Just Don't Know What Went Wrong: When fandoms are harpooned by sensationalism.

 

Well, shit.
A mass-shooting is being tied to My Little Pony Fans, somehow.
(Because of course it is).

Part One: A thing that happened:

The Lateral Spiral Maneuver:
It's more of a side-spiral than a downward one. There was once a time where it almost felt that being a fan of any facet of popular culture that wasn't pro-sports was no longer a target for derision, especially if that fan happened to have an XY chromosome.  Gone were the days of the 80s and 90s where one would face all kinds of harassment for daring to wear an Urusei Yatsura t-shirt or choosing to play D&D rather than give a crap about March Madness.  This was an emergent time when technology enabled access to new media in a new way, but new media consumption would have to fit into an increasingly balkanizing environment for young people within standard and higher education. The still continuing result of which has been a decent into full Zimbardian control dynamic between administrative authority, with students, and students with other students.  Such a prizonized school system of zero-tolerance monitored behavior and unthinking maximum consequence for that which does not deserve it, has created a more intense social hierarchy, that emerging students have known all their lives.  There was no moment when things changed.  No one day when shit got real.  It was always this.  Always.  The shooter was 19, we have to take into account that this was more of a factor on him than it would be on someone in their 50s, to say it isn't, is foolishly discounting something with a significant impact.

The main difference aside from a now exponentially increased intensity of these terrible conditions from just a few years ago, is their targeting system has moved away from what was once thought of only as "nerd culture" or geeky shit, because everyone has something they're a fan of now thanks to proliferation.  This chain of institutional abuse simply moving from one type of target to another has only just recently been broken by the one and only Coronachan, who by forcing classes into homes, have for the first time exposed parents to the type of micro-tyrancy that some educators are all to accustomed and comfortable deploying.  It also puts physical barriers between bullying abusers and their targets of abuse.  But the old habits hard to break now return in this sensationalized coverage that no one will still be talking about after 20 days from now (random guess, call it 17 or 22 if it makes you feel better).  He's a "weirdo" because of MLP, not because of the tremendously shitty life he's probably had as a whole, oh no, couldn't be that.

You Call This Archeology?
This entire process seems to be book-ended for the moment.  Columbine is on one end, and FedEx Shooter Brandon Hole on the other.   People old enough, remember after Columbine happened, that if you wore a black leather trench-coat and listened to Manson or KMFDM, the school Stasi  were coming for you to have a little sit-down "chat" or something.  I remember police showing up to an address I no longer lived at because I fit "the profile."   But a whole generation was about to get it stuck to them, because Mortal Kombat existed.  Yep, Mortal Kombat confused the boomers, it looked violent, and had come out just in time to be blamable for obviously causing 2 students who were abusing substances to cope with mental illness and getting tortured on a daily basis at an institutional learning facility which had spectacularly failed in its fiduciary duty to ensure they were able to be reasonably safe from such things. They came for the video games despite no evidence they played a role in anything.  It was easy for them.  It was all there in a nice little package.  And most importantly, it helped direct attention away from the systemic failures which were the true cause, because acknowledging those would mean acknowledging that said problems were boomer-caused and needed to be addressed... and we can't have that now, can we?

To Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Jack Thompson, Captain Kangaroo, Arthur Pobert, and Patrica Vance: Fuck You so fucking much.

Then is Now. Now is Then. This Blog is on Repeat.
A guy who had a red-flag, went to white supremacy websites in 2020, and had a job and life so shitty he couldn't see a way out of it, went and shot people where he worked, and then offed himself.  But holy shit he had a waifu thing for Applejack, so that must be the 100% causal factor because lol NERD WEIRDO! Do something normal like watch The Kardasians!  Nothing else comes into play now, it's the pony thing.  The news is quick to jump on it because it's more sensational than, say... the brand of shoes this guy preferred, and because someone liking something they are "not supposed to like" still not only can be played up as deviant, but also is a tool for the producers, program directors, writers, to meme to an audience which gets a dopamene hit in the elevation of their own self-image by the diminishing of others.

