--Thunder Bolt--

I really, really hope not.  One of the things I like most about FiM is that it's "for girls" but does not assume that "for girls" means "must be consigned to a ghetto of pink ruffles, saccharine glurge, and waiting for Prince Charming."  Why can't a show "for girls" be entertaining for everybody else and still be "for girls?"  You know, like all those shows "for guys" (basically, every action-adventure movie or superhero movie ever made) are assumed to be worthy of being watched by everybody.  Nobody ever asks, "Should they de-masculinize The Avengers?"  If Hasbro were to "de-feminize" MLP with G5, they would be restoring the old gender segregation ("little girls are supposed to watch shows that reinforce 'feminine' gender roles in such an over-amped way that no one else can stand to watch them.  Little girls are freaks, they have cooties.  All the good shows have to be made with a male audience in mind.") that G4 rebels against.  If they do that, I'm rage-quitting the franchise.

On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.  Unless it's your avatar pic.

"Why do I wear this collar and hames?  I'm not pulling a wagon.  I don't have the rest of the harness on.  I look stupid, don't I?" *lifts hoof*  "I--can't--get--this--thing--off!"

I can haz fishburger?

I found a gun that makes yellow Portals!  Wheeeeeee!

Ultimately, no, but I'd play along and sound interested.  First, I'd be curious as to how it works.  How exactly does "kill random person" = "3 million bucks?"  Does the box itself send out a death-ray, or does it signal the "box killers," who send out a hit-man to whack somebody?

I would ask if I could keep the box for a few days and think about it.  If they agreed, I'd call the FBI and see if they could use the box (indicators of its manufacture, fingerprints, etc.) to track the "box killers" down and put them out of business.

(OOC: It looks like people are just jumping right into this.  If that's not correct and there's an OOC thread where we need to apply somewhere, I apologize, and will edit or delete upon request.)

Friendship and Ponies: The Twilight of the Human Species

Or:

Liveblogging Apocalypse, The Old Fashioned Way: One Woman's Account of the End

by Clary Shae

Entry #1:

The funny thing is, I thought I was prepared.  In the unlikely event that it's "somebody" reading this, and not "somepony," and you've ever read Liveblogging Collapse, you'd know.  If I done my job right, it might have helped you be more prepared yourself.  I'll still post on LC when I can get wifi, but I reckon the internet isn't long for this world, so now I'm using a more durable medium: good ol' fashioned paper and ink.  Acid-free paper, and inks made from recipes used by Irish monks in the Dark Ages.  The knotwork designs you'll see on these pages are a tribute to those guys.  Trying to keep the lamp of civilization lit even as everything fell apart around them.  If you are a pony, I hope it'll help you see the good in us, not just the bad.

Now, if you've never read Liveblogging Collapse, there's something I should make clear: when I said I thought I was prepared, that doesn't mean I was one of those survivalist types with a bunker stashed with guns, gold and silver bullion and canned food, looking forward to the day when I'd get to start shooting at mutant zombie biker gangs.  I despise don't like  Let's just say I've got cause to never want to see any of those jakelegs ever again. 

Before the ponies came, I was a professional Steampunk.  I made things, from corsets to mobile phone cases to costume mechanical arms and ray guns, and sold them over the internet.  I was a stickler for authenticity.  My gears weren't glued on, hell no!  They meshed with other gears, and whenever possible, actually did something.  It gave me a chance to develop old fashioned Maker skills, skills I could use in more down-to-earth ways once the flow of cheap crap from China stopped.  Looters and and wannabee warlords can't steal skills.  I collect skills the way some people coll used to collect shot glasses.  After reading "The New Age of Sail" by Dimitry Orlov, I saved up, spent about a year building myself a seagoing gypsy wagon, then sold the Airstream trailer I was living in, and outfitted her for the sea.  She's a fifty-foot "Bolger box" sailboat with a self-trimming wingsail and a flat bottom so I can beach her when I want.  I've got a little workshop, an aeroponics greenhouse on deck, wind generator and solar panels. 

