I've been debating on posting this for a long while. I've known for a while that the next week's episode (Flight to the finish. Spoilers inc) will actually decide if I will continue hanging around the pony fandom or quitting in tears. Sounds stupid, but hear/read me out.

I'm handicapped. Several of my readers might already know this. Now you do too. I've been slowly going blind since I was born. I'm already pathologically colourblind and can't go outside without heavy-duty shades because every light in the world is about 10000x brighter than for normal people. I currently live off of a disability pension and have done so for a few years.

Allow me to wallow in self-pity for a moment: I've had to give up on a ridiculous amount of things that I've wanted to do, because I simply can't do them. Several childhood dreams and even adulthood dreams have been thrown away because they are just impossible. Not 'work hard and you'll succeed' but just flat out impossible. I wanted, for example, to try and learn how to fly a plane. I've always loved the idea of flight ever since I watched birds as a kid. I used to love doing that too, but had to give up when I couldn't tell the birds apart from the leaves because they were all just a mush of colour. The fact is, I know how much it hurts, I know what it feels like to have to give up something. Especially because I shared the same stupid thing that Scoots does: Flight. I remember when I was twelve and finally got the end diagnosis. Until then, I'd just been a kid with glasses. After that, I was a disabled little shit who couldn't do anything. Didn't help that I was approaching puberty, moving onto the cesspit that is known here as Upper Elementary and over in the US as Junior High. I sucked at sports because most of them involved a small, rapidly moving ball/puck/whatever that was impossible for me to see. The only ones I liked to play were basketball and volleyball, and those happened about once a year. Well, I survived, moved onto martial arts (aikido and judo) where I didn't really need to see the other guy instead of just grappling them. I'm pretty big now and was as a kid as well (now 6 foot 6 / 196cm and 250lbs or 120kg). Guess how much a huge dude with glasses and bad at sports gets bullied btw?

So what am I leading up to? I'm Scootaloo.

Yeah, as stupid and childish as it sounds, there's so much in common I have with that little filly that it's gotten personal for me. Scoots has been shown to be a little daredevil with a fragile little heart of gold. I love her as a character over everyone else in the series. Sleepless In Ponyville was the most touching episode I've seen in the whole series, because it finally fulfilled Scoots' dream of bonding with Rainbow Dash and gave her a big sister figure. FIM has meant so much to me over these three seasons and given me so much hope and optimism that I can't even describe it, but there's always been one trope or meme or whatever I've hated:

Scootaloo is a cripple who can't learn to fly.

Do you people actually understand how horrid that is? It means that the little filly would have to give up everything she loves and find a meager compromise of an existence compared to other pegasi. She could become an awesome speed racer, a scooter show-off or whatever. But like my friend told me: "Sure, it'd be awesome to win gold in the Special Olympics, but I'd rather be able to walk." The number one reason I love about MLP:FIM is that Equestria is such an optimistic place. It's a place where miracles happen, things get fixed with talking them out and arguments never last for a long time. It's something that real life isn't. I just can't imagine a place where a character gains wings and learns to fly with them for being a really good friend, but at the same time, there would be a filly who can't learn or be cured with magic.

Sure it would be dramatic. A little filly giving up on her dreams and accepting reality. A good lesson for all those little kids watching the series from wheelchairs. You know what? Fuck that. You don't leech drama from someone's suffering in a place like Equestria. It's about solving problems and becoming better, not accepting the problems and living with them.

Why do I even worry about it? Wouldn't it be a foregone conclusion that she'll learn to fly? Well... no. Faust herself, despite her awesomeness, always wanted to make Scoots a cripple to teach kids about disability. People cite this as a reason why Scoots won't learn to fly. Also bears mention that Philomena in A Birnd In A Hoof was supposed to be just a sick bird that dies into Fluttershy's hooves and teaches kids about losing things they care about. I'm so happy it got changed. Faust also said that she didn't think RD would ever become a big sister to Scoots, so I know the DHX team don't live by the original, 5 years old show bible any more, which has only been to the betterment of the series. Equestria, like I said, isn't the real world. It's a place where happy miracles happen. It's a place where I can go for 20 minutes to actually feel happy and forget how shitty RL is.

The second reason is their adult fan pandering and meta-episodes. Especially now that I saw Daring Done and the HUMONGOUS amounts of fanfic meta in it, I'm really worried that the DHX team has seen the LUDICROUS amounts of the Scootaloo-is-a-cripple fics/comics/pictures and will go with it. Just like how they saw a lot of humanised art of the ponies and decided it would be awesome to make a movie that has the ponies turned into humans. (They said it was one of the main reasons for it, after all).

Lately, the worry about Scoots' ability to fly has been weighing on me severely for the reasons I've listed. Ever since I saw the animatic from ComicCon. I would have been happy if the topic never came up, but they're going to tackle it now. It's made me worried about writing and not feel motivated to write anything. I've done some plans for CIAM, written half a chapter of it, but that's it. I'm just so uncertain of the future.

So here's the bottom line: If Scootaloo is proven to be a cripple, I will quit this whole fandom. Writing fics, reading news, hanging around in brony meetups etc, for the simple reason that if a filly can't become what she dreams in Equestria, it is no longer a place where I want to visit. I'd be totally okay if she didn't learn to fly right now, but if she's told to never be able to... I don't think I could take it. If/when you wish to comment on this blog, I sincerely ask you to take into account that this is the most personal thing I've ever written on the Internet. If you are just a reaction seeker or a troll, please, just for once, move along. You don't have to be an asshole who comes here citing realism, good drama or me being childish. I know I'm childish. That's why I can be an innocent, happy kid every time a new episode comes out. I just want to be that in the future as well.