Community · 2:38pm Aug 22nd, 2014
Being a brony has been a lot of things over these brief few years. It's been an in-joke. It's been a movement. It's been ambiguous. Now, it seems like it's slowly becoming a dirty word. Within the community, I mean. It's always been a dirty word elsewhere.
I see it all the time in forums. People running as quickly as they can from the idea that 'Love and Tolerate' was a thing that people believed in. A litany of "You know that was just a 4Chan joke, right?" and "I never believed in any of that friendship crap." On and on. People just retreating from the idea that collectively we could be better people, as though it's some toxic idea. Frankly, I find it depressing that the tone has changed so much.
Of course, for some people, all of that is true. They just wanted to watch a cartoon and all the rest of this stuff was probably irritating. But things like Bronies for Good didn't spring out of nowhere. The brony reputation across the internet for being very nice (if sometimes way too enthusiastic) didn't spring into being spontaneously. There was an idea that was embraced a couple of years ago that seems to be drifting into passé these day, and that makes me sad. It was a beautiful idea. The thought that maybe we could be different kinds of internet people. Users that took the time to be thoughtful and kind, rather than viciously ripping each other apart because anonymity is super fun. More and more, I see that retreating, and nowhere faster than in the various groups within this site. It feels like I'm some sort of old-timer when I need to point out that back in my day someone would step in and ask people to calm down and be kind when ten readers descended on an author and ripped them to shreds in the story's comments. We've drifted so far from that that we've apparently needed several site posts about how to behave.
It is with all of that stewing in my head that I read InquisitorM's blog post calling for people to actively help others around here. He's asking for people to put themselves out there if they can, and to throw a lifeline to people that are struggling. I think it's a worthwhile message for us these days.
It dovetails into a discussion that Knight of Cerebus and I were having the other day. We were brainstorming a way to create an author's group to help new writers, but focusing on emotional support rather than the more technical how-to-write kinds of skills. A place where people can go to talk about their fears and anxieties, not just how to effectively use a semicolon (which I still can't do). I still don't really know how best to operate such a group, but more and more it seems like something that is necessary as this community becomes less and less effective at self-policing.
When it comes to helping people, I'll have to admit that I could be better. I've always helped anyone who has PMed me and asked, but InquisitorM is quite right that the people that need help the most are probably the least likely to reach out for it. So I'm going to try and keep that in mind and reach out when I see something that I think could be a problem. I hope you will, too.
For some, or even most, the whole idea of a brony might be a joke. For me, it wasn't and isn't. I made quite a few life changes based on what this show was all about. I'm more thoughtful. I work to be nice. If I have nothing but negativity in what I'm about to post, I delete it. I've donated more to charity than I ever have before. I worked to actively keep myself doing creative things. All of this is important to me and I treasure it, so if I'm the last starry-eyed brony, then so be it. I'm willing to stand here and seem uncool if that's what it's come down to. Part of that is helping people, and I'm going to try to do a better job.
I personally don't see it as 'people retreating from the idea' as much as 'the ones who still believe that friendship is magic are becoming a minority as there are, to this day, people joining the community and the site.
Reaching out of people you think need help is a very good thing in theory, but more often than not it's like reaching into a snake den and hoping you don't get bit. If there's going to be a group to help new writers emotionally, sign me up; but don't think you can take all the responsibility away from the people that need help. If someone isn't willing then there's very little you can do.
If you get the group going sign me up for it. Until then I wish you the best of luck!
2391077 I don't want to take all the responsibility away from people. I just want get myself into a place where I can send a PM to people that look like they are being ripped up by the trolls on this site and remind them that being a new author isn't a crime that should be met with viciousness. Yes, their story might need a lot of work, but that doesn't mean they deserve that.
It's something that has to be used judiciously. Sometimes authors bring that reaction on themselves by being hostile to reasonable criticism. I have no patience for that. You don't get to dictate that you only get praise. I'm 100% against that kind of bullshit. But I'm equally against people being overly nasty just because they want to be able to link their comment to other people in Skype and laugh 'cause it's super funny.
