I found a petition to cancel MLP:FiM....and I can't stop laughing

[Jackie Snack 1,498]

At first, I was excited, then I saw that it was closed.

 

Maybe next time, right? >3>

[Brownie dash 34]

lol I saw that. Must have been humiliating knowing he didn't even make it to 100 sigs.

On 8/20/2017 at 0:31 AM, Prospekt said:

A petition is going to need wayyyyyyyyy more than 100 signatures for Hasbro to even take notice. And besides, the ignorance there is just too ridiculous to take seriously.

What if...

Just bare with me here...

but what if Hasbro saw the petition, but didn't care, because it is dumb to cancel a TV show due to someone's feelings being hurt by said shows fanbase?

My mind = blown

Edited October 1, 2017 by Brownie dash

[Alexshy 14,709]

On 20.08.2017 at 6:57 AM, Mind Scape said:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING AT THIS PERSON WHO CLEARLY HAS NEVER WATCHED THE SHOW HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA......

*Clears throat* Okay, so I found this petition to cancel MLP:FiM just because of the brony community: https://www.change.org/p/my-little-pony-friendship-is-magic-bronies-cancel-the-series-my-little-pony-friendship-is-magic-to-end-the-brony-fad?source_location=minibar Don't worry, it's from 5 years ago, It's closed, and it didn't get all 100 signatures needed for the show to immediatly be canceled forever or as someone thought. This person states that bronies are "a very hostile group, verbally attacking and harassing anyone who doesn't agree with them." and "do not let your children search for "My Little Pony" on the internet...These bronies twist the cartoon in ways to suit themselves and their disturbing desires..." and my personal favorite, "On the very surface, they can be nice and friendly, especially in public. Online, they will be careful about what they say and how they act around parents, trying to explain that they only like the cartoon in sweet, harmless fun. Don't you believe them for a second. " Obviously this person is only looking at a minority of the fandom, the bronies who make very violent and sexual content; and an even smaller part of the community: the bronies who are constantly trying to convert non-bronies to being bronies, and will harass and send death threats to anyone who disagrees. But literally any fandom has those people, and also rule 34 happens. This is just a classic case of "i've only seen this one minor group of a community, so every single other person in the community is exactly that". Also the person mentions a disabled pony being in the show who is fan-made, but when this character didn't live up to some expectations of the bronies they sent death threats to the creators. When an online user shared their opinion about the disabled character, some bronies sent a bunch of death threats and hate to the user. I was very confused about this fan-made disabled character. It took me awhile to realize it was Derpy Hooves, but she wasn't fan created. She was just a background character with an animation error in her eyes that made fans adore her, and the creators acknowledged this kept the mistake in her eyes and added her to more episodes. Of course some people may not be happy too about it, just like literally anything, but clearly who made the petition clearly hasn't done any proper research. If you read what they say exactly they are over-exaggerated things. Yeah, sending death threats to someone is a big deal, especially if the person targeted didn't do anything wrong, but the creator of the petition had it in their mind that every single male fan of the show makes violent, sexual content, are pedophiles, into beastiality(this is all said by the person), are very hostile, hateful, intolerant perverts and each and every one of them send death threats. Talk about over-generalization, geez. Links to very violent videos and p0rn are listed below the article, along with a picture of a supposed swastika in the show which doesn't even go to a picture, just more links to that picture that you have to download to see. The person as stated more stuff about very violent videos and p0rn websites, and a personally encounter with a brony that didn't go well...

True fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic will know that FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC, and listen to the friendship lessons by actually watching the show, and actually genuinely like it because of the characters, storyline, and lore. At least, I hope so. This petition may have been already posted about a long time ago, since it's been on the internet for a while, but I just wanted to share how ridiculous and hilarious this petition is especially to those who haven't seen it. Hehehehe.

P.S. I did eventually stop laughing xD

Dost thou have coordinates for the nuke? It might hath grown during those 5 years...

Edited October 1, 2017 by Alexshy

[Babyyoshi309 1,829]

6 years have passed and it still has not gotten 100 signatures! 

