The dancing bear · 1:48am Oct 19th, 2020

The wonder of the dancing bear is not how well he dances, but that he dances at all.
—Old Russian proverb

If someone had told me in October 2010 I would fall in love with candy-colored magical ponies some six months later, I would have laughed at them. But from May 2011 on, I followed MLPFIM and MLPEG avidly, right to their finish. I never took a break from them; I never quit in disgust. I loved them throughout their runs and on to this day. Aside from a few bits and pieces here and there I haven’t chased down or gotten around to yet, I’ve watched all of them.
Could they have been better? Yes, absolutely—EG in particular ranges wildly in quality from excellent to dismal. I’m not blind to their faults and shortcomings and corporate hobbles, but I prefer to celebrate what the production staffs were able to achieve in spite of the limitations they were forced to labor under.
Moreover, some folks hold the later seasons of FIM were worse than the earlier seasons. I disagree. They were different, which I suspect is the real basis of most such complaints, but frankly, I would argue they were, at least in some ways, better.

As one might guess, if something catches my fancy enough to follow it actively at all, it catches my fancy enough to become a long-term interest. (I confess I’m utterly baffled by people who claim to be big fans of a television series, yet haven’t bothered to watch multiple seasons of it.) Still, for all the scores, maybe hundreds, of animated movies and series I’ve followed, only three ever inspired me enough to write any fan fiction at all: the animated Star Trek, Disney’s TaleSpin, and MLPFIM/EG.
For the first, I think I’ve lost anything I might have written other than a two-thousand–word vignette that, on a site like Fimfiction, would be rated M for erotic content. For the second, I still have five text files amounting to fourteen thousand words, ranging from attempts at stories in the spirit of actual episodes to more M-rated material. All six text files date to 1994, but the content probably is older; I don’t remember at this point, but I think those files represent the last of a series of format changes over the early years of the desktop-computer age.
I’m sure someone out there is asking why, if I was willing to write erotica for those, I don’t post any such material on Fimfiction. Part of the answer is time: I’m no longer a young man in his twenties or thirties, I’m an older man in his late fifties; my perspective has shifted and my priorities have changed. Also, the world has changed a great deal, in many ways.
Anyway, I’ve maundered on enough now. As a parting thought, I will add this: this particular passion, and this particular writing project, has lasted longer than most, and it looks like it will continue for the foreseeable future. That is new and different for me.