Okay, I'll do a Bronycon post. · 4:08am Aug 13th, 2015
'Coz you haven't read enough of those yet, right?
Here's a speaker's-eye-view of Wanderer D's Advanced Writing panel. I guess there were about 250 people. You probably know a lot of the people in the front rows, but I didn't ask if I could name them, so tough luck. (I think the red-headed kid is either GaPJaxie or Professor Plum.) I did get the pants on, but after the talk, I saw my fly was open.
After I realized the convention center was listing, I had everybody move two seats to their right.
No cosplay for me this time. I brought 20 pieces of a 21-piece Bad Horse costume. 
Earlier, at Trotcon, I'd met ROBCakeran53, author of My Little Dashie, who prefers to be called Alex. Alex looks like Mario cosplaying Big Mac, or maybe vice-versa, and is the living spirit of bronydom. Not the reality of Friday nights spent home alone jacking off to horse porn, but the ideal of being friendly, generous, kind... all that harmony stuff. I'm surprised he didn't make me sneeze.
We had a big authors' dinner Saturday (huge thanks to Sunchaser!), and Alex wasn't there. Later, I realized that I might've been the only pony there who knew he was coming, and it had been up to me to get him invited to the dinner. Oops.
Jake the Army Guy, ROBCakeran53, JMac, Zyrian, Admiral Biscuit
It turned out okay. He got an event room from his hotel, bought a massive amount of pizza and liquor, and threw an impromptu party even bigger than ours. But this struck home a weird point: There are more than 100 people on fimfiction. Yet I seem to be in a self-contained circle of 100-200 writers and commentators, and they were the only folks I saw in Quills & Sofas except the guys who were there to draw vomiting Fluttershy or play TSSSF. I was horse-famous at Bronycon, but if you list fimfiction's users in descending order of followers, I'm barely in the top 10% of folks who've published more than a few stories. There are over 100 writers ahead of me, most of whom don't get talked about in our circles even though lots more folks read their stories than mine. Anonymous Pegasus, Aegis Shield, DawnFade, TittySparkles, Vengeful Spirit, Zamairiac, The Abyss, mr maximus (one of my followers), Rated Ponystar, Loyal2Luna... they all have over 2000 followers, and they don't all write horseporn. Where were they? Why are we cut off in our own little horse ghetto?
(ADDED: Fewer than half of the stories by Aegis Shield, mr maximus, or Rated Ponystar are tagged romance or sex.)
Am I in my own Truman Show? Is it all a lie!?
Yeah, I used an interrobang. Deal with it.
Anyway. TheJediMasterEd got me just what I've always wanted!
Drax99, me. Photo by MidnightDancer. This was just after I killed Admiral Biscuit and took his shirt.
Back in Quills & Sofas, GaPJaxie introduced me to a wonderful game called Evil Overlord, in which I pretended to be myself. It was a lot of fun, but then I already knew it would be. That's why I'm me. 
Jordanis and SPark were auctioning off a plushie of Skywriter's OC. I was unable to frighten him into bidding on it by detailing my plans for it if I won, but he ended up with it anyway, courtesy of SR Foxley.
Plushie leg irons not included. I assume the glass is a magic containment field, to keep her from escaping.
It took me this long to post because I was waiting to get permission from each person whose picture I identified. (Except Admiral Biscuit, because he's dead.) I met a lot of folks for the first time: Archonix, AShadowOfCygnus, Blagdaross, Bradel, Cold in Gardez, Corejo, djthomp, Eldorado, Elusive Badgerpony, Explosive Orange, FightDragon01, GaPJaxie, hazeyhooves, Jordanis, Majin Syeekoh, MidnightDancer, Nadnerb, Noble Cause, parasprite, Peregrine Caged, ProfessorOats, RedSquirrel456, SPark, SR Foxley, Thornwing, yamgoth. And I met a lot of folks again: Admiral Biscuit, Applejinx, Aquaman, Axis of Rotation, bookplayer, Drax99, Ferret, GaryOak, Golden Vision, Jake, JMac, kalash93, Morning Sun, Pascoite, Pav Fiero, Professor Plum, ROBCakeran53, shalrath, Skeeter, Skywriter, Solitair, Sunchaser, TheJediMasterEd, Wanderer D, Zyrian. There were more who I saw but didn't get to talk to (Vicodin, Cap'n Chryssalid, Pen Stroke, scoots2, Burruka Pansa or however he spells it).
