The Knowledge of Avoidance · 1:55am Oct 20th, 2015
http://www.equestriadaily.com/2015/10/pony-declining-but-hopefully-more-stuff.html
Sometimes I feel like I entered this whole thing a bit late, and the end of this epic fantasy novella I had hoped to write might come too late for anyone to actually read it. Hopefully more content will come and stave off the end. Perhaps we'll see years of pony left. I just have so many ideas left in me that I want to share, and I'm so afraid that I'll never be able to. I really have a problem motivating myself to write, or well, do anything important. I just get so anxious that I'll mess up that I just avoid doing it. Well, I'm getting older, my family's getting older, world's moving on. I guess I just don't like change and try to cling on to what was for as long as I can.
But that's more of a statement on me than on Pony.
Well, got sidetracked there. Back to Pony. As I said, I have so many stories to write, so don't expect me going anywhere. I think the full immensity of adulthood has finally caught up with me ('bout time, I'm 22), so I'm going to try my best to write as much as I can about anything and everything.
TL;DR
Maestro sad Pony might end. Maestro don't like change. Maestro hopefully write more.
Well, thanks in advance for letting me spew my thoughts out like a stream of Ebola-induced vomit.
Have a good night , and hope for ten more years of pony!
I believe you're a bit alarmed over a fairly minor thing.
1.) All the best shows only last 7 seasons. A few years ago I read an article that defended that premise better than anything, but damned if I can find the thing. It boiled down to something like this: Seasons 1-3 are really the show just picking up steam. That's when most of the dedicated fanbase joins up and starts evangelizing the show. Seasons 4-5 are usually the peak of the show's popularity growth, primarily because by this point the storylines are getting so complex that you usually need a primer just to watch a single episode of the show during this part of it's run. Seasons 6-7 are when the major stories have been told and all the bigger plot lines are being tied up neatly with a bow. By the time you hit the end of Season 7, if the network decides to flog the expired equine, the stories that are told are usually just re-hashes of the stories told in S01-S06.
2.) Trekkies, 'nuf said. Need more explanation? OK, so the original Star Trek was (rightly) cancelled after 2.5 seasons. I could go into why canceling the show was a good idea, but this isn't a Star Trek site, so that's for another time. Point is, the show had reached critical mass with its fanbase and took off in a huge way...but it wouldn't be until TNG that it hit mainstream success, and that only happened because of the fanbase that kept the show high enough in ratings to keep cycled in syndication for 20 years. One of the reasons anthropologists and behavioral scientists are so interested in Bronies is because the subculture is so much like early Trekkies (and yes, it's TREKKIES, not "trekkers," and I can say this because Gene "The Great Bird of the Galaxy" Roddenberry himself declared it so!) that they want to watch this thing develop in real-time over the course of the next two decades, not have to rely on 2nd and 3rd hand reports after the fact. Translation: Sit back, relax, kick up your feet, the fandom's not going anywhere, even if the show does.
3.) Ranma 1/2...yeah, OK, that does take explaining. First off, check this site out. I'll wait. OK, so now that you've read all 32-odd volumes of one of the manga, feel free to watch the anime. (Depending on which season you pick to watch, your viewing experience may vary.) If you're not totally hooked by now and hunting down some of the finest fanfics on the Internet (I highly recommend Hearts of Ice, a truly epic story that's not for the faint of heart) you're truly missing out. And there is a LOOOOOOT of Ranma 1/2 fanfics out there. Here's the thing: Ranma 1/2 was first published in 1989. That's before some of the people on this site were born. New fanfics are still being written for Ranma 1/2, and the series is still getting new fans to this day. And this is for a series that goes against the vast majority of American culture's standards of what is and is not "entertainment." tl;dr - Don't worry, there's plenty of opportunity for this thing to keep going.
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I appreciate your words, and thank you heartily for them. I was just rather depressed at the time of writing this.
I'm just at 'that' time in my life. You know, that point where I'm an adult that just really became so, and me and the all the other new adults that just emerged from the cocoon are just bumping around into each other trying to find out where all the free food is.
gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Group-of-Pandas-Falling-Down-Slide.gif
That and the longest election in Canadian history just wrapped up today and... well, politics are always depressing.
I'm not gonna even think about abandoning the pony ship until I finish my stories, dood. After that, I will probably still keep my eyes open for more FutaTwi regardless if I still like MLP or not, dood.
But the only thing this will cause is I might actually get something done instead of lurking on FimFiction or Derpibooru, dood.
Everything will eventually come to an end. I think that when it comes to pony, the long pauses mid season are doing quite a bit of damage.
And now to your writing - great to know you have many more ideas, as I (and many others I bet) would love to read 'em!