So the narrative is:
This guy = Brony
This guy does mass shooting
Mass shooting = Nazi
Brony = Nazi

Not only is this saying that the Brony community is full of nazis, even though it's not, it also tacitly argues that in some cases being a Brony causes you to become one... somehow?  As of the time of writing this, according to stories published by CNN and The Daily Beast, "no clear motive" has been released.  Yes he went to Brony websites and simped for AJ.  Like I said, he also probably wore shoes every time he went out, so is the news gonna look really hard at NewBalance or whoever?  No, because that's dumb.  So it any singular focus.  It's an appealing action because it's lazy.

New required reading.

Right now, the people who fit the modern American definition of "nazi" are proliferated in almost all the things.  Brony culture doesn't have any more of a "nazi problem" than NFL fans, or people who prefer Dunkin to Starbucks... meaning they're in just about everything, because this kind of shit doesn't gravitate just to one thing or another. The racism,hatred, and appeal of absolutism that goes with modern "nazi" is not a square peg looking for a round hole, it is a weaponized gas.  A toxic miasma that wraps itself around any and all challenges that humans face, becoming a tainted clear-coat over the entire structure of someone's life.  It manifests, then infects, damaging the coda of human thought to such an extent as to be irredeemable.  But was that causal here?  Was it truly a function of the Brony community?  It has been declared so:

From the publication that brought you a totally not made up but also yeah they totally made it up, story.

So whether this incident has anything to do with nazi anything or it doesn't, the social attitudes against the lifestyle activity that is "Brony" have been labeled as having a "nazi problem."  The infuriating component of this is that many of these political pontifications are the product of positions and posturing from petty princesses in Ivory Towers who have had nothing but disdain and derision for a fandom that they do not partake in, with nerd-shame and bullying being penultimate to said activity's full extinction, execution, cancellation, secession from existence, whatever you want to call it. Many of the sources of this associative pairing are bad actors using mala fides arguments in an effort to not help preserve, but rather destroy MLP fandom. It's "take that you nerds! You're not allowed to like something I don't think you should like!"  This was seen with anime fandom in the 90's and now we see it here, when there has yet to be an established connection of motivation to anything at all.  The same red herring arguments could be made about any other activities. Remember Nazi Furries and how crazy that shit was?

Not every mass shooter is a nazi. Some just don't like Mondays.
Racial motivations are common, but not the only motivations ever.

So people making this specific connection are being both disingenuous and reactionary. It's irresponsible to say "he's a brony therefore nazi; so that's why he did it" while ignoring the current hellscape of an underfunded educational system that produces waves of PTSD in the young people trapped in it, the stigmatized barriers to mental health and often inaccessible price tag such help comes with, and an overall despair which has later generations dropping dead at younger ages thanks to the financial greed, medical gluttony, and psychopathy of the boomers.  That kind of thing produces a mindset that can make Fascism attractive as an alternative to the current situation. That's literally how Fascism started the first time. 

And it's not just about guns, I already talked about guns and entertainment media.

'sssup Bitches!

Generational differences are still at work here, and I know I've been repeating things like this ad nauseum (last post for a long time when I do this I promise);  When Charles Whitman went to the top of the University of Texas and blasted 19 other people on the ground before being shot by police, literally all the warning signs were there and he sought help from 5 different doctors.  It being the 1960's they just crammed a bunch of Valium down him and told him to keep his hair short... Then when the -holy shit that didn't work- happened, they tried to blame it on everything other than the fact that doctors gave habit forming tranks to a guy with a brain tumor who had been in the US Marines and expressing violent idiation for a year.  When Mark David Chapman gunned down the worlds most famous hippie, John Lennon, and directly tied it to a popular book at the time, no one called Sallinger some right-wing manifesto author, the boomers kept lining up to give their hero Holden Caulfield a fucking blowjob, and forcing 7th graders to read Catcher in the Rye in school well into the 2000s. They couldn't have what they liked besmirched because of violent actions, but you dear X-Y-Zer are NOT going to get the same measures they gave themselves.  MLP is gonna get it.

