)Friendshipping · 10:00am Aug 26th, 2015
The discussion about that 'unsung' rating has gone to so many places! One of the results has been a two-post series by Bookplayer on the subject of friendship and networking. It got tricky, because people found the subject challenging. What, me friendship? You mean even HERE we have to jump over those hurdles all the time or be shunned? 
I started replying to a post and ended up with rather a lot to say, so here's another friendship blog, which I hope brings at least a little magic… because I'm very much on the side of the 'what me friendship?' brigade. I joke that I avoid my friends to save time, and I'm known for burying myself in writing and expressing my love by always hitting deadlines, but there's a backstory. The way I interact with friends is nontypical, and I've had time to work out some of the details.
As an autistic person and an old horse with some experience, here's the deal: I find that social interaction requires a lot of trust and ability to keep a stable mental model of others, going. I can only conclude that for most people, they soak up a continual stream of little nuances to direct them and encourage them: friendship is nurturing.
It's a leeetle too easy for me to tune this out (as much of it as I can even sense in the first place!) and become distracted by my own sort of nuances: for instance, while writing it might be the interactions between characters, or some environmental detail that'll affect behavior. I may be less of a friend because I've dropped into this state and got obsessed with my work. I may be a bit more of a writer 
because any decent normal person won't want to do things like that and will attend to their friends better.
Even when I do attend to my friends, I figure I'm sort of clumsy about it, and I fall back on being naively well-meaning: I try to extend caring and friendship and not count the cost, because it'll usually seem sort of one-sided to me because I can't register the feedback like most people do.
I've got this one friend in a recovery group who knows me super well. She's married but we're still very tight with each other, in a little time-tested clique where we've each walked through some heavy shit with each other, unflinchingly. This is how well she knows me: I turned up after a long absence (in a new place) and not only did she tell me how much she missed me, she kissed my hand and gave it a little pet like some cherished, half-tame bird. Because she knew me so well that (a) she could get away with it and (b) understood how ridiculously hard it was to get a message like 'this is me enjoying your company' through the stultified rules of social intercourse where you have to smile, you have to say 'how nice to see you' etcetera, and the overtones with which you'd be REALLY meaning it will be lost on old 'Jinxie…
That's the thing. I'll pick up if SHE is troubled, like I was a dog or horse, but the more modulated and artificial stuff has never made a lot of sense to me.
One more thing about that: a friend like this is what you get if you do as Bookplayer suggests. It's the result of a number of years of communication, in good times and bad, continually making the slight effort to share a reality when the realities rarely line up that well. A great deal of friendly awkwardness led to this sort of intimacy: very likely the same dynamic as a proper mate-ship, and one where we are most definitely 'there for each other' in difficult times.
It doesn't necessarily start with 'be of service to me' or 'let me be of service to you' but that ends up a mode of expressing the reality: you get to share your life with people EVEN WHEN the signaling has always been slightly awkward, and sometimes the hidden realities are heartwarming rather than a lurking trap. You might even say it's pony-ish: that in presenting a cartooned and colorful image of how friendship can be, MLP is giving us a template for what the real world is like.
Is it any wonder that this show had such a profound effect on me, and still does?
And surely it is no mystery why I still love it and keep Faust's vision alive (even in my peculiar genre writings) and care so much about its merits.
Equestria is us. It is no fantasy world, much less an afterlife to highlight the cruelness of this world. It's real. If DHX lost its mind and took to writing hollow junk (if you think there's danger of that, rewatch 'Amending Fences'), Equestria would live on mainly in us, and would stay real.
Equestria is like the green shoots poking through deteriorated concrete, the warmth of friendship bursting forth in spite of everything a poorly-adjusted world can do to obstruct it. We're not resonating with something precious and fugitive in it. It is resonating with that magic that's in us. Even me, an old nag with too many miles of bad road behind me: turns out the spirit wasn't dead after all.
In that spirit, and in spite of all my obvious faults, I will learn to be a better friend, and accept the give-and-take that always accompanies friendship. 'Cos we don't become friends just to sit and meditate on the beauty of that. Friendship is 'Look Before You Sleep' or 'Fall Weather Friends'. It's funny, and it's ponies, and by the end of the episode if you really try, things should be okay. 
`I couldn't agree more, and I hope you don't mind if I share my personal story here.
Before I can to pony fandom, I was shy on the internet. I would join forums or groups, type up long replies to people, then delete them, because I was afraid that what I had to say wasn't that funny or interesting, or that people would take it the wrong way and get mad at me. So I never said anything, I lurked and occasionally participated in memes and roll calls-- things where I could hide behind everyone else doing it.
When I came to this fandom, I decided I wasn't going to do that. Everyone here was a fan of Friendship is Magic, they should be able to understand that some people aren't as socially aware, or that sometimes people don't display the best judgement, and that those are things we're trying to overcome. I decided that if I offended someone, or if I said the wrong thing, we could treat it like a friendship problem.
And that worked. For once in my life I actually posted things. Sometimes they've been the wrong things, and I had to post again to explain myself, or just leave it and try to do better next time. I've had a few cases where I couldn't work things out with people, but I've had way more misunderstandings that were cleared up with an explanation or a PM. And way more than even that, I've found people who liked to hear what I had to say.
Jinx, you're absolutely right: the real world isn't as far from Equestria as we like to think. I think for a lot of people "this isn't Equestria" can be a convenient excuse not to take a risk; a way to avoid trusting people by assuming they aren't worthy of trust and never giving them a chance-- even if it's just the chance to treat them like a friend. But more people are trustworthy than not, and more people are friendly than not, especially if you give them the benefit of the doubt or address your problems with them like friends. The world isn't perfect, but neither is Equestria. It's how we treat each other when we mess up that makes it Equestria.
I haven't anything to add, except that these words are exactly what I needed to see right about now. Brought a much-needed smile to my face. Thank you.
Honestly i just want to make myself stop doing the thing where fanfic writers show that they don't have the commitment to be writers.
I count myself lucky that I just happened to meet such fine people in the course of this journey.