The B-word: Why it's fine to be a brony

If you look at Louder Yay's little "ABOUT LY" section, tucked away in a corner of the screen, you'll see that I've written this:

Vague thoughts and ramblings from a British brony

 It's that last word that I want to dwell on here. When I first came into the MLP:FiM fandom, in the spring of 2012, I wasn't entirely comfortable with using the word. There were a number of reasons, but one of them was that I worried that it tended to imply the sort of fan for whom My Little Pony really is everything, the type of person who really didn't have any other interests at all – and that's not something that I wanted to be a part of.

The other main problem was that I didn't really like the word itself, given the way it seems to imply that only male fans can be bronies. You know and I know (now) that this isn't the case at all; that large swathes of female fans actively choose to be known as bronies and dislike being called "pegasisters" instead; but I didn't know that back then. Many otherwise neutral mainstream media outlets still don't, it would seem.

Now, though, I'm much more comfortable with the word, to the extent that I actually feel rather irritated when I read a piece arguing that "we" (the fandom) should drop it entirely in favour of something else. Quite apart from the fact that it would be impossible to enforce, is there really a better term out there? "Fans of MLP:FiM from outside the show's target audience" isn't going to fly; bronies it is, and bronies it will stay.

As for reacting to criticism of the fandom? In a lot of cases, the best course is simply "Don't". If a writer is spending a whole piece telling us that we're all pathetic manchildren, evil child stalkers, active bestialists, incapable losers or any combination of the above, they're probably not likely to react even to reasoned argument. They're not going to go away, so it might be better if we spent our time on more interesting things.

I understand how hard it can be to hold your tongue when you see a writer who says that they wouldn't trust bronies with their kids. (Goodness knows what they'd make of those bronies who have their own kids.) It's a very emotive charge, for obvious reasons, and so naturally it's upsetting. But if a writer won't allow any form of disagreement with their point of view, why do they enable comments at all?

The one place where I might make a slight exception is if a writer has made a clear error of fact. For example, claiming that cons like BUCK were originally aimed at little kids, or stating that there's explicit fanart on the first page of Google results for pony names. Both of those are demonstrably untrue. But it's so easy to get off the point and start giving opinions. If you do correct facts, only do it if you can link to a strong source proving you right.

What we have here is, I firmly believe, a fundamentally good and decent fandom. There are bad bronies who've done bad things. We shouldn't shrink from calling those people out any more than we would if we came across them outside the fandom. But that's a far cry from saying that what we're part of is an utter cesspit of moral depravity and filth. No. It's really not. No more than any other subset of this strange and wonderful thing we call life.

Bring a brony doesn't magically make you a better person. It doesn't give you a free pass to hurt people by word or deed. And nobody should be pushed into identifying as a brony unless they freely choose to. But if you want to call yourself a brony, if you like the idea of being part of this crazy group of people, then go right ahead and do it. Do you have anything to be ashamed of? No? Then you have nothing to be ashamed of by calling yourself a brony.