Honestly, that snake bite is why I've held back on helping more. Even when the person is receptive and appreciative, I get sucked into hours and hours of helping someone write, and I'm not exactly an expert myself. Sometimes I don't mind, like when I was helping keam recently, or when I helped Dragonas77 with his Piano Mule story. I'm doing that because they are my friends. But with strangers, you never know what you are getting into, and it certainly can, and has, bite you in the ass. It's a risk, but I try to be brave when it comes to risks. I can always just tell the person I've had enough if it comes to that.
2391083 Yeah, I'm not sure how to go about such a group, but I think it would be worthwhile. I'm still mulling it over.
god brony drama is the worst. especially because my followed authors make blog posts daily about it! i'm sick of all of this drama to be quite frank, i write what i like and i dont give two shits if i get a bad review because bad reviews let you know where you've gone wrong and if it doesnt then it doesnt count as a bad review so you can automatically subtract one downvote even if the site doesn't do that. i keep going off on tangents when i write small rants so i forgot what my point was.
I think the main reason why "Love and Tolerate" has degraded in meaning or hasn't been taken so seriously anymore is because people throw it all around the place. Want to deflect criticism? That's what they do. And yes, I do agree some criticism is uncalled for and even too critical. But still people use the "Love and Tolerate" motto as an excuse to never improve or say the person trying to help the writer out is an asshole. The saying has degraded as a shield the author uses to deflect criticism off themselves, and in doing so many reviewers or critics see it as an excuse for bad writing and act even more ruthlessly to tear the author apart. Also, trolls. They throw it around all the time. Even further degrading the phrase to one of sarcasm.
Raise awareness of brony fandom change. Ice bucket challenge.
I hate to just seem like I'm nodding my head in agreement like some old man reminiscing over the good ol' days, but I came into the fandom just after season 2 had started--like, the weekend after I started watching episodes, The Return of Harmony aired. That wait for Lesson Zero was killer, but soooo worth.
I can't say that I was there at the dawn of pony, but I do remember a time when ponies were completely banned from 4chan... before /mlp/ was created, before there was even a notion of ponies coming back to that site. I frequented Ponychan in those days, the most successful offshoot, and met a poster there under the name of Mikie Pie.
Mikie Pie is a /b/rony. As in, he was one of the original posters on /b/ when /co/ pushed them out. He is also one of the greatest advocates of love and tolerance that I've ever met. He told me one of the old litanies of a /b/rony:
Back when I frequented Ponychan, love and tolerance was something I talked about quite a bit. I take it quite a lot more seriously than those I see around me. That being said, I am still, in the most unflattering fashion, a human being.
You actually specified Knight of Cerebus in your blog post; he is a shining example of my struggle with such sentiments. We got into a heated discussion concerning Sparity, which involved him accusing me of accusing him of being a pedophile (which I never did) and ended with me being "talked to" by the moderators--the first and only time they've ever had to talk to me about anything. They told me to stop stoking the fire just to stoke it, and that the accusations were more important than what I'd actually done.
Now, I retroactively regret my statements. I guess, at the time, I was still figuring out what the realm of expected and accepted behavior is on FIMFiction. You could say that I was still finding my voice; I adapt to the environment I come into, and the tempo of conversations on FIMFiction is far different from Ponychan, which was the only other place I'd had sustained interaction with others at. I am not, first and foremost, a social person, though my struggles with socialization have taught me a lot about myself and others.
Specifically involving this, I strongly recommend you create a group themed around the idea of love and tolerance, that it's not dead within the fandom, and that we should never be a joke, most of all to ourselves. I can't say I'll involve myself, as I certainly don't feel I'm a wise enough person to be able to apologize to Knight of Cerebus and truly leave our past in the past, but I support you wholeheartedly. Please, please work toward this end.