Oh and fuck you Tipper Gore too.

Part Two: The nazi-problem:

That Was Just the Prologue:
Now we switch gears to the larger scale of things.  By no means does that actually mean the presence of nazi ideology and those who proliferate it should not be aggressively addressed anyway.  Nazi espousers are bad and can not be allowed into social spaces. When something is dangerous, the threat it poses needs to be stopped immediately and you can go into the causal relationships after that.

Something should be done to combat this presence, and that action should be uncompromising in commitment, self-sustaining, and most importantly, explicitly agreed upon regarding what criteria is necessary to be fulfilled in order to spark such action.  If you guessed it's that last one that's going to be the source of potential problems, you've been paying attention, so good for you!  What does count and what does not count needs to be defined because the "I know it when I see it" way of doing this is woefully insufficient here, and unless you're title is god of the internet, impossible to implement logistically.  Everyone who is jumping into this with the blunted impetus of just Nazi = BAD is not looking where they leap. This is going to become a problem once the obvious content is dealt with and time marches on.  How is this uncompromising effort going to be mitigated with the idea of similarity ≠ synergy; imitation ≠ endorsement; parody ≠ approval; transverse ≠ subvert?  People are already used to hair-trigger banhammers and censorbots being so hypersensitive and overbearing, that they make mistakes of unimaginable stupidity concurrent with robot-logic as portrayed in Futurama episode: Insane in the Mainframe. If you put A.I. in charge of not only filtering content, but then exacting punitive measures against the offending party, then it will fuck up at an error rate beyond a reasonable threshold, and even humans can end up acting the same way too making things Kafkaesque.

The above was banned from youtube for "promoting hate speech" because by the most extreme technical definition it might fit some word filter that doesn't know what mimicry-satire is or what references are. (Link to video here, along with the Original Artist Witch Taunter online public profile).  This is like when some media platforms took down Schindler's List because it had "nazi imagery" in it, because they could not figure out that the movie is not an endorsement of nazi ideology. Don't worry, Spielberg is replacing all problematic images, with walkie-talkies.

Here's Where I Repeat the Same Thing I Just Said With Different Words:
Website gatekeeping of actual nazi ideology as portrayed in visual or audio media is an important and ongoing goal, such things are a danger to public safety manifested.  To initiate and maintain this effort effectively, the definitions and criteria that must be set as identifiers must be set in a rubric of limited (but not nonexistent) specific criteria, because the material it will encounter will have maximum variability.  There is a problem however, in that so many are  coming at this with all the disorganized energy of a college freshman cafeteria protest against Taco Tuesday, and the results will be just as ineffectual.  Saying "Ban Nazi Stuff!" is so easy, sometimes no one thinks of what "Nazi Stuff" actually means beyond the superficial, and how said "Nazi Stuff" will actively seek to subvert, sidestep, or otherwise surreptitiously remain a presence where it is not wanted.  Because these fascist elements are definitely going to try to get around those obstacles, they're not gonna just go home and sulk.  If you can't define it, you can't ban it effectively, and there's no Miller Test that can be done at a pace effective enough to allow for the volume of website activity not to be throttled to the point of determent to functionality.

The official English language account of Dies Irae was kicked off of Twitter for "offensive images" ...think about the logic that needed to be in place to actually do that.  This is an example of "doing it wrong."

