Can I Get There By Rainbow Light? Yes, There And Back Again · 5:22pm Oct 11th, 2019
"Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls."
Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said.”
-- The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
Before we begin:
I wrote this in 2016, a final project for my senior seminar that was half biography half essay about something that affected your development as a person. Clearly, my single-minded ass chose ponies because ponies. Even in the middle of writing it, though, I knew it was something I'd keep in my pocket for the day when the show did eventually end because it sums up the crux of what I've learned and what I've shared from both Friendship is Magic and the fandom. It has a big chunk of my "Somewhere Only We Know" retrospective blog, and it's a smidge out of date (I wrote the ending the same day Newbie Dash aired) and keep in mind it's originally written in a semi-academic context and explains what we already know, but I think it's worth sharing.
Okay, that's all, see you at the bottom for personal updates.
Before I knew The Last Unicorn would become my favorite book, I watched the animated adaptation on cable. I don’t think I could have been more than eight or nine the first time I witnessed Molly Grue, the middle-aged woman with broken dreams, meet the unicorn in the forest long after a maiden is supposed to have unicorns. The fantasy film possessed a gravitas that reached far beyond my usual fare already, but Molly drove it to places I’d never known. Screaming, she demanded of the unicorn, “Where have you been?...Where were you when I was new? When I was one of those fine young maidens you always come to? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?”
I sat on the wooly carpet floor, eyes wide and shocked into silence as Molly’s voice tore with sorrow. I realized two things, then: First: unicorns and magic weren’t real, yet Molly breaking down before the unicorn had a depth and realness that I’d never seen before and couldn’t yet grasp because I didn’t have the age or experience to do so. Second: Someday, I would understand Molly Grue. Rereading the book ten years later, I understood that someday—someday frighteningly soon—I would become Molly Grue.
I was right on all three counts. But I’d never predicted my own Molly Grue moment would literally involve unicorns.
Let’s backtrack.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic isn’t my first rodeo. By the time the show rolled around in 2010, I’d earned my stripes and understood the rolling undulations, shifts, and jolting sharp turns of a fandom, especially a fandom for a television show. There’s a difference between merely enjoying a show and being part of a fandom. Fandom is community. Fandom is specialized slang, in-jokes, conventions, card trades over the table, and hot-blooded forum debates at midnight. There are lines between the shows you like, the shows you love, and the shows you cancel appointments for. My first real involvement with fandom was 2001’s Invader Zim, where I traversed all the milestones: bad fanworks, immature online shouting matches, reciting entire episodes verbatim, fierce debates of what characters ought or ought not to be romantically involved, and the devastating heartbreak of an early cancellation.
Fandoms are like boyfriends: you never forget your First. Your First is your whole world, your life, an emotional, illogical rollercoaster that’ll seem silly ten years later but for now is deadly serious. Cathedrals rise in the middle of living rooms and the young fan knows—yes, knows!—this is it forever, they will never love anything more than this thing right here. Phrases like, “Your favorite character sucks” become a dueling glove, and “your show sucks, my show is better” is an outright declaration of war.
And then you chill out. You learn that different tribes can coexist and that someone not liking your media of choice isn’t the end of the world. From boyfriend to township, I guess. I’d been committed to Pokémon since late 1999 and technically it came first, but that has always been less a fandom and more a General-Thing-I-Liked, coming in a smidge too late to ride the fad and too shy to interact with anyone except one or two people. Involvement with Pokémon was, and still is, a steady involvement, but for me had mostly been a solo experience. When Yu-Gi-Oh rolled around in 2004, I segued into a high school dueling clique (a subsidiary of both the trading card and anime nerds, an offshoot of the general nerd population) to play the trading card game. When it came to the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, however, I found myself pretty much on my own. I nestled into a decent online forum to shoot the breeze with fellow fans and share fanfiction, yes, but overall a tiny and modest fandom experience. My time with Danny Phantom (2006 to 2008) led me back to writing seriously (as opposed to one half-baked story a year) and, going into my early 20s, let me settle into a forum of both like-minded older fans and the screeching horde of fourteen-year-olds enthralled with their First. That clash of hotblooded newbies and chill veterans offered a welcome dose of perspective, I think.
Now, while I had various levels of involvement in all these fandoms, I can’t fully say I’d been fully part of them. This, I think, due to the fact that they were all relatively small fanbases. Zim had been the biggest, but cancelation hit the community hard and it couldn’t quite sustain itself. The fandoms I allied with were neighborhoods, not countries. Big fandoms were either too intimidating to break into, or else just didn’t interest me. Still, I knew what involvement in a major fandom looked like: specialized conventions, enough references and terminology to form a secret language, and labels. Labels separate the casuals from the hardcores: Star Trek fans vs Trekkers; Harry Potter readers vs Potterheads; Dr. Who viewers vs Whoovians. Come 2010, I’d experience a massive fandom community for the first time: not being just a Pony fan, but a Brony.
