Actitivity on that MLPArena

[Beth3346]

Yeah i remember when i was growing up teachers and professors would make comments like "you kids think you invented whatever thing. we were doing that this way back in the 60s". i can't really remember specific examples but it's probably something every generation goes through as we age.

marketing, especially on the internet loves to rebrand things and pretend they never existed before

[lovesbabysquirmy]

yeah the spaces and places on the internet were gender-biased just like today is.
places where the "menfolk" were hanging out were often different than what the girls were doing - and there were way fewer males in MLP spaces. 

the "bronies" are terribly mis-informed.  There was a LOT going on online for G1, just it wasn't often in places that they would have found themselves unless they went out of their way to look for it. 

G4 was very popular with them because animation was having another explosion of popularity (probably due to Comedy Central and Cartoon Network) and many of the producers and creators from shows they already knew and loved were now working on FiM.

[Taffeta]

I have been attending UK Ponycon since 2009 only missing 2013 & 2021. I have seen it grown from a small convention to one of the largest and very few conventions for older gen collectors in Europe. Nothing Bronycon number gazillion of brony focussed only.
What you don't see on the website but is very present in real life when the con happens. There is attention for all gens. Every year I see a lot of vendors who also have been there since I have been attending. This year there are about 80 vendors and I know staff has tried to put a variety in it. There is no event schedule released so you can't tell there isn't enough attention for the older gens or 20 years of UKPC. So don't let that social media fool you
I can't speak for your wallet but hopefully the convention will be in a place easier to reach for you someday

I've been to ponycon several times, just not since the pandemic. The location is an issue - a broken assurance to move around the country by successive organisational teams. But the website using only G4 terminology/characters and the SM feed just reinforce the impression I had the last time I went to Ponycon (pre-pandemic) that it was slowly becoming more G4-centric with G1 reduced just to vending. I get that Brony revenue helps support venue costs and ticket prices, but frankly, I'd rather it was a small convention that continued to include everyone, rather than something being exclusively promoted to bronies and with G1 etc being pushed off to just vending.

It's also always been one of the biggest older gen conventions in Europe, because it was also one of, if not the first to regularly run. That's not a payoff for being swamped by G4 memorabilia. Ponycon held its own before G4 happened, and it was, honestly, a better event before the UK's brony convention shut down. It's not that bronies shouldn't be welcome at Ponycon. But it's not their convention. It was an older gen convention from the start and the whole framework and targeting of it should be centred on that - not on what G4 fans want, expect or need. That starts with the website and the SM feed. It should be promoting all generations. If it doesn't, how are we meant to feel welcome?

That, plus hiked ticket prices, paying for a concert I wouldn't attend, and a special guest from G5...none of that validates me spending what is about half my monthly income just to get there. If I'm going to do that, it needs to feel like a convention where collectors like me are welcome, not an afterthought. That starts with the website and promotion, but also in the whole format of the event and who it's really aimed at.

Going back on topic.

It's funny mentioning gender spaces. Two of the people I talked to most in the pony community back in the late 1990s and early 2000s were guys. I talked to them a lot, one of them went to a lot of US meets (Steamer, if anyone remembers? He had to give up collecting though because of complex reasons). The other is still around and I recently touched base with him again after years. There were also others, and have always been other older gen male pony fans. There wasn't a 'movement' about it, of course, and the world's media didn't get involved in it. But I always remember there being guys prominent in the pony community. Remembering it was a small space then, and is a bigger one now...and how online worked.

I think part of the mentality of G4 "we created the fandom" is that need for validation of something that's the fourth iteration of its franchise. I often felt like there was so much insecurity, especially towards G3 as the immediate predecessor...the need to tear it down and ridicule it to justify G4 being "a thing". Saying there was no older fandom helps them with the idea they created something brand new. A lot of G4's popularity is that perfect storm of tech, meme, timing and audience.

Also, I've noticed the short memory of the internet. This is not pony related, but in football (soccer) conversations there are so many people who talk about football here in terms of 3 years or 5 years ago, and imagine everything was determined in that short period. If you're lucky they can go back to the nineties because that's when the leagues restructured. But the understanding that some clubs here are over 100, or 150 years old and have massive historical achievements even if they're currently not doing well is lost on a lot of fans. You also see them praise a player as the best ever one week and then jump on his back the next when he concedes a goal or something...like everything is immediate and there's no room for context.

[Carrehz]

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.