Something I need to Address

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING POST IS FORWARDED BY A CAPS-LOCK WARNING THAT SHALL BE READ IN THE TRADITIONAL ROYAL CANTERLOT VOICE. THIS ARRAY OF WORDS HAS ONLY BEEN SPELL-CHECKED, AND ITS CONTENT MIGHT SHOWCASE WHAT KIND OF PERSON I AM. THIS IS JUST ONE INDIVIDUAL'S OPINION, AND SHOULD IN NO WAY REPRESENT ANY POINT OF VIEW EXPRESSED BUT MINE. 

IF YOU'RE GOING TO JUDGE SOMEONE, JUDGE ME.

I'm writing this in the most bizarre set of events and circumstances imaginable. I'm writing this on my new laptop, with WordPad (because this badass mofo doesn't have MS Word, I'm that much of a Microsoft snob), after watching Aliens, after spending two hours checking My Little Pony Hate websites, and at almost 3 am. It's likely this will be finished by the time my clock reaches 4 am, but consider all those circumstances when reading this. This is not my average article critic that I write every week. I was actually planning to make a review of Crainy Creations' "My Little Pony: Brony Edition", which I consider a very competent work of editing, but instead I decided to write this.

Why?

Easy. Because I need to do this for myself. I could say I'm doing this for the fandom. I could say I want to prove that the Brony Community is worth saving, but we all know the answer. It's impossible to save it, because it doesn't need to. The Brony community stepped into the internet, grew, and now it's part of it. It has everything that makes an internet community: Contributors, main websites, social networking, fanart, rule 34, and (yes) drama. That last one is recent, and I think it's the one we needed the most. The Brony fandom is not (read the following in Brad Pitt's voice) a unique snowflake. It's just like any other internet community. The only difference is, it has its elements slightly off balance. This might be bad, but for the most part this plays in its favor.

For example, there's drama, oh yes. But the amount of drama in the Brony community is but a spec of the drama from the other community I'm related to: The furries. Yes, I know, it's easy to poke fun at us and don't get me started on how much of a hypocrite I am, but really, I count myself in as well. I created a ton of drama as a furry. I bawed at people for trashing my ideas, and went to bed feeling like I wanted to die. I was the type of furry who didn't look when crossing the street, wishing to get hit by a truck. I was emo, I was angsty, and by God I was wrong.  Now, that's how I got started in the furry fandom. I don't know if there is a good way to get in, but I can say my first touch with it was like getting hit on the back of the head with a sledgehammer. You have no idea how bad things got after that. Soon the claims for art theft came and soon enough I found myself running a jagged FA page where the most interesting comments you could read were "Oh so fucking hot, fapfapfapfap!" or "Somebody's gonna sue ya!".

I think I'm missing the point of this paragraph. But seriously, what I'm trying to get through with this is that, if there is a community that does feast on drama that is the furry community. The good thing about this though, is that the furries have assimilated it. They know they have lots of drama, and many of them have fun with it. It's another tool in the toolbox of fun, and they know how to wield it. I was at the early steps of the community in the internet back in 2001, and I managed to see how it moved from drama fest to drama fest and loving every second of it.

Now for the Brony community, we are still trying to get the hang of it. This drama thing is not only tiny, but we seem to be assimilating it better. I'm not completely sure where this will take us, but the thing is that, unlike the furry fandom where the drama comes and stays on the inside, this drama comes from the outside. I might be judging this the wrong way, but I don't see bronies hating on bronies, or pegasisters starting cat fights. What I see is people who aren't bronies throwing shit at bronies, and that's...really silly. If done right it's hilarious, but some people actually seem kind of serious about it. I don't know what they think are trying to get to. Do they think we will stop being bronies and realize how fucking weird our fandom is? Guys, I have news for you. We know we are weird! Being weird is fucking awesome! Being normal is the boring part, who wants to be normal!? I like having a Rainbow Dash toy on my night stand. I like wearing a Princess Luna t-shirt that says "All shall love me and despair". And I like talking to my other brony friends and make jokes. However, I don't like painting my face blue and put on a rainbow wig. I don't like posting on PonyChan about sexually abusing Twilight Sparkle. And, even though I appreciate the rule 34, I don't like drawing it. What I'm trying to say with this is that I understand why those guys and gals hate the most extreme bronies. I can see they look at them and they are like "Oh my God, did you just seriously do that?" and they grab their laptops, go to their blogs, and start posting about it not knowing that this is the internet, and even though the information goes everywhere, people will tend to ignore it. If you make a very witty post about how some brony dressed up as Rainbow Dash and made a connection between bronies and furries, these two things will happens, and only these two:

One, those who read the article will ignore it as it's not addressed to them.

Or two, those who should read the article, as it addresses them, won't read it because they are prancing around in their Rainbow Dash fursuits.

So in the end, nobody cares, the same way nobody cares for this thing I wrote. But like I said, I wrote this for myself, and those people eventually just write for themselves too. Who could blame them? When you live in this day and age, you need to hear (or read) yourself out loud, to make sure you still have a bit of sanity left in your brain. I didn't write this to defend the fanbase, hell no. I'm no knight in shiny armor, and besides, the fandom doesn't need one. There's no need to clean the image of the Bronies, it's already tainted. But there's no need to defend them, their actions speak louder than anything the haters can say.

Is the fandom perfect? No. Is it going to last? You have no idea. I am addressing the bronies directly right now, and I want you to pay close attention because this is really important. Transformers survived three Michael Bay movies, and they are still going strong with haters, trolls and several reboots of their beloved characters. Firefly has a massive, really hardcore and dedicated fanbase, with only 13 episodes. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is everywhere on the internet. No, really, we are every-fucking-were. I checked. I double checked. You can play Six degrees of Kevin Bacon with the ponies now. We are never going to vanish. This pony thing starts, and it's like that story of the automatic mechanical legs. Even after we are gone, it will still be going.

And if you read all the way to these words, it means I wrote a simple intro without even doing a proper spell check. Well, maybe some spell-check, but definitely not a grammar edit or anything like that. I just wanted to capture what my mind was going through at 3:19 am. Consider this my brain poured on a text processor.

Oooh, by the way, I was recently asked, if I had to pick one, what I'd rather be: Brony or Furry. I picked Brony. Because, thanks to these pastel-colored ponies, I:

- Re-discovered my passion for writing.

- Re-discovered my passion for drawing.

- Started to make drawings everybody can enjoy (I don't draw Rule34, I set that as a rule I haven't broke yet).

- Found a mean to evade myself when problems are way too much.

- Met more people who, like me, were kind of sick of the internet's self-worth.

- Learnt how to deal with bad news.

- Coped with the death of my 11 year old cat.

- Discovered that money is not the most important thing in the World, even when you are broke.

- Recovered my hope on humanity's spirit of progress.

I will be fair, it was during my stay in the Furry Fandom that I met three of my best friends, and my absolute best friend of all time. That's really important, but I don't think I can thank the fanbase for that. My best friend of all time and I met up after we both made a story based on the same picture. We could have started a drama fest in there, but because we were not the average furry, we treated each other very politely. That was seven years ago. Last summer I spent one month in his house during my holidays. See what I mean? The Brony fandom is like that, minus the coincidence.

And now it's really the end. No more, no more words. Not until sunday.