We need to go back again, a little farther this time. Like art, Hasbro’s My Little Pony (or MLP) franchise and toy line has movements, which the collectors call “generations”. Generation One (G1 for short) in the 80s, the Generation Two in the mid-90s (which, contrary to popular belief, had no animated adaptation), Generation Three in the 2000s, and the current Generation Four. Like many, I knew the franchise back in the first generation, but as a 90s kid, I came in late. Late enough to know My Little Pony’s reputation as a silly little girl’s show with frilly tea parties and rainbows, and old enough to know it wasn’t cool. I’ve always liked anthropomorphic animal stories, however, so when I found My Little Pony: Rescue at Midnight Castle in a rental store, I gave it a shot.
I sat in the living room, popped in the video and saw…the single coolest thing I had ever seen in my life.
I expected cutseypoo butterflies and got vicious dragons plummeting from the sky and scooping up little ponies to deliver as slaves to their wicked master, Tirek. The darkness of the tone, environment, and villains clashed magnificently with ponies’ bright color palettes. Midnight Castle fit right in with the likes of Tolkien’s Mordor and the evil centaur, Tirek outright threatened to behead children more than once. As of late, G4 has a trend of forgiving and redeeming their villains, or else banishing them elsewhere. Meanwhile, back in the 80s, the doughy little ponies of G1 had a body count. The following 80s show—Midnight Castle had only been the pilot—had a softer tone and lower budget. I saw where the reputation had come from. Certainly, the original My Little Pony has its share of silliness, but I argue it’s no more than any other commercially driven 80’s show. Pony’s only crime was being a girl show, and in nerd culture, girl show equals lame.
To my disappointment, G3 of Pony ended up the vacant, frivolous merchandise push everyone always accused MLP of being. Eyes got bigger, brains got smaller, the color palate never expanded beyond pastel blues, pinks, and purples. Conflicts went from “The dark lord will make us slaves!” to “We don’t have enough cake for the birthday party!”
Pony had never been a fandom for me. Midnight Castle never reran on television and I watched so long ago I’d thought it a dream. It had been a passing fancy, at best. I’d poke my head in every few years, look around and ask, “Hey, is this franchise good yet? No? Okay, back to Danny Phantom.”
In the cobwebs of my mind, I never forgot Midnight Castle. I knew the franchise had the potential to be good if only given the chance. In 2010, Lauren Faust gave it that chance.
Kindly allow me a modicum of smug hipster cred: I liked the show before it was cool. The cartoon news sites I followed reported concept art and plans for a MLP reboot somewhere in early 2010 or late ‘09. The concept art didn’t seem anything special—if anything, it looked bizarre. The quasi-anime look of G3.5 (aka: G3: Even Worse Edition) blossomed in full with small bodies, big heads, tiny muzzles, tall ears, and enormous eyes. But rumor had it that Lauren Faust, alum writer and storyboarder of the excellent Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and Powerpuff Girls, took the helm of showrunner. I’d been burnt by Pony before, but I trusted Faust’s resume. I’d give it a shot. Hey, couldn’t be worse than G3.5.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ended up a chimera of all the old generations with a modern edge. The adventure and fantasy settings hearkened back to Generation One; most episodes had a slice-of-life format of My Little Pony Tales, and recycled names from Generation Three. The main characters (colloquially known as The Mane Six) are composed of six mares, two of each pony type: the studious unicorn leader, Twilight Sparkle; impatient firebrand pegasus, Rainbow Dash; the practical earth pony farmer, Applejack; the fashion designer/artist/businessmare unicorn, Rarity; resident comic relief and hyperactive party planner, Pinkie Pie the earth pony; and Fluttershy, a socially anxious pegasus who prefers the company of animals on the ground. Together, these six ponies live in Ponyville, learning how to build and maintain friendships, with a soupçon of let’s-save-the-world now and then. On paper, it sounded decent. In action, it became so much more.
Honestly, I'm still not entirely sure how to contextualize the way I felt the first time I watched the premiere two-parter episode of Friendship is Magic. I could tell you how it surpassed my expectations of being not only better than G3 (a low hanging fruit) but matched and bested G1. I could share my surprised delight when, in a metatextual wink to the audience, Twilight tiredly sighed, "Tell me she's not" when Pinkie sang the show's first musical number. Or I could expound how Rainbow Dash's aggressive tomboyishness, Twilight Sparkle's early cynicism, and Fluttershy's pitch-perfect example of social anxiety displayed a diverse cast of personalities; a rarity not only for Pony but for most "girly" media. But I think the most likely candidate for my Molly moment, however, came at the finale of the first episode.
The appearance of Nightmare Moon, a black alicorn (a winged unicorn) whose Maleficent-esque persona and evil laughter recalled fuzzy memories of Tirek, made me sit up and pay attention. When Twilight realized the sixth Element of Harmony was Magic (that is, the literal magic of friendship) and blasted Nightmare Moon with a swirling storm of rainbow light...I think that was it. It all came together: the clever writing, old-school throwbacks, the genuinely different and finely crafted equine world—my god, they weren’t just women in horse suits, they actually moved and behaved like ponies!—and finally, Princess Luna's freedom and redemption from her own darkness and jealousy. Something swelled in my chest for this silly little horse show in a way I couldn’t name. A tug, a twinge, an old ache I’d forgotten I had. But I knew for certain I had been waiting for this show all my life.
