Sometimes I really love our fandom

Fluttershy Happy by Mast88, May 2011. CC by 3.0

Well, actually I love it most of the time. Not always, however, and if you've spotted the labels I've put on this post then you may have an inkling of what I'm about to say. Yes, it has to do with Equestria Girls, or more precisely the reaction of some fans to it. Now, I freely admit to detesting what I saw of the show in the earlier previews, and although the trailer is much better made than I'd feared I still worry about the premise. Hopefully, it won't be a generic "misfit thrown into high school becomes prom queen" story, but we won't know for sure for another few weeks.

However, there's a big difference between whinging about what you fear might happen to MLP, or — even more justifiably — feeling disappointed that it won't be a full-on Friendship is Magic movie, and taking things just that bit too far. Which means? Well, a small number of people let themselves and our fandom down by going so far as to harass DHX employees. I don't personally know anyone who did that, and it's not as if this fandom is uniquely bad for these things; any big fandom will have such people in its midst; but it's still a shame.

That's the bad bit. Now the good bit: a fan named Featherprop decided to counter the harassment, by starting a campaign to use the Twitter hashtag #ThankYouDHX. It quickly got noticed, as these things do in our fandom, and a lot of people tweeted messages with the hashtag. Even me! (Bet you didn't even know I had a Twitter account...) Best of all, though, it was used by Hasbro themselves, and their VP of development and scripted entertainment contacted Featherprop to say that what he did had been hugely appreciated.

So, what started out as a rather embarrassing and ugly story, about a minority of fans taking things way beyond the limits of acceptable complaining, ended up as a heartwarming tale of the goodwill so many of us have towards the people who've helped to bring us FiM in the first place. It's things like this that remind me why I love being in this fandom so much. As you can see from the picture at the top of this post, Fluttershy approves, and there is no greater honour than that!