Always Remeber · 7:58pm Jun 4th, 2020
People's lives have weight. #Black Lives Matter is a thing because their lives are in more danger than others.
People who are protesting are good. People who are looting are bad. These are two groups and I don't have the patience to pretend they're not.
Vigilante justice via pointy metal stick is not somehow helpful, even if we pretend that's what Jetfire did.
We, both as people who claim to care about this show and just as people who are alive and can do things, have a responsibility to not make things worse. Defend yourselves, protect people's lives no matter who they are, but right now trying to do more will make things worse. Safety is paramount.
TBC I'm assuming you can safely protest when I say that. If you need to decompress before dealing with everything, here's Captian America fighting HYDRA. Get it all out of your system, and then either pray for healing or find someone to help.
Reblog from Cynewulf
More than one person shared with me the image of a crazed fanatic chasing unarmed protestors with a bladed weapon before being forcibly disarmed. Every single one of these people then followed this up by revealing that the individual in question was a writer of fanfiction for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic--specifically, he was the man behind the account Jetfire2012, where he posted one of the most beloved of that community’s stories, It’s A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door which the astute reader will note is a bit from Tolkien.
You’ll not find much in his writings to suggest that one day, years later, he would try to murder people in broad daylight in the most cartoonish way imaginable, all but frothing at the mouth. It’s a standard adventure yarn about three friends questing beyond the edges of the map to secure a panacea for their friend’s terrible illness. The story borrows heavily from Tolkien and Norse mythology, and its harmless. It’s a bit “old” feeling, but it's also the story that inspired me to begin writing again when I had given it up.
And it was written by a would-be right-wing assassin.
How does that happen? And why are people not surprised? In mulling it over, I continue to return to a joke that’s floated around for years: Bronies either ended up being trans/gay or they ended up being nazis.
Rather than focus on a fanfiction from 2011 (you won’t find much in there to explain this, and its TVtropes page won’t help you either) it’s perhaps better to recap how the Brony phenomenon happened in the first place, because it happened during a very tumultuous time in the internet’s history.
In 2011, 4chan is a pretty miserable place, but its nazis are still mostly a joke. /pol/ is still considered by many to be something of a zoo for the internet and society’s losers to rant at each other and pretend to know things about the Crusades because they played a Total War game once. On the site’s /co/ board, a place dedicated to discussing and meme-ing about western animation, someone posts regarding a reboot of the My Little Pony franchise for a new generation of television watchers. Of note is the name Lauren Faust as the woman spearheading the project--many knew her from other projects. There was a consensus that she had fallen far if she was stuck hawking toys for Hasbro and a general levity. A few people promised to watch and report how awful it was when the series debuted.
But they liked it! Or didn’t hate it. Or thought that there was just enough expressiveness in the flash animation to make gifs and stock images out of frames from the show to clog the board within the coming weeks.
Their fellow channers hated them, and it wasn’t long before ponies of any sort had been expelled from 4chan altogether. But instead of fading into obscurity as yet another forced fad, the mostly insincere channers had accidentally drawn some attention to the show and had convinced a number of young men to watch it.
They liked what they saw. Speculating on why is difficult and I’ll only say here that despite the great performative bemusement at the time, that 19-24-year-old men raised to repress their emotions beyond anger and deliberately kept from many healthy forms of emotional intimacy and openness should find a colorful show that earnestly celebrates connectedness and expressing oneself is not that much of a surprise. Normal looked like being obsessed with measuring to a masculine ideal, and not-normal looked like being happy about watching a silly cartoon about magical horses, and young men embraced not normal. For a bit.
As noted in this insightful Twitter thread by one Wootmaster, the early days of the fandom were not exactly politically charged. A high fantasy setting with a mostly female cast and soft aesthetic with an episodic structure centering Aesops lent itself to some ideological bents: people reacted to that bright optimism one way or another, either leaning into it or questioning it while also generally leaning into it. Women can be self-reliant and don’t need men to fix everything for them. This wasn’t universal but it was wide-spread.