If I didn't list your name, I'm probably trying to crush your spirit by leaving you out.
And there was that fan who asked a question at every panel I gave or attended. I wonder who he is, and what advanced technology he used to be everywhere at once.
I know who you mean! I have no clue how he managed that!
You know, plushie leg irons could be arranged...
Technically, we met in passing at last year's dinner, but I was not very social last year. Which was a bit silly, because I was regretting being so asocial while I was doing it, and I really enjoyed actually getting out and talking to everyone this year.
Maybe next year I'll manage to attend some panels, though I'm always afraid I talk too much for someone who isn't a panelist.
I've always found this interesting. I know, or know by reputation, a lot of these people because they're shippers. (And many of them do write the occasional horseporn, for the record.) But my shipping circles and my writing circles only overlap on a few points.
I can see myself in that first picture, I was apparently trying to hide behind Admiral Biscuit but it didn't take.
3316248 But do shippers not come to Bronycon? They weren't even at the shipping panel.
I almost crashed your panel... but then I didn't, and I went and moderated my own.
3316255
The Abyss was at the con, but I don't know if he came to the shipping panel.
Edit: More specifically, I think with several of those folks (I won't say who) they feel kind of a contempt from and for the "writing" side of the community, so even if they do go I don't think they spend much time around the writing track or Quills and Sofas.
3316248
Having just read your blog post on the shipping panel, I wonder if you could say that someone who you can attach the tag 'shipper' to is approaching writing in a different way than someone in the Bad-Horse-o-Sphere. Just a venn diagram with a small intersection--people who like to think and talk about writing one way versus people who like to think and talk about writing in other ways. I don't know those writers as people, though, so I can't really speculate very far. A matter of intuitive versus analytic writing? I dunno.
Maybe it's just that they don't come to cons. Do they not get the kind of interaction on this site that encourages them to come? Or is it just a big coincidence?
Yeah, I'll admit to feeling the same way when looking through the list of most followed users. For many, my reaction was simply "who?" while for others, I recognized the name but couldn't say what they were associated with to have drawn the followers. It did underline the degree that even the fairly small community (or the smaller one composed of active writers as opposed to all users, which I look in on but am not so much a part of) is more divided than I tended to be aware of. Or cliquish, I suppose.
It's making me nostalgic for the days of thinking about graph theory.
3316272
I think that's very much a part of it. And as I implied in my edit here: 3316261 , I think there's a certain amount of respect lost in translation, along with some of them not liking to really think and talk about writing much at all, and doing it mostly for fun.
Some of it is coincidence, I'm sure, I can't speak for every shipper out there. But I do know a few bigger authors who feel like there's kind of a genre ghetto and decide to stay in places where they can discuss why Pinkie is hard to ship rather than story vs. theme. I also know a few who don't even care about that, and stay in their own little circle of folks. Not everyone on FiMfic is willing to try very hard to be the best writer they can be.
Of course you chose that pic of me, ha ha. Jake's expression mixed with mine just makes that picture so much funnier.
So yeah, I honestly didn't tell a lot of people I was going, mainly because it wasn't a certain thing until a week before the con, and at that point I had only known a bunch of "bigger" fimfic people for a week, two at best, and hadn't gotten around to throwing the message that "yo, I'm goin' to Bronycon, huzzah!" Still glad to see ya there, Bad Horse, and no worries about the dinner thingie. Like I said in another post, I wasn't expected and I understand that most the bigger fimfic people have a community going on that I'm just not a part of. I wasn't upset or anything, so no worries. Glad you all had fun and enjoyed yourselves.
I still say the funniest bit of the con was when you had one of Admiral Biscuit's shirts on, and you happened to steal his lanyard. Then out of the blue someone approached and said "Holy crap you're Admiral Biscuit, I've always wanted to meet you" and then walked off. Oh man, that was too rich to make up, and I feel so bad for that person, knowing well that you weren't, in fact, AB, because if you were, I'm pretty sure the world would implode upon itself.
