Reflection About the Past, the Future, and Untraditional Manhood

Hey, all. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? If you’ve read my smattering of blogs since late March, you already know what’s been going on. For those that haven’t, my mother’s cancer became terminal in March before she passed away back in April. Thus I was engaged with taking care of her in her last days and arranging several of her affairs after her passing. Obviously, this impacted my participation on this website since then, and the only things I’ve posted are just occasional updates on my personal well-being. I didn’t want to be one of those guys who just disappear from this website after building up an audience (however small); too many authors whose works I enjoyed did that and left many stories unresolved. I have always maintained since the time I opened an account here nearly 8 years ago that if I were to ever pack up my things and leave the fandom, I would give prior notice here so that nobody would be left hanging.

And over the last three months, deciding whether or not to leave the fandom has been a big question in my mind. There were certainly a lot of factors that seemed to point to departure as the most reasonable reaction. My mother’s passing and the aftermath are taking up plenty of my time. Friendship is Magic has not been producing new content for three years now. Generation 5 of My Little Pony is deeply unsatisfactory and unenjoyable to me. I’ve gotten a volunteer job as a website manager for a small magazine that also requires more effort in my life than I needed to devote when I was in college and initially writing these stories. Both the Grand Brony Gala and BronyCon, the two conventions I went to regularly, have gone under, and the closest ones are a good ways across the country. My frequent readings of Biblical Scripture to my mother on her deathbed made me more reflective and realize I need to strengthen my relationship with Jesus Christ, something that I think this website hasn’t always encouraged (just look at the clopfics I’ve written).

Suffice to say, there are a lot of reasons for me to bounce from this website and fandom that most would call reasonable. Life can only throw so much at you before you need to give up certain commitments. My mother went through that when she got her job as a teacher, and she cut back on many of her social clubs to devote time to both her occupation and her family. There are some things that you should not feel obligated to do just because you’ve been doing them for a long time. I think it is safe to say that many of us here, if push came to shove and we needed to devote more time to other aspects of our life, would drop this pony stuff like a sack of potatoes and do what we needed to do.

And for the last two months or so, that was kind of how I was feeling. The Brony fandom was a place of mostly good memories for me, but that was kind of what I felt like they should stay as: memories. There are demarcations in your life where you don’t act like as you did before, and I really thought that my mother’s passing was one of those times. It was not meant to happen to somebody who had been relatively healthy all her life and had no family history of cancer, but it happened anyway. I thought I would be able to see her well into my forties, but she was gone at age 64 and I’m not even 27 yet. General logic and philosophy dictates that things should not be as they were after such an event. To quote from the Good Book: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Manhood has kind of been a topic I’ve focused on for a while now, even before everything with my mother happened. It was something that I was told I lacked for years, going all the way back to elementary and middle school. I wasn’t strong enough, cool enough, or tough enough; the typical spiel that young kids and tweens insult each other at that age. I joined this fandom when I was in high school, not even two years after leaving middle school, so it should come as no surprise I didn’t tell anybody but my parents that I was a part of all this. At the time, I considered myself exercising a nontraditional masculinity by participating in the fandom, and that was kind of how I perceived myself up to around 2019. Both of my parents were relatively supportive of how I conducted myself. I was a man in my mind; a different kind of man from the rugged cowboy in Westerns or hardboiled dicks of film noirs, but a man nonetheless.

Maybe the past few years gave me broader understanding about masculinity. Maybe the political turmoil of the late 2010s made me reconsider certain things about myself. Maybe I started associating with more women, letting me actually see what femininity consisted of (it’s sometimes hard to gauge that when you grow up in a household with a 3:1 male-to-female ratio). Regardless of the reason, I’ve started to think I’m not much of a man. I don’t have much of an income to support myself. I haven’t really had any sort of consistent romantic relationship. I haven’t lived anywhere except with my parents and a college dormitory they paid for. Almost all of what I have has been from parental support, both financially and emotionally, and I have produced little to nothing fruitful from their generosity (except, perhaps, in some vague development of my morality). I suppose I’ve grown to believe manhood is success, or at least a valiant attempt at success, be it professionally, romantically, or socially. And right now, I have little to show for all the years I’ve been on this Earth, and I get the nagging feeling I haven’t been trying enough.