Yes, I was Molly Grue then.
Friendship is Magic, where have you been? Where was it twenty years ago, when the only traits of so many token female characters were pretty ribbons, giggling, and talking about boys and fashion? Where was it ten years ago, when I longed for fantasy settings, talking animals that still behaved like animals, and continuity? Where was it five years ago, when I wondered where why all the heart and sincerity and quality drained from so many animated shows? Why now? Why when I was already in my twenties and didn't need it nearly as badly? What good was it to be here now?
And like Molly, I quickly decided it didn’t matter how long it took to reach me. It was here now.
If the premiere was my infatuation, then episode five, “Griffon the Brush-Off,” was the second date. In the episode, the normally bubbly (and a little annoying) Pinkie Pie struggles with Gilda, an old griffon friend of Rainbow Dash. Pinkie’s more than willing to be Gilda’s friend (Pinkie is everyone’s friend whether they like it or not), but Gilda’s kind of the biggest jerk in the universe. She’s nasty to Rainbow’s other friends behind her back—especially Pinkie Pie. When Gilda makes Fluttershy cry, Pinkie decides enough is enough and in retaliation to the one who’d wronged her, she… throws a surprise party. When Gilda ends up setting off multiple harmless pranks, it spurs her into finally revealing her ugly side to Rainbow. Gilda automatically accuses Pinkie of setting her up to look bad, but a bemused Pinkie argues, “I threw this party to improve your attitude. I thought a good party might turn that frown upside down.”
On first watch, I automatically assumed Pinkie Pied lied. Of course the whole thing had to be an elaborate gambit to reveal Gilda’s true colors, showing that Pinkie’s smarter than the viewer took her for. Rewatching it a week later, an incredible thought struck me: What if Pinkie Pie was being sincere? What if, despite Gilda had done to her, all Pinkie really wanted to do was make Gilda laugh and smile? So, I rewound the episode and watched the scene again. And again. This time, I saw no tricks, no mean-spirited “gotchas,” no gambit. Pinkie Pie ran this party legit. Indeed, I’d misjudged her. Under my nose, she revealed herself to be not just clever, but kind.
I’d never even considered it. And the more I thought about it, the more that bothered me. I realized that at some point between start and end of my quasi-goth teenage years I’d become jaded. The concept of a character—of anyone—genuinely being so kind with no ulterior motives had become foreign to me. I didn’t like that; I was better than that.
In the past twenty years, television—cartoons included—ran on snark and rebellion, but very little heart. “Griffon” helped me discover the core of Friendship is Magic: sincerity. Cynicism isn’t wisdom, and kindness isn’t foolishness. I always knew this, but the show helped remind me of that. Sick of darkness, I wanted rainbows.
I was not the only one.
A clear memory sticks out in my mind from the MLP: FIM’s first month. “Yeah,” I said, “you wouldn’t think so, but it’s really great show!” I looked to my friend, Kyra, and sighed. “Shame it’s on a network nobody has and the franchise has a bad reputation. I wish it had a fanbase.” At that moment, a monkey paw somewhere closed a finger.
They called themselves Bronies (a joking portmanteau of “bro” and “pony”): a fanbase mostly composed of men between their mid-teens and thirties, who began watching ponies ironically, then sincerely, then emphatically. Their numbers could populate a small country, and would later run dozens of conventions, each populated by the hundreds. The media and the rest of the internet watched, perplexed. Early Bronies themselves had a giggly confusion of it themselves. This was supposed to be a show for little girls, what the hell were these weirdos doing here?
Here, I am again reminded of Molly Grue. When she decides to join the unicorn and her magician companion on their quest, the magician argues, “Unicorns are for beginnings, for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls."
Unimpressed, Molly laughs and tells him, “You don’t know much about unicorns.”
Meanwhile, I felt as if I’d pulled a Rip Van-Winkle. I’d taken a nap in my little cottage and awoken to a bustling metropolis. Watching this odd, but not unwelcome community of weird nerds who liked horses made me want to contribute to it. Already, the community glutted on fan content: music, music videos, art, comics, statues, and of course, fanfiction. Fanfiction has a bad rap on the internet. It’s an amateur field that anyone with a keyboard can get into, so the quality…let’s be nice and say it fluctuates. At its best, fanfiction rivals professional novels. At its worst, it’s the place where grammar and character development go to die. I won’t say I’m above occasionally mocking the latest half-baked cringe-fest, but as a personal rule, I always keep it private. If I must criticize, I try to make it constructive. More often than not, the bad stuff comes from fans under eighteen, and even if they’re not, they’re still learning. My fanfiction repertoire spans well over a decade; I’ve been that silly fourteen-year-old with the edgy, overpowered original character. If anything, I only cringe because I remember myself.
It’s always the good fiction that inspires me to write my own. For fanfiction, specifically, I need a world with unexplored avenues and FiM’s universe offered a massive sandbox to explore. I’d planned for my first stories to be character pieces or a world-building exercise, but it didn’t quite turn out that way.
