x8 Thanks. That's weird though. The slidshow doesn't make this new IP look like it is aimed at older fans at all.

edited 9th Feb '13 7:49:21 PM by Chariot

Admittedly, the fandom is starting to lose its appeal for me. I've separated myself from it before (after S2 ended, if you recall), and while I missed some of the thread interactions, I wouldn't say that I felt a hole had been torn in my heart or anything. Especially now, with mixed feelings about the finale and other recent announcements (and especially about how those mixed feelings have been received by others), I don't feel all that much loyalty to the fandom anymore. The show is still fine, for the most part; I just don't feel much impetus to hang around in, say, the off-season anymore.

A group that refuses to examine or even acknowledge its worst parts and focuses only on how good and wonderful they imagine themselves to be will eventually come across as hypocritical no matter what they champion.

edited 9th Feb '13 7:51:17 PM by RedSavant

@Red: ??? ...you lost me :V

The fandom certainly isn't perfect. And I will be thankful because of that that even with these recent nods, the show isn't changing completely to what they want. It's not changing everything according to what fans demand, it makes a few harmless additions that they may benefit from and they know they can make good use of.

If they did something like basically wrote an episode as simply a lampshaded apology over MMDW, or adapted a fanfic word for word, then I feel they would be going over the line.

The one easter egg I feel may have been cheap was using Ditzy's fan name Derpy, if only because they had their own name planned and it felt like a case of Did Not Do Research considering the word's background.

edited 9th Feb '13 7:56:16 PM by Psi001

Yeah. And if ALL you look at is the negative, you come off as needlessly pessimistic, overly critical, and rather short sighted.

Are there issues? Yes, but on the whole, they are far far FAR minot compared to the good. And the majority of the issues, are magnified far in excess of their actual impact by people bitching about there being an issue.

well, option two is to much of a legal nightmare to even consider.

edited 9th Feb '13 7:57:01 PM by Seraphem

@Ace: How so?

^^Well, yeah - going back to MMDW would be a bit much. I'd prefer just to mentally discontinue it, or at least heavily alter it.

^I'm not of the habit of not considering assholes assholes just because they say 'love and tolerate' at me.

edited 9th Feb '13 7:58:07 PM by RedSavant

I'm thankful they didn't do anything like Brian's "The Reason You Suck" Speech with it. William's just wrote a better RD episode completely separate from it, and people loved it and moved on. That's how you improve on something people didn't like.

edited 9th Feb '13 8:00:08 PM by Psi001

@ Red and who said to do that? it's letting a small group color your opinions of the whole that I'm talking about.

Whoo, my Uncle got Wi-Fi, so I'll be spending Chinese New Year with you guys.

@Psi 001: I always thought that MMDW had some interesting things to explore, but perhaps that is best left to fan fic authors.

It may have had some interesting concepts to use again (I admit I like the superhero idea), I mean more in the blatant Self-Deprecation sort of referencing, and just basically have the characters discuss how crappy the episode was to the viewers. I hate that sort of pandering, especially since most of the time, the show in question never actually changes according to these critisms and thinks lampshading just makes it all better.

edited 9th Feb '13 8:06:03 PM by Psi001

Well, Fi M has never been that self aware so I doubt we have to worry about that (unless you weren't being that literal).

Well not that literal, more like, you know actually stopping the story for a blatant Call Back that is obviously meant to be the writers trying to suck up over what fans didn't like about it. As said, Family Guy's examples are most obvious (eg. Quagmire's Take That, Scrappy! speech on Brian).

edited 9th Feb '13 8:07:49 PM by Psi001

@Seraph: The genesis of the fandom was surprising; the composition is not. I just wish people would stop conflating the two.

Yeah, I doubt that is going to happen.

What exactly do you mean? Why was one surprising but the other not.

edited 9th Feb '13 8:10:43 PM by Mio

@Red: Wish granted. Your desire has transcended entropy ◕‿‿◕

edited 9th Feb '13 8:11:18 PM by AceOfScarabs

I think the only thing that really counted as pandering was the Derpy scenes.

She is so cute!

Have we got an 'age' worked out for her yet?

@Red, Seraphem; I honestly think the truth is somewhere in the middle. There are definitely jackasses and terrible people in the fandom, just the same as there are in every other fandom. The fandom isn't a unified group; it's just a group of people who happen to like a certain show and don't necessarily have anything else in common. At the same time, I don't think those people define the fandom. In all honesty, I've never interacted all that much with the bulk of the drama because I find that you only find it if you go looking for it. The problem is that the people who feel strongest about things are the loudest. The fandom is 10% white knights who defend it at any cost and 10% fan dumb who like to stir shit up. That 20% of the fandom is the cause of 90% of the drama. You can't claim that the FIM fanbase is better than any other fanbase. It isn't. At the same time, you can't claim that the fanbase sucks, because it doesn't. It's the people at both ends who are raising a stink about it.

@Mio: I think what he means is that a lot of people assume or try to prove that bronies are somehow a better or more friendly fandom due to the fact that it formed around a feel-good show like FIM rather than something more cynical. And I agree that there's a problem there. People assume that people who are fans of the show will follow the whole "Love and tolerance" thing when the simple truth is that a lot of them don't because the fanbase is comprised of roughly the same demographics as any other internet fandom.

edited 9th Feb '13 8:14:37 PM by JapaneseTeeth

@Mio: By genesis, I mean the source show, pretty much. The basic thrust of my earlier post was that you see so many posts going around where people are like 'this show taught me how to love', etc etc, but the fandom itself is just another slice of Internet, and anonymity makes bronies act like assholes the same way it does everyone else. The lessons they're claiming don't seem to have stuck, is my point.

^This, basically. Maybe I just have the misfortune to run into too many of the white knights, but it tends to polarize me a little bit, I guess.

Anyway, I feel like I'm just dragging people down at this point... I'll be back later, I guess.

edited 9th Feb '13 8:14:45 PM by RedSavant

Yeah. Honestly, I think that's fine, that it's got the same composition as any other fandom you'd care to name. The only thing that ever seems to differ is the exact percentages, and even then only in some cases. Ultimately, I'd rather this be seen as just any other fandom, rather than as some sort of Dancing Bear.

Pime taradox

edited 9th Feb '13 8:16:32 PM by AceOfScarabs

@Red: Ah, well your probably exactly right.

I'm sure there are people for whom that is true, but otherwise Bronies are just like any other fandom on the internet, with all the good and bad it implies.

@J Teeth: Well, I certainly wish the fandom were as nice as it implied.

edited 9th Feb '13 8:17:45 PM by Mio

So.. I've been hearing that the Fandom is currently tearing itself apart right now.

Can someone explain to me what exactly happend? Is this cause of the Alicorn Twilight thing?

@dmysta: Basically the past week or two has been a string of dramatic things, Alicorn Twilight among them.