They have lots of people who follow them.
You have other writers following you.
It is an iterative thing.
Clearly the best writer on the site is followed by you, bookplayer, Wanderer D, Obs, Cold in Gardez, GaPJaxie, Ghost of Heraclitus, Skywriter, and absolutely no one else.
Though that actually makes me wonder if some sort of iterative count of followers might be interesting - i.e. whether being followed by people with lots of followers is a better predictor of your quality of writing than your absolute number of followers.
3316290
You think that's bad? I saw BH without his trademark top hat, wearing Admiral Biscuit's nametag, and I stared for about 10 seconds before blurting out "Wow, you look just like Bad Horse!"
Btw BH - many thanks for taking the time to read my little snippets and drabbles of writing. I may turn my attention to getting "The Glass Eye" fleshed out to satiate your fix for stories of the 'political-cyberpunk-mystery-romance' genre.
3316290
That's beautiful.
Way to crush a man's dreams.
3316287
I was kind of dancing in that direction and not wanting to say it outright, both because I don't actually know these people, and because I didn't want to come across as... negative about it. Different levels or types of engagement are great, but it doesn't leave the two groups with as much to talk about as someone might expect.
I've really enjoyed getting the chance to meet the faces behind the personalities that I talk with here--it's the major motivation for me to go anywhere outside the vendor hall, aside from seeking out ego-stroking from someone occasionally knowing my name. But that's built on having the 'analytic' conversations and reading the 'analytic' blog posts. Does Pinkie Pie being hard to ship make the same connections? I mean, seriously, I don't know, because I don't engage with the fandom in that way.
I mean, when you get right down to it, there's a level of give-a-crap about horsewords in general necessary in order for someone to give a crap about meeting horseword people at a convention. Maybe it takes people who devote too much brainspace to picking apart horsewords to want to fly across the country or the ocean to meet other horseword people.
3316343
Absolutely it does. The more serious shippers are just as analytic, the analysis just tends to be focused in the direction of character and the question of what makes people love each other/what makes them happy in relationships, since those are so central to writing a good romance. (And, to be honest, it shows; I've always felt that canon character romances written by non-shippers tend to come across a little stiff and bland, like they aren't quite comfortable really digging into the "whys" of a character's emotions.)
But yeah, this is why it's weird to me. I have one skype chat with a few of my writer friends, and one with a few of my romance friends, and I don't quite understand why I have two different skype chats except that they've never really had reason to interact except occasionally through me.
Edit: And with regards to flying across the ocean, I went to my first BronyCon back in 2013 with DbzOrDie, my co-founder of the current AppleDash group, who was from Belgium and staying with me. He barely writes, but he's a huge shipper, and we'd done enough shipping work together that we got to be that close.
3316261
I find this really fascinating, and unexpected (though that may be more a comment on me than on them). One of my big takeaways from going to the author dinner and sitting with Bad Horse, TheJediMasterEd, and TheMaskedFerret was how much it felt like being at a writing-focused SFF convention (e.g. Minicon, which I went to earlier this year, and where I got to fanboy Tom Doherty all day). I'm sure that's not a lot of peoples' thing, but it absolutely is mine. Trading around "Eye of Argon" and Bulwer-Lytton finalists? That's my idea of a great evening.
Part of me really doesn't understand why people would get into fanfiction without having an underlying interest in writing. That seems like getting into pony art without being interested in making good art, and as awesome as I've always felt this is, I tend to have a hard time seeing how that thought process works in general. I'm not disagreeing with your point of view; it sounds about right to me, from interactions I've had with some authors on this site. But I really do find this idea fascinatingly nonsensical. It's like living in a Lewis Carroll story.
3316352
Yes, that makes sense. As much brainspace and as much picking apart, just focused on very different parts of storytelling, leaving surprisingly little basis for interaction for a bunch of people who all write on FimFiction.
