one hour of Haze at BronyCon 2018 · 2:09pm Aug 20th, 2018
Odyssey, AKA Eurobeat Brony, played the final set of Bronypalooza, late on Saturday night.. technically Sunday morning, going on until 2 AM. He puts on a really impressive show.
Irrespective of music style, I've never seen a (fan convention) concert that impressed me like he did here. He had so much energy, roaming the stage as he sang his heart out (I think pretty rare for electronic artists, who don't move much and rarely need to sing their own lyrics?).
(it took me years of BronyCons to finally notice.... those lasers are actually projecting pony lineart on the opposite walls of the event hall. you wouldn't see them unless you're looking directly away from the stage, for some reason)
And he had a pretty diverse setlist, a lot of different styles and some covers. Yes, he even played some Initial D tracks. Then to finish it all at the end, played his early MLP fandom hits like the famous "Discord", and going further back with an updated remix of "Luna", which always seemed underappreciated.
After the announcement that 2019 would be the last BronyCon, coinciding with the last season of Friendship is Magic, so many fans resolved to attend this final time. It's already being built up in imaginations as something important with this sense of fatality. Closure, nostalgia, catharsis.
I'm pretty sure Odyssey didn't know about that announcement, much like the rest of us in the convention center at the time. Yet, in retrospect, it sorta felt like he was giving that "sending off" performance that everyone wishes they'll get to deliver in 2019, honoring the past and mixing it with the present. But to him it wasn't a "funeral fandom" at all, which is how everyone else seems to be approaching the last BC. He simply wanted to put on the best concert he could.
Earlier that day, I'd attended ChocoPony's "History of the Fandom" panel, which was more than just a meme thing because he tied it together with his interesting research on American conventions and social trends (sure why not, I'll plug his kickstarter). Ironically he didn't know about the planned end of BC either, but he argued an interesting perspective for how much of a mark the Brony fandom had made, more than I had even considered myself.
There's other MLP conventions besides BronyCon, but for everyone this one seems to symbolize the fandom itself. Is 2019 going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy on the "end of the fandom", just because people really want to see a properly planned beautiful ending? Or is it more chaotic than that, and the fandom keeps on going beyond anyone's plans, maybe bigger or smaller or turning into something new?
It's hard enough finding time to sleep during BronyCon, while planning to also wake up in the morning for 10 AM panels. My pattern seems to be to stay up at 2 AM in the dance hall just to see what happens. It's not even a weird vignette, just an experience I felt.
Everyone trying to catch up to the present moment.
I've been getting really bummed out by all the talk of the fandom dying lately. Maybe it's that I hate to see the decline in size and passion being presented in a way that's finally becoming hard to deny. I fear the fandom dying because of what it's come to mean to me.
But, it's probably not really "dying." The first big wave of it was already over by the time I showed up in 2015, and things kept going. The second wave will probably end with the show, or BronyCon, or both. But that's not the true end. Maybe there won't be a third wave, but a long tail instead. Someone posited in the comments of Pascoite's recent blog that there will still be truly hardcore fans around, as well as some number of casuals. The moderately committed might not stick around, but the hardcore will.
I'm good with doing a big sendoff at next year's BC. Maybe Odyssey will get to be the person who officially closes out the music side! But I think there will still be cons, even if they're not as big. And I think there will still be people.
I hope, anyway.
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I wish there was video of that history panel I mentioned, because it had some interesting ideas about how the fandom evolved a lot more than we realize, and is still evolving. but from the inside its easy to confuse this with "living/dying" which I don't think entirely explains things.
the speaker had an interesting point about how rare it is for a singular show/franchise to have so much impact on conventions (not just giant omni-fandom events like ComicCon) and MLP was 2nd only to Star Trek by that metric. in 2013, there were over 50 pony cons in the US alone. obviously too many to be sustainable, but it was a sign of how huge this was. strangely, Star Wars has a ton of fans, but they only have one SW-centric convention
for a bit of optimism, there's a lot of fans who haven't kept up with the last few seasons of the show, but are still involved with the community. show guests like VAs and writers are important at cons, but it's also equally (or more) about the fans and their creations/interests. I personally don't think the end of Gen4 is the apocalypse we're supposed to fear.
Good question. I think everyone will treat it as the end, and then when we all wake up the next morning we'll find things resuming as they always have. Not that nothing will change, but I don't think it will be so sharp.
As complicated as I feel about the "end of pony" and the last bronycon, I'm more worried about the effect gen5 will have. Will it merge with the FIM fandom in the same way EQG has? I kinda don't want it to. I don't want the thing that replaces pony to be right there in the same space, sharing room on like the feature box. I'd rather it be...over there somewhere, where I can ignore it if I want to.
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it'd be nice if Gen 5 had its own unique identity, it could merge better with this fandom like EqG sorta does. though the leaks so far indicate that it's trying too hard to imitate Gen 4, being too similar yet too different that I can see it having an Uncanny Valley effect on the established fanbase.
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Uncanny Valley is a good way to put it. Personally I always expected them to keep the world and form of Equestria (and overall design of the ponies) that Faust created intact for gen5, since it was so good. Why get rid of it when you can just go forward or backward in time, or to a new location, and tell brand new stories? I probably would have hated this approach, but it's what I expected. Instead they're, like, Frankensteining it. (I get attached to setting through the characters I love. So it's very hard for me to divorce them and keep the setting while introducing new characters. It just makes me want the old characters!)