2391230 I think the problem is that people seem to always want to reduce things to black or white when it needs to be seen as shades of grey. Loving and Tolerating is needed sometimes. Other times it's a detriment. It's situational, but people keep throwing it out there like it's all or nothing. I'm much more willing to be lenient on a twelve year old who has written their first story and doesn't know how to respond well to criticism than some twenty-something who's just emotionally stunted. It's something that I consider before responding. It's not always obvious, but if I feel like the person is just young and in over their head, I try to respond with kid gloves. I'm not giving the same approach to, say, Realitycheck going off on the gay community. He's a big enough boy to deal with whatever flack he draws from that.
xjuggernaughtx,
I stand with you. "Love and tolerate" where it's feasible, be kind but firm when needed, seek the shades of gray that are appropriate to the situation, and for Luna's sake be good to yourself and others.
This all ties in with a background movement I'm trying to start (outside of FimFic; I haven't mentioned it here before now) whose basic tenet is, "Would everyone, everywhere kindly get the heck over themselves, right now, including me." I'll be glad to tell you more if you're interested, and I may eventually make a post about it here (not that I have enough followers for it to reach many).
As a duly appointed member of the Knights of Jubal, and one who has most certainly erred on the side of bitch in the past, I am dedicated to becoming a better person and fostering the same in others. I spend a fair bit of time counseling (again, both friendly and firm) and just being there for people, and I think it's worthy work.
All this makes me even sorrier that we passed right by each other at BABS. Next time!
Light and laughter,
SongCoyote
Semicolons are literally the easiest auxiliary punctuation marks to use; you connect two complete sentences with them.
Advanced version: Semicolons should also be used instead of commas for listing items which have commas in them. For example, from an ALS Ice Bucket Challenge story I'm writing:
I actually think the opposite. The community is much better nowadays at policing than before, which is why these cases of "10 people falling on a writer" get so much attention. It is a far cry from the days of the trainwreck explorers.
2391370
Almost!
Fixed.
2391386 I considered putting the colon, but considered it ultimately optional.
2391392
For lists separated by semicolons, the colon is not optional; for lists separated by commas, you would not use a colon. That's basically the only difference between using commas vs. using semicolons in a list. Commas don't have a colon in the sentence, whereas semicolons do.
2391115
No clue either unfortunately :(
2391374 This is actually a very good point. The community is better now than it was six months ago.
2391306 2391230 This is a HUGE problem with the bony fanbase as a whole. They seem to be very black and white in their thinking in everything. Celestia vs Luna. Twilight's friends abandoning her. Mare Do Well. Twilicorn. Equstria Girls. People set up camps and then lob insults and anger at each other, rather than listening to either side. This is why so many people have made drama about these issues and declared they are leaving the fandom, rather than just talking things out.
It's not different with stories by new authors. People can't handle the ambiguity of "this is crap, yes, but that's because the person is just starting out and I need to find some way to use nuance to tell this obviously sensitive young writer how to improve", so they go with "let's make fun of how shitty this is" because it's easier to approach. People who want to support the author's story, rather than seeing these people and thinking "Okay, yes, they are all assholes, but they do have a point and some of their criticism is valid" will see it and go "obvs these people are just trolls leaving negative comments for shits and giggles". And thus, nothing gets done and everyone feels very bitter and angry. The number of problems that could have been satisfied by just talking with people on this site is huge.
2391442 It's not just a brony problem; it's a people problem, pretty much everywhere I've ever been, in real life or over the internet, regardless of the topic. Humans do not like dealing with non-absolutes.
Having said that, there's no reason FimFic can't be a place where people don't act like that.
2391543 Oh I agree, but in bronies the effect seems to be magnified.
Its not surprising at all that the love and friendship part of the fandom is what got people enthused in the first place. People like the idea of being better, I think its an intrinsic part of human nature. What people don't really like is the WORK that goes into it.
Being nicer isn't as easy as just throwing some coins in a tip jar, in many ways to live up to the show you have to abandon certain cynical aspects of your mindset. The problem there is so many peoples worldviews are entirely based upon cynicism.
"I cant go to the gym because the buff guys will flex their muscles tauntingly at me and laugh at my belly fat." Places the blame for a personal lack of fitness upon people that you haven't even talked too. What does this have to do with the show? Well how different do you think rainbow dash is from the typical jock? I played sports for fifteen years and I can tell you she and AJ are pretty great representations of athletic characters, they really captured how stressful the pressure to perform is and how family and friends unknowingly give young athletes the impression they either come in first place or not bother coming back at all.
