• Member Since 22nd Apr, 2012
  • offline last seen 53 minutes ago

Nyronus


Greetings World. You may call me Nyronus. I write stories, among other things. My hobbies include existential ennui, being Princess Luna, and Saving the World. Feel free to hit me up on Steam to chat!

More Blog Posts181

Nov
26th
2018

Throwing My Hat into the Anon-a-Miss Commentary RIng · 10:54pm Nov 26th, 2018

So, I've noticed a lot, and I mean, a lot of conjecture surrounding the fixation on the Anon-A-Miss story. This lead me to thinking on it, and I realized I had a somewhat novel observation on the mess that I could share. I also figured it would just got lost if I dropped it as a comment, so, here we are.

A fair warning though: I never read the Anon-a-Miss story. I also don't really intend to. I've heard a few rough synopses, and it sounds bad. The weird achronology, the handwaved ending, some of the behavior from various characters, and the sheer rawness of it all add up to something that will both probably trigger me and just not be a good read. What I have done though, besides see everyone drop their two cents on this pandemic of fix-fics and accusation fics that are allegedly coming out right now, is gotten super fucking salty about the show and post stories about it.

Why is that relevant? Well, aside from the obvious, here's the deal.

When the show or sub-series have the characters I like acting like assholes, that hurts me.

A lot.

Circa Late-2012 this show and community were about all I had. My family life was, uh, bad. Like, before I dropped out of grad school I was regularly getting clemency from my teachers to turn in assignments late because I didn't know if I wasn't going to end up on the street with no money, car, or support network at any random moment levels of bad. I had my real world friends, who were also all tied up in the show, the show, and the fanfiction, and that was about it.

This show and the world created around it was, for lack of a better term, a safe space. A place where I could go and see hope, joy, compassion, reasonableness, and humor. I loved the characters, I loved the world, and I loved the fandom.

And then I had to endure an out of nowhere episode where Rainbow Dash, a character I loved, was warped into a hideous caricature of herself, and her friends, all also characters I loved, all circled around her and engaged in a coordinated campaign of humiliation and ostracization behind her back in order to break her so she'd stop being slightly annoying.

That got under my skin, badly. The fact that it got under my skin so badly also got under my skin badly, because I thought I was going crazy and reacting in a way over the top manner, leading to a wonderful oroborus of anger and shame. It was not fun times, and if I had written Rogues in 2012 rather than 2013, it would not have had a happy ending.

So, if you will allow me to put my emotional clothing back on now, I suspect a lot of the same is going on. I know a lot of people are in the same boat with the show and fandom being a source of escape from how awful our lives are. I know a lot of people feel an extreme amount of respect and affection for various characters, and I know we once again have a story about the group turning on a beloved character in an incredibly brutal and sudden fashion over reasons that are, with any scrutiny, not very good. If Hume is wrong, a repetition of condition should expectedly produce a repetition of outcome. History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes, as they say.

The fact is, we draw a lot of inspiration from these characters, and part of what we love about these characters and what inspires us is their love for each other. Their love and their loyalty to each other also affirms a kind of optimistic faith most of us aren't getting from our own lives. So, when the characters betray each other, and the story either leaves it unpunished and unquestioned, or worse, tries to pass off this betrayal of righteous and sensible, the characters betray the audience's love and faith in them as well. That's something that can be cutting, especially when you don't have much else going for you.

So... people turn to transformative art as a means to cope. To reconcile the dissonance, to fix the problem and erase it, to take vengeance on those who hurt them, to come to terms with that hurt. To go back to me for the continuing pertinent example, Rogues was, despite what you might believe from the comments, an attempt to bring a happy and in-character resolution to the Mare-Do-Well story. To stay true to and reconcile both Twilight's compassion and insightfulness and the shittiness of what she and the others had done. For me, it was making peace with it as part of the canon.

And then season 6 had a total rehash of Mare-Do-Well and another episode that was even worse, but that's a story for another time.

Now, you may be saying "That seems like a sensible read, Nyronus, but isn't this all a little silly? You talk about betrayal and vengeance, but they're cartoon characters. You can't be betrayed by someone else's imagination. Getting upset, let alone engaging in a performatory baggage grappling in public, just doesn't make rational sense." To which I would reply;

1) This kind of dramatically undersells the sheer power, and importance, of art's capacity to touch people. To engage our empathy, faith, and drive, and I keep using the word "faith," deliberately, here. Good art is spiritual fire, so when people play with it, someone inevitably gets burned.
2) Maybe in an absolute sense, but compared to the petty, emotional, unthinking, sadistic evil I have seen come out of people I thought I could trust and total random strangers all because they were having a bad day and needed to hurt someone to make themselves feel in control - I will take some kids writing gobs of allegedly mediocre vent art and call it a fucking win for human sensibility and self control every day of the week.

All that said and done I should close this out by pointing out that this is my best guess, based on my own history and some basic parallels that can be easily observed or intuited. There are, of course, as many reasons to do any given thing as there are grains of sand on a beach, but I suspect for the people sincerely pumping this stuff out, some level of coping with dissonance is a root cause. Either way, I hope you all enjoyed this little spontaneous side tangent into my personal history and psychology for the purposes of exploring a fad everyone I know decided to talk about all of a sudden, and I will continue to be... around.

Fair well, and until we meet again,
Nyronus

Comments ( 4 )

What’s weird to me is that there’s this much of a reaction to the otherwise normally ignored comics.

4973354
I've said it before, but I'll say it here again.

The reason people seem to care so much about Anon-A-Miss isn't just that it showed the characters in an unflattering light. It's that it was, based on every other jerk thing we've ever seen them do in canon, believable. That's what gives it staying power; the fact that on some level we could buy the human girls turning on Sunset based on gossip, even when she was in such an incredibly vulnerable position it would destroy her. If we didn't have the capacity to believe it, it would just be largely thrown into the bad-story trash. Mare-Do-Well was similar; the whole crux of the issue was that it took every negative aspect of the characters (especially Twilight and Applejack's tendencies to be holier-than-thou) and essentially drove them home as canon and overbearing.

Yeah, I recently read the comic, and it was a strange experience. I actually found myself wondering at several points if the author(s) had even seen the show.

I still haven’t decided if there is a place for that tale in my FIMFiction universes or not, but if there is, there would have to be some serious work to tie it in... which touches on some of your own points. How does one resolve the dissonance? Or does one seek to “correct” what was so badly written?

Or, does one simply examine the situation further, from any number of angles - even turning it inside-out like an old glove - as a continuing conversation within the FIMFiction community?

Thank you for sharing this, all of it. :twilightsmile:

Maybe in an absolute sense, but compared to the petty, emotional, unthinking, sadistic evil I have seen come out of people I thought I could trust and total random strangers all because they were having a bad day and needed to hurt someone to make themselves feel in control...

Ah, old wounds.

I've been avoiding that comic for the same reason. Some stories hit hard, and those stories are hard to handle when they come without resolution.

Login or register to comment