It seems like there tends to be a lot of praise for the sweep of grand ideas in literary circles in general, with character relegated to a supporting role. I realized when writing this comment that while I could go downstairs to our library and pick out several authors who are definitely not character focused (like Asimov or... most of that era's genre authors), I couldn't go downstairs to the library and pick out an author who definitely was character-focused--just ones who did good characters in support of their big ideas (like Pratchett or Zelazny). Maybe Use of Weapons could be called character-driven, but I guess our library is a bit lopsided.
Because we're the elect, obviously.
I wonder if this is like asking if M.A. Larson and Cormac McCarthy would have a lot in common as writers. Both perform the art, yet they approach it very differently. Would they enjoy a conversation together? I don't know.
I vote we make this the new FIMfiction logo
lh3.googleusercontent.com/bEeI6B9wmnLynfR3hTSqc_h4dhxM_vgRt-rnrNibPA0=w360-h639-no
It really sums up what we're all about here. All in favor...
3316290
I dunno, man. Every time I mentioned you were at the con, people were excited to get the chance to meet you.
Okay, it wasn't my imagination, that first image proves that I am literally unable to tell you apart from Applejinx.
3316307
Hmmmm
so, followers who have more followers than me. And IDEALLY that would include almost anypony but I gotta work from 678 or so, being not perfect in my obscurity. The complete list of all my followers who have MORE followers than me:
A Bag Of Vicodin, A Follower, Abramus5250, Admiral Biscuit, Art Inspired, Bookplayer, Chatoyance, CyborgSamurai, Eristotle, GaryOak, Manes, Obselescence, RazedRainbow, ROBCakeran53, Shakespearicles, Skeeter The Lurker, Skywriter, Sleepless Brony, Steel Resolve, Swiper The Fox, Tchernobog, The Descendant, Wanderer D
all awesome, yay! I has the best followers. Some of them even read my writing and like my mane! You'd be surprised which ones, too. That's four of the listed eight. Would be five, but my books are just not evil enough for the Bad Horse 
Workin' on it though
Total follower count for that list: 34,477 followers of (my followers that have more followers than me/are better'n me)
I win
I'd seriously like to see anypony top that. No, let me rephrase that: I want to go and follow anybody who can top that, because they must really have something going on. Who dares to challenge the great and powerful Trixieverse, secret shame of the great and the good? 
You must top 34,477 total followers of yours that have more followers than you do.
I want a chart of THIS metric so I can see all the other ponies that skilled writers enjoy. I bet there'd be surprises in the list. And it's self-correcting, because if you gain lots of followers through people referring to the list, you drop off the list!
3316908
To be honest, I think this logic is a bit off. It's taking the notion of "a good writer is a writer with lots of followers" and extends it to "a good judge of writing is one with lots of followers", which is just as flawed, if not more so. Also, the most-followed writer on the site would be dead bottom, even if all other top 50 writers followed him.
But fun of it, I had a look: 6,614 followers with 20 of my 35 followers having more followers than me. Just to give you an example how this might look for people with really low follower counts.
3317040 Ah, but this is not wrong. Guys like Pen Stroke and Skirts don't need this kind of help. We already know who they are. It's okay for them to be on the bottom of this list and not one of them would complain about that.
The important thing is it's a purely mechanical metric: no curation. I also didn't say 'a great judge of writing' though that's probably normal for the heavily-followed: what I'm thinking of is just 'got something to offer, in touch with something storyrelated that's good'. If you have someone who has huge follower counts because they're great at HiE with red and black alicorns, that represents something, so if THEY like another writer it's an indication that their fans might also like that other writer. And so the other writer gets to count the HiEpone's followers (unless they eclipse their master!)
It's very likely to add up to 'writing quality' simply because you can't rack up a truly amazing score this way unless you've appealed to a broad selection of other popular writers. Some of my high-rank followers hate each others' writing
this is quite okay, it's the average sense of things we're looking at.
3316827 All old people look alike.
3316908
You caught me. Fact is I didn't want all the Minecraft videos.
How'd you add up your followers' followers so quickly?
3316248 3316272 Fewer than half of the stories by Aegis Shield, mr maximus, or Rated Ponystar are tagged romance or sex.
3317054 Hehe okay, I wasn't seeing it as a 'helping-measure' but thought you wanted to imply it would be a more objective measure for writing quality.