How much easier would it be to just snort and say "oh those poor privileged little sports stars and their sports cliques have it so bad." as opposed to acknowledging that maybe the buff guys at the gym don't actually have it out for you and that you are the only thing keeping yourself from getting in shape?
You have to abandon cynicism to truly understand the world, but once you do you realize there are no easy answers and no easy solutions. And there are still lots of other groups in the world that are more than willing to offer easy answers that dont require people to ask a lot of questions and easy victories that dont require you to do a lot of work.
The brony fandom was never actually especially nice; you're suffering from the golden age fallacy here, which is where you paint the past in a more positive light than it actually deserves.
As early as season 1 there were bronies throwing tantrums over Feeling Pinkie Keen, and there are still people who freak out over The Mysterious Mare Do Well. Heck, there are people who haven't gotten over Twilight Sparkle getting wings or becoming a princess.
The idea that things have changed is simply wrong; they haven't. Either your awareness has shifted or, more likely, you are simply suffering from the same thing which has made every generation since Ancient Greece at least complain about "kids these days", even as the world becomes better and better.
Everyone always likes to think of whatever groups they belong to as being especially good or nice or just or full of smart people or whatever else they personally value, but when you deal with a group as large as bronies - millions of people - reversion to the mean is nearly inevitable. Bronies reflect the general population of their age, generally speaking, with a few exceptions.
That's not to say that people shouldn't try to treat each other decently, but that you should be aware when you rant about the past that things weren't actually better, and, as RainbowBob pointed out, trying to use "love and tolerate" as a means of deflecting criticism is inappropriate.
2391442
I think another problem is that, quite frankly, we end up with several different, shall we say, strains.
First off, we've got the young people. These people have no idea what they're doing and write crap because they have no real understanding of how to tell a story. Likely, this is a result of lack of practice, not being quite well-read enough, and a lack of understanding of basic story structure. These stories vary from painful to read to just bad, bland, or boring.
Then you've got the people who write out their power fantasies. These stories vary pretty wildly, but very frequently make a character (or characters) into a mary sue, or include an OC who isn't a very good character. They are essentially writing a story about how awesome it would be if X happened. I have the suspicion, as I have mentioned before, that this sort of story appeals very well to the base but very poorly to the peak, because people who are higher up the totem pole are simply much better at coming up with their own power fantasies which both seem more realistic to them and are better suited to their own, personal tastes. As a result, these stories have zero appeal to them and actually may come off as rather creepy. This group is, I think, the group which gets the most flak thrown at them, some of which may be justified - and of course, these are also the people who are most likely to get upset when someone tells them that their personal power fantasy is bad.
Then you've got the obssessionists. These people are REALLY into something that is somewhere between strange, creepy, disturbing, and noxious to everyone else. Note that this may not be sexual in nature - they may be obsessed with something else instead, and it just shines through in their writing, with whatever their interest is overpowering everything else.
Then you've got the advocates. These people write stories to advocate for some issue, or just write very strongly from some particular world view which is not the show's world view. And these stories can be anywhere from applauded to hated, depending on what the particular issue is. Look at the ex-gay guy who wrote Mystquestria - was he trying to anger everyone else? Probably not. But many of the gaynst stories are the same way, and come from similar places. There are the people who write the Christian-type stories as well which end up coming off as very weird, and there are others I'm sure I'm forgetting. These sorts of people are really good at being lightning rods, but may also simply go wholly unnoticed because the stories simply don't interest most people. When they do get featured, they tend to draw a lot of attention though, and often negative attention.
On the other hand, you've got groups of readers who are prone to cause issues.
You've got the Social Justice Warrior types, who tend to get in fights with people over whatever issue of the day they're obsessed with or decide to take issue with, and so pick a fight with someone who wrote something which somehow goes against their sensibilities.