I figured, when climate change started wreaking havoc and the conventional oil started getting scarce, I'd have everything I needed to be nimble and adapt.  And as I shared what I learned with my readers on Liveblogging Collapse, I could help them get ready too.  And vice versa.  But then, nobody was prepared for ponies.  Nobody.  Zombies?  Sure.  There were books about how to survive a Zombie Apocalypse, and even zombie-themed guns and ammunition.  We had a whole literature of alien invasion stories.  None of it helped.  Try and find any one of those stories where the invaders are adorable.  I can't think of one, and I bet you can't either.

I was in San Francisco running a booth of my wares at a Con when the Alicorns came through the Portal.  "We have come to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies," Celestia said in that sweet, ever-so-gentle voice of hers.  Don't ask me how cartoon characters actually show up in real life.  Unless the show was some kind of advance propaganda, prepared with human collaborators to help make us welcome the change.  Guess it worked pretty well, too.  There were bronies asking Celestia to turn them into ponies even before it came out that she could actually do it.  And of course once it was apparent that Equestria was real, everybody had to see the show, just to find out who and what these ponies were supposed to be.  At the time though, I thought it was just an amazingly well-planned Alternate Reality Game or prank by a bunch of really clever bronies.  It wasn't until I was back on the Vector Equilibrium that night fielding questions from my readers asking whether the arrival of the ponies meant the Collapse had been canceled, or if it was here, that I started checking the real news sites.

I headed out to sea and advised my readers to trigger their emergency plans.  Whatever the ponies' intentions, the world as we knew it was over.  The financial markets would go haywire, there'd be runs on banks and grocery stores, letters of credit and investment capital would freeze up as the Masters of the Universe held on to their capital until they could see how things shook out, 'Just-In-Time' supply lines would start coming apart.  And that's not counting panicked responses from government like martial law or preparations to fight the ponies, or the whackaloon end of the religious spectrum going bugnutty about the Apocalypse.  Turns out they were right, of course--it just wasn't their Apocalypse.

I was well on my way to the Equator when governments started flipping their "internet kill switches."  I don't know much about how the War for Humanity went, except that we lost.  By the time I made port in Lima, hackers and ham radio operators were finding work-arounds for the news blackouts, but nobody really knew what was going on, apart from more and more people turning into ponies.  If that's the right term for it.  I'm pretty sure that an adult human being actually "turning into" a three and a half to four-foot pony would violate conservation of matter and energy.  As the sort of geek who agrees that a Star Trek transporter would kill a person and create a copy of them at the destination instead of actually "transporting" them, it seems to me that "turning into" a pony--creating a whole new sort of body and brain with who knows what kind of neural structures and instincts and whatnot--is the same thing, only a lot more obvious.

Enough for today,

Clary

Liveblogging Collapse

Post #1128  6/28/2016

Posted by: Clary Shae

Land Ho!  Looks like I made it!  Now if I can just find a place to beach the VE and make repairs.  The sail, rigging, and hull are intact, but the geodesic canopy for the aeroponics got punched in by a wave.  If I can find the right salvage I might be able to bodge it back together, but it's probably time to move to something more low-tech.  After Oregon, I'm still pretty nervous about trying coastal permaculture.  Maybe there won't be as many thugs over here.  Does anyone know anything about the nuclear power plants?  Are the ponies decommissioning them safely, or are we about to have 400 Fukushimas spilling DoomGlow into the oceans?

No avatar

Comment by: Mint Sprinkle, 6/2802016 3:42 p.m.

Clary?  Is that you?  Are you still human?  I was Rowdy Cowgirl116.  Now I'm a unicorn!  A magic unicorn!  You should join us Clary.  This new world we're building--it's sooo much better than the old world!  Everypony gets their own special talent that's also their passion!  There are no boring jobs, because everypony does what they love!  It's everything we hoped for before--sustainable localized economies based on renewable energy, only better, because it's happening in a Golden Age, not a Dark Age!  Come, Clary.  I promise you won't regret it!  All you have to do is find a pony and say you're ready.

Comment by: Clary Shae, 6/2802016 3:58 p.m.

