Question in need of a response

[obabscribbler]

I'm ... slightly discomfited and bemused, and also a little embarrassed. I'm not sure, however, whether my reaction is entirely justified or not, and so I'm asking for the opinions of anyone who might feel inclined to give theirs. You see,  few days ago I submitted my one and only MLP: FiM fanfic to Equestria Daily, pretty much the biggest hub in

Comments

[van]

wtf kind of elist community is this?! I do think that some fics are not "stories" in that they have a beginning, middle, and end, with an obvious climax and resolution, etc. But that doesn't mean that they're not stories. I can't say what I think without reading the fic in question, but it does seem a bit over the top, and rather, well... judgmental. Because it's entirely possible that what doesn't seem to be a story to person A will be full of story elements to Person B that Person A missed out on for a variety of reasons. i.e. a story about someone with extreme social anxiety being terrified to go outside--but without explicitly stating that is why they spend all day staring out their window watching other people live their lives--would very much be "a story" whereas to someone with no concept of social anxiety might just be "this is a boring store of a guy staring out his window all day doing nothing. There's no plot or purpose." It can mean different things to different people

[obabscribbler]

I'm slowly getting the impression that the MLP: FiM community is an incredibly judgemental place to be a fan, which is a shame as I've been into MLP since I was ... about two or three years old? Along with Care Bears it pretty much was my very first fandom EVER (I ran around our garden pretending to be half the cast of the old Saturday morning cartoon and had toys my mother lovingly scoured charity shops to buy for me as we had little money for luxuries in recession-blasted Britain of the 80s), so it's disappointing that the reboot of the past few years has made me feel like a stranger in my own back garden. Apparently being female is now a big minus if you want to be accepted (or at least it has been in the places I've hung out) and having firsthand experience of a) the original series/fandom of the 80s or b) any other fandom before this one also lands you in the GO AWAY AND STOP POLLUTING OUR FANNISH GENE POOL category. I really, really hope I've just met the cream of the crap, and I would happily like to be proved wrong, but I

[insanepurin]

Have you tried feminist_mlp? I don't know what the place is like, but it's supposed to be safe from misogyny and rabid "bronies" and welcomes discussion of all gens.

[grandlarseny]

oooo, there's a FEMINIST MLP community?! Dear god, my inner girl and adult female are squeeing in turns. I know this rec wasn't directed at me buuuut, I'm totally checkin' it out.

[ginnekomiko]

Wow. Just. Wow. They want a full blown story as in beginning middle and end? They want conflict and character development for everything that gets posted? I kind of get it, but wow, that's limiting. As someone who mainly likes to write short fandom drabbles, I find this format to be very exclusionary.

[iki_teru]

wow. my first thought was "what kind of pretentious douche-canoes are we dealing with here

[sam_cc]

Ugh. Equestria Daily...

You're not the only one who's had issue with the elitism on that website. A friend of mine had her G1 MLP art (a beautiful piece of art, too!) used there without her permission for the sake of bashing pre-G4 ponies... Needless to say, I don't have a lot of respect for that website and think it's a shame that it's the biggest MLP website online, when other places are much nicer.

Anyway, having read and enjoyed the fic you posted, while some of their points could be taken as valid crit, the "It's not a story because it doesn't have conflict" point is just... bizarre. I'm not sure how limited the depth of book reading these pre-readers have had is, but plenty of short stories, especially slice-of-life stories, don't have conflict. Because, shockingly enough, it is possible to have a day in a life without conflict

[misura]

... Since when was MLP about conflict and character development?

In my humble opinion, the art of story telling is much more about entertainment - which is, obviously, a very subjective matter. I also note the slightly awkward bit where it is said:

it would mean expanding on everything the story has already, to which point it may not resemble what you originally envisioned for the story

which seems to change the argument from 'what you wrote isn't a story' to 'what you wrote is a story, but it's not a story that meets our criteria for posting'. This seems a fair enough point, made rather poorly and with an odd lack of 's.

I've seen a lot of squeeing about MLP:FiM on my f-list, so I'm sorry to hear the fandom is uh less than magical. (Mostly going by your comment above here, rather than the post.)