Jun
26th
2015
Proud to be an American.... at least for today. · 7:14pm Jun 26th, 2015
The first step of a very long road to equality
Supreme Court strikes down bans on same-sex marriage
(all images that follow are my headcanon and are not meant to make any assumptions about the Pony's personal sexuality, they all have the right to be with who ever they want to be with: Stallion, Mare, Dragon, Yak, Donkey, Gryphon, Hydra, Doll, Tom, Princess, Changling, and/or any of the many creatures I missed)
But those characters aren't even gay save for maybe Lyra and bon bon? Also about time America caught up.
3186112 Well that all depends on your head-canon.
It's true the only support we have for any of these is that Lyra and Bon-bon insist they are just best friends.
But hopefully in the future Hasbro and DHX won't have to insit that it is just friendship!
3186153 head canon is irrelevant. It is actually annoying to a degree that people refuse to just accept that Lyra and bonbon are straight. if the producers say they are just friends then they are just friends. No pony in MLP is gay, bi-sexual, trans, gender queer, gender fluent because it is a kids show. The only ponies we know that actually have a sexuality are those that have had kids or have been shown to fall in love with someone. E.g Rarity and spike are straight.
I would love for them to make gay or bi-sexual characters but given that America has only just legalize gay marriage now in all states I am afraid we will most likely not see it this year or even the next. This is why the good people on this website make OC's that are all of the above. But using two ponies that are not gay as the poster gay couple is not only insulting but makes out that any female that has another female friend must instantly be trying to get in the others pants. Lass time I checked being lesbian meant you were attracted to the other sex not a sex addict.
Anyway it is early in the morning here and I am just ranting for the sake of it. I hope the LGBT celebrate long and hard this weekend because they have earned a celebration. Nice to know as well that if I ever have a male partner I could potentially get married in America now.
3186209 I agree with many of the points you make, and I'm happy that PRIDE month is basically getting an extra week stuck on to the end of it! Last week was Shanghai PRIDE and I know that it was one of the most fun weeks of my life!
I would encourage you to look around at other children's shows that are currently being shown on major networks. Steven Universe is a Prime example, especially with some of the newer episodes where it becomes more and more obvious that the genderless intelligent gemstones that all use female pronouns can be in love with each other.
As far as MLP goes I would argue that "No Pony is gay" is a pretty big stamp to put on a show that chooses to only present love in the context of marriage. If they were to say in the show that Stallions could only love Mares and vise versa then we fans would possibly have to admit defeat (although that would be the point an angry mob of Shipping Bronies would show up at both Hasbro and DHX). The show specifically chooses not to address pre-marriage relationships and has only presented us with three recognizable couples that do not function as parents (counting the Cakes before the twins). If we were to assume that none of the background ponies are dating or married because we never see physical evidence of it (except in hearts and hooves, and those couples are never seen again...maybe), then we would have to assume that there is no sex before marriage and all of the parents who still live in ponyville stay in side and are never seen... maybe they just hang out on the northeast side of town?
To address the idea of it being a children's TV show from a slightly different point of view, I would point you to this article The case for starting sex education in kindergarten
The idea behind the most progressive forms of Sexual and Sexuality Education is that these are things that kids can handle especially when presented as relationships with in their grasp. The target demegraphic for MLP:FIM is roughly 6-12 if i'm not mistaken, and at this age Children will have been exposed to the ideas of Dating. By saying that we should only expose these children to dating in a heterosexual context we are actually enforcing the idea that being Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans, Queer, Pansexual, or Asexual is not normal, and with this we invite the problems that are so present in our modern time.
I would remind you of the Young Brony who was teased about being gay because he liked MLP, and even with his parents support trying to help him understand that it didn't matter what others thought, felt like he could not go on living.
I don't know if you have faced hate before, or abuse, or bullying, but as someone who has faced all three I can tell you that it is much harder to handle then one might think. Education is the best option... if we educate children at an early age to understand that who ever you love is okay we can can another step down the road of Equality, and not the type Starlight Glimmer preaches, but the type where no one ever has to live in fear of telling others about themselves.