You've got the Shut Up About It Already types, who get tired of seeing the same things over and over again - gaynst tends to be a target of this, especially poorly written gaynst, because there are large volumes of it. But this also applies to pretty much any memetic trend, from the league of humans acting villainous types to self-insert in Equestria stories to Twilight Sparkle Eats A Peach. These can easily start fights and, because many starting authors will bandwagon onto trends, they're likely to get hit by them.
You've got the trolls, who will be that way regardless.
And then you've got the critics who, while they aren't a problem in and of themselves, can end up being sucked into problems by other people, usually oversensitive authors or other people who end up directing them to stories written by newbies or which are otherwise weak, and then when they give their feedback, problems emerge.
The authors can pretty much always stop this nonsense from happening, but very frequently fail to do so.
2391884 I'm not comparing the fandom to itself at different times so much as the way the fandom used to be compared to other internet groups versus the way it is now. Before it was significantly more pleasant. People made an effort at it. Now, brony forums are almost identical to most other forums I visit.. Maybe you were hanging out in different places than I was, but it's not nostalgia. There has definitely been a change. Bronies haven't always been the best behaved, but we were better once. I think each Mare-Do-Well type incident eroded some of that, though. Over time, the sparkle wore off.
2391974
Well, actually, she grew wings and became a happy and successful young despot. The fans, on the other hand...
2392308 The sparkle will never wear off of that Sparkle. She's great!
Unless they give the scripts completely over to Merriweather Williams, that is...
2392374 Come on, man. She's not that superb. They could give her to Dave Polsky, too!
2391298 I'd love to make that group, but I'm still trying to figure out what would actually make it useful. Should I try and get big authors to tell their stories to illustrate the fact that we all struggle sometimes? Should I try and set up a mentoring system? Do I create a place where people can just go and vent? I'm not really sure what the best approach is.
One thing Knight and I discussed that I liked a lot was the idea of asking new authors to create the best paragraph that they could. A paragraph isn't a huge time commitment for either the author or a reviewer. You can create one without getting so emotionally tied up in its success that critic crushes you. That would allow authors to be able to improve without feeling like they've wasted their time.
I'd hope that that would be an environment where they would feel confident enough to air their worries, and people could offer suggestions and support as needed.
Like I said, I'm still trying to make it all fit in my head.
And it's nice to hear about some people from /mlp/ and /b/ that have this perspective that I have. I feel like the 4channers are often times the people I see tearing at the edges of the fandom. I'm always thinking, "Wait, it started over there. Why are you guys working so hard to pretend this thing you did is meaningless?" Though that's pretty unfair. The fandom is large and the people I see now are likely an entirely different group. It just feels weird to me.
2391353 We should still meet up for lunch in SF sometime.
2391374 Well, I think my view of things extends further back than my time at this site, and thus my experience with The Trainwreck Explorers. I was a brony for quite a while before I started writing.
However, I see the degradation of things as an overall trend. The line is going to have some ups and downs, and I do agree that lately it's been a little better. Those site posts helped some, but things aren't that far from the days of the TWE sometimes. We still have Plan 9 from Equestria and Rage Reviews, though neither are at the level that the TWE were at.
A lot of it just might be this site, to tell you the truth. Things like the MLP subreddit aren't quite as friendly as they used to be, but they are sunshine and roses compared to some of my days here. Not all of them. Just some. I've had plenty of great interactions here and seen some people do some amazing acts of kindness. I've just also really seen the opposite, and it gets me down sometimes.
you my friend, are a truly wonderful being. thank you
2392447
If you made that group, I'd love to contribute.
I may be from the relatively newer group of brony converts, but this is actually the biggest reason as to why I became a brony. While the cartoon about colorful horses was nice, it was the morals represented in the Elements of Harmony and the community's attitude of love and toleration that turned me from someone who actively harassed bronies into a part of this wonderful movement. It really saddens me to see, like you said, that this idea is not what many bronies focus on now.
2392447 I explain this behaviour of destroying everything with a simple "it's 4chan".
Yeah, I think it's not so much that individual people are losing that ideal, as it is that the people who hold that ideal are getting overwhelmed by the crowd of Internet Goons that's started showing up.
2394299 That's probably very true. The brony ranks have swelled, and with it comes more and more people that are indifferent to the original concept.