That is implying that the 'HiE with red and black alicorns' writer also likes reading about those, which does not have to be the case at all. I initially turned to fanfiction because of Cloudy Skies, who wrote shipping exclusively, but 80% of my stories have a sad, dark, or tragedy tag (or a combination of those). If the tables were turned and I was the more popular one, anyone taking me following Cloudy Skies as a sign that we wrote stories appealing to similar audiences would set themselves up for disappointment.
I agree that to appeal to a popular writer, your writing proficiency probably has to be above the quality your regular fimfic user might be satisfied with, but it doesn't change the fact that to actually appeal to those authors, they have to know you exist, and that having a look at your writing is worth their time in the first place. This is just as much a marketing endeavor as getting popular with the masses, albeit a different one.
3317084 Yeah, I had to give up the Minecraft videos
I am a little commonerpony compared to you, oh Horse. I have less to look through, and I just went page by page looking at my followers and counting up the ones that were over 678. Go to your Followers tab and just start scrolling through and paging. Remember, for you it has to be 'only the ones with followers > 1158'.
You may still beat my score, you know. Your Horseness has been of interest to a bunch of fancy pants high-ranking writers. I'm fascinated to see, if you want to give it a try. You have a score of 34,477 to beat.
One pony has beaten my score just by a mane-hair, Bookplayer did the math.
xjuggernaughtx has 423 followers, and a total among his more-followed followers of 35,417.
(Daemon of Decay, Regidar, Skywriter, Horizon, Manes, Twinkletail, Gleaming, Bradel, Ebon Mane, FanOfMostEverything, Autumn Breeze, Hivemind, Noble Thought, Blacksilverflames, Abramus5250, LoneUnicornWriter, Georg, BronyWriter, Vengeful Spirit, Seether00, PresentPerfect, RBDash47, Steel Resolve, CanterlotGuardian, iloveportalz0r, RainbowBob, Lilith911, Skeeter the Lurker, Tchernobog, Paleo Prints, Biker_Dash, Follower, bookplayer.)
3317093
Yet, in Rated's case at least, I'll bet those stories brought in more than 3/4 of his followers. Shippers follow people who might write more of their ship more often than people follow people who might write good stories.
I used to scan the followers of people who followed me, and I can't tell you how many times it was me, Rated, Tchernobog, KrazyTheFox, BronyNeumo, and HoofBitingActionOverload. They seemed to be going down the list of highly rated AppleDash fics and following all the authors. And Rated also writes FlutterDash and a few other ships, and I bet he gets the same from those.
Anyway, to your point, I know I've interacted with Rated on the AppleDash group, but not really anywhere else.
3317093
Well, aside from what bookplayer said, I think it's a concept that's applicable in general, not just to 'shippers' as an other-group. Some people approach writing in ways that don't leave them much to talk about with people who approach it in other ways.
3317110
Tcher! Now, Tcher I know. Tcher comes from the same community that SPark and I met in, so I've known him for about 12 years. He's in the Brony channel SPark started on the IRC network we met on. The funny thing is, though, that despite that, I have rarely talked writing with him, and never very in-depth. The things that excite him about writing are not the things that excite me about writing. It's... hmm.
It's sort of like I'm too agreeable about character to have a discussion with. It goes, "I think X and Y about Character Z", and I stroke my chin and say, "Yes, you could write a story that made that make sense," and the discussion peters out. I recognize that the next direction for discussion would be what you could write in order to justify that for the character, but it just doesn't spark my brain.
It feels like choice paralysis, actually. There are usually lots of ways to justify X and Y, but without some other restriction, I don't know how to choose between them and just shrug. Without the focus, plot ideas don't start accreting. Approaching stories from the other end gives me the restrictions that make it more obvious which justification I should be using.
Mm, I didn't like that we said all of two words to each other this year, at an outside estimate.
I think it may have been the hat.
3316235
Perish the thought! Beanie Cadance already has enough limitations, being an inanimate object and all!
Plushie velcro-clasp regalia, however, may be a thing to look into. I should talk to you when I see where my finances are.