[Hierok 11,831]

If I think of the fandom, this is what I think of in the first place. ( Without singing frogs that is of course ).

 

[EpicEnergy 23,218]

Some people just misunderstand things on purpose, which is ignorance. Anyways, these petitions don't usually work and this one was clearly made by someone who hasn't grasped that concept.

[Tom Gallagher 33,588]

I guess they got their wish then. 

[SasQ 1,376]

Well, although the whole thing sure is on the border of funny and cringe, the person who made that petition does have a point: there are pretty messed up people in the fandom (as in pretty much any fandom). And the real question here should rather be: what should we do about it? Or can we do anything about it, for that matter? :q

One possible solution might be to disclaim such people from the fandom, by setting some conditions one has to meet in order to call oneself a fan.
I mean, I'm not saying that we should put the bar very high, it doesn't necessarily have to be something strict, but… oh, I don't know… at least having watched the actual show wouldn't hurt :q
I find it rather weird when people call themselves a fan of something and yet they never watched the source material, and all they want is to belong somewhere because they think it's cool.

But if we wanted to really clean the air, we would have to require people to follow the moral standards that can be found in the show if they want to call themselves true fans. (Something that I personally call a "Harmony Brony" – someone who lives up to those moral standards and life lessons from the show, and does his/her best to implement them in his/her life.)
Then, if someone accused us of the fandom being nasty, we could always say: "But look, we have this here moral code, and those people are not following it, which means that they are not real fans, they're impostors."

Unfortunately, there are some problems with this approach, and I'm pretty sure you already thought of them:
"Love and tolerate" – anyone remembers that? If you're new in the fandom, I'd like to remind you that this was once our slogan. And that's precisely the thing that would be contradicted when we assumed the approach from the previous paragraph: One could argue that we're not as tolerant and inclusive as we claim, if we don't allow certain people to call themselves fans or refuse them right to do so :q  I've already heard this argument multiple times before, every time something nasty happened in the fandom and some people were condemning it – there always was another group who claimed that we have to allow such nasty behaviours in the fandom, because we don't have the right to refuse anyone the right of calling themselves fans; that such people are fans too, and we have to tolerate it, because we're tolerant, aren't we? It's in our motto after all :q

The problem is much broader, though, and I even think that it's the predominant problem in our modern society these days. It is a so-called "Tolerance Paradox", which says, that if you want to be really tolerant, you have to also tolerate intolerant people :q  Or people who misbehave, or misrepresent your community. The notion of tolerance has been blown up so much these days, and became so much political, that it lose any meaning whatsoever. If you disagree with something, or have a different opinion that a certain group of people, they will call you intolerant. And often it doesn't stop at that – they will also do what they can to stop you from expressing this world view, which… paradoxically, contradicts the very definition of tolerance :J  They want you to be tolerant towards them, but they're unwilling to tolerate you if you're not.

Sounds familiar?

This also reminds me when a couple of years ago, a couple of my friends had enough of censorship in the media, so they started their own medium, an internet radio, whose sole motto was "no censorship whatsoever". They wanted it to be a platform in which everyone could come and say whatever they have to say, and no world views would be excluded. At first, it worked pretty well, and there was a lot of interesting podcasts, interviews, talks etc. But soon after it started to attract all sorts of messed up people with crazy ideas. UFO-catchers, Flat Earthers, lunatics, cult leaders, or people propagating extremism or totalitarianism. All these things started to scare off both listeners who weren't interested in such crazy stuff, as well as guests who didn't want to show up in such company and didn't want to be associated with it. So after a couple of months, crazy woo stuff was the only thing that remained on the platform, because woo people aren't afraid of other woo people and they were the only ones who didn't scare each other. But even among them there was a lot of disagreement about the subjects that should be presented on the platform, so in the end, the platform rot and died with natural death :q

So what's the moral of this story?