Inspired by the Keane song of the same name, and influenced by Black Beauty, 2011’s Somewhere Only We Know presented an alternate universe in which the main characters were real-world cart ponies, and the show took place in the mind of an aged, lonely Rainbow Dash—here, simply Dash. (Or maybe Rainbow Dash was the one dreaming of cart ponies; I left it to interpretation.) Her old stablemates have gone down their own paths—and most of them grim—and all she wants is her youth and friends back. At night, she dreams of open sky.
A reviewer of mine would later muse that Somewhere Only We Know was actually a story about Bronies. Looking back, I think that review was right. At the dawn on the fandom, after the giggling disbelief of liking Pony wore off and fans allowed their genuine love of the show to settle, I read the same claim in message boards and comment sections over and over again: “This show helped me.” Many of my fellow fans stayed with Friendship is Magic not just because of the show’s excellent quality, but because little colorful equines offered them some respite from their own lives. Viewers with depression shared that sometimes a new episode shone a lights at the end of their tunnel, or how Pinkie Pie reminded them to keep smiling. As with Dash, for Bronies, Equestria became our sanctuary. Of course, it wouldn’t solve any real-world problems we struggled with, but the show offered a soft, clean place to rest for a while. Likewise, the mood of the 2011 Brony fandom basked in a warm honeymoon glow, still delighted at the marvel of itself. In that small pocket of time, years before Twilight Sparkle elevated to Princess, before dozens of dramas and controversies tore lines in the sand of our fandom, I think we held a little something of what Dash had every time she went to sleep. For a while, every time we went online, we had our own little bit of Equestria. On some level, I think that’s why readers of Somewhere responded so strongly to the story. They were all Dash, just trying to get back to the place they used to love. So was I.
In the first half of 2011, I went through one of the worst bouts of anxiety I’d ever experienced. I’d been struggling with (and eventually failed) a prerequisite math course, ashamed of my lack of knowledge and surrounded by students two years younger than me who breezed through class without effort. I spent half the class in tears and constantly lost valuable time on exams because I’d need to step out and vomit. Some days I felt the ground slipping out from under me, but ponies and the community who loved them offered a needed uptick to get back on my feet. That January, a deep chasm split though my trio of best friends. At the time of writing Somewhere Only We Know, two of my friends hadn't spoken to each other in half a year. I remained close with both parties—they’d no quarrel with me, after all—but our steadfast continent of comrades cracked into a peninsula: all of us lived on separate islands and I traversed them in a sorry canoe. No more shared group window for instant messages. No more venting or three a.m. jokes. Despite the fact that both parties regretted the split and wanted to reconcile, neither wanted to be the first to reach out. In fear of conflict, I didn’t push them. The tension had fizzled out months ago, leaving all three of us in stagnate limbo. We all wanted the fellowship back, but didn’t know how to fuse the islands back together. Looking back, I realize that Dash's desire to put her herd back together always reflected my own. This, I think, is the heart of that rusted chestnut, Write What You Know. I’ve never been an old, broken down cart pony, but I knew what it is to feel as if everything good is behind you. I knew what it was to long for the good old day to come back and make everything good again. I knew what it was to be lonely.
On the night I finished Somewhere’s final draft, I received an IM from my friend: “Do you think it would be okay if I sent her a message to say happy birthday?”
I sat in the dining room and stared at my monitor for a few seconds. It always takes a moment for my mind to connect back to the real world after weaving stories in others and for half a second I suspected my sleep deprived mind played tricks on me.
“Yes,” I told him. “I think that would be a really good idea.”
He simply said, “Okay.” Two weeks later, hesent the birthday greeting and, like magic, our peninsula became a continent again.I wonder now where I’d been in the draft when I got that message. It might be wishful thinking or a distortion of memory, but I swear my friend sent it during the conclusion, just before Dash goes back to sleep and becomes/dreams of becoming Rainbow Dash, flying free in the Ponyville skies on her way to meet all of her friends. I don’t think that memory’s true. It feels too narratively perfect to be true. Still, I like to believe it.
I didn’t plan Somewhere Only We Know, I sneezed it. My muse threw pepper in my face one night, and the first paragraph exploded onto a notebook page in a stream-of-consciousness splatter of florid prose and experimental formatting. I wrote the rest of the rough draft the following two days, and the final draft the night after. Sneeze stories come rarely, once every four years at most, but when they hit they are always heartfelt, important pieces one way or another. In the past, however, they’d always been important and big to me and only me. In my tenish years writing fanfiction, I attracted a modest number of reviews. Multi-chapter pieces attracted around thirty reviews and one-shots got about nine. Fifteen, if I got lucky.
