Reploid Productions wrote:Um... you don't have much experience with the way large fandoms work, do you?
In any fandom- not just the MLP fandom, you have three types of fans. Casual fans who maybe enjoy the show but don't otherwise engage in other fannish activities; regular fans who enjoy the show and enjoy discussing it and participating in fannish activities with fellow fans, but can and do talk about other stuff with people outside the fandom; and the completely unhinged fans who while they make up the smallest portion of the fanbase tend to seem like a large part of it because they are completely unhinged, loud, and have to make every single discussion about the show and their fannish activities.
Of the three, casual fans probably are the largest group in any fandom, but also the quietest and most likely to lose interest and move on to something else once the show is over; they don't engage in additional fan activities such as discussions or creating fanwork. After them, the next largest group and the main driving force behind a fandom's long-term survival are the regular fans who create their own communities and pool their creative efforts, thus keeping their mutual interest in the material going long after the show has ended; because they don't obsess constantly, they don't burn out but instead mix the fandom in with the rest of their other interests. The smallest group are the completely unhinged fans who obsess wildly, fixate on one thing or another, and cannot drop it and talk about anything else; they give the rest of the fandom a bad reputation because of their excess and due to their extremely obsessive tendencies they tend to burn hot for a little while and then burn out and find something shiny and new to obsess over. And trust me, the crazy obsessive fans in any fandom can and do drive the casual and regular fans up the wall as a result.
It's just less noticeable in smaller fandoms- with fewer fans, there are fewer crazies. If you have a fandom of 100 people, you might have 50 casual fans, 49 regular fans, and 1 nutjob: and that nutjob gets excluded, ridiculed, and shunned for their behavior. But say you've got a fandom of 100,000 fans and use the same percentages: 50,000 casual fans, 49,000 regular fans, and 1,000 nutjobs. Sure, the nutjobs might be shunned by the other 99,000 fans, but that 1,000 nutjobs can band together and feed on one another's crazy antics. That's what's going on in the pony fandom, just like it happened in the Harry Potter fandom, the Star Wars fandom, the Star Trek fandom, the Doctor Who fandom, the Hunger Games fandom, the Bleach fandom, the Twilight fandom (granted, that one has a disproportionately high number of crazies,) and so on: these fandoms become large enough to self-sustain their populations of crazies despite the annoyance they cause the other groups.
tl;dr versionDon't blame an entire fandom for the idiocy the tiny but really freaking obnoxious minority gets up to!