A post I don't want to make, but I am · 1:10am Jun 5th, 2020
Yeah, I'm doing the thing.
These posts seem to be in vogue today, not because anyone wanted them, but out of necessity.
Maybe you're sick of them, maybe not. Well, here comes mine. If you don't want to see it, I completely understand if you just click away, and I will never, ever hold that against you. These aren't fun to read, and I imagine many of you are just here for the stories. That's fine, and I'm kinda the same way myself.
With that out of the way, I'm doing what I came here to the "New Blog Post" page to do, and if you're still here, you're still here, I guess.
So let's go.
But! Here's the thing: I hate political posts. They're not my jam, and other people can talk politics to ya if you're looking for that, so I'm not gonna do one - not here in Pony-world. Ponies aren't about politics to me, and I'm not going to make them into that. Ponies are about something bigger and better than policies: they're about ideas. They're about ideas of how we experience each other as people, and ideas about how to make that experience into something good that makes us better people.
They're about this thing, this idea, called friendship.
So what I'm going to do is weigh in not on how I see the specific politics of the moment, but instead on how, as I see it, the way those politics should be informed by the ideology of ponies (because I'm sure a thing about ideology will be less hazardous, right? 
)
To make this germane to the flavor of the times here in Pony fandom, I'll say that in the center of the big picture I see a theme going around today.
And that theme is: Despair.
I see this despair in two main parts that I want to say things about.
Part 1:
"Whatever happened to Love and Tolerate?"
Gonna be blunt here:
What happened to it is that "Love and Tolerate" was never the message of the show.
At least, not in the indiscriminate form that gives rise to the Paradox of Tolerance (the error of over-tolerating all ideas as equally valid to the extent that it ends up allowing intolerant ideas to become problems that erode the environment of tolerance we're trying to foster in the first place).
It was never really about tolerance at all, in fact. The title is "Friendship is Magic," not "Tolerance is Magic."
One of the big lessons of the show is that an important part of friendship is choosing your friends, because you get to choose, and the wrong choices can hurt you - and hurt other people you care about. Gilda was one of the most important season 1 characters, because this was what she taught, and this is such a critical lesson for the kids the show was meant for. Let us not forget, that's why the show existed and who it was for: kids, dealing with personal, emotional friendship challenges posed by other kids. Does that mean it's not for grown-ups? No! Those lessons are great for adults, too, because a whole lot of us could also use a lot polishing on our personal friendship skills. Who it was not for, though, is that it was not for adults dealing with the political and cynically transactional kinds of "friendship" in which impersonal cost-benefit analysis sometimes dictates rationalizing the presence of bad actors you nonetheless need something from. That kind of thing isn't really covered by friendship lessons, because those kinds of people are not friends, not in the personal, true sense of the word. Too many people get that confused - they think that merely being stuck with someone means being "friends" with that someone, or that friendship lessons and principles are easily and directly applicable to that situation. They're not. Dealing with those people is a whole different skillset than dealing with your friends, and it should be different, because there's a world of difference between friends vs. collaborators or coworkers you just find yourself stuck with in the interests of accomplishing some other end. The show didn't really cover that aspect very much.
The show's message was never a broad blanket that covered tolerating bad ideas or bad behavior, accepting those people as friends anyway, and just hoping they would somehow get better. That is, in fact, a very dangerous lesson to take away if that's what you got, because that's the thinking of abuse victims. "It'll be different this time" is the delusion that keeps them coming back to their abusers, because sometimes after an incidence of abuse, an abuser does seem to get better for a little while before they go back to their old ways and the same old story repeats itself, over and over again. It's a well and thoroughly explained vicious cycle that you can read more about elsewhere.
All I'm gonna say on it any further is, if you find yourself in that situation, you need to stop tolerating it and either break that behavior (usually pretty hard to do), or get rid of that person. Dash got rid of Gilda. And that was absolutely the right call.
Unlike the blow-up at the end of that episode, though, it doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be a big acrimonious emotional shouting match. And it honestly shouldn't be, because what does that even accomplish, other than making things scarier and more bitter than they need to be?
It's really simple, and it can be done very subtly and quietly without a fuss: just stop talking to bad people. Well, okay, IRL it can be somewhat more complex, but this fandom is mostly on the internet, and on the internet it's easy. Instead of hitting the reply button and feeding the troll, you hit the block button and don't look back. You don't have to, and often shouldn't, talk against them, because that's just gonna get you tarred up in their drama. Just deny them the attention of talking to them or about them. Ultimately, in the course of your internet experience it's your choice who you interact with. Don't give that platform to people who aren't your friends. Choose your circle(s) of the fandom wisely. Which brings me to the next part...
Part 2:
"The fandom is dead!"
No, it's not.
That's me, being blunt again.
People think this because they see something ugly in it that they would rather not.
It looks like a failing to some people because they see this nebulous "fandom" thing, which is really many fragmentary and often insular and isolated parts, as some sort of cohesive whole, and further, that this whole is failing to achieve some goal they've decided it should be achieving.