Rowdy?  But you said you'd put a bullet in your brain "before you became a horse, instead o' ridin' one!"  Well...I guess dead is dead either way.  I'm sorry.  I guess...maybe I should be glad that something of you lives on in this new world of theirs.  Or should I say "something of her lives on in this new world of yours?"  Please understand, I don't hate you.  Ponies, I mean.  I just think you're making a horrible, tragic mistake.  What you're doing is just as bad as if we had won, and gone over and started paving Equestria with suburbs and strip malls and turned Canterlot Castle into Disneyland Equestria.  Erasing diversity instead of embracing it.  We could have had a shared culture--shared cultures, because here on Earth there were lots of them.  I know that we weren't doing the best job of running our world, and maybe your Celestia really can run things better than our corporations and Potemkin democracies did.  But she could have left us our humanity--created a world where we could all benefit from our differences instead of

Sorry, I gotta go.  Something's going on out there.  There's an honest-to-gorrammit battleship.  I thought the war was over?

OOC: For the sake of clarity: what's written in Georgia font is entries in a journal Clary is writing for History.  The posts for "Liveblogging Collapse" written in Arial are blog posts on whatever's left of the internet, so other characters can, in principle, (that is, if desired by their players) read and respond to them.

According to this video, Twilight is a god.

Anyway, I guess she could be a god since she's related to Celestia and Luna now.. Congratulations, Twily.

I gotta say, I much prefer Scottish!Spike to the one in canon. Also: Celestia using Twilight as a guinea pony for potions testing?  BAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAAA!

Katarzhyna tried to follow her gesture.  "Up in the clouds?" she asked, hoping for confirmation, but the girl was clearly too nervous to even look at her, much less at whatever she felt was watching them.  "After being instantaneously teleported to The Planet of Greek Mythology, encountering three-headed giant wolf, talking to dead child speaking for Labyrinth of Tartarus, being told I am supposed to become superhero planetary guardian, watching her disappear like genie into this," she said, gesturing with the Shard, "seeing what should have been irreparable broken legs heal before my eyes and the woman get up and walk away, and a young man find things that should not have been in carry-on baggage on an airplane in first place he looks...my Inner Skeptic, she has decided to just be quiet and watch for awhile," Katarzhyna said, hoping to reassure the girl. 

"When I first came out of fuselage, it looked to me like weather was being controlled.  There was enough rain to put out fires on aircraft, but ground I am standing on now, is not even wet.  So maybe whoever or whatever did that, is watching us now?  Can you feel anything of intent?  Impressions of hostility, or curiosity from watcher?" 

Katarzhyna's body language was tense, like she wanted to start pacing rapidly, in several directions at once.  There were too many things that needed to be done right away. 

• Salvage everything potentially useful from the wreckage, from survival needs to possible trade goods.
• Get away from the wreckage before more predators or the Greek Aliens In Black showed up, or Amarok decided to get hungry again.
• Try to see if Tiffany could be summoned with everyone touching the Shard.
• Get a really, really good look at her surroundings.
• Try to see if there really was a watcher in the clouds, and figure out if they should try to contact it, or escape.
• Start out for the city, to make contact with the locals.
• Avoid the locals until she could be sure they would not be unleashing a fatal pathogen on them.
• Try to find out if the aliens might decide that the safest quarantine procedure was an airstrike--

OK, that last one stood out from the rest.  The phrase, 'It's the only way to be sure' took on a rather more ominous tone when one might be on the receiving end.  Katarzhyna's first thought was to try to get the others to safety.  But then--  What if they would be right?  I do not want to kill a whole world!  She scanned the skies again, not sure if she should expect flying saucers with atomic death-rays, Apollo in his flying Sun-chariot, or...colorful flying creatures?  A flock of them seemed to be coming from the direction of the cloud-topped mountain.  It didn't look like any sort of attack run.  To the contrary, even at a distance there was an innocent charm about them, like exotic birds soaring and wheeling on a lovely spring day.  They didn't seem to be quite the right shape for birds though¹.

As tempting as it was to just watch them, and hope they got close enough for a better look, there were too many urgent priorities jostling for position in Katarzhyna's inner bullet list.  She tore her eyes away from them and back toward the clouds the other woman had (maybe) indicated.  Maybe if she could catch a glimpse of the Watcher--if there was one--without tipping it off...

NOTE:

1. @@Shanashie, I'm guessing that these are pegasi.  If they're something else, like manticores or dragons--or birds!--let me know and I'll edit Katarzhyna's impression if necessary.  

Concept art from the proposed My Little Pony: The Wizard of Oz spinoff movie.

"I got my cutie mark!  My talent is twirling a glowing hula hoop!"

