Have you ever read Jetfire2012's ponyfic
It's a Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door? Quite possibly you have, as it's long been considered one of the early classics. Indeed, I gave it a positive review years ago. If you go to the page I linked to now, though, you'll see that comments have been disabled. His profile has done the same thing. Why am I mentioning Jetfire2012 now? Because I'm semi-detached from the fandom as usual and didn't quite grasp that I should have talked about this earlier. Read on:
Here's a blog by Cynewulf, one of the fandom's outstanding authors. In it, she mentions that an image showing a person "chasing unarmed protestors with a bladed weapon before being forcibly disarmed" featured Jetfire2012. As the heroic disarmer? No. As the person with the weapon. Cynewulf's post is long and I don't want to do it injustice by summarising it glibly, but suffice to say here that she pinpoints 4chan's /pol/ board as a major root cause, especially the April Fool's Day joke where it was briefly merged with the /mlp/ board. Some in the comments and elsewhere consider this an oversimplification, I should note.
And
here's a blog by MrNumbers, in which he talks about the Jetfire2012 incident, placing it in a wider context
in the MLP fandom. In his words: "It's the hate and racism I saw emerge in support of him that's disgusted me." MrNumbers also mentions an incident where he contacted the Fimfiction staff over a PM and was told that he was trying to "shut down free speech". (For clarity, I'm not sure from context whether or not that was a direct quote from the staff member[s] in question.)
As an aside here, I have long had a problem with Fimfiction's tolerance of intolerable content. I've always tended to assume that my feelings at least in part have to do with the fact that I'm not from the US and so don't see free speech as the absolute good that many Americans do, some of those in a frankly creepy quasi-religious manner. Regular readers of this blog will know that foalcon is the thing I tend to get exercised about – I think it should be not only prohibited but a straight-up bannable offence – but that's not for this blog post.
So instead I'll move on to something relevant: here's
FanOfMostEverything being absolutely furious. You don't see that every day, and when it happens you sit up and take notice of it. I'll hop back to MrNumbers now and note that he did make
a follow-up post the following day in which he said (I paraphrase) that he felt heartened by how many people weren't ignoring that these problems existed, but rather that they
did understand and so made active efforts to keep such things and such people out of their own personal communities.
Returning to Cynewulf's post, she makes the case that the "new normal" that seemed to be genuinely there to build in the early years of our fandom (perhaps up until about 2012) was
not the normal that would reassert itself if we relaxed and did nothing, and that we as a fandom misunderstood that. To quote her again: "The 'normies' aren’t the SJWs you think are coming for your show and your fan art and your memes. The normies are the LARPers with Wehrmacht profile pics in your threads." And too many of us tolerated (if not loved) it. Too much and for too long. I am not innocent of this.
Is this fandom a good place? Well, of course there are plenty of places which
are still true to the original, positive spirit of the fandom – stemming from the spirit of the show itself. Nobody is trying to say that there is not plenty of good to be found here. There certainly is. I wouldn't still be a part of it otherwise, and I don't intend to be leaving any time soon. But that's a different thing, and in any case "Is the fandom a good place?" is really not the correct question to be asking. The correct question is whether it's good
enough. And the blunt answer to that question is no.
It doesn't take much in the way of guts to make a post on a small blog that few people read, but it's still been too much for me, apparently. Not good enough, Logan. Not good enough. So, long overdue though it is, let me say this very clearly: if you're a Nazi or a fascist or a sexist or a racist or a homophobe or a transphobe then
get out of here. I want those people to be in no doubt: you are not welcome here. I do believe people can change. So go away and change. Change
properly. Then we'll welcome you back with open arms.
Then.
That is on you.
Cleaning up our fandom is on us.
Let's do this.