I'm sure you're thinking now: "Well, it means that SOME censorship is required. Isn't it what all the big platforms are doing right now?"
Or, if you're more on the libertarian side, you may think: "The fact that such things happen surely doesn't mean we should relinquish our freedoms and censor everything, now does it?"
And you've probably guessed that these views seem to be contradictory: We can only have one or another, we can't have both, can we?

Well, if you're like me, you would rather try to see past the paradox and find a solution that would satisfy both sides. Because if anything I learned about the paradoxes in my life is this:
The only way to escape a paradox is to surpass the limits in which the paradox emerged in the first place.
In this case, on one hand, we want to be able to express ourselves freely without anyone telling us what's the right or wrong way of doing it.
On the other hand, we don't want other people's views to mess with ours. There are things that are either too disturbing for us, or simply not interesting to us, and we don't want to be forced to deal with them in our lives (that is, we don't really want to tolerate something that we don't accept, and as you know, or should know, tolerance cannot be compelled). And even if we do, we don't want to do that all the time. For example, I don't mind to see some pr0n from time to time (I'm an adult after all), but it doesn't mean that I want to see it all the time. I don't like pony gore, though, and I don't want to have anything to do with it, but I don't mind other people liking it, as long as they keep it to themselves and don't have me watch it, especially unexpectedly. But I can't stop them from doing it, and – to be frank – I should't.

So how can we solve this paradox?

Well, I'll give you a hint: the solution evolves around what I wrote in another thread some time ago.

The problem with the fandom still stands though. And I think it might be harder to solve than the problem with freedom of expression vs. censorship, or the Tolerance Paradox, without introducing some subdivisions in the fandom, or setting some rules / boundaries that I'm pretty sure most people won't be happy with. But creating "safe spaces", forcing tolerance, or increasing censorship, is NOT the way, I can tell you at least that much. And neither is the opposite: just letting everyone do whatever they want, even at the cost of putting the entire fandom in bad light.

And what are your thoughts?

Edited April 26, 2022 by SasQ

[Courageous Thunder Dash 7,824]

At first glance I knew that this had to be someone who just failed to see the big picture and went off of hasty generalizations that landed them in this pit, which is true. But then I remembered that every fandom has its bad side and it's hard to combat against it due to quite a few factors. In the end, you can't let yourself fall into one of these pits without seeing the big picture and doing exploring. It's then you decide whether you want in or not. 

[SasQ 1,376]

Sure thing, but you see, this argument can be twisted the other way around as well (and I've already seen it twisted around that way a couple of times before):
One might argue that saying that most MLP fans are nice and friendly people is a generalization as well, and that it "misrepresents" the fandom in some way, because it paints it with more colour than there really is; that saying that, for example, cloppers, or people who enjoy pony gore, or people "from the spectrum" (choose your favourite spectrum here), are "just the minority", is a "misrepresentation of the fandom", or that it "offends" those people by denying their existence or their tastes, because apparently being a fan is just a matter of self-proclaiming oneself to be one, and it doesn't matter what the rest of the fandom thinks about it.

Imagine that some really bad person publicly announced that he's a MLP fan. Can a pedo be a fan? Can a serial killer be a fan? Where's the boundary?
If there's none, then we have a problem, because this means that nasty people will always be found in the fandom, and their behaviour will be generalized on the entire fandom. If we wanted to stop it from happening, we would have to put boundaries somewhere, and then we're back to square one with that "tolerance" and "inclusiveness" thing :q
That's the gist of the paradox right here.

[Splashee 28,564]

On 2017-08-20 at 5:57 AM, Mind Scape said:

it didn't get all 100 signatures needed for the show to immediatly be canceled forever

Is it possible to cancel other things with just 100 signatures?

 

Who has that kind of power anyway to cancel a show? It would certainly stop the Bronies if the show got cancelled, right?

[SergioFernandez 33]

Haters, haters everywhere

[Evil Pink One 13,506]

3 hours ago, Splashee said:

Is it possible to cancel other things with just 100 signatures?

 

Who has that kind of power anyway to cancel a show? It would certainly stop the Bronies if the show got cancelled, right?

Well you only need one signature to cancel the show.... If you know what I mean....