Eating Your Own Is Just Derpy

[feotakahari]

Sometimes I think about the people who hated each other over Derpy Hooves.

Honestly, there wasn’t much to her. She was a minor character in My Little Pony, a klutz with a lazy eye and a stereotypically “dumb” voice. But some people adored her. So many fans held her up as some kind of positive representation of mental disabilities. There were pics and fics and headcanons celebrating her as a likable, even heroic figure who didn’t let her disability hold her back. If you didn’t like Derpy, they accused you of being prejudiced against people with mental disabilities and wanting to erase their existence.

Naturally, other people despised Derpy as a shallow stereotype. They thought she was making fun of mental disabilities in a way that was incompatible with the love and tolerance My Little Pony espoused. If you liked Derpy, they accused you of being prejudiced against people with mental disabilities and wanting to mock them rather than acknowledge their struggles.

I never saw either side attempt to understand where the other was coming from. Both wanted to see intellectual disabilities portrayed in a respectful way, both assumed the other must not want that, and both thought the other was making the My Little Pony fandom worse.

I recently saw a Jew accuse another Jew of trivializing the Holocaust. I regularly see lesbians accuse other lesbians of secretly being straight. We split our communities into pieces in order to tear each other down, and the great god Derpy looks on and laughs.

Comments

[sonata_green]

We should all learn from her example: there's nothing wrong with looking at the world two different ways at once.