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Tumblr and Bronies.
This is something that's been really annoying me for a while now, and it's something that I really want to get off my chest. To make a long story short, there's been a trend of bloggers and other quote-on-quote "social justice" types calling bronies misogynist shitstains, fedora'd neckbeards, nerds, and every other unflattering stereotype they can think of.
And on the surface, you'd think they might have a point: like any other typical "nerd" fandom, misogyny exists. But the level of zealotry from anti-brony types on Tumblr soon surpasses a reasonable criticism of the fandom's flaws and into straight-up emotionally abusive and sociopathic behavior. What might have had some measure of good intentions quickly distorted into a hideous miasma of online bullying. It got to the point where the anti-brony types started posting hateful messages just to stir up shit, and in one particularly disgusting case attempted to cause real-world harm to a rape survivor because she didn't think that the existence of a softcore porn blog entitled "Ask Princess Molestia" was offensive.
And what makes it all the more infuriating is that a lot of the common arguments have been utterly and completely dismantled by those who actually do the relevant research. (Tenafly Viper's said some things that I find pretty gross in the past, but on this one point she's completely spot-on.)
And so far there hasn't been a single apology for wrongdoing, or even anything resembling rebuttal to these points. The people who are so dead-set on attacking bronies are so convinced of their own moral superiority that they can't even comprehend the idea that they might, just might, have taken things too far. It's a near-perfect real life example of the "Knight Templar" trope.
And for what? For a freaking cartoon about technicolor magic horses. Just... what?
Comments
It's not the pr0n angle, it's the rape jokes, I thought. And this is basically every fandom police blog in a nutshell(see Calloutstuck). They're run by people who would be told to stay the fuck away from the internet if they ever saw a therapist, have zero sense of proportion due to youth or failing to interact with the world outside of the screen and have a race to the bottom in who can be the leftiest, regardless of whether or not the minorities they're trying to protect actually agree with them.
Criticizing certain behaviors by some fans of a series seems alright to me. I like Friendship is Magic, but I try to stay away from most fan stuff because I do not care for fan interpretations of the series that add sexual, violent, or other "adult" content that I do not believe fits the show. While I do not know how many older fans of the show enjoy those types of fan works, I think that sometimes people who are aware of those types of works will think poorly of older fans of the show itself based on them. I personally find that pretty frustrating. Admittedly, that sort of perception problem is not unique to fans of MLP though.
Generalizing about people who like a TV show does not seem fair to me, especially when it means making fun of people solely because they like a TV show that certain other people who have exhibited annoying or inappropriate behaviors like. I think Tumblr can make the generalizations worse by functioning as an echo chamber while still giving people access to outlier fandom blogs written by people who take their fandom in an extreme direction.
Welp. I generally find bronies irritating for being pathological attention seekers, but people who are obsessed with attributing every negative trait to them they can find are even bigger losers.
I do not disagree with your main point, but there is something I would like to address,
The problem I have with this case in particular is that the misogyny is combined with them appropriating a show for little girls. Also, I take issue with the "typical nerd fandom" implication with respect to overwhelmingly male-dominated nerd communities being less prevalent than people think.
yeah i was really confused about mras being fans of a show with an almost-all-female cast?? like i know they're horses butSometimes I get annoyed by the fact that the whole "brony" thing is even a thing.
So you're a grown-up who likes a children's show. Big fucking whoop.
Like, I've always unashamedly enjoyed children's cartoons, so for me, watching Friendship Is Magic was just another example of that, not something special where I felt the need to justify my enjoyment of the show or parade it around.
I don't think that bronies have a significant overlap with MRAs so much as much as they're associated with each other as part of the "creepy nerd who wears fedoras" boogeyman the internet loves so much.
Yeah this is my main issue with the whole thing. The actual name "brony" too is just ugh.
