Some of you who know me beyond My Little Pony will know that last year, to my enormous surprise, I found myself immersed in what I discovered were the deeply abusive production conditions of a fifty-year-old horror film. I'd never watched The Last House on the Left (1972) until then, never even wanted to watch it – but I saw a thread, pulled it, and ended up down a rabbit hole. Mixed metaphor I know, but there is a link with MLP here, so bear with me.
I won't go into great detail, but the bare facts are these: Last House was a low-budget horror feature, the first such film made by Wes Craven. It's often talked about by horror fans in terms of Craven's career or its influence on the rape-revenge genre or whatever. It's much less commonly discussed that one of its stars, Sandra Peabody,¹ was severely psychologically abused by certain co-stars during production. I get the feeling many people who watch the film don't even know about this.
¹ Credited as Sandra Cassel.
And a big reason for this is that people haven't asked questions, at least not enough. The late David Hess kept being invited to conventions even after he'd admitted in Vanity Fair – not some ultra-obscure fanzine – that he'd used coercion and threats to Peabody on a level that today we'd consider horrifying. As far as I can tell, the horror and cinema media didn't really talk about it beyond trivia spots. Craven – then still alive and active – didn't speak out and wasn't publicly challenged about his set management.
This is where My Little Pony fandom comes into the picture. I think we all know by now that back in the earlier days of our community, the phrase "love and tolerate" was too often seen as an absolute – meaning that a small but ethically significant number of the people who were welcomed in should not have been. In fact, should have been told, "No. Get out and stay out." We also know that this took far, far too long to be acknowledged, and that people were hurt as a result. That is to our shame.
But where can people raise these questions in the mid-2020s? They can do it on a small scale by talking to friends and contacts on Discord servers or whatever, but only a few people see that. The days of mass-usage forums and message boards are over. Social media has been degraded and politicised to the point where it's often useless except for chatting to people who already agree with you. Many websites have either instituted heavy moderation for comments or dropped the ability altogether. And so on.
That leaves large in-person gatherings, which in the MLP world essentially means conventions. But questions at cons are moderated. If someone had attended a horror con's Q&A session in 2008, when the Vanity Fair piece was published, and said they wanted to say, "David Hess, by your own admission you're an abusive shit" then it would likely have been shut down. Similarly, if someone had stood up in a large Pony panel and said, "Look, this guy on the stage has admitted inappropriate contact with minors; why the hell's he here?" the same would likely have applied.
Conventions and similar events are essentially celebratory spaces, and the feeling of "getting away from it all" is important to a large number of attendees, absolutely including me. It's only honest to say that I wouldn't pay to go to a Pony convention where serious/political issues dominated. But asking the questions I mentioned in those specific cases would have been not only reasonable, but at least arguably morally necessary and better respecting of survivors than leaving everything to "lore'n'listicles".
Connoisseurs of fright the big horror media outlets may be, but rocking the boat that contains Wes Craven's beautifully preserved legacy seems to be too scary a prospect. In Pony we don't have such things. Equestria Daily was perhaps that place for a few years, but even EQD has declined very noticeably in reach since the halcyon days of a decade ago. So for more than half a dozen people to see what you ask, you need a mass, in-person space: a convention. We're back where we started.
In a fragmented online culture, almost everywhere has evolved rules against, essentially, making too much of a fuss. We seem to have created – even if with good intentions – an environment where, #MeToo notwithstanding, speaking out about abusers within has become more difficult. That's really not good, especially for a fandom like ours in Pony where we know predators have got in and harmed people because of insufficient scrutiny.
Knowing where to draw the boundary is extremely difficult. I can't say I'd be confident of getting it right, especially as there's an undeniable risk of false or even malicious accusations. But the principle remains: just occasionally we really do need public uncomfortable questions to be, if not loved, then at least tolerated.
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