I'm going to indulge myself here today with something that's very important to me but won't be relevant to most of my readers...
As some of you reading this will know, I'm a regular attendee and occasional organiser of the Worcester Shires, an informal ponymeet which usually runs on two Saturday afternoons each month in (surprisingly enough) Worcester. The English one, not the one in Massachusetts! We had a meet yesterday and as usual it was a perfectly pleasant afternoon with personable people and plenty of pastel plush (and otherwise) ponies.
There was, however, one notable aspect to this meet, as it will be the last one we ever have while Friendship is Magic is still a live series. The next time we meet to talk about ponies, drink caffeinated beverages and eat cake, FiM will be in the past. The meet has been running since 2013, and indeed I was at the very first such gathering, though we only adopted the Worcester Shires name much more recently.
One thing all of us agree on is that we intend to continue with these meets. Why wouldn't we? The fandom isn't going to disappear after the final episodes of FiM air on Discovery Family on 12th October. Nor is My Little Pony, and several of us are at least to some degree interested in other generations past or future. We seem to get on with each other and besides, the café where we hold our meetups treats us very well.
Of course, we can't know where things will go from here. But as with the fandom as a whole, I'm optimistic. After all, we've had new attendees join us even in 2019, six years after these meets began and nine years after FiM itself got under way. Several of us who intend to be there at UK PonyCon in a fortnight are regulars or semi-regulars in Worcester, and doubtless there'll be a little measure of "Worcester meet on tour" in Nottingham.
I think a good deal of our success has been down to Pigasus, our extremely popular meet leader. I also think people have enjoyed the atmosphere, which is deliberately kept laid-back but work-safe, and which unlike some other meetup groups is still very much a Pony meet. Yes, we talk about other things too sometimes, though we keep real-world politics out of it as much as possible, but we're something of an outpost of Equestria.
It struck me today, when we were discussing our future meet calendar, that everybody simply took it as read that we'd still be holding these meets not merely for the rest of this year but much further into the future. Indeed, we spent a little time talking about our intention to hold a G5 movie meet at a local cinema if there is indeed a UK cinematic release for the assumed prequel feature film for the new generation. And that isn't likely to happen until 2021. I look forward to it!
That's enough rambling – so I'll end simply by saying that the next Worcester Shires meet (or "bronyponyneigh") is likely to be on Saturday, 19th October. We certainly welcome newcomers – see the link above (in the second paragraph) for details of location, times and so on. Yes, it will be strange not to have a new episode of FiM to look forward to... but I'm pretty sure the meet itself will feel much as it does now. And that's a good thing. :)
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