Prometheus is female Titan? Katarzhyna thought.  In the version she'd heard, "he" had stolen the fire of the Gods and given it to humankind.  For this, Zeus had punished him by chaining him to a rock, so that vultures could peck out his liver; it would grow back so that they could do it again the next day, and the next...  This made him a hero of sorts to people who valued progress, like science-fiction enthusiasts, techies, and people like Katarzhyna, who dreamed of riding the Promethean fire all the way to space.  Well...if she is a girl, so much the better.  Could we actually meet her?  Set her free?

"Hey guys! There is a city over there, I can see a road in the forest to that place. Should we go try our luck and check it out?"

Looking up from the Shard--which wasn't conjuring a genie-Tiffany to answer her questions--Katarzhyna turned to follow the other woman's gaze to the city.  At full zoom, its wall looked to be more for decor than defense.  Something of a relief, as that implied a peaceful people.  There was no obvious indicator of their level of technology.  No roads choked with cars, or lanes of flying vehicles tracing across the sky.  But then, the aliens might have a concept of 'advanced' that didn't involve some lots-of-vehicles version of human modernity.  But we would be very poor 'Guardians' if we meet the locals and accidentally kill ninety percent of them off because they have no resistance to some bacterium that is harmless to us!  She looked back down at the Shard, which was doing nothing whatsoever aside from being slightly warm to the touch.  This is very important!  Maybe it does not work only for me?  Maybe we all have to touch it?  So that no one of us can 'own' it and all Guardians are equal? 

Before she could try to figure out how to ask the others to join her in touching the Shard like some group of teenage cartoon superheroes another young woman--wasn't she wearing different clothes earlier?--spoke up:

"G-guys?" She spoke up, placing the rucksack on the floor and fastening it up after placing the bag of - now various male and female - clothes inside. "I...should have probably said something earlier, but...something's been watching us while we've been here..."

"Where?" Katarzhyna asked.

"Well, Twilight, after finishing up the Daring Do series, I picked up a Forelock Holmes book, and learned the concept of a 'three pipe problem.'  The rest is history..."

I have three ponytails.  I'd much rather have a pony.

Young Cadence had to practice for some time before she could get the "...give a little shake" maneuver in her friendship dance right.

OT: Hmm.  I seem to have an unintentional knack for picking hard-to-caption avatars. -_-

Well, no...?

 

Medusa, as far as I can remember without looking at the wiki page, was a poor girl who was cursed with cobra hairs by Hera after she caught Zeus' leering eyes. Prometheus is one of the female titans that were not locked in the Tartarus, along with Epimethrus and Metis, but later she was chained to a rock after stealing the fire or something, that part I don't know much XD

 

There are a lot of variations in the mythology as a whole, so I might be wrong here

I hadn't heard of a version where Prometheus was female.  I wouldn't be too surprised if some ancient fanfic myth writer genderflipped her because she was too powerful a symbol to be left as a girl.  Not unlike the way ancient Hebrew writers substituted the masculine noun "asherim" (sacred pillars) for Asherah, the goddess the pillars were erected to honor.  Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you'd intended to write it that way before I had Katarzhyna react to it.

"Hang four, duuuude!"

"Indubitably, sah!  If you had your Bubble-Pipe filled with LSD, you would see the blue fractals too!"

For some reason, "Ninjalestia" doesn't work quite as well as the other -lestia nicknames.

--

How did Celestia get her cutie mark?  She wondered what happened to the sun after nightfall, so she stayed up and waited and waited and waited until it dawned on her.

Gotta tell you. I have no idea how that happened.

Well, mainly the reminder of the extent of the creativity of the brony community, and of the empowering technologies that make it possible.  It's easy to go "hey, it's the 21st Century, where's my jetpack!" while taking the things we do have for granted.

No idea where you got that little strawman from, my point is that it's starting to appear more as arrogant than loving. Not even starting really, it's been this way for a while.

Sorry, my post must have come across as more antagonistic than I intended.  I got the impression from the part of your post where you described the fan animations as "so perfect, so seamless" in what seemed to me like a tone of complaint.

It's easy to get though.