It's mainly a thing that's done to increase solidarity among people with similar interests. Like, "hey, you like that thing? Awesome, I like that thing, too! Let's go be thing-liking buddies!" (This is hardly exclusive to bronies: I'm a huge fan of Digimon and Magic: the Gathering, among other things.)
"Parading it around" in most cases really just means means being open and honest about what you like. People who complain about "parading it around" also kind of annoy me since it's effectively saying "you can like what you want as long as you don't express it."
Well, to be fair, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways and venues for expressing one's tastes.
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I could find, besides lots of snarky pics, the ponysonas of some MRA podcast types(including a few dudettes, strangely enough): http://i.ytimg.com/vi/qJ6wdCOwLMw/hqdefault.jpg
If fans of magic started calling themselves "Brogic: The Brotherings", I'd probly stop playing it.It's not the idea of a fandom community name that bothers me, it's very much this specific one. Because a) the word "bro" bothers me on its own, b) the emphasis on the gender aspect really weirds me out. It's like "WE'RE MEN WE LIKE MAN THINGS LITTLE CARTOON HORSES IS A MAN THING also girls are allowed to be bronies too I guess".
As for fandoms being a male thing the fantasy and LARP has plenty of girls around here, as far as I see it at least. I'd rather look for male domination in SF and RPG circles. Fantasy is girlier, I guess?
There is literally no way to state this argument that doesn't essentially boil down to "EW! Boys have cooties! Keep them away from my toys!"
Also, good job implying that "good bronies" don't exist since hippos that paint houses don't exist either.
In my experience, "emphasizing the gender aspect" is only done by the people who are petty enough to think the name means anything different from "trekkie" or "whovian."
There are better ways to express what you like than shoving ponies into every context-irrelevant scenario you can think of. Also, a lot of guys like Frozen, yet don't feel the need to constantly remind everyone of the fact and make it into a persecution complex effigy.
The most annoying thing about bronies is that they assume that other people are annoyed at their supposed gender defiance when really, we're annoyed that they won't shut up about ponies when we are involved in something else. Also, liking a children's cartoon "for girls" is incredibly mild in terms of gender stereotypes. Try wearing skirts in public before crowing about how gender deviant you are.
As for fantasy and gender demographics, this is anecdotal evidence, but the anime and JRPG forums I went to have a relatively even male/female userbase, even (especially) shonen.
That doesn't mean the name itself isn't terrible. And even though I'm sure you're quite right that most people using the term don't mean it in a gendered way, that doesn't erase the gendered-ness of the term. I know, personally, female fans of the show who feel excluded by the term.I can kind of get that. I mean, I was kind of annoyed by seeing all the pony avatars on TV Tropes a couple years ago before I became a fan.
However, I think that a lot of it's overblown. There exist entire spaces on the net like Reddit's /r/CringePics which are essentially dedicated bullying spaces where the insecure make fun of other insecure people, and quite a lot of it is aimed at pony-related comments. It's gotten to the point where even posting a comment with a pony avatar on Youtube is enough to get angry replies. Hell, A let's player I follow did an run of a pony fangame (and he wasn't even a fan of the show, his girlfriend who commented with him was), and people started saying things like "you gay" and "kill it with fire." There was even a ten-year-old boy named Micheal Morones who attempted suicide because how other kids treated him for liking the show.
I guess what I'm saying here is that I hate bullies. I hate people who think that other people liking something they don't or being "annoying" about it gives them a free pass to harass, insult, and belittle them for it, even moreso when they try to hide it under the guise of some noble cause. I have several close friends in my Magic playgroup who are also fans of the show, and it pisses me off to see so many people on the internet thinking this gives them an excuse to act like gigantic assholes without consequence. (Especially when some of the people doing this are anime fans, who if anything should know exactly what it's like to be on the receiving end of this kind of attitude.)
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Meh, they don't really cut into the target audience that much. If you compare the expanded audience leading to more seasons and fan content to the unlikely scenario of awkward nerds creeping kids out and the risk of them stumbling upon 18+ content that is avoidable with good parental controls, it's still a net positive thing for the target demographic.