Also,
That is actually the very glass in which Horizon once served me a mixed drink known as a "Princess Cadance." It was, appropriately enough, passion fruit-based. I find the idea of inebriated unicorns wearing shot glasses around on the end of their horns to be disproportionately hilarious.
3317176 I will take it as a goal to at least remember how to spell your username by the end of the year.
Don't worry about the hat. Its defenses hardly ever go off accidentally.
I'm still hoping Pav notices my new spelling for his name.
auto-facts.org/images/1984-pontiac-fiero-tps-21293705.jpg
3317229
Heh, a high honor. But don't feel too obligated; the name itself is a misspelling, so I'm as wrong as everyone else.
I am just going to place this right here as my spirit is crushed :
3317308 Mission accomplished!
In your case I was confused because just before posting I read a long Bronycon blog post where someone kept talking about you, but kept calling you "her" and "she", so I wanted to first check my emails from when we had lunch together to make sure I was matching up the name and face correctly.
3317386
Thaaaat bit would be because I am in the same boat as Trixie is, but she is further along than I am. And so I ask people online to use the preferred one. It does lead to a touch of confusion thooough.
3316352
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but... I note the qualifier "canon character romances ... tend to come across a little stiff and bland."
If that's a real problem writers like me have, I'd like to work on it. But is it possible this is because romances between the Main 6 are inherently stiff and bland because they are inherently OOC? Personally, I see shipping any two of the Mane 6 as fighting canon. If you extract their characters from the show, you can make up reasons why they might be right for each other. But we've seen them all being friends for so long, with no romantic overtones, that I think shipping them almost has to come across as artificial. Lyra / Bon-Bon and Octavia / Vinyl both work much better for me. For the same reason, I never understood Kirk/Spock or Holmes/Watson, let alone Harry/Draco. Scully/Mulder could work for me because you could argue there's sexual tension in the show. But pairing people who have a long history of close friendship in which they've consistently shown a lack of sexual interest in each other doesn't make sense to me.
I'm also suspicious of homosexual shipping just because it's so common: They are maybe 5% of relationships in real life, yet maybe 90%? of relationships in fan-fiction shipping. That indicates a huge reality distortion field, and a desire to make ships for some reason other than the compatibility of the characters.
3317631
Well, I think that's probably the opinion of the authors of those fics (they're usually done as a challenge or agreement of some sort.) Shippers who are also good writers, on the other hand, like Kits or bats or Sharp Spark or TD, don't have that problem, and their characters usually feel perfectly in character to me. I think that shippers have a different view of the characters, and are better at extrapolating (at least romantic) feelings that aren't shown in canon, and making them feel like a natural extension of canon. Something keeps "real writers" who will happily write a fic where Twilight is possessed by a malevolent magical artifact from seeming comfortable with the idea of her deciding to ask out one of the ponies in her circle of friends.
There are a few reasons for that. One "common wisdom" one that's hard to prove is that people of one gender don't like pairing characters they might have crushes on with an insert, they'd rather pair them with another character they also like. (This is the same idea behind straight guys watching lesbian porn-- there's no "competition" in the fantasy.)
A more demonstrable one is that most fictional universes don't have realistic gender ratios, at least among characters people care about. That makes your options shipping them with a side character you don't really care about, or putting them with a main character of the same sex.
And related to the previous one, the emotional relationships between the main characters are often the draw of the source material, so when romance comes up, it's likely that more people will be drawn to the relationships they liked as friendships in the source.
On the other hand, I'm just a bi woman in a hetero marriage who loves writing lesbian couples. But I'm actually kind of an oddity in shipping for that.
3317040
Actually, per the Dunning-Kruger effect, it is more or less the same thing; anything which correlates positively with writing ability will also correlate positively with your ability to distinguish good writing from bad writing.
That's why I think your followers' followers would be an interesting metric; the better you are at doing something, the better you are at judging it. The fact that you have 35 followers, but a lot of them have a lot of followers themselves, is probably a positive sign as to the quality of your writing. Though there is probably some better way of measuring it.
3317110
I've noticed the same thing with my RariJack stuff, though I write a wide variety of stuff so the majority of my followers, at this point, aren't RariJack types.
