on all this new Guardians of Equestria stuff, it sounds like that’s going to be the next spin-off.

Certainly with it’s current momentum, I don’t think MLP is going back into storage any time soon, it’s one of Hasbro’s golden geese.

I’m still on the fence about Guardians of Equestria though, the toys look to be amazing in design and quality, but I’m not a fan of the random accessories tig-welded onto the side of everything. This is pretty stardard for children’s toys, but I don’t really want to see it leak back into the show.

One of the best things that Friendship is Magic did was not abuse the elements of harmony. There are some shows that would’ve had the orbital friendship canon out at least every other episode, but FiM was incredibly sparing with it.

FiM does abuse the ‘friendship monologue solves everything’ device, but arguably, that’s not a bad message.

I’m concerned that GoE will have some kind of gimmick that’ll be overused and cheapen the whole thing.

As for Larson departing, it’s a shame because he’s a good writer, but FiM does have a lot of writers, so I think we’ll survive.

I haven’t seen it actually… So I can’t really weigh in on this properly…

Going on the information in the question alone, I don’t think any sensible person thinks feminists are ruining Ghostbusters - switching to a female case was a good idea for a reimagining of the original story. However, the film looks like it’s going to be bad, so people are jumping on any reasons they can because a full-objective-breakdown is hard.

On the brony front, SSWU at it’s peak actually did a lot. Although the campaign circulated on tumblr, it had a measurable impact on google results.

These days it’s fallen by the wayside a bit, but I did a quick check myself before answering this and the outlook’s pretty good. A few pics that need snipping here and there, but nothing awful. This is probably more down to Google’s filtering than the efforts of SSWU now though - a few other cartoon searches I did had more or less the same ratio, which was again, very good.

The fandom’s chilled out a lot more now, and I think the need for big movements has passed - I’ve actually contemplated calling it a day on this blog as I’m not sure it’s needed any more.

URL change. Making this a general blog. I’m still mainly focusing on the Brony fandom, but I’ve essentially opened the door to covering anything else I feel like now as well.