Yeah, I'm going to disagree on this. Demanding that people abandon a name that gives them something coherent to identify with and promotes community spirit for the sole reason that you don't like the word isn't really justified in my eyes.
Getting offended by the inclusion of the word "bro" in "brony" is kind of like the people who are massively offended by "feminism" because it has "female" in it.
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The problem here is that there's a backlash against a backlash against a backlash.
If not for the stereotype about what male tastes "should" be like in media, the whole brony phenomenon wouldn't exist; MLP:FIM would probably be a generally well-received though still children-oriented show. But there is a stereotype that guys for some reason shouldn't be interested in cutesy ponies and bright color schemes in a children's cartoon, so some of the guys who do like this show became sick of feeling ashamed about their tastes and decided to be bold about showing it off instead.
Then some of those people started being obnoxious, either overdoing their cause or hijacking it for other purposes (or maybe both), and then there started to be a backlash against them.
Then some of those people who hate on bronies started being obnoxious themselves, so now there's a backlash against those people.
So basically you have a chain of some people being obnoxious and other people feeling offended and giving a fuck.
I can't say I agree with this, either. The association of "bro" and "dudebro" with this kind of thing is mainly the result of a strawman caricature that people set up to make it easier to tear down others they don't like. It's a standard tactic among people who want to give their "enemy" an entirely negative identity so that they can fight it without really having to think about what they're doing.
Other examples of this include "neckbeards", "libtards", "conservatards", "feminazis", and basically any other disparaging name that's based purely on an exaggerated stereotype from people who've already decided long in advance who they want to hate.
Then why do men apply the label to themselves unironically? (e.g. bros before hoes) The only time you're going to see the other labels self-applied is if it's tongue-in-cheek.
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I've never actually heard someone say "bros before hoes" unironically. I don't doubt that it happens, but it seems like such a cliche at this point that I can't imagine it really anywhere near as much of a thing in real life as people make it out to be. Either way, what makes it bad isn't the word "bro" but the word "hoes", which is actually a harmful word since it's a disparaging remark towards women.
I still think that railing against the label of "brony" is not only stupid, but also does far more harm than good. The only true purpose of such a label is to allow people to form something resembling a collective identity of like-minded interests. Judging such a label for anything other than that is pointless, because it's what people do that matters, not what label they do it under.
That, and saying "there are no good bronies" implies that it is impossible to be a good person if you identify as a brony, which is not only completely false, but also an emotionally manipulative argument that effectively condones bullying and abuse based on the label.
People need to stop railing against the label, and start railing against the individuals who do wrong. If you're going to judge a person negatively for no other reason than that they identify as a "brony", then I'm sorry, but you're being an asshole. They have done literally nothing wrong aside from using a word you dislike (and not even anything that comes close to an actual slur) and you are insistent on demanding that they abandon something that brings them happiness and/or comfort.
(And for the record, I don't think "bromance" is that bad either. It's a joke that's meant to distinguish a Heterosexual Life Partnership from an actual gay relationship.)
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You realize that's a futile effort, right? Nobody has the time or attention span to care about fandom squabbles.
The media overwhelmingly uses the term bronies, and to most outsiders this will simply mean 'male fan of MLP', end of story. The people who would view you negatively for it wouldn't care whether you called yourself a brony, a mareman, or simply a fan of the show, they would still hold to the perception that you're a)an emasculated manchild if the negative view comes from chauvinism or b)a misogynist neckbeard if they come from a leftish angle, and protesting that you're not like the bad apples would only make the latter distrust you more due to the logic of kafkatrapping.
Besides, the most problematic element of the fandom(the 4chan segment) already hates the brony label anyway and see how well their efforts to relabel themselves horsefuckers have been noticed.
this
I mean, that's basically what it means to me.
This even applies to some bronies themselves.
read: just saying he's your friend is so gay, man