Maybe I should look at the folks who followed me for Forever and Again and Again and see how many of them are Twilestia folks.
Clearly I need to get on the AppleDash gravy train too. I hear you guys get little umbrellas in your drinks and everything.
3317631
3317665
Straight fans tend to like gay ships of the opposite sex because straight people generally tend to find sex between two members of the opposite sex to be hawt.
Why that should be, I don't know. It's been a thing in lots of cultures throughout history so it seems to defy a social or psychological explanation. My guess it's one of those evolutionary vestiges, like pelvic bones in whales or nipples on male mammals, that are there because evolution is not directed towards some goal but instead some shit that just happened, you know?
But I also think there's something to Bookplayer's explanation because I have a college friend who's a very successful professional, highly competitive, definitely an alpha dog. She only watches guy-on-guy porn because she doesn't like other women anywhere near a man she's interested in, even if it's only a porn actor.
In conclusion:
"Gotta delivery for a Mister Amore!"
"Who?"
"Mister Amore--one gross of citronella candles an' a case of Extra-Strength RAID™. Mister A. More live at this address?"
"Oh. That's 'Mi Amore." That's my wife. And, uh, he's a she."
"Mm. It's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world sir--sign here..."
3317107
I suspect you're probably pretty close to the maximum; once you get above a certain point, it becomes increasingly difficult to get a high number (though on the other hand, you do have more followers, and thus more chances to have one that has a really high count).
I've got 28,936 amongst followers with more than 733 (my current follower count). Clearly I need to get Wanderer D and Pen Stroke to follow me.
JediMasterEd, who has 114 followers who are disproportionately awesome, has a score of 22,056.
Ghost of Heraclitus has 23,720 despite his 1,057 followers.
Prince Rutherford sports 9,952 with his 24 followers.
3317749 Bradel managed 58,153
he is of course known for curating the Canterlot Library and is an EqD prereader, which just goes to show there are all kinds of reasons to be 'unsung with an amazing readerbase'.
I don't know if there's anypony who has a higher score than 58,153, but it seems possible. Now I really want to see this as a sitewide metric. I've already found a very cool writer in xjuggernaughtx, who's quite good, and whom I'd never heard of.
As far as Rarijack shipping, I feel ya
in fact, I shipped them in my books. I am sort of in the Bookplayer camp, though, because I shipped them as a situational and doomed romance. My take on that ship was that it is glorious, explosive, passionate, and can't possibly last for long. I guess it could if Applejack was domesticated into Rarity's pet horse, but I can't really see that happening so the relationship is doomed to explode spectacularly.
And so I got a VERY spectacular meltdown, your ultimate fire-and-ice confrontation—I've never seen Rarity so angry, it was breathtaking, though of course she was the 'ice'—and it was done, and they're much happier being friends now.
Gotta love tending your own little seething gardens of ponyships!
3317631
This may be a contributing factor to alien brain worms; why are these characters all of a sudden wanting to smooch?
This sort of intrusive thinking is problematic and, you're absolutely right, doesn't make much sense.
On the other hand, the characters have only all been friends for less than two years, and they're all young adults. Moreover, spending time around people can cause your feelings towards them to change over time - I've seen it happen before in circles of friends. I've been on both sides of it, developing a crush on someone/having them develop a crush on me over the course of four years or so. It can and does happen.
Sudden changes can also trigger it - for instance, someone breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, a change in living conditions, spending time with them in a different way than you did previously, or discovering that they are of a compatible sexual orientation or that they've been nursing a crush on you that you've been completely oblivious to for a long period of time. People being attracted to you can be attractive in and of itself. But again, these aren't sudden intrusive thoughts, and frankly, I think a lot of it is more about putting out of your mind the idea that X person is attractive because they're unavailable, and once you find out that they are available, you don't have any reason to put those thoughts out of your mind. Or maybe it is just "Well, I wasn't thinking about it before, but now that you mention it..."
It feels very natural and kind of nice.
I dunno. That's been my experience with that sort of thing, anyway.
One other thing is that a lot of the shippers seem to tend towards ships that you can pretend like stuff from the show is actual signs of attraction between the characters. Shipping goggles are, to some extent, an actual boon there, because you can recontextualize the events of the show to suit your needs, as long as you can get other people to see what you see.