I submitted the story to the blog and greater fandom hub, Equestria Daily on a Saturday afternoon. By Monday night, Somewhere Only We Know had accumulated a hundred comments and growing. They ranged from block paragraph analyses to variations of “I’m sad and my heart hurts”. One reader wrote that they’d cried themselves to sleep because of me. Another terse review simply read: “Dear Author: Fuck you. P.S.: 5 stars”, which in internet lingo is remarkably high praise. That year, Somewhere became a common staple on recommendation lists, and to this day it still shows up in threads discussing sad fandom classics. I had a hit. In the grand scheme of things, a minor hit—any given Brony will know Fallout: Equestria, My Little Dashie, and Past Sins over Somewhere—but more attention than I’d ever known. I didn’t quite know what to do with it. What do you say when people tell you that you’ve socked them in the gut? I responded here and there with my regular “thank yous”—awkward, when that reader was, in turn, thanking me—and small clarifications to questions. Somewhere happened before we had our own specialized fanfiction site with private messages and comment boxes, so responding individually wasn’t fully feasible. I’ve also always been a quiet person by nature, so even while integrated in the fandom, I had little interaction or discussion. I pop in now and then to say something, and then vanish for another eight months. In retrospect, my online moniker, Patchwork Poltergeist, fits well. I’m always around, seldom seen, and shake things up every now and then. Still, I did want more interaction with more Bronies. My circle of friends tolerated my late-night theories on Equestrian culture and history, but ultimately had no interest in ponies. I tried a few forums, but none of them panned out for one reason or another. There are other avenues to friends, however.
By late 2011, buzz for Somewhere died down, but received an uptick of attention that November. The Rainbow Dash Presents YouTube series parodied it, and I took an interview for the Pony Fiction Vault, an archive for exemplary and influential Pony stories. Five months later, the Vault coordinator messaged me with an invitation to a fanfiction panel at the upcoming Canterlot Gardens convention—one Pony convention of many—in Ohio. The planets aligned so that an Ohio trip was feasible, and I emphatically said yes. I would share the stage with five other authors and we had to plan our topics ahead of time. So that July, we formed a Skype chatroom so we could plan, strategize, and get to know each other. I figured we’d pop in every couple of weeks to converge, do the convention as colleagues, and never see each other again. How wrong I was.
The initial awkwardness of meeting new people came and went so fast I don’t even remember it. We all hit it off immediately, especially Saddlesoap Opera and I. He, another old timer in the fandom—we’re both at least five years older than most Bronies—and an overthinking nerd, shared my love of world-building and culture theory. We talked continuity and possible timelines between the My Little Pony generations and the feasibility of Dream Valley being a precursor to Equestria. Not long after, we talked not just convention and Pony stuff, but anything and everything else. So often we’d stay up late chatting, we eventually dubbed ourselves the Skype Slumber Party. Every fellowship needs a name, after all. Before I knew it, the five of us had become friends, and though some aren’t as active in the chat anymore, we remain friends today. I’d made acquaintances through shared fandoms before, but none of them reached beyond a shallow shared interest; none I could truly call friends. Once the convention passed, the chat remained as a small tight-knit writing group. We’re each other’s proofreaders, editors, supporters, cheerleaders, and readers. Show me any story I’ve written past 2012 and I’ll show you a Slumber Party member who’s its biggest fan.
A con is a meeting of the tribes. A hidden village of dorks tucked into a hotel or convention hall where for once they share their passions without shame and let their freak flags fly. The ecstatic mood overpowers the crowds and noise. Whatever quarrels we have online, whatever pony we champion, it doesn’t matter now. We come in harmony. Here are your people. Welcome home.
My mother accompanied me to the convention, both to see my panel and because she could meet up with a close Ohio friend. I couldn’t help but feel some hesitation about that. Through most of my nerdy obsessions, she’d seem to have a tolerance for them at best and a mild annoyance at worst. I’d long decided to keep my fan-stuff to myself when I could, so when I first mentioned the panel and what kind of convention I’d be going to, it took a couple of attempts to explain. I’m not sure she entirely believed there were this many adult fans of My Little Pony.
Our car rolled up to a Holiday Inn swamped with nerds sporting rainbow wigs, yellow wings, elaborate costumed dresses, and in-joke t-shirts. Signs advertised the schedules for voice actor panels, show writer panels, and the art dealer hall. Not far from the registration desk, an unseen chorus echoed through the hall: “Come on everypony, smile, smile, smile…” Two steps in the hotel, the Slumber Party met me with open arms and a resounding cry of “PATCHES!”
Mom stood back and stared at the eclectic herd of passionate oddballs massed around her. After a second, she smiled. “Ohhhh. Now I get it.”
The panel, to my relief, went well. I’d written out an essay to accompany my small talk on how to handle a story when the official canon conflicts with it. I’d never spoken to a crowd before, but neither had any of our peers (luckily, nerds can’t smell fear). Looking at the video footage of the panel four years later, I can hardly believe how easygoing I appear. You’d never guess the lackadaisical gum chewing was a way to mitigate nerves or that I “casually” leaned on the table to keep from fainting. All evidence of stiff shoulders and knocking knees were brushed under the rug, or else not noticed at all. The audience laughed at all my jokes and could groove with my talking points. Far from the awkward bundle terror I feared I’d be, I quickly got into the rhythm of the shared panel; we fired lighthearted jibes at ourselves and interacted with the audience. For a short twenty minutes, for the first time in my life, I became—dare I say it?—cool.