The closest thing I've encountered to the kind of elitism it sounds like you're talking about is people on another thread complaining about people who use Pony Creator to make their OC's rather than drawing them themselves or commissioning an artist.  I didn't jump into that because others basically said what I would have in response.  Not everybody can churn out nice-looking vectored pony art, or wants to spend actual money to get a passable picture of their OC. 

And that too. That kind of hypocrisy shouldn't be coddled, it should be confronted. But that's more a complaint about people in general than just bronies.

I guess I can see your point there, at least to a degree (not knowing exactly how much confrontation you're calling for).  It might be easier for me to not be too mad at grimdark/horror/war-oriented pony fics because I don't read them in the first place.   I confess, I did find it a bit...odd...when, after reading lots of "humans suck, ponies are so much better, I wish I could live in Equestria" type posts, I tried to solicit discussion on how we could make our world better, and from that quarter of the fandom here thus far: crickets.

Sunyatay put on her saddlebags and cloak, with her hood doffed this time.  It took most of her concentration to hold them in place, along with keeping the flower Atlas had given her tied into her mane.  The remainder of her brainpower ran around in circles trying to think of something to say.  Atlas hadn't answered her question about his interests, but she didn't want to pry.  And Starshine...  She could probably talk to him about magic, geometry, or science once he was rested.  But that common interest meant that he could subject her ideas--and Sunyatay herself--to informed scrutiny.  That frightened her more than the prospect of Atlas making a misstep.  He would probably step through her, rather than on her.  That wouldn't go so well for her books though, so she was careful to stay clear.  Suddenly, she had a thought.

What if scaling principles don't apply to him because he's existing in a bounded spacetime with a different metric?  Would his boundary squash me?  Or would I cross over into his metric...  Sunyatay pulled away from that train of thought, as it seemed headed for a rather strange rabbit hole.  If Starshine's "How did you get to be so big" made him uncomfortable, the questions that idea brought up would be an Atlas-sized faux pas to ask.

As they neared her shelter, it hit her: she was about to be a hostess for two ponies--and she hadn't had a chance to make any preparations whatsoever!  For now, Starshine looked like he just wanted someplace relatively comfortable to crash, so he would probably be OK, at least until the morning.  Accommodations for Atlas on the other hand...  She looked around, trying to find a clearing big enough for him to nest in without tearing out too many trees, and hopefully without any boulders in the way.  She'd been trying to avoid staring at him, trying to treat him like she would treat any other pony.  But that meant she hadn't really taken his measure with the kind of precision she felt she needed to try and suggest a comfortable place for him.  He might be able to lie down on the road, but then he'd be exposed.  She guessed he'd want more concealment.  

It still took some doing to summon the courage to speak, but it seemed to be getting easier with time.  "Goodnight Starshine.  As I said earlier, you're welcome to the fruit in my shelter if you want it.  Atlas...is there anything that you need?"  Not that I'll be able to do very much...but I've got to try, right?

Hey look!  It's Appletoad from My Little Amphibian: Frogs Are Magic!

  Ninja Strike!  "WATAAAA!"

"Too!  Much!  Timey-Wimey Stuff!  AIEEEEEEEEE!"

Fanart, Fanfiction? Every fandom does that, no problem. Making and selling T-shirts, dolls and sculptures? We're large enough for that to work, so why not? Hosting over 5 Cons and meetups per year, producing/creating/funding our own animated spins on MLP....I'm starting to grow concerned.

None of this is peculiar to the MLP fandom.  There are fan-made live-action movies for Star Wars and Star Trek.  People can get teams together and create full-length original movies like Iron Sky funded by Kickstarter.  I think this is freaking awesome.  Even though most of the resulting creative output isn't awesome, the fact that ordinary people can produce and distribute it without the blessing of one of a handful of Hollywood studios or one of three (count 'em, three) television networks like in the "Good Old Days," is fantastic, IMO.  It means that a much greater portion of the creative potential of the human species is being unleashed. 

I've always enjoyed the better half of the fan content we put out, but now I'm starting to think that it's getting to be a little much. Won't be long until a group can make another show in the shadow of Hasbro and DHX and keep that going far past MLP's inevitable end. Now, I've been in fandoms where animations have been made, they're bound to happen. But they've never been so numerous and so perfect, so seamless.