Wootmaster above points to a 4chan mod’s decision to combine the nascent /mlp/ and /pol/ boards for April Fools as being the catalyst for a shift, but there were earlier moments for when far-right infiltration turned an occasionally obnoxious but mostly friendly community into a breeding ground for proto-fascist agitprop. An earlier reactionary wave saw Catholic and Evangelical fans reacting strongly to being the odd ones out in a space that was explicitly but casually queer-friendly, “shipping” female characters together happily and frequently. Having come for the positivity and community, the fear that one might be tied to something gay was intolerable. Things like this and performative anti-”SJW” sentiments were not very compelling. They were weak, their spokespeople were largely inarticulate or pompous, and it was too easy to mock them.
We were really naive, on reflection. A lot of us knew that anime had been thoroughly run through with weird internet nazis, but anime was more inherently “cursed” we joked. That wouldn’t happen to us. The very idea was laughable. What would they do, make nazi ponies? Weren’t the /pol/ mouthbreathers all about fighting degeneracy or something? What could fit their hateful ideas about degenerate effeminate men than liking a show about colorful magic horses?
The April Fool’s stunt where /mlp/ and /pol/ were united in one board for a day was a catalyst, but not a spontaneous one. We know now, in 2020, that /pol/ and other white supremacist/altright infiltrators had been leaking into fandom spaces looking for fresh recruiting grounds for probably years, repeating the tactics that led to neo-nazi skinheads flooding into and then being forcibly expelled from the punk scene in the 80s and 90s. But punk had been politically conscious, and fandom did not have that inoculation.
Worth noting: /mlp/ was the most hated board on 4chan. It had been a concession by moot, the man who founded 4chan as a place to talk about anime, had made very begrudgingly as quarantine all pony content and keep the hated brony menace in a controllable space. It revived the channer aspect of early fandom and brought channer culture back to pony fan spaces in force. The young men posting in /mlp/ and on the copycat “Ponychan” were disaffected, disconnected, frequently miserable. When the boards merged, /pol/ quickly shaped a narrative that was perfect for attracting these sorts of people. It went like this: Everyone else makes fun of you and hates you, but we don’t. We know what its like to be despised by people who think they’re better than you.
It didn’t matter that the actual reason was because almost everyone posting in /pol/ was a racist bad actor at best. It didn’t matter to the anime fans before them, and now we’ve all seen roughly a thousand smug anime girls in MAGA hats.
What matters is the emotion. What matters is not what is but what feels to be. You aren’t immune to propaganda. Not even when you know all the facts are you immune to propaganda. It doesn’t matter that the people telling you that they’re on “your” side against the outsider are themselves outsiders, or that they very openly just want to turn you into a footsoldier for their movement, or that they want to hurt people whom you are friends with. What matters is that you feel like the world is laughing and instead of asking why you decide that you’ll go with whoever pretends they are, even if they’re named something martial and german and have several detailed replicas of Wehrmacht uniforms that they wear daily. And whether we want to admit it, that’s a normal response. Humans in privileged positions of society get mildly stung and turn into ragequakes that consume others’ lives and happiness. We’ve all seen suburbanites yell at teenage workers in Target. This isn’t controversial. It’s just easy to assume that’s different from obnoxious nerds turning into nazi-supporting sword wavers, but it’s not on a deep fundamental level.
Jetfire seemed very normal. His story was very in-line with the positive, colorful, newborn community he inhabited. He sort of vanished a few years ago, his last missive being that he would be dipping his toe into publishing fantasy novels with the big boys. I don’t think many thought he’d make it, but it’s probably safe to say that we all wished him well.
But that’s just it, I think. He was normal. His outside normality wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t an illusion. It was just that normal doesn’t mean what we think it means. When you wake up and find that when you weren’t paying attention the spaces and communities you loved were full of nazis twisting the stories that made you happy into antisemetic memes, know that the people sharing those? They’re normal. There but for the grace of god goes John-fucking-Bradford. It starts with Jetfires, writing normal upbeat stories about how the world is wide and mysterious and it ends with Mr. I Studied the Blade running his fat little legs as fast as they go.