The Slumber Party gathered outside the conference hall afterwards, musing on how well we did and laughing at the silly mistakes nobody noticed but us. Giddy and spent from the energy of public speaking, I almost missed his approach. The guy could have been anywhere between fifteen and twenty-three. He wore no cosplay, no Pony shirt, no fandom paraphernalia at all, save the little Rainbow Dash symbol pinned to his lapel. Slight and unassuming, he pulled from the crowd and shied up to me.
I looked over my shoulder, trying to locate Rob. Rob wrote My Little Dashie, a story far more famous than mine, and I presumed he was the one being sought. It took a couple of seconds to realize that the one this person looked for was me.
“Excuse me.” He had a trembling shyness to his voice I knew all too well. “You’re the one who wrote Somewhere, right?” When I nodded, he smiled nervously and held out a notebook page covered in the signatures of fandom superstars. I recognize voice actors Tara Strong, Peter New, and Andrea Libman among them. “Can I have your autograph?”
“O-oh!” I laughed, astonished and still wondering why he didn’t look for someone more notable. “Yeah, sure!”
I took a couple of photos with him, and when we were done, he thanked me for my time. He hung back, shuffling his feet. Eventually, he gathers his courage and says, “Seriously, thanks. Somewhere Only We Know is my favorite.”
I grinned, delighted. I’d been told the same online many times, but hearing it face-to-face made me melt. The novelty of creating someone’s favorite anything threw me for a loop. “Wow, really? I wrote your favorite fanfic?”
“No,” he told me. “I mean my favorite story. Ever.”
My mouth opened and closed without a sound.
On the plane ride home, Mom turned to me and said, “You know I noticed something weird about that panel.”
I looked up from my writing notebook and put down my pen. “Oh yeah?” Amused, I expected her to point out the obvious: I was the only woman and the only person of color. In a mass of doughy white nerds, I have a tendency to stick out.
The Slumber Party had earlier commissioned a set of figures modeled after our ponysonas (a pony version of oneself) for all of us. My own, a green pegasus with my hat and glasses, traveled safely wrapped in a towel in my lap. My mother nodded towards the figure, and deadpanned, “You were the only pegasus.”
I have a flashbulb memory from summer 2011 of me browsing Ponychan and skimming threads full of altruism, kindness, and optimism. I can’t emphasize the mood of those early days, I really can’t. I hardly remember a bad word between anyone, and nearly all the fandom arguments fought in good humor. No complaints, no controversy, no drama. I can recall several proclaiming with utmost confidence that no fandom matched the passion and kindness of the Brony fandom. As if what was true in 2011 could be true through decades and onward.
A nice thought. I knew better. Every fandom is birthed in Eden. It’s easy to maintain peace when there’s nothing to fight about, and the show hasn’t had time to change the status quo or ruffle feathers. The Brony population peaked somewhere in late 2012, at least twice the size it had been when I published Somewhere. Eventually, the clash of differing opinions and personalities and levels of devotion brought the familiar boil of intertribal scuffles. Debates turned vicious, pessimists bemoaned the declining quality of the show, and we learned that Twilight Sparkle would grow wings and become a Princess and the sky was falling.
Same old, same old.
I won’t lie; I miss the golden days of the early Brony fandom. Who wouldn’t miss Eden? But the other shoe drops, the honeymoon ends, and newness wears off. Doomsayers bemoan the death of harmony that our fandom has crashed and burned: “Ah, alas! Our poor fandom hath become a hotbed of drama and bitterness and pandering! Absalom! Absalom!” In truth, it’s only become the norm for a fandom; of any community. The word “fan” derives from “fanatic”; overreaction has always been the name of the game and it’s a game I’ve played a long time. I feel sometimes like this fandom’s big sister. I see the flames of controversy light the skyline, watch for a moment, and go back in my little cottage. I like this fandom and I love Friendship is Magic, but I’m old enough to know neither defines my life, it’s just one part of it. Learning when to step away, what’s worth expediting energy on, when to accept the limitations of what a show is capable of, all this comes with time. They’ll learn.
Every few months someone asks, terrified our numbers have dropped from tens of millions to mere millions, “Is our fandom dying?” Trust me, it’s not. Not yet, anyhow. But to tell you the truth, it doesn’t matter a great deal to me either way. I was here before the masses of Bronies and when the show eventually ends, I’ll still visit from time to time. Or not. Who knows the future?
For now, I still have my unicorn and we still have a ways to travel together.
And there we are. Now here we are in the future, and the finale of Friendship is Magic airs in less than 24 hours. The good news is I'm not as sad about it as I thought I'd be. ...Then again I'm also currently writing an Invader Zim darkfic about the death of a musical planet that did nothing wrong and something something sadfeels something something Newbery Award, so I'm probably just processing differently.
