Confession, I kind of really liked the online adult mlp:fim fandom, getting into it at the end of season 1. Back then it was kind of a lot of really jaded, cynical, bitter people encountering a vision of optimism and goodness that WASN’T wrapped in a cynical and condescending and pandering vision of childhood, and being inspired towards a genuinely impressive, if self-consciously ridiculous, outpouring of creativity in response.

But what a lot of it’s become, jeeeeeeeeesus christ.

And I appreciate that some of the things some of that first crowd (you know, “we”) did, or at least smirked at, probably accelerated that shift. Like, you could half-analogize, half-summarize the shift as going from “Haha dude, what if we made porn of this?” to “Dude. Porn of this.”