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I want this entire post to be stickied on the front page on this site forever. This is the perfect summation of not just communities like this, but lolcows in general. It's an emptiness void that people have cultivated and curated as a replacement for meaningful activities, like charity or going to church. This is their incredibly degenerate version of going to Church. As someone who has been to Mare Fair three times and was a part of the community for over a decade, it's a collection of rejects that seldom has anything to do with the series it's associated with. The larp can be fun as a joke, but I would never be friends with any of these people. Perhaps in a way, a place like Mare Fair really is the physical representation of 4chan.
I don't understand you. You said you went to Mare Fair 3 times and that people like these can't replace meaningful activities, like charity, as you said. But the whole point of Mare Fair is to donate money to charity to help horses in need. What happened to having fun and contributing to society at the same time?
This is the perfect summation of not just communities like this, but lolcows in general. It's an emptiness void that people have cultivated and curated as a replacement for meaningful activities, like charity or going to church. This is their incredibly degenerate version of going to Church
I'm super interested in lolcowdom, especially how it structurally happens, how to correctly identify and enumerate sub-groups and trends and concepts in such a wildly disparate, secretive and fragmented social environment across all the discord servers and social media. It would be easy to say things like "everyone in this group is A" or "no one in this group does B" but neither of them would be fully accurate. You have all these sub-communities and individuals to discern. Even on the surface groupings of the pony crowd you can easily detect the different social layers. You get all the "regular" nerds and mild autismos, who are just into nerdy shit and fandoms. You got all the tiktok girlies who are in for buying merch for their curated style, as G4 is still big in Asia with their normal female fandom dramas, you got all the hardcore toy collector autismo flavors and going down to the dregs, you find these at the bottom, cause of the the previously mentioned self-selecting ways. I find it really interesting to observe the process where a simple nerd slowly gets roped into it and becomes a degenerate.
It keeps happening not just to ponies, but to other fandoms and internet circles too. The Sonic fandom, for example which needs no introduction, or the Team Fortress 2 tranny hell. My personal favorite though are the neet covens who keep trying to groom others to become neets and hang out with them, and keeps posting all those "comfy neet threads" on 4chan, especially on /pol/ . They are the definition of terminally online, bitter losers, constantly on seven layers of ironic shitposting. It is very enjoying to observe the progression of these circles, starting as edgy shitposting communes of irreverent teenagers just having fun and doing dumb shit. Not really judging them. we have been there. Then as the community matures it becomes more and more active, wanting to "things" yearning for a "purpose" and they usually fixate onto the most insanely petty of goals, like waifu wars or endless beefing with other discord servers or brigading imageboards. They slowly become less and less ironic and irreverent fun, they play less games over constant ironic edgy chats and people slowly start to decay. Many of the teens are done with their edgy teen phase and go on to uni, another large group finally ends their neetdom in their 20s, gets blue collar jobs, gets other interests, possibly even a gf and stop showing up. Since these are often the most mentally balanced, socially competent and well, just fun to be around persons, the speed of communities decaying ramps up as only the hard core of bitter turboneets in their thirties, or people with actual mental problems are left behind to act out. In the end, the groups are ostensibly still about video games or anime or my little pony, but the cloutseeking behavior of the terminally online takes over. In a funny way, their brutally tryhard seven layers of irony shitposting became more genuine than anything else in their lives. Their edgy masks became their face and they cant take it off, because there is nothing behind it, just a moldy basement.
There is that particularly apt quote in Dark Tower about it.
“You’re eating a bitter meal. You don’t know that because someone told you it was sweet and your own tastebuds are numb.”
The larp can be fun as a joke, but I would never be friends with any of these people. Perhaps in a way, a place like Mare Fair really is the physical representation of 4chan.
You can hang around with the nerds who are not too far gone. In fact, there are many of them who are just "normal" dudes with nerdy interests, but those are not really "'friends" in a way like a guy you know from high school. They are more like a coworker you are on good terms with and sometimes share a beer after work. There's always an asterisk attached to it, And boy, it sure do fucking gets tiresome to have internet friends, cause they decay like plutonium left on the table. Trooned out, revealed to be a pedophile, married and disappeared from the internet(best outcome), incarcerated, DFE in a psychotic break, decided to play only dota2 and spam you with cringe political memes, sort of drifted away or simply failed to log in one day and remaining an eternal mystery. Also, people with no social skills make shitty friends for completely obvious reasons.
More on topic. Imagine being so degenerate, that even the fnaf loving zoomies are talking down to you. The pedophile reveal was like a TWEEST in a m. night shyamalan movie. You knew it was coming and it was still enertaining.
I don't understand you. You said you went to Mare Fair 3 times and that people like these can't replace meaningful activities, like charity, as you said. But the whole point of Mare Fair is to donate money to charity to help horses in need. What happened to having fun and contributing to society at the same time?
I'll be honest, while I do support the charity that they consistently have offered and also raised the most amount of money for a single charity in the fandom's history, I find the charity itself to be a bit of a smokescreen and in some ways inflated, since the last three charities were largely boosted by a handful of people donating $5,000 to $15,000 each. LemonDrop and the owner of /mlpol/ I believe donated over $50,000 together just in Mare Fair 2. God bless those degenerates, they seem like nice guys, and I'm more than happy Kim got so much money for her horse farm. I just don't believe the majority of the attendees that go to not only this convention but other ones to be regularly charitable individuals. I can't speak for everyone nor do I want to discount the people who are good hearted, but having seen the people who have gone there and who regularly champion the space online, the regular decorum or behavior I see exhibited are about being as reactionary and counter culture as possible, even if it means being the biggest (foalcon) degenerate.
You can hang around with the nerds who are not too far gone. In fact, there are many of them who are just "normal" dudes with nerdy interests, but those are not really "'friends" in a way like a guy you know from high school. They are more like a coworker you are on good terms with and sometimes share a beer after work.
This is more what I'm getting at. A lot of people there are just having fun and IRL shitposting, which I find to not be applicable in lumping them in with the real lowlifes, but then you get a large enough swath that are too far gone. Some outcasts just take things too far and take extreme ideologies or taboo cultural ideas and make them an identity, instead of actually honoring what the thing they're a fan of would want.
There is a PowerPoint expose document created by an extremely mentally ill underage Twitter user named Doviee/Bambi (weedpone), which provides fascinating insight into the mind of this man.
Buddy, I think you just need to entirely get the fuck off the Internet. You're doing yourself no favors here in any way whatsoever. Even assuming your story is true, all you're also doing is continuing to put yourself in situations and places that you still shouldn't fucking be in. Jesus Christ, what the fuck.
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