Yeah, as to where I've been, in the grand tradition of cycles, my first fandom rolled up in a brand new Enter the Florpus last August and said "Hey baby, wanna get back together?" and I said "Well I don't know, I'm kind of in the middle of this story about Dinky Doo and a werewolf" and Invader Zim said, "Check out these two tall dudes. They're privileged assholes and best friends who've been molded by Irken society, but I'm sure you're not interested in that--"
And then I jumped in the front seat and here I am on the highway, neck-deep in Almighty Tallest backstory, whups.
I'm not gone, I'm not leaving and I AM still writing that werewolf story. Eventually.
So, uh, I guess that's about it.
That's all for new G4 episodes, everybody. Good job challenging them gender norms, that Lyra plushie was unnecessary, Rarity is best pony, Radient Hope is worst pony, drink your water, wear your seatbelt, and I love you.
See you on the other side,
Patch
Thanks for writing and posting. :)
Thank you for writing this, and for sharing it!
And while it's your work with Silver Spoon and the Riches that I love the most (seriously, Silver Standard is pretty firmly in my top-ten best ponyfics ever), Somewhere is hell of a story, and -- as they say -- quite a punch in the feels. But not a gratuitous one, not by a million miles. So thank you for writing that, too, and all of your other stories as well, and sharing them with us all.
I love you too Patch.
Somewhere is really very good. I should read it again soon.
I didn’t intend to be sitting in the welfare office (I’m not doing so hot at the moment) crying, yet here I am.
Thank you for writing, Patchwork. Would love to meet you at TrotCon next year if you feel like making another Ohio trip.
Your story, The Last Human, was the first MLP fanfiction I ever read, and the first story I came across when I joined this fandom. It's still one of my Favorites, and now I'll get to read Somewhere Only We Know, now that I know you wrote it.
Thank you for writing, and thank you for still being here.
You sure you don't mean pegasus?
:V
Keep on keeping on.
You were my first favorite author in this fandom, and Somewhere was my first favorite story. I still go back and reread it from time to time.
There's so much wisdom in this post that I honestly can't pick a single point to highlight as the most poignant, but I will say this fandom was my First, and you've hit the sentiment so perfectly on the head that I can feel it in my bones. It'll hurt watching that horse ride into the sunset, but nothing gold can stay, and I'll cherish every happy, silly, zany, stupid memory and the friends made along the way.
It might be silly to say, but don't ever stop being you.
Thanks.
- definitely very good way to say it . Also, descriptions of fan life, including "hot-blooded forum debates at midnight" are very realistic.
Still, I can't fully agree with "Of course, it wouldn’t solve any real-world problems we struggled with [...]" - because ..welll... interhuman relations ARE part of what can become solution or new problem in any given area .... so .... real-world relations formed around this specific show aren't completely virtual and worthless. Or at least can be made into something important. or, at very minimum, I should try to pull this trick ....
aaayy link me to ur zim fic pls
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Thank YOU for reading and replying!
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Now, if my final essay had been about what I'd learned as a writer instead of as a person, I probably... still wouldn't have mentioned Silver Standard because it was like, half done in May 2016 and would write about The Last Human instead. But honestly, Silver Standard and its supplemental stories really are my best stuff and probably the best example of what I'm all about as a writer. Maybe as a person, too, because my personal philosophies about people being the messy, lovely, flawed people they are just trying to get by in the world come through pretty loud.
Plus, it's hella long AND structurally consistent the whole way through and that's a hell of an accomplishment.
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No promises, but we'll see. I'd like to make it to Trot or EFNW next year since I couldn't make Bronycon this year. (Which is probably for the best, those crowds sounded nightmarish).
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Wait, what?! Your FIRST one? Holy crap I had no idea, that's awesome. I'm kinda proud of that.
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You and me both, pal. That's all anyone can ask of us. c:
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True, but what I meant was the show itself (or even the fandom itself) isn't a panacea for what ails you. Like all things, you gotta make connections and do the work yourself if you're gonna friendship.
(It also suddenly occurs to me that the only reason I don't do forum debates anymore is because I ended up writing fanfic partially inspired by "everyone is wrong about this character and here's why" so not that much changed.)
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Speaking of Firsts, it really is serendipitous how Invader Zim came back into my life when it did. Since the news dropped that Season Nine was the last one and finally kicked me out of the denial stage of grief, I'd been pretty sad about it. Not all the time, not always consciously, but it was the same dull crappy feeling I get when I'm genuinely sad and try to bury it. Not just about the show, but my time in it and... well, you read the essay. I knew it was for the best, I knew it had to happen. but that didn't mean I had to be happy about it.
But when I came back to Zim--not just a visit, but a full return--is that even though I'm not fourteen anymore and won't put the house into total lockdown when the theme song plays, it's the same show I always loved. But better. There's different things to love about it, and new people to love it with, new things to learn from it and old things I always knew from it. It didn't resurrect because nothing had died at all. And hell, if this little show that barely got a chance to live still sustained itself and punched me in the face with inspiration, me and MLP have nothing to worry about.
Still misted up at the ending, though.
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Speaking of which: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20750321 Don't get spooked by the 2nd person pov I know what I'm doing I promise.
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Cool I live in SoCal so I will be road tripping up to Everfree as always next August.