As I said before, my mother cut things out of her life when she knew they would distract from what was important. And going into June, I was approaching the Brony fandom with the same mindset. Everything that had appealed it to me was seemingly gone or at least greatly reduced. I listed a dozen things I wanted to do in the fandom, but always slacked with the execution. Maybe I didn’t feel like a man because MLP was eating up so much of my time that I couldn’t focus my mindset on “true” success in my field. Maybe the dream job or the perfect special somebody was around the corner if only I’d stop trying to tinker with that story about Discord and his estranged son. Maybe all of this should be left to my younger days, when I could be a little quirky and not think about all the things I’ll have to do when I’m “grown-up”.

Perhaps it was time to put away childish things.

But something happened last week that I’m not quite sure how to explain. If I wrote this into a story for FimFic, many of you would downvote it for having such a hackneyed plot twist. Yet what happens below actually happened, God as my witness:

My father and I had gone to my mother’s school to drop off some papers and pick up her belongings in her office. We were looking around for a video that we were going to use in her funeral service, but had no luck in locating (we found it later at home). Frustrated, my father went off to the nearby restroom, and I was left alone in the office looking at all the things Mom had collected over the years. There were paintings and quilts adorning the walls, gifts from either family members or friends. Pictures of our family stood upon her desk, as well as a few pictures from MLP conventions that she had attended along with me. Memories, as I’ve said, that I planned to hold on to and cherish, but would soon abandon to the past.

Yet when I looked at her visitation desk (the desk students sat at when they had meetings with Mom), I saw she had a paper bag adorned with pins from her various clubs and events she had attended. And on that side facing me, I saw this pinned button standing front and center:

I took this picture at the time because I felt a strange sense of…not quite euphoria, but realization. Like when you realize the answer to a math problem you’ve pondered for hours and suddenly understand. KEEP CALM AND BRONY ON. A silly little button she got at BronyCon and happened to be pointing right at me a few days before her funeral. This provided the impetus I needed to finally understand what I was going to do about my life in the fandom.

I know for many of you, this whole story with the button is just coincidence, and it likely is. The bag had four sides and could’ve been propped on any one of them at random. Had it been a side with one of her scholastic or professional organizations, I may not have even paid attention to the bag. I may subscribe to Christianity, but even I think most things that happen can be ascribed to basic laws of nature than the direct hand of God Himself. Perhaps it’s just my grief-addled mind looking for some sort of meaning in something as insignificant as a button from a long-cancelled convention. Yet I can’t shake the fact that this lowly button, a silly distortion of British World War Two propaganda, had been deliberately placed for my benefit by some mysterious force.

Over the past two weeks since I saw the button, I considered this idea of “manhood vs. being a brony” that I’d been struggling with. The more I thought, the more I realized that this was a false dichotomy. It wasn’t this fandom or the activities in it that were sapping me of this perceived “manhood” or success. I wasn’t putting largescale writing projects or job hunting on hold because that BamHoofYah Recovery Project needed to be done. All the fandom stuff was getting pushed to the side just as much as the “real” stuff was, because I simply wasn’t doing any of them. How often did I provide an update with a long list of to-dos that were never fulfilled? The fandom wasn’t rewarding because I wasn’t making it rewarding. I wasn’t succeeding at being a man because I was failing at being a man, but because I wasn’t even trying to be a man. I was lazy and procrastinating, fumbling for an easy decision or opportunity that would never come to my doorstep.

To quote that guy from Bojack Horseman: It’s you.

To leave the fandom now would be akin to joining a diorama club, never doing any work, and quitting in a huff because a perfect replica of the National Mall didn’t appear in front of me. It would be shoving the responsibility of my decision on the fandom itself, instead of my own behavior.

Because of this, I’ve resolved that I’m going to complete a good deal of things that I’d put on my last update. I want to see if this emotion is a legitimate tiring of the fandom, or just an attempt to excuse my own laziness. If it is the former, then I’ll simply leave this fandom and announce so on this account. Nobody is under an obligation to stay here if they don’t want to. But if it turns out to be the latter, I will always thank myself for not tossing away something that really does mean a lot to me.

I don’t know which it will be just yet, but you all can expect a few more stories and posts from yours truly. I’m not done with the fandom just yet. There’s still much more I need to learn about myself and what I want to do, and I hope by spending a little more time here I’ll be able to figure it out.

Thank you to all who follow me, and I hope this little adventure of self-discovery will provide something substantial to you as well.