It Has to Look AND Quack Like a Duck.
No one is watching Shewolf of the SS because they think that the Münchner Abkommen was the best way to institute Das Nürnberger Gesetze.  It's because the Commandant has oppai-tastic tig ol' bitties.  Software (and people who don't know shit) have censored or otherwise restricted access to things that fit a technical quantitative definition, but are qualitatively very evidently not a an endorsement. Some of the loudest voices of the anti-nazism in fandom ideal can also be some of the most ineffectually vague.  If you don't know what the Münchner Abkommen, Das Nürnberger Gesetze, Anschluss Österreichs, Nacht der langen Messer, The Marshall Plan, Operation Gladio, of the outcomes of the Nuremberg Trials were... do you even know enough about what it is you're trying to prevent?  Nazis know, they're actually really into that shit.  Here's the wiki entry of an informative history source I recommend (the original work is in French but there must be an English verson out there) it's by no means exaustive despite being 240 minutes long, but it is one of the fewer historical studies to focus on social, cultural, and soft economic aespects of the war in Europe, and mostly ignore the military nuts and bolts that everything else is so obsessed with.  It also does not deal with the Pacific theater, the Invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Dai Tōa Kyōeiken (aka GEACPS), or Unit 731.  That's other reading.

So, is this Parody, or Promotion?  Should it matter or not matter? What is do be done if anything? (A warning, specific tagging, censorship, banning the artist from future access?  All of these are options).  Answers to these questions need to be in place before the need to ask them even happens, otherwise this will bogg down to nothing.  Some instances will have to deal with these issues en masse as well.

Quality of inquiry needs to be high, or these images all get treated as if they are the same.  Furthermore, (no one reads this but) if a significant group of Bronies saw these, there would not be 100% concurrence right now of what they qualify as (allowed or disallowed), and such views will likely differ a year or two years from now regarding the same images, depending on what has yet to happen. A manifestation of creeping absolutism is a possibility. Such progression is not bad or good, they can be both, and the result of application shall be the arbiter of such things.

This application of quantitative thought where qualitative should be, is a pitfall that many social movements have faced and many have also succumbed to.  It's now the NYPIRG thing fell apart in the early 2000s, it's how MADD went from a Traffic Safety group to the Prohibition Party, and has the final result of an absolutist mindset of polar orientation (meaning that any move or adaptation away from the "pole" of what the stated ideology is, is seen as a move toward its antithesis or that which it stands against).  That brings a significant potential determent to the main goal.

If you even bring this potential shortcoming up, some of the energized hoard dog-piles like the Sans-Culottes at the Bastille or Red Guard on the Four Olds.  Just asking where the demarcation will be or even a "how does this work" question at all, brings slobbering accusations of counter-revolutionary thought.  In their methodology it is a bivalance of proclamation: You are with them explicitly, or against them.  This leads to the conclusion that anyone who does not openly voice emphatic support in one of only a few prescribed ways, without question, is ipso-facto not "with them" and therefore supports nazis doing nazi things. The process of flawed logic ends up producing this:

X = Against Nazis
Y = Asks how best to be against Nazis
X = Y didn't state they agreed with me hard enough!!
X = Y therefore is a Nazi!
Y = "dafuq?"

Figuratively or literally, that formula if left to continue unabaited ends like this:

Robespierre Executes the Executioner, having run out of necks.

I already stepped on this landmine by saying that a vague policy can lead to both ineffective actions, and creeping absolutism in these matters, and the result was immediate and predictable.  They were ready to go full  红八月 just for that. I actually forgot that, Twitter has a collective reading-level of "high school" at maximum on its best days, and shit flew over so many heads it would have been more effective to just post the Spider Man meme with "how do I banned Nazi" in the word-bubble.  Creeping absolutism is not good in this case, because there will always be lack of full concurrence, which will cause balkanization, conglomeration around the maximum of definitions will then become something forced rather than a willing activity, and as the authority of it continues to grow it shall begin banhammering things that don't fit the original criteria of dangerous ideology but simply have some sort of similarity too close for its now ingrained sensibilities.

And I was originally going to talk about how the line from Nagatoro getting translated as "sus" was fine, and the only people complaining were people who had no JLPT scores to their name.