Do we, collectively, actually have a goal?
I think a lot of people assumed it was, "spread friendship," or, "be a good friend," or some approximation and combination of those things, and that's... well, it's pretty good, actually. I would argue that these should be the goal, if anything is. It's a good message. It's what the show was about. Let's go with that.
But the big question underneath it: what is the nature of that goal in terms of achievement metrics? Is there some fixed endpoint where we can call it done?
I would argue no, it's not a goal that can be defined as being met at some fixed marker. It's not an effort toward a final end, but an ongoing thing that can never be completely finished. It's never finished for the same reason that Christianity has been around for 2,000 years and has succeeded in becoming the majority religion by a large margin in the whole of the Western world, but still proselytizes and evangelizes, even among their own. Christians still preach to the choir as much as to the non-Christian, and the reason for this is that they understand that faith is fickle and tenuous because people are fickle and tenuous and change their mind with the blowing of the wind. And no, this isn't a comment on Christianity specifically here - that's just how it is with anything that is not a tangible product, but rather a mindset. Cultivating a mindset requires... you know, cultivation. Effort on a continuing basis. Friendship and the message of its value and how to understand it and be good at it are no different.
It's never done, and we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that there's some endpoint at which the work becomes permanent and finished.
The implication of these points is:
The work clearly not being finished - because it's never finished - doesn't mean it has failed.
It doesn't mean that the fandom is "dead." Even when friendship within the fandom may be perceived to be at an ebb, and you see ugly things trying to take its place, it doesn't mean that it's time to give up and write a death certificate. On the contrary, what it means is that, if you believe in this friendship thing, the fandom needs you now more than ever. That is the opposite of the time to give up. This is the time when you count the most.
This is the time to speak.
I guess I believe that, because I'm posting this post. Honestly, I wish we could afford to just be all about the little horse stories and not have to struggle with this, but it is how it is.
This fandom isn't dead to me because a lot of you here are my friends, people who changed my life and made me a better person, and I'm not giving up on that.
So what do we do now? Go around asking people, "Have you heard about the good news of friendship?"
No, because that would be hokey and weird and it wouldn't work. Friendship isn't something you explain in the abstract. It's something you live. You don't tell people about being their friend, you just are their friend. Or not. See above, choose good friends. Don't forget that part. You don't have to be friends with the whole fandom. You don't have to go to the places that are uncomfortable for you. You don't have to put up with toxicity or hate speech or bigots or any of these bad people who try to platform themselves through the bad-faith argument of demanding "but you gotta love and tolerate!" their intolerance. No, you don't. Bad elements can and should be filtered out unless and until they are willing to make genuine amends and a genuine change to become better. And that is possible - again, people are fickle and tenuous and change their minds sometimes.
I'm not sure what else we can do other than simply make ourselves the examples by being good friends to the people who are worth it. But I do know we shouldn't give up on that.
So I'm not.
Well put on all levels. Thank you for it.
Well said. But I have to say, what's going on now is about peoples' lives, not politics.
A+
I feel like Gilda is a particularly germane point here. Sure, she got redemption later on, that part matters. (You think she would have gotten that redemption if Rainbow had just kept her around, beating up on Fluttershy, making Rainbow make excuses for her, and acting like that was fine and nothing was wrong? Throwing out the Nazis is oft times the best thing you can do for the Nazis, too.)
But setting that aside, it's the thing you have to do for the sake of the Fluttershys among us, and for our own sakes too.
Nicely said, Wilson.
A very thoughtful post. And I'm not giving up on this fandom. Hell, I am part of fandoms that are way smaller but people still stick around.
Well said Winston, thanks for putting this out there.
Thank you, Winston. :)
I didn't want to make a post about this either. But in many ways, ignoring it would be an implicit approval of the status quo. Thank you for continuing the conversation.
5276850 Unfortunately, the modern republican party has no real scruples or ideals. They politicize everything, because they have no other way to hold on to power.
They did that with the pandemic; "wear a mask" should not be a political issue. "Don't kill people" should absolutely not be a political issue. But the republicans made it into one. Intentionally and despicably.
Excellent post.
Well said.
I will say this. Being tolerant and diverse in people's ethnicities is rather easy for me, what matters is how other people think. If someone from another part of the world with different colored skin and an accent talks with me, but we think pretty damn the same, on how to run a nation, economics, social policy etc. I will damn near embrace this other person and treat them like a brother/sister. Talking with someone from America, with the same skin and voice, hold on, I'll do you one better, when I am at Christmas dinner with my family, and I hear my family talking about politics that are different from mine, there is a small part of me that wants to get up from my seat, lunge at them from across the table, wrap my hands around their neck, and squeeze with the strength of a boa constrictor. Thought and beliefs are what really matter, I'm not proud to say I can be this way, but I will confess it.
To parrot what others said, I think you put this quite well