Pony fandom was quietly queer-friendly and full of excitable, relatively normal people who had found a new way to make friends, and that was always true. It’s true even right now, in the same spaces where they also made a literal actual pony named “Aryanne”. Our mistake was that we thought “normal” looked like a well-adjusted non-bigot who can relate to their fellow humans in positive ways.
Bronies in 2012 really embraced the not-normal when they started using “love and tolerance” as an admittedly eye-rolling way of communicating a not-normal attitude of embracing their difference. The phrase is pretty empty now and the cringe remains, but it did actually mean something once. There was a weird kind of solidarity, and that solidarity and dialogue produced some genuinely lovely things. A lot of people realized that the Normal that was compulsive heteronormativity could be thrown off as had the shackles of masculine expectations. They had made a very tiny step away from conforming and found the next ones easier. Some of those young men have new names and gender markers on their driver’s licenses now. Some of the young women who were friends with them aren’t women at all. Sheltered teens in zealously religious upbringings realized that what they had been taught about the gays and the Other wasn’t true and that it was very possible to be friends with people who weren’t religious in any way or who were even from different faiths. We made that a new normal for a very short time.
But no good rising out of the Broad Normal just endures. If there’s anything to learn about the Swordsman stepping outside his front door to fuck around and find out, its that the Normal will sweep away the things you value unless you resist it, not once but again and again whenever it threatens to snap you back into place. And even if you know that, even if somewhere in your heart you know that the world is going to creep in, the worst thing you can do is be convinced by bad actors that the way to prevent it is by buying into ideologies built on pathological hatred and fear of their precious status quo being disrupted. The “normies” aren’t the SJWs you think are coming for your show and your fan art and your memes. The normies are the LARPers with Wehrmacht profile pics in your threads. Because normal was a facade over the ugly truth that was /pol/. There was nothing more normal than racist dudes telling tired jokes to each other in between genocide memes.
As meme-worthy as Jetfire is, I can’t help but see in him the visage of all fascist movements. They start with uncouth chuckling over a pint, they continue in like-minded back rooms, they progress to slogans and signage, they take power by whispering in the ears of those who feel left behind and ignored, they lead them up the streets in Bavaria and come back to burn the Reichstag only after a hundred separate little instances where something as small as a genuine pushback might have toppled them altogether. If the churches in Rome had turned up their noses at Mussolini he would have been forgotten in a month, probably. If the Weimar Social Democrats, the blue checkmarks of their day, had done more than make very clever jokes, perhaps they would have made those get-togethers full of Nazis less cozy and empowering, and torn their beloved symbols down. And maybe, if we had started paying attention when the weird catholic bronies got mad and then when the weird WWII obsessed ones got more numerous and more Wehrmachty, just maybe we could have avoided this fucking picture. Or this one?
Normal is a lie. Normal is a word that starts as farce and ends in tragedy, and unless you want to wake up to your own Jetfire McStudiesTheBlade, you’ll keep the /pol/lacks of the world out of your spaces and your communities, or the status quo built on repression and suppression will track you down, and it blots out the sun.
Also, as a Christian, anyone who talks about loving God and swords eagerly dripping blood doesn't know the first thing about God. The military actions Isreal undertook in the Old Testament were isolated incidents that I'm willing to justify for a few reasons, the most relevant being that they were forming a nation with an army and laws. Jesus and Christianity explicitly don't do this; one of his sidekicks attacks the Romans and cut his ear off (In a stunning display of swordsmanship, you missed the entire head, buddy) and Jesus healed him and rebuked Peter. One of Jesus's last miracles was healing someone who was going to help torture hin. And his last lesson is about the importance of non-violence.
Admittedly, Jetfire is just one side of all this. There are people on the exact opposite end of the whole conflict who are endorsing looting and violent rioting who call themselves Christians, which I find dubious at best. Maybe it's cognitive dissonance, or maybe it's just lukewarm faith, but it seems like people who fall down the leftist rabbithole are as much a threat to the cause as people like Jetfire who've clearly developed delusions of conservative Christian grandeur.