I know someone is already thinking "this is about modern nazis, not that historical Beer-Hall Putch stuff, and ¡internet!, and you don't get it"   Shut your freshman face up.  Yeah I know all of that, everyone knows that.  You think those Habbo raids were really National Socialists of America having a long-delayed victory party in the wake of the fucking Skokie case?  They're doing it to was originally get a rise out of people (because zomg_triggrz lulz) and then it grows from there, with the infected idealogues latching on to it like a remora fish onto anything the moves.  They are drawn to it like an insect is to a bug zapper.  It expands... grows out into a tree with many branches like racism, nativism, misogyny, jingoism, debate-bro stupidity, and the inevitable ethnicized religion (wherein the name of a religion is used to denote a person's ethnic or racial identity, which it technically can not do, but has grown into such function via repeated bad-faith statements).  Cutting down that whole tree is a longer and harder process than lopping the smaller branches.  And care must be taken so that -branches or trunk- when cut, don't land on and damage something unrelated.  This is not an easy process.  If it were, this entire problem would have been solved by 1979.

Someone is gonna read this and call me pro-nazi, for not being energetic enough, for questioning methodology, and because it points out the shortcomings and potential unintended consequences of going full Leeroy Jenkins on just "ban all nazis" as a plan.  That's like starting Le Mans with a half full gas tank because you can get off the line quicker.  It's not a good strategy.

Pictured: the what, not the how.

Anti-nazi efforts in American online fandoms and social media are having bit of a Boromir- Moment.  Some see using one of the defining characteristics of actual fascist totalitarian movements as acceptable, as long as they and their like-minded policy members are the arbiters of such figuratively weaponized discharges.  Just let ME use the one ring and it will totally work out I just know it  = totalitarian arbitration. That never works out for the best because there's no off-switch.  Becoming that which you oppose in order to oppose it, is a literary device, and as it is such, should not be used as a model for real world sociopolitical strategies in entertainment or online interactive media.  A fan shouldn't get dog-piled and banned just because they're crossover-ing Girls und Panzer w/ the Maine 6 or something, even if the evocative imagery is there.  Take this adorable video of Anchovy for example (NSFW lyrics if you are where they speak Italian).  Is it just expressing an appreciation for Anchovy and her aesthetic?  Or is it a rousing call to continue the cause of the Partito Nazionale Fascista... because you really can't get any more literally Fascist than Giovinezza and the anime reincarnation of Mussollini (except maybe if you played All'armi Inno Fascista).

Measure Twice, Cut Once:
So for the last time, I'm not going all paradox of tollerance here calling this a slippery-slope.  The singular mote of this entire idea is that this "critique is not dissent."  Saying "don't fuck up" is not the same as saying "don't do it."  This is a thing that should and must be done.  Inspecting the engines before takeoff is not an insult to the mechanical crew.  It's something you do to add redundant safety.  So equally, is the advocating for clear definitions and processes not an indicator of disagreement with the premise or its impetus.

Kneejerk reactions based on ignorance are nothing new:

I almost got suspended from school for having a Dark Horse issue of Blade of the Immortal because someone saw this fucking page and lost their shit.  The counter to my primafacia defense of "it has nothing to do with nazis" was actually challenged with "it doesn't matter, it just reminds people that nazis existed and nazis are bad so therefore this is also just as bad."  I literally had to have a friend (parent's friend) threaten a lawsuit to get them to back off.  So let's try to do things correctly, so results will last and the avenues of infiltration will be forever blocked for this kind of ideology, and they won't be able to cry foul or hitch a ride in on something.

All this over some fuckwit going all waifu for Applejack.  I'm not gonna let some big media repeateateteded story of "bad person was fan of such-thing, which means such-thing is bad and watch out if your kids have a fucking Rainbow Dash t-shirt or some teacher sees a Vinyl Scratch pony figure in the background of a middle schooler Zoom classes" change what I like.   ...moral panic, thy name is the for-profit news cycle. 

Fuck that shit, Applejack is cool.  Both as a Pony and as Booze.
(And no I'm not country, NYC born, raised, still live in when not in Tokyo).

Fight against the presence of nazis.  Don't (necessarily) break any laws over MLP though... we can go full Abbie Hoffman for better things.  And everyone out there, please remember, the worst Nazi infiltration is still happening exactly where we all know it is:

BLM
ACAB