We’re not fans of Gawker chortling up its sleeve at Bronies, but the flipside of that is they have the best coverage of the subculture outside of, well, the actual subculture. Although they’ve kind of blown the whole “Derpy Hooves” story, currently forming into an Internet crapstorm.
Derpy is, of course, an inside joke that took off: an animator crossed her eyes, and fans immediately exploded, naming her Derpy Hooves. This being the Internet, of course, there were immediately people who threw a hissy fit about how it was all a giant retard joke and how dare we be so ableist and, well, you’ve been on the Internet, you know how this works.
In other words, it’s your typical Internet Argument: people who are way too sensitive over something screaming while the people who offended them antagonize them for lulz. If this were any other fandom, nobody who actually owned the characters would care. But Hasbro, being fairly sensitive, has changed an episode that featured Derpy, and Bronies have gone ballistic.
So, who’s right here?
Nobody.
Let’s start with the accusations of ableism. Here’s the unaltered clip of Derpy:
If you’re offended by this, boy, we hope you don’t watch, uh, any other kind of animation.
Derpy isn’t a retard joke as handled here: she’s a fairly standard “idiot” character in animation. She’s Ralph Wiggum. We’re not talking about the fan art here or what people say on message boards: that’s a separate conversation. In the context of the episode itself, this is no different from stuff that airs a dozen times a day across a dozen cable networks. Hasbro no more set out to deliberately offend people than they set out to, say, commit arson.
Similarly, there’s a whole “entitlement” problem here; people tend to conflate what they personally find offensive with something that’s a larger social issue. The reality, though, is that there’s a pretty big gap between something you find personally offensive and something that’s offensive on a larger level.
For example, if Jay Leno went on the air in blackface tomorrow and did a whole minstrel number, Black people would be extremely upset. But while they may find it personally offensive, that’s not the only reason it’s wrong, something honkies like your author can have a hard time understanding. It’s also wrong because Leno would be participating in a form of systematic oppression and institutionalized racism. He wouldn’t just be offending Black people: he’d be actively pitching in to keep the Black man down.
This isn’t to say that in the past we haven’t treated the mentally challenged like crap (or that it doesn’t still happen in the present), or to invalidate people’s feelings: if you’re offended, you’re offended, it’s just total strangers don’t have to care if they don’t want to. And it’s also true that jokes about the mentally disabled can be seen as dehumanizing, depending on their context.
However, first of all, most of the ableism complaints in the Pony community aren’t about that: they’re somebody inflating being personally offended to a wider issue. It’s the guy who randomly shows up on a message board and demands you apologize to him for using the word “retarded” because he has a retarded brother. Secondly, it’s hard to argue a cartoon pony most kids won’t even realize can be construed as mentally challenged until they get to high school is dehumanizing, especially in a minute and a half.
Then again, the Bronies aren’t doing so hot, either.
This is the replacement voice work.
OK, the voice work is bad, but does it really merit death threats? Bronies are so furious, blogs have been shut down, Twitter accounts have been overwhelmed, and basically the whole fandom looks like trolls right now.
We get it: Derpy was a character created largely by the fans and the fans have a huge emotional attachment to her. Changes to anything tend to freak nerds out, but especially this kind of nerd.
That said…oh brother. We thought the guy arguing that fighting games have a culture of sexual harassment they’re entitled to was going to be the biggest nerd fail this week. Nope, here’s a lower place.
Did it occur to anybody that this was just a little, we don’t know, entitled and sad? Freaking out over cartoon voicework to the degree that blogs normally covering celebrity hookups and bad press releases take note and think it’s funny? We get that it matters to you, and that it matters a lot, but there does come a point where you have to look at yourself and ask if maybe you aren’t overreacting slightly.
Of course, none of this means that we have to let Hasbro off the hook, either.
Here’s the big problem: Hasbro had to know the Bronies were going to go ape and that this was going to be a gigantic mess inside the community.
Admittedly, Hasbro has an insanely difficult job: they rebooted a series to sell toys to little girls and discovered at least some of the toys were instead being sold to obsessed young men, some of whom are rather weird. They can’t ignore these guys entirely, they’re the ones who drove the show from something parents watch with their kids to a minor pop culture phenomenon. But at the same time, they’re faced with an audience impossible to please.
There was no good option here, as they were stuck between two very entitled populations, but the option they went with was probably the worst one. They could have just quietly taken the episode off the air and iTunes, and quietly retired the character to background scenes or the occasional silent sight gag. Instead, they chose the method that was going to cause the most mess.
So, there we have it: far too many words on a dispute few care about and means nothing where everyone’s wrong. Any Bronies want to weigh in about how they feel?
image courtesy Hasbro