There is an expression: “One bad apple spoils the barrel.” It has to do with public perception going against a group due to the behavior of just one maverick. Of course, it’s not fair to the group being discussed.

The brony community has long been a pronounced example of an eccentric group, and the legacy media has long sought after any excuse to jump all over them.

Now, thanks to the actions of one bad guy, the entire brony fandom has been “linked with neo-Nazism & shootings”. Sound unfair? That’s just how The Sun has framed it with the following headline:

In reality, bronies aren’t especially dangerous, though I still wouldn’t let them play with any children of mine. The vast majority of bronies are just fans of the show. It would be great if the article pointed that out.

Oh, hold on. They did. Eight paragraphs into the story:

While the overwhelming majority of bronies are just sincere fans of the series,…

The Sun’s article

Then they went right back to framing the fandom as deranged sociopaths:

…online forums have been infested with extreme porn and racist messaging for years — and have even been linked with real world violence before.

The Sun, continuing the same sentence

When discussing bronies, it’s hard to tell where the irony ends and the fanatical lunacy begins. But one fan took things too far when he carried out a mass killing, beforehand expressing a desire to be with the character of Applejack (pictured above) “in the afterlife”.

I can’t speak for bronies, but I imagine that they are currently saddened, both at the tragedy, and by reason of the press’ attempts to frame them in an intensely negative light. The list of people falsely-branded as racist or neo-Nazi is growing by the day, and it so happens that bronies are the latest addition to the club.

Sadly, if the press wanted to defame any group as neo-Nazis, they’d have a simple time doing so. A long-running internet meme is to corrupt something that seems innocent, which often has to do with producing fan art with Nazi imagery. If it’s an intellectual property that you like, or any fandom, it’s likely already received the same treatment at the hands of photoshoppers. While the artists might find it funny, a sad potential side-effect is that a corporate legacy media with an agenda would find it trivial to dig up their works to use as misleading examples of connections to Nazism.

These misleading examples would then be presented to consumers of legacy media, who don’t know well enough that the images were merely intended as jokes (in poor taste), and not representative of the sincerely-held ideals of the greater community.

I’m a live-and-let-live kinda guy. As I see it, if a bunch of guys want to play with plush ponies, that’s totally up to them, and there’s no reason to complain if they’re laid-back about it. Better still, they’re funny, and give us some laughs. Of course, I do have the right to point out when one is acting like a goofball or is taking things too far.

Don’t give bronies a hard time. They’re people, just like you and me. The difference being that women find them much harder to date.