It bums me out that a lot of people in the fandom don’t call themselves bronies because of what other people think it means.
It’s our label. We’ll define it. If you want to be a brony, then go ahead and tell people why brony means to you.
In a way, I can understand why people associate the term brony with bad things because as humans, we tend to focus on the bad things that happen rather than the good. Also, there is now a bad sterotype when people imagine a typical brony.
I’d rather we have a term for the bad people in the mlp fandom so the term brony can be slowly not seen as something horrible.
In reply to LBT’s first paragraph. Something I actually recently thought about before seeing this is that: I think having a name also tends to make people treat any group with a name as more of a hivemind and always judge based on the worst. Using other fandoms before us an example: Trekkies, furries. Those fandoms have names, and much like us have caught some shit and is a subject of parody or ridicule even in mainstream media. However, something that doesn’t really have a fandom name, such as Pokemon doesn’t really have that same stigma. Even thought theres mountains of underage and bestiality (and just as many if not more untagged) porn no one makes the assumption that you like it because you want to see porn of underage trainers or monsters.
Another example, the Korra fandom recently had an incident where one of the sites offering streams of the Season premiere had shown porn during commercial breaks. This stream was also streamed by other streams and was also seen by kids and families outside of the USA or those who don’t have cable. And you’ll never guess what happened…. people blamed the person(s) who ran that stream. They actually held the offending person(s) responsible instead of going “All Korra fans are awful”, “Kill all Korra fans”, “Korra fans are all sexist scum” which is what would have happened had that happened if it were a MLP stream. Now had the fandom had a commonly used fandom name… the results might have hit a little closer to home.
Oh, so don’t call yourself a brony, problem solved right? Wrong. As mentioned in the below post that I wrote- anyone doing anything seen as awful will automatically be called “Brony” anyway, even if there is ZERO/ZICH/NADA indication that the persons in question use the label at all. Likewise any cosplayer wearing a Star Fleet uniform MUST be a Trekkie and anyone wearing a animal mascot outfit MUST be a furry, even if they themselves don’t use those labels. The second paragraph I actually had an idea for a name, talked about before “Phony”: http://broniesagainstbullshit.tumblr.com/post/78771504384/about-the-thing-of-changing-the-name-of-bronies
Well thats my analysis on the effects of labels. tl;dr- labels or the lack of can effect how people group things
But askasanebrony ‘s image above reigns true, its still up to us who go by the label to define the label. If you want it to be something good, then do good by it and take a stand when to exclude problematic behaviors/people from it.
Reblogging for this perfect response.
Speaking of Pokemon, I remember an old manager asking me to help them use the internet to find a decent picture of a Pokemon (they were going to make a hand made gift of it). Cue me google image searching it with safe search MAXXED (because I know you, internet), and finding porn pictures of that pokemon scattered about. Fortunately, I managed to scroll away as soon as we saw any, but I about slammed my head into keyboard as soon as it caught my eye.
-Mr. Owl
