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Conventional Wisdom - Bronies, The Washington Post, and a T-Shirt
🕑 Added 2016-12-09 08:49:53 +0000 UTC
Okay, so the bare bones of this story have already appeared in comic form , but I’ve retold this story enough in person that I think I can do it better now in text form. Did you know that The Washington Post used my picture in a story on My Little Pony fandom? Well, there it is up top, so you know it happened! What the heck was the story there, you ask? Well, grab a chair, sit back, and let ol’ Uncle Simon tell you kids a story…
I have to start off with an important bit of context: I was never really much of a Brony. Yeah, I watched the show for a few seasons and thought it was alright, but I was never as deeply into it as a lot of people and honestly haven’t seen an episode in years. Now, that’s not me trying to pull a “Don’t lump me in with this embarrassing group now that I know people find it embarrassing” maneuver. After all, I still willingly broadcast the fact that I attend anime conventions, filled with anime fans. Clearly, I have no standards when it comes to my reputation. So if you still like watching small horsies, more power to you. I just came around to the opinion that, if I was gonna take time out of my day to watch a children’s show, I’d rather watch something like Adventure Time or Gravity Falls, that’s all.
No, the reason I bring all this up is to make clear that, if you wanted somebody to explain what the Brony culture was “about”, I wasn’t the person to come to. I spent a good chunk of my time living in DC frequenting Brony meetups, but not because I was in any way plugged in to the fandom. I just needed some kind of interaction with other human beings that wasn’t completely toxic. Like I said, this was in DC, and most of my time in the District of Columbia was spent either being worked to physical and emotional exhaustion at a mismanaged job or stewing in paranoid isolation like a slightly-nerdier Travis Bickle. I really needed some normal human contact, and even talking with complete strangers about Technicolor horses qualified as “normal” at that point, so I jumped on it. But again, I wasn’t the person to talk to if you wanted to know the inner workings of Bronydom.
Like, say, if you were a reporter for the Washington Post and you were attending a brony meetup to research a story on the phenomenon.
The dudes organizing the thing sent out a heads up about a week before that a reporter would be there to see what was up. Like, so anyone who wanted would have time to piece together a fake identity or something, I dunno. I didn’t care one way or the other, and I needed to go anyway so I could meet Viga and talk about the Digimon panel we’d be hosting the next week (attending a meetup of one fandom to discuss hosting a panel on another, that’s some geekception right there). And to reiterate again, I had nothing to give anyone looking for more information. The room that afternoon was loaded with people WAAAAAY more into the fandom than me. You had guys writing massive fanfics, drawing crazy elaborate fanart, recording surprisingly good music, all that manicly-productive fanart stuff. Me? I was just some dude who’d seen the show before and didn’t have anything better to do with my free time. There was no reason for an inquiring reporter to even talk to me. So, of course, she did.
Granted, it started out with the basic “what’s your name and would you sue us if we print a picture you’re in?” that she probably had to ask everybody in the room. That part wasn’t unusual. But again, that SHOULD have been all there was to it, because that was all I had to give on the topic at hand. There were, like, three-dozen other people with far more to offer the reading public about what it meant to be a Brony.
But then, she didn’t really talk to me about My Little Pony. She wanted to know all about my t-shirt.
Yeah, I need to back up, because even now it seems like what clothes I threw on that day should have been irrelevant. But no, it turns out the key to this whole tale is the fact that I was wearing a shirt with the words “I’m Famous On The Internet” written on it. If you’ve seen me at a con when I’m not cosplaying (or dressed as “myself” with that LOGO shirt) then you’ve seen the shirt, I’ve had it for ages. Michael "Mookie" Terracciano sold them for a year or two after he got tired of correcting people who introduced him as “a famous cartoonist”. Apparently they were terrible sellers (a common problem with webcomic-based clothing, honestly) but I still think it’s terrific, and it’s been my go-to con shirt ever since. Well, since this was in many respects a tiny little one-afternoon MLP con, I figured I might as well wear the thing to the meetup. And wouldn’t you know it, the reporter seemed to find it even more interesting than I did. She just kept on asking me questions about if it was related to my comics, if I’d made it myself, what they guy who DID make it was known for, all kinds of stuff. I seriously spent three times as long talking to her about that shirt than I did talking about myself, and even saw her specifically write “Famous on the Internet” in her notes under my info.
Buuuut I had other stuff to think about that day. Like I said, me and Viga were hosting a Digimon panel at Anime Boston a week or so after this, so we had to talk out plenty of stuff related to that. And then I had to actually GO to Anime Boston, which involved the great and terrible trip back FROM Boston that resulted in me permanently swearing off Megabus (well, that and they nearly killed my Servo puppet that one time). All that to say, I forgot all about there being a reporter working on a story about the thing I went to that weekend.
And then I walked into work my first day back, and one of the bartenders runs up to me, excitedly clutching the previous weekend’s Washington Post. Yup, there I was. Big as life. I didn’t get teased or anything, everybody there already knew I was a geek of apocalyptic proportions, so this didn’t really change anything. I think the bigger deal was that a co-worker had appeared in the paper WITHOUT committing some kind of horrible crime. As for me, I was more confused than anything. Of all the people in attendance, why the crap would they want ME in one of the pictures?
And then it hit me. THE SHIRT. Look at that picture again. Take a good look at how it’s framed. It’s kinda terrible. The other guy’s clearly the focal point of the shot, I’m just hanging on the edge of the frame. Under any normal circumstances, I’d have been cropped out entirely so that the other guy could have the whole frame to himself. Heck, I’ve even got some other guy’s head peeking out from behind my shoulder. That’s a pretty lousy picture. But look at the shirt. Look at how much space they allotted for it. Look how careful they were to squeeze every single letter into the frame. THAT’S the part they cared about. They wanted a picture of the shirt, and my hairy mug just happened to be inside of it at the time.
So, yeah. Untold thousands of Washington Post readers saw my picture and assumed I must be the prototypical Brony, all because a reporter thought my t-shirt was, like, the most interesting thing. That’s a thing that happened in my life. I actually told that story to Mookie once, and he felt compelled to apologize, but I didn’t mind. I think it’s a pretty cool story to have. Granted, I have seen that picture used in meme form since, which I wasn’t especially thrilled over, but that was more due to the knowledge that my face had actually been on 4chan at some point. Now THERE’S something to feel shame over.
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