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When characters have a certain level of chemistry, we can pretend like maybe they harbor other feelings for each other as well. Pinkie Pie having a crush on Rainbow Dash? Clearly that must be the case! I mean, just look at Griffon the Brushoff and Wonderbolts Academy - Pinkie Pie is desperate to spend time with Rainbow Dash in any capacity, and suffers from real separation anxiety!
Or so say the PinkieDash shippers. But if they can convince the audience of the same thing - that their emotions in the story are a natural extension of what we see in the show - then they can run with it. And they don't even have to do it explictly - all they really have to do is present the characters in such a way that feels consistent with how they behave in the show, but with more overt attraction. Indeed, this is, I suspect, why starting out with a cutsey snuggling scene in a shipfic tends not to work all that well - they're being very in the audience's face about how the characters aren't behaving like they are in the show. Even if they might act cutesy once in a while in private when they're in a relationship, starting us out with that separates the characters more from what we actually see on screen - and if you don't ship that particular pairing, that can be pretty offputting. Heck, it can be pretty offputting even if you do ship them, because it feels inauthentic, telling the audience "See! These two characters love each other!"
Having a good grasp over the characters gives a big advantage in terms of recognizing when they're behaving on and off-model, which is I suspect part of why the more analytical shippers spend so much time trying to grok the characters - if you can grasp their mindset intuitively, you can see what sorts of things they might do without it feeling like you're creating contrivances or pulling them around like a puppet on strings.
And I think that having some basis on the actual show for the attraction helps as well - of the most popular ships on Derpibooru, only SoarinDash, TwiDash, and Twixie don't really have much "evidence" for them in the show (though SoarinDash is mostly based on the idea that Rainbow Dash would want to bag a Wonderbolt, and while it is popular to draw, it isn't particiularly popular score-wise). And TwiDash has Twilight's List, which is basically "Why Rainbow Dash and Twilight should kiss, the story".
But I think the idea that a lot of shippers obsess over the characters is probably right - I remember when I first joined the fandom, I spent an enormous amount of time doing exactly that, and I still do so to some extent. I suspect this is also something of a barrier to entry for many shippers into other kinds of stories as well - when you spend a lot of time obsessing over the characters, you might not spend as much time focusing on other aspects of writing which are also important, and which are especially important for doing an original work or a work which is idea-focused instead of character-focused (at least, in the sense that shippers think of things as being idea or character focused).
One other thing is something 3317665 touched on:
There's a certain interpretation of Rainbow Dash that I've seen bookplayer refer to as "shipping Dash" who is, while recognizably Rainbow Dash, is not quite the Rainbow Dash from the show, but is more of an extrapolation from her - an older, more mature, and less thoughtless character. "Shipping Dash" shows up in an awful lot of shipfics (and frankly, even stories outside of shipfics), as well as some "future Rainbow Dash" stories. Luna and Celestia also both have a couple of alternative interpretations I've seen in a fairly large number of stories, and there are at least three (entirely contradictory) interpretations of Big Mac I've seen.
3316320
This amuses me to no end. Nobody came up to me and thought that I was Bad Horse.
Should've worn my top hat.
...next year, let's all wear top hats on Saturday. Bring a certain amount of class to the place.
3316356
See, I can kinda get where the shippers are coming from. I have my own clique, and it isn't the one some of you guys have. There are times I feel like I'm Piers Anthony, trying to hang out with Maya Angelou and whoever else is well-regarded as not a hack. And I don't even ship major ponies, dammit.
Seriously, though, I think the shippers get a lot of flack and negative comments from people who have a different OTP than they do--I might dislike Bad Horse for trying to ship Twilight and Big Mac, for example, since Fluttermac is clearly the superior ship. [And it's worth mentioning here that
Bad Horsesomepony on this page sank all the ships in a game of Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder. All of them.] Do they really want to be dragged into a debate about how their Twistaloo fanfic is bad and they should feel bad?I'm not saying that holds true for everyone, of course--but I can see it being a possible reason why they might not want to let it be known who they are.