BronyCon, Epilogue · 9:44am Aug 27th, 2019
Epilogue:
Hi there! This is part of my blog series on the adventure that was the last BronyCon! If you're just joining us, you should probably start here:
Day 0
Part 1 of Day 1
Part 2 of Day 1
Part 1 of Day 2
Part 2 of Day 2
Part 1 of Day 3
Part 2 of Day 3
Day 4
Epilogue
So here we are, at the end. Almost past the end, really.
Okay, not quite. There's still a few scraps of the final day to clean up. After the closing ceremonies finished, the staff kinda shooed us all out of the convention center. No surprise there; having been con staff, I'm well aware that the shutdown and cleanup is a project in itself and some stuff's kinda gotta get done lickedy-split because there's contractual timeframes and so on.
Trick Question was throwing a dead dog party for the writer crowd in her suite, and I wish I'd gone to it, but honestly? There comes a point where you're just kinda ready for a con to be OVER. Usually I can last out all three days of a con, no trouble, but after four days of a particularly tough rather than average con, that's kinda where I was. So, although I was torn, I had to pass. I hear good things about that party, though.
Instead, that Sunday night was a pretty quiet one. I got some subway for dinner, went back to my hotel room, took a few minutes to collect some notes (some of which contributed to this chronicle we're nearing the end of now), and spent the rest of the night reading The Enchanted Library until I pretty much fell asleep (between the west coast vs. east coast time difference, and being four days worth of beat, that didn't take longer than until maybe... 10pm or so? I don't remember).
Then I got up the next day, checked out, caught the train back to the airport, and flew home. Hung out with some fellow Seattle-bound bronies in the airport while we waited for the flight (there were a lot of bronies on it, shocking). Otherwise, there's really nothing much else to tell. It was uneventful, as you generally wish the return trip to be, so I count myself lucky for that.
And now I'm home, and I started writing some recollections and thoughts on this whole BronyCon adventure, which brings us to... right now!
Yeah, I lied a bit with the blog title for this one, because I guess it's not pure epilogue. That part up there was just a bit of cleaning up the final cobwebs of the main sequence of events.
This is where the epilogue starts.
Epilogue (For Real This Time):
Epilogues to real life ongoing streams of experience are tricky; when you've reached the end of the story, you're at the present moment. There's nowhere to go for more but the future, and writing about the future is notoriously fraught with accuracy problems.
But, hell, I'll try anyway.
The trick, I think, is to avoid mentioning specific events you can't possibly know, and stick to the more conceptual ideas. Those are a lot easier.
To see the concepts being laid out in their groundwork and explain my thoughts about the future, though, we need to look back real quick at some things I said I had thoughts on. Now's the time for those.
What I want to say first in that regard is that the thing that strikes me about the overall mood of this BronyCon is the intense self-awareness that hung over the weekend, but without being oppressive or glum. Everyone knew the party was ending - but also that that was no reason to stop the party.
And I think that is the most beautiful reflection of BronyCon's most important take-away.
The "It's in Our Hooves Now: The Importance of Fanfiction After the Series Ends" panel was the most specific concrete form that this awareness was cast into, at least in my BronyCon experience. Lots of good points were brought up in this panel: among them, the panelists noted that, up until now, the canon was always subject to change. With the series ending, those days are over. What we have is what we have, and in a way, that frees us, the fandom writers, from the uncertainties of new material springing up out of our control.
Inexplicably, this... well, it seems to scare a lot of people, I'm noticing around the internets of late. And it shouldn't; the end of show canon is not the kind of end bringing a deathlike finality that so many other facets of the fandom seem to be concerned that it is, and are consequently facing with an unfortunate sense of almost existential dread.
To us, the writers—and to everyone else—it should instead be seen as the passing of a torch.
We are free to write the stories we want to write, as we always have been – but now even moreso, knowing that we are no longer just borrowing, but owning.
And more than just that, in every sense, we are free to make this world ours now - we are free to decide what it all means, for ourselves.
Of course, these ponies already meant so much to us, it's hard to even express.
I know (and I suspect that this is true for many of us) that they changed my life profoundly, and for the better.
When I found ponies, I was not in a good place. When I began writing ponies, this showed. Those old pieces from back in the mists of time are kinda cringy now, but I can't regret it because the stuff I poured out through ponyfic in the earliest of my days here was genuine. I was writing what I knew, because I had to write it somewhere.
I chose ponies because I felt an awakening in some part of my soul, pretty much right from the start, that their message rang true - there was something better. There were good things in life. There were good people out there, the kind that I wanted to be around.
They were right.
Friendship is Magic.
The friends I've made here are what ponies really mean to me. I've learned so much from them, and from all of you. Every single one of you is effin' magical, and don't you ever forget it!
That's why I feel like Twilight Sparkle. Well, among other reasons, but that'd be the biggest one; her journey was one that I needed to undertake as well, and in a lot of ways, I feel as if she and I did it together. I kinda think we all did, each in our own ways, according to our own needs, drawing from the multitudes of things ponies has had to offer over the course of these last nine years.
And it was all leading to this.
I think that for many of us who were there at this last BronyCon, we were not just at a convention.
We were privileged to witness, in person, a pivotal moment of transition into the next phase of what this whole pony thing means.
Insomuch as BronyCon's ending is a proxy for the show itself ending, you could say that August 4th, 2019 was our graduation day.
We are the students no longer. No more friendship lessons will be given to us, because now it is time for them to be given by us. Twilight and all her friends were our examples, and now it is time for us to be the examples. We were shown a world where friendship is magic, and now it is time for us to take the magic of friendship out into the world.
It's time for us to lead by example. Maybe the best way to do that is to simply live what we were taught. Ponies instill good things within us. If all the values and the lessons of ponies live on in us, if they reflect in the ways we treat everyone and in how we conduct ourselves and in the things we do, then we can show the world that those ideals matter, and ponies are not over, because they made us better people. They changed lives, and that's permanent. Those changes are written on our hearts forever. They never go away.
If we just keep on living life carrying the good things from ponies with us, this can't be the end, because there's still so much left to do.
There are still more friends to meet.
There are still more conventions to go to.
There are still more stories to write.
And we can share that with the world. One candle can light another. Friendship begets friendship, and that's some real-life magic.
That's what all of this means to me. That's the epilogue to my first, last, and greatest BronyCon.
Thank you all for coming on this journey with me.
I look forward to finding out with you what comes next.
- Winston, 2:34am, August 27th
You’re welcome. I enjoy sharing this trot thru life with all of you too.
I've really enjoyed reading this series, thanks for writing it! Eagerly looking forward to EFNW next year.
You're welcome, and thank you.
Thank you for bringing us on this journey, or rather, all of them that you have.
Thank you for this look back at the final BronyCon, which–as your words always do–painted a clear enough picture to feel like we were there.
Thank you for your first stories. I don't think they are cringy; you used ponies to express feelings and emotions that could apply to anyone, and you wholeheartedly succeeded: even with situations and traumas that I've never experienced, you made me feel them. And writing those helped you get through your own problems, so they would be well worth existing even if they didn't also stand well on their own.
Thank you for the stories since. As I've said before, regardless of the casts being pastel magical ponies, the stories you tell are, at their hearts, about people, which makes them relevant to anyone. (And damned if you didn't lodge the Seawall almost as firmly in at least one reader's mind as it is in (the original) Sunburst's.)
Thank you for appreciating and articulating so well the role that you and other fanfic authors have now: keepers of the MLP:FiM world. And, with that in mind, thank you in advance for the stories you write in the future. For helping keep the ponies alive, and for continuing to share their journeys with us.