Taffeta - you absolutely took the words out of my mouth re: Ponycon (get out of my brain!
). That's one reason I stopped attending. Won't say anything else since I don't want to go too far off-topic or anything, but it's really, really nice to know it's not just me that feels that way about it all.
What else... Right, yeah, I think fandom history being lost/forgotten to time is a definite problem, not just for us but a lot of fandoms... But I think we're definitely losing a lot of it. It was
there, the sites existed, Wayback Machine has a decent amount of stuff archived. But to be fair, as much as I hate the Brony attitude of "We were the first people to do this!", I can kind of understand it, in a way, because by the time they came around... how many of those old sites were still around AND easily accessible? Geocities was long gone by then, Tripod and Angelfire have eaten some sites, more and more G1-3 sites have gone in the years since G4 happened... whenever I saw non-pony fans talking about MLP, before G4, it was with this air of "Yes, this actually does have a fandom! :O!" you know? (Which is part of why it annoys me so much that Bronies became a thing... half of those guys would've mocked the hell out of us before it became "cool" to like ponies!
)
Uhh I think I went on a tangent there, oops
; But it is true that we've lost a lot of our history, and I hate that... I dunno if any of you know about the Fanlore wiki? They're trying to preserve as much fandom history as possible (for any/all fandoms) and I LOVE it, it's really fascinating reading through it all and seeing how fandoms used to work, not just in the early days of the 'net but even pre-internet, the transition between the two periods, etc.
Maybe sometime some of us could get together (IDK how much I could contribute since I wasn't here in the earliest days, and spent most of the G3/G3.5 days just lurking on the sidelines and not participating in any of the communities) and try and write up as much pony history as we can remember, and put it on there? Or somewhere else, idk... I just think it'd be a shame to lose all of that for good. I just had a quick look through and they've got decent coverage on FiM's fandom history, and an okay-ish page for Tales (there's some inaccurate stuff on it, like claiming it was the first series to have boy ponies? o.O But it's a decent enough overview, and at least it doesn't say Tales is G2!
), but I can't find anything for the rest of the franchise. It'd be lovely to have a write-up of the history for the REST of pony fandom, I think.
There was absolutely the idea of ridiculing/denying the previous iterations of MLP too, from bronies. Like I said, a lot of them (not all!!! I know there were definitely some fans who casually enjoyed the earlier gens, and then got REALLY into G4, there were people who were just neutral to the earlier gens... etc etc... but I do think this was quite a Thing) were the kind of person that would've mocked us/the idea of there being a Pony Fandom before G4 made it "cool" to do so! So I do think there was a lot of weird insecurity and trying to make it clear "Oh, I like the COOL ponies, not those stupid lame OLD ones"... if that makes sense. And to be fair, I suspect a lot of it was... what's the word I want, crowd mentality? people just going along with it cause it's the "in thing" to mock G1-G3, just repeating what others say. Which I've noticed happening in a lot of fandoms/communities (I think there's a thin line between "[thing, i.e. a character/episode/concept/etc] is genuinely unpopular/no one can take it seriously/etc" and "the thing isn't *that* bad and a lot of people don't actually feel *that* strongly about it, but it's become cool and popular to rag on it"... if that makes sense) but um.. yeah... I dunno where I'm going with this.
I'll stop rambling now, lol.
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we had to make a special trip to get more when i had just been to the store.