Keep The Harmony
-Don Swordspony
3186258 I will be honest I have never liked the word pronouns. be the gender you want to be but don't refer to it as a pronoun. the word itself leaves a bitter taste thanks mostly to Tumblr wearing it like a fashion trend. This may be unfair but really as far as things go Tumblr have managed to turn transsexual's, gender queer, and a few others into as I said above fashion accessories and sadly this makes people think of them as the crazed other kin and fifty different pronoun people.
but anyway as a whole America should be proud. Finally the LGBT have the rights that any human should have. Steven universe I have heard people try to say that it is only for the LGBT community hell I have heard that with MLP but I honestly think a show should not appeal to someone because of race, sexuality or gender. I mean Korra was "bi-sexual" in the second avatar series but I honestly did not like it. Now we are both the same sexuality but I found the show boring. Of course shows should try to have a mix of diversity but at the end of the day the majority of people in America are white and straight. Same as why in Japan the shows there mostly have Japanese and straight protagonist.
And I still think we are years away from having transsexual/ gender queer/ so on characters in a show because lets be honest a kid is not going to understand. but at the same time I feel that we should have more documentaries that discuss being gay, being bi-sexual, being transsexual and so on. I feel shows like this would help transgender kids and the rest. I feel this could be a key step in getting people aware and not assuming the kid is weird which can lead to terrible consequences. I think that there should be an insurance company that help trans people pay plastic surgeons and so on to be the gender/sex they identify as.
At the end of the day every person regardless of what they like to fuck or look like should be treated as an equal.
3188640 I think that its unfair to believe that children can't understand something just because its not "normal". Part of the reason we have MLP:FiM and not another cookie-cutter girly show is because Luaren Fuast believed:
" Girls like stories with real conflict; girls are smart enough to understand complex plots; girls aren’t as easily frightened as everyone seems to think. Girls are complex human beings, and they can be brave, strong, kind and independent–but they can also be uncertain, awkward, silly, arrogant or stubborn. They shouldn’t have to succumb to pressure to be perfect."
My Little NON-Homophobic, NON-Racist, NON-Smart-Shaming Pony: A Rebuttal
I would say this applies to boys and girls a like!
As someone who has worked in the education field, I know that its very hard to educate kids, and every kid is different, but we also never realize just how much impact society has on children. That in fact is something that is incredibly hard to measure, as the only way to prove anything beyond though experiments would be to isolate a group of children from birth and see how the functioned.... not very ethical.
Pronouns are interesting, in English and many other languages (maybe all?) they are an indicator and a descriptor. When you say he it implies a culturally constructed idea of what that person should look like. This would not be a problem except for the fact that for all of human history women have been seen (either culturally or through social training) as not men... look at their pronouns: woman she, they actually use the male pronouns as a base, this is a problem as it enforces an idea that women would not exist without men (I don't have a source to back this up, so I would encourage you to think about it, I know i am not the first person to say this, and I encourage you to do some more research if you are interested).
Also to say that the LGBTQ community finally has the same rights that every human should have is not taking into consideration all of the other things that they still don't have.... this is just one more battle won in a very long war.
3188912 Man has been a gender neutral term for thousand of years it was only in the last couple hundred that it came to be used as male. If I am right it was something like neman and woman both meant male human and female human. But later it was shortened to just man. Also I am not saying kids are stupid I am saying is that a child should get inspiration from a good person not a person that has similar, colour, gender or sexual orientation.
3189131 I couldn't find any actual information about the history of the word nemen, but it does presents some really interesting possibility for researching why the change happened when it did.
As far as children go I totally agree that children need to learn from good figures, and I highly support more diversity there. If you ever get a chance to live in china you will realize how much there culture presents non-chinese as different or odd or even bad. An example would be the inbreed Hate of the Japanese, The Sino-Japanese wars were in the early part of the 1900s and ended after Japans defeat in World War II. However, even among children born in the after 2005 you find that when asked about the Japanese they tell you how terrible the Japanese are and are often caught drawing pictures of dead Japanese soldiers. Probably the biggest contributing factor to this is that 60% of the channels of Chinese TV show films about the Japanese war with many many scenes of countless Chinese people dying.
It was a long brutal war, and the Japanese did not handle themselves as well as they could have (and still haven't apologized) but this is not something children should be learning. That is an extreme case but I do think we need more obviously specifically defined "good" characters so that children can pick their role models from a larger variety... and example would be young boys who really like Rainbow Dash or Pinkie Pie (or any other of the mane 6).
3191175 Simply put mate they did it to shorten the world. man itself was gender neutral as I said above. But I agree a role model can be anyone regardless of sex, gender and race.