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well, my point was slightly different - there seems to be way (or ways) to study those ultracomplex phenomena behind our weakness. Like timelessly applicable Milgram experiment. I feel extremely sad by realization humans discovered one of those asymmetries/loopholes/quirks what plagued them for very long time ... (after having two world wars and balancing at the edge of thermonuclear last War!) yet stopped here and never produced anything to resist this effect?? May be I'm missing something fundamental, some little paper/thought buried under mountains of 'other research', but I think those reasons behind why we can't behave like ponies (or even like we should behave in many situations!) deserve very close attention. Infamous 'human nature' not set in stone (and today's technology often can melt stones ... but water can do the same ...) but discovering any applicable workaround from our quirks sure require effort. And often in unusual direction ... From article above it quite clear you can apply some very serious analytical mind to social situations. May i ask you to either accept me into your 'human study group', or try to repeat same thing I tried to do in 2013, when I rounded up all emails of persons I discovered to be interested in some way in solving this 'dolphin captivity problem' and just said to all of them what I hope to do, and asked for working together towards this goal? (not like it was able to bring into this world any kind of Dolphin (cetacea) Revolution, but I actually tried to take my part in probably first recorded attempt at rescuing captive dolphins in Russia ...whole thing failed spectaculary (dolphins {Delfa and Zeus} died, but it was not worst thing about it ..worst thing about it was how activists I trusted to be strong turned out to be too weak for actually altering course of dolphinarium's pseudocare... so, I'm not animal activist anymore, I have bigger, blocking problem to solve, or at least attempt to solve).
Sorry for coming like this out of the blue.... but I have this tendency to cling to ppl who know how to use their head AND heart, and may be, not unlike ponies, by working together some effect on even roots of really global problems (they all in us, humans) can be discovered and applied?
You really should write creative non-fiction more often, Patches.
This bit stands out in my mind, since here we have the opposite happening: nine seasons, followed by a proper ending, and no shark-jump (there, I said it). Going through so many blogs about the show's end, I can't find a single person saying they're leaving because of it. That should tell us something.
I'm glad you're sticking around. The place wouldn't be the same without our Patches.
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Heh, you're welcome. :)
My Little Pony "Viva La Vida" - AMV PMV - Jun 5, 2010, LM1313
not done by me, obviously, but I tend to listen/watch this from time to time
A great while ago the world was begun
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain
But that's all one, our play is done
And we'll strive to please you every day...
Every day...
Whee!
this really hit me hard. i guess all these posts are describing what i wish fandoms would be for me, the experiences i wish i went/could go through. but, this isn't the time or place for me to talk about my issues or difficulties with creating content.
i just wanted to say that even though i barely know you, i'm so incredibly proud of you anyway for going ahead, writing these brilliant stories and getting involved with a community. it's honestly kind of inspiring. i'm going to go write something now.
I still come back to this blog quite regularly. The part about your experience being told somewhere was that boy's favourite story makes me tear up every time, and I am not an easy crier. Which is not a virtue, if I'm being honest. I wish I could cry more. So thank you for helping with that.
"Radiant Hope is worst pony," though, has me still very curious. I happen to quite like her, but I take no issue with characters I like being torn to shreds by others. As such, I have finally worked up the courage to ask why you feel that way? If you've got a rant locked and loaded, dude I am so down. I almost never see dialogue about the comics.
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Oh boy, that's a whole blog in itself. The truth is I probably dislike the comics she's in more than the character herself, but they're so tied together it's hard to say. The short version is that she exists to be Sombra's put up on native perfect sweet girlfriend whose only fault is that she loved too much. And also apparently just doesn't care that he enslaved an entire civilization of ponies for years but the comic apparently forgot that too because we can't actually remember the harm he did to anypony because then he can't be redeemed. I've been planning on longer blog (or set of them) exploring how FiM approaches redemption and reformation, so that's a better time and place for this but uh.
Radiant Hope unfortunately has Everything Patch Dislikes Disease. There had to eventually be somepony I straight out dislike and turned out it was her.
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Y'know what. Went and refamiliarized myself with that arc. I get it now.
When I first read it some years back I think I was primarily enamored with all the concepts it presented. Hope evolving from a filly that represents everything good about the empire to a bitter, cynical mare who would destroy it to bring her friend back just so she can be annoyed at him, Sombra having essentially a split personality (just because it's a tired and obnoxious trope doesn't mean I won't be swayed by it), getting a bit more history about Princess Amore (basically Cadance Prime), etc. Going back over it all, though, yeah the execution is not ideal. Hope is indeed infuriatingly naive, she's a lot more enamored with being a saviour to a dead concept of sombra than I remembered, Sombra does not need to be some perfect handsome prince deep down inside, the dulling down of all the enslavement, and so on and so forth. In my experience the comics tend to be very hit-or-miss. Thought I remember this one as a hit, and I still have a soft spot, but looking back on it now, yeah, it's... flawed.
But hey, at least it's better than the Cosmos arc.
Thanks for responding. Looking forward to Cozy shenanigans, if they're indeed coming :D