And this is a bad thing, how?  To me this sounds like somebody saying, "I went into the book store the other day, and I'm tellin' ya, there were way too many different books in there, man!  And so many of them are well-written!  It was better back when there was just the Bible, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and maybe Thoreau and Joyce for the coffeehouse hipsters."  I've read that only about a thousand people actually participated in the Renaissance, as in creating the art, literature, architecture and music that defines it.  Even if that's understating by an order of magnitude, I think it's pretty amazing that our little fandom for a cartoon probably has more participating creatives involved.

Add that to this growing mindset running rampant in the brony community that fanon ≥ canon and they(Show people) be twisting around to please us

I agree, I wouldn't want this to happen.  However, I think this problem would likely be an even greater danger if our only outlet for expressing our enjoyment of the show was as passive consumers buying merchandise.  In that scenario, Hasbro and DHX would be under more pressure to offer fan service via focus groups and marketing research in order to keep us buying.  As it is, fans who want there to be something like Double Rainboom or Snowdrop or Fallout: Equestria can go off and make and/or enjoy them on their own, and the main show doesn't have to compromise itself to appeal to those audiences. 

Consider the reverse case, the Star Wars franchise.  Here we have a set of movies designed to appeal to roughly the brony demographic (mostly adolescent and adult males), but with an important and lucrative secondary demographic: the kids who buy most of the toys.  Lucas "twisted around to please" that secondary demographic, and as a result we got Ewoks, Child!Vader, and Jar-Jar Binks.  Note that this took place in the complete absence of a creative community of child Star Wars fans making fan-films about 8-year-old Jedi kids saving the Galaxy by accident and coincidence accompanied by ridiculously clownish sidekicks.

I'm starting to feel a threat of rampant fan of the fandom elitism creeping across the interwebs.

 

So yeah, anyone else sharing my dread, or is it all unfounded?

Maybe I'm too new to the community to have encountered the "fandom elitism" you're talking about.  However, it seems to me that an "elite" of lots of fans making music, animations, fanfics, art, etc. is actually less elitist than the prior situation of "only professionals working for the company can do any of this stuff and present it to the world."  The opposite of "elitism" is "democratization," the spreading of participatory empowerment toward more and more people.  But isn't that what you're worrying about here?  So, I'm not quite following the continuity of your argument.

I think that we put too much stuff also. Now people are getting called faggots everywhere, on TV shows and stuff. We could've been more quiet enjoying MLP FiM, not telling all the world about it. Now when someone says that bronies and faggots or horrible creatures, it feels awkward being one that I want to stop. It's too much.

This is a flaw in society, particularly the haters you're talking about.  Why is it such a shock that adult men would like a show targeted toward little girls?  Nobody gets their knickers in a knot over adult female Transformers fans, or female Harry Potter fans who ship Harry and Draco in fanfics.  Why?  Because male entertainment is good for everybody, you see.  Men are the default humans.  Women are the sexually-desirable sorta-people that serve as prizes to be won by the real people, i.e., "the hero gets the girl."  This means that women should be accustomed to a universe of shows centered on male characters, with maybe one "chick" among the protagonists as a love interest or token (Harry Potter, The Avengers, Inception, etc., etc..).  We don't just assume that every woman who likes Thor only does so 'cause she thinks he's hot (even if many of them do); good [male-defaulted] entertainment is good entertainment. 

On the other hand, if a show is made for females, then it has cooties.  The only reason a Real Man^tm would watch a show like that ("a date movie" or "chick flick") is to get laid.  Because, obviously no show that isn't made for men could ever be good enough for men.  If a man actually enjoys a show that's not male-defaulted, clearly there's something wrong with him and he shouldn't be allowed in the treehouse.  And if the show is meant for little girls...*gasp!* *pearlcluch* *faint*  The male FiM demographic is shocking because, under the assumptions of "baseline misogyny," they're slumming.  Like billionaires who sneak into McDonalds when they could be having pheasant under glass at a fine restaurant.  And since the only reason men would stoop to watching "a show for girls" is to get laid...then they're either gays (i.e., infested with too many girl-cooties) or pedophiles.  Because we all know that little girls are idiots who would gobble up any saccharine glurge that's shoveled at them, as long as it's got enough ruffles, rainbows, and magic spaklies, amirite d00dz?