Ypu know, people still write shipfics on Digimon s1(1999-2000). Still create porn on NGE (the original one, that's god damn 1995-1996) etc, etc, etc. Things like that do not simply die one day, or at least the day is way away. Neither do people who follow it. And it's not random outcasts either. My point is, while it's highly unlikely that pony will face a major decline any time soon, even if it DOES happens it will not die out for a long, long time. Pony on and wrte. We're not even half way done yet.
I haven't watched a single episode since S1 other than the S2 finale, pretty sure I'm not going anywhere until people stop writing and drawing.
At this point, the fandom has become large enough and well established enough that it has become self sustaining for quite some time. MLP:FIM has a vast number of jumping off points for fan fiction to branch off of, an in depth world that's only really hinted at the ways things work in said world which means that fan fiction authors and fans in general have a lot of gaps that they can use their imagine to fill in. It's also quite interesting in the ways the characters and world reacts to situations as these ponies DON'T act like normal humans would. They're much more naive and childish in many ways but occasionally hint at maturity in various instances making it plausible that when an unusual situation arises, some ponies will come up with unusual and unconventional methods of handling them. This makes it fun to just throw a wrench in the works and see what happens. There is also the fact that these creatures aren't even humaniod which poses an entirely different set of challenges that we, ourselves, have never had to deal with and are always fun to try and bring a new idea or take on how they might solve the simple issue of "how do they hold things in hooves and walk at the same time?" or "how would ponies react if I pretty much lit the world on fire via warfare" or even "are halters considered kinky pony bondage?" Everything is new and has a different perspective when you are talking about how sentient small equines navigate and interact with their world, much less handle all the dramas of life along with it!
Also consider things like "pony racism" where some races do have some very defined advantages over others and in a situation where those advantages are an invaluable asset, or even just in normal life where certain advantages aren't needed as badly or are needed in very specific roles, it becomes a question of how these seemingly harmonious beings would react to someone wanting the power of another or even finding the powers of one race inconsequential. What would happen in a world where unicorns could control the weather just and effectively as any pegasus with less effort?
Think back to rarity when they all got their cutie marks switched, she wasn't "good" at the job, but that's because she literally arranged the clouds into neat checkerboard patterns across the sky. If she had no control over them or poor control over them, they wouldn't have been arranged in a neat grid pattern which begs the question that if a seamstress can arrange the sky in a checkerboard, why can't she just push them all out of the way or maybe drag them down to a lake and squeeze them empty with her magic? Just how well could this unicorn control the weather if she understood the concepts behind it? Again, look at her sorting apples back in the flim flam episode, doing what granny smith supposedly has a nack for, or maybe look at how magic could be used to harvest a field in far less time. What happens when one race actually starts showing that "they can do it all better and then some"? The situation might also be possible for the other races... but I digress.
Ultimately, this whole world that is shown in MLP:FIM is a fully fledged multiverse of possibilities based on "How..", "what if...", "why..." and other beginnings to an endless number of questions relating to their culture and lore and how we can change it to make a totally different world that is as far different from our own as possible. They aren't human, they aren't bound by the normal laws of reality as we know them, and they have access or exposure to a number of magical beings and energies that make literally anything possible. On top of that, we have relatable characters and relatable limitations somehow coming together to live in this magical world that draws us in and gives us a tour of just one set of possibilities vastly different from most other stories in the world. Most of it is already made and allows us to use these completely wild and different aspects of the world to explore wild possibilities while still having the world be familiar enough to everyone else that you don't need to hold their hand to guide them through it. They already know the gist of things and it simply takes a little bit of defining the ways this world differs from others to get them on track, easy. You also have a stock of well loved characters that you instantly get to use as templates and gain immediate recognition for several traits they happen to have meaning that your characters don't necessarily need as in depth an introduction and you can get right to the story at hand, exploring possibilities in new ways.
Point being, just like how people still watch, write, read and cosplay in the universe of star trek or star wars or... well dozens of really popular shows that are literally centuries old, MLP will likely have a fandom fueling the need and supply of new pony related material for years to come. It stops when we stop, and there is entirely way too many brony websites, roleplays, games, fan videos, fan fictions, and music for this "fad" to die out any time soon, and even if it does eventually start to fade, people are creatures of habit. There will always be niche groups where fans of old shows and such gather to share their enjoyment of said shows and if MLP somehow becomes an exception to that with all the full spectrum of areas we've gathered in, explored, and in some cases, invaded, then I'll start the site up to cease this happening of this exception myself just to prove my point.
Look at it this way, even IF MLP ends, which is eventually will, we have at least Season 6 and a movie that's non EQG in 2017 confirmed, so we have plenty left to go, and even if we didn't, well, look at it this way, until recently, DBZ had ended ages ago, and it's fandom is still very much alive, and considering that there's a grand total of 26 MLP conventions that exist around the world, yeah I doubt the fandom will die overnight after the show's finale, and heck, witth Slice of Life, this is officially Hasbro's longest running show, outdoing even the original Transformers cartoon which had around 95 episodes, I think.