5276127
I agree, I wanted to make that clear. I might edit the beginning of this.
That's a well thought out response from Cyenwulf, but I'm also not sure you can discount internet nerd culture. Before FiM kickstarted the nicey nice phase one of the most popular shows on the planet among nerds and general audiences alike was House, a story about an asshole who's only worthwhile quality is he fixes people.
Or as a lot of people read it, an asshole who is right about everything and is allowed to be an asshole.
And in the nerd sections of the internet where ageing 90's kids were trying to convince themselves that liking cartoons (from your childhood, for a lot of people anything past 1998 had to be terrible) in your late teens/early 20's was Cool Actually, that was very appealing no matter what you're actual background or personality was like. You're not just cool, you're smart, and if you're smart then you're never wrong about anything, and if you're never wrong about anything then you can do or say whatever you like.
And (and this is the most important part) anyone who points out you're being unreasonable/outright terrible is an idiot who just doesn't understand you. And if you can't force them to, you can just do what you were going to do anyway and ignore them.
Which is also the other part of it, particularly among wanna be writers and video essayists who only talk about nerd stuff. The fantasy isn't just being right, it's being innately right. That's why their argument always boils down to it used to be cool to be a nerd and then [insert slur for outsider here] came along and took over your hobby. Took away your hobby and therefore your identity. If you're innately right then you don't have to change, you just have to wait until you can reset the clock and go back to that heady, rose tinted time when the nerd world worked the way it was supposed to: just for you.*
(*it never did)
Fandom is a space that produces interesting works and views and whatnot on it's material and brings folks together, it's also a space where preformative assholes can plant their flag. And the problem is, there's a lot of cases where it isn't preformative.
You're not just dealing with some perpetual teenager who thinks shit talking the animation industry means they really care, or thinks not caring makes them bulletproof, you're dealing with someone who, whatever their political ideology if any, is incapable of squaring their deep seated desire to be likeable and cool and smart with the fact their obsessions mean they aren't those things.
But it can't be them because they like X show so damn much they're near violent about when it starts to go bad (defies a social contract that exists nowhere but in their minds) (because you wouldn't be this violent if you weren't passionate, right? You wouldn't spend well beyond your formative years obsessing about this if doing so didn't validate you, right?) so it must be everyone else.
And if that sounds like the logic of someone who doesn't understand why white people can't say the n-word anymore, there's a reason for that beyond just growing up in that kind of household. It's the same seesaw fascism is. You're the one, pure true ruler of the earth on the cusp of victory, but you're also the beaten dog who's the real victim here. And that makes it okay because you're not just taking your rightful place, you're righting a deep, personal wrong. Against you.
And nerd culture tells people this all the time as much as "be good to one another", because that guy who doesn't hate She-Ra 2018 but is also always there in the background, undermining anything even remotely progressive? The guy with the Knight Templar avatar who loves Fluttershy? Or likes Rainbow Dash for a lot of creepy pseudo self actualisation reasons? The art school kid who wants to be an animator when they grow up but also constantly, fiercely advocates for a world where faceless nerds can treat freelance workers or non-cis, female creators, all people currently working their dream job, like total garbage? They're all as much a part of nerd culture as the people you like. There's entire forums and youtube videos dedicated to creating them.
So it's absolutely worth talking about what's wrong with the normal world, but we've also got this really serious problem where a certain kind of isolated nerd sees themselves as not just non-conformist but as special. I don't think you can really overlook the fact this was growing during the 2000's and exploded in the 2010's, just in time for MLP to become one of the big lenses nerds view the world through.
5276388
Wow, that's great! You should make that a blog post.
Come to think of it, that's the same problem the church has in America. People cosplay as martyrs in expensive suits and inform the opinion of thousands.
5276575
Here's a useful info comic about someone's experience with how military glorification and 80's toons inadvertently influence white supremacy. It's the other side of the nerd culture thing.
https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/