That's the rule that the FiM creative team decided to break, with extreme prejudice.  They created a show--for little girls, yes--but they treated that audience with enough respect to make a show for them that was actually good, with excellent animation and appealing story lines and likeable characters with depth and growth, and a living world for them to inhabit.  They treat girls as real people.  As a result, other sorts of real people, including men, also enjoy the show.  This, to my mind, is one of the truly great things about FiM, and the brony/pegasister community.

I'd prefer to have little fan works, but that are good!

The "crap to good stuff ratio" isn't just a problem for our community.  It's pretty much an issue for all creative endeavor.  Sturgeon's Law:

According to the NewHackersDictionary [JargonFile], science fiction author TheodoreSturgeon once said "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." The law is almost always quoted with the word "crap", so that can be considered to be the common usage, but Sturgeon himself said "crud", so it depends on whether you want an exact quote or the common usage.

 

--Source

I'm sure there's lots of MLP fan-crap out there, but I'm quite impressed by the level of craft being produced for free by the brony community.  That lullaby Celestia sings for Luna (I don't remember the title, but the feels, man!)?  Fighting is Magic?  Heck, Motion Spark (a member on this Forum) has an animated OC avatar and signature that couldn't have been done by one person for such a casual purpose "when I was your age."  Yeah, he ought to get off my lawn.  But still, it's pretty cool.

I'm not the one to put my nose in others fetishes but grimdark fanfics make me think that we're blood sucking creatures. Or a few animations, like Double Rainboom, the animation was good, but the story didn't make me think it was so high art no. Also grimdark drawings and such. I don't mind, but, for crying out loud, there are 9year old kids watching MLP, and what do you think will happen if they find grimdark or pornography?

I haven't read any grimdark/horror FiM fanfics because FiM is where I go for a breather from the whole "gritty," grimdark trend of pretty much everything else.  So, I can't judge that segment of the creative output.  I do find it very mildly annoying when I see somebrony saying, "Oh, I hate this horrible crapsack world!  If only I could live in Equestria, where the ponies are so much better than we awful humans are!," but then I look at their avatar or signature and see a pony OC with a combat knife in its mouth and a vulcan cannon mounted on its back, with a soupcon of grit, grime, and dried bloodstains to complete the artistic effect.  But--whatever floats their boat.  I would much rather they have the opportunity to express themselves, and me the opportunity to not read their fanfic or join their RP of Doompocalypse Equestria, than for them not to have the opportunity to express themselves and be appreciated by an audience.

As for the pornography?  Rule 34 ("If it exists, there's porn of it") doesn't just affect FiM.  Besides, Bugs Bunny cross-dressed and shipped himself with his male adversaries in the show canon.  The only reason that isn't causing mass headsplosions is because Loony Toons became a "venerated classic" before there was such a thing as the internet. 

I have the feeling that back in the early days of the fandom (before I became a Brony, or for that matter even knew about it) were more intimate and light-spirited. As if everyone knew each other and Equestria Daily was just blooming, and the amount of fan content was very little.

If "It was so much better in the early days" isn't Somebody's Rule or Law, it ought to be.  Here's Greta Christina explaining why "the amazingness of atheists" is doomed.  Christians could say almost the exact same things she does, just substitute "Christian" and "believer" for "atheist" and "queer" (she compares the "coming out" of the New Atheist movement with the emergence of the openly gay community), and talk about the 1st Century instead of the 21st.  For Christians, "the early days" were illuminated by people like Paul, Peter, James, and John, and all those people who fearlessly went into the Colosseum to face lions.  The local church pot-luck pales in comparison.  Or talk to the fans of a band who were there when they were playing in bars and small dance clubs about how much better it was then, before the band (or even a whole genre, like punk) became a huge hit.

I know it's probably the opposite of the intent of many of the posters, but this thread actually gives me a boost of hope for the future, and makes me more proud to be a brony, not less. 

@@Starshine,

"Um, no. As far as I know, Prometheus is one of the female titans who were not imprisoned in the Tartarus.

Starshine, I've been meaning to ask: Did you mean to have her say "Medusa" there (typo)?

If you slide all of the little pieces of the puzzle around 'till they're arranged correctly, you'll discover that Feld0 has three heads!

"My lips are gone!  Maybe if I just keep my face deadpan, nobody will notice..."