Allow me to take you back to around last year, around January/February 2013. This was around the time where I was heavily involved in the brony fandom, reading fanfictions, browsing fanart, talking about the show, etc. It was all a very close community and I'd grown to become quite. However, at around that same time, I ended up on the receiving end of something quite nasty. An anime critic by the name of Hope Chapman a.k.a. JesuOtaku, who at the time worked for the online web show site ThatGuyWith started posting some pretty harsh things about bronies on her Twitter. This was all in the wake of a controversy called "Down With Molestia" or DWM, which was made in protest of a prominent fan blog called "Ask Princess Molestia", which reimagined the mentor character Princess Celestia as a horny nymphomaniac. DWM was very vocal about protesting this character because it enabled rape culture, as they claimed. Now, I was not actually made aware of any of this until JO started saying some very nasty things about bronies on her Twitter. I'd looked up to and respected JO since I'd been a fan of Channel Awesome/TGWTG since I was a teenager and found it in, and since I never cared for Molestia or any of the NSFW side of the pony fandom I'd ended up getting super offended by all of her broad generalized statements. I'd been very left-leaning and thus tended to sympathize with feminist interests, but I was never educated in it so I'd not been very understanding of her. I got so upset by this that I eventually ended up going on multiple different forums to complain about it, including the official ThatGuyWithTheGlasses forums and the forums for a pony-related imageboard I used. (I won't say which as I already have plenty of bad blood with that community and I'm not going to try to reignite past flames by inciting a potential brigade.) The latter is the one that was especially important to me, as in most of my "discussions" there I learned a lot more about the eeeeeevil SJWs and how they were threatening to take away everything I ever knew and ever cared about. Unlike most of the others there, however, I wasn't entirely willing to join in the circlejerk and ended up playing devil's advocate quite often. Not surprisingly, most of the time I was ridiculed for it. On the surface, a lot of their complaints seemed very valid: I actually agreed that DWM was a misguided campaign, in part due to many instances of death threats/doxxing, as well as the spreading of outright hateful messages that lack context, and other instances of hypocrisy from its prominent members (one DWMer was found to have drawn pornographic fanart an underage Naruto being violently raped: but apparently something named "Molestia" isn't okay.) This ended up growing into a much larger anti-brony sentiment on Tumblr which, in my mind, is still very overblown: there have even been several efforts to help promote a positive atmosphere for the show's target demographic, such as the SafeSearch Wrapup performed on the 20th of every month. Look a bit deeper, however, and you'd find that the rhetoric used on said forum was much deeper than simple criticism of extremist methods (which is a problem on Tumblr in general, if somewhat of an exaggerated one) but rather a backlash against anything that might call for them to reflect on their behaviors or attitudes. There was a quite lengthy "social justice extremism" thread that I'd frequented which more often than not was rooted in anti-feminist paranoia and made the common /r/TumblrInAction[1] mistake of thinking that confused extremist action with "extreme" ideology (hint: do you know how the then-"moderates" of the civil rights movement are looked upon now? Not very kindly.) Ponies for Parents, one of the most benign and milquetoast pro-feminist pony blogs out there, briefly came under fire in the thread for being "anti-brony" simply because she'd dared to criticize the pony fandom. Not attack, not spread lies or misinformation, not threaten or doxx anyone, criticize. Hell, freaking Internet Aristocrat of all people made a video on the whole DWM thing, and that should tell you a lot about what kind of awful person this "anti-SJW" sentiment attracts. As a general rule, any criticism of the methods of social justice will always attract people who will hate anything and everything that seeks to challenge the status quo. This is why MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat were the first to latch onto the Zoe Quinn controversy: it gave them a platform to attack feminism even when it had nothing to do with the supposed conflict of interest between her and Nathan Greyson. This continued well after the thread was locked, and into the "Quinnspiracy" thread, which started well before "GamerGate" even had a name and was mostly rooted in the same antifeminist paranoia. Two of the regular posters in the previous thread I had eventually learned through various IRC conversations had quite the unsavory history to them: one was a supporter of Davis Aurini and advocated for racial separatism, and the other was a notorious board troll who loved to start shit for his own amusement, but from what little I've been able to learn from him apparently might have had a history with the white supremacist group called the National Alliance. It's hard to know since he seldom speaks with any intention but to make people mad at each other and could very well have been exaggerating, but given his involvement in the anti-SJW threads I wouldn't be surprised. It took me a long time to realize how awful these threads were, in part because I was so heavily entrenched in the community, but also because I actually felt that I might be able to get people to listen to my concerns and why I thought they were going over the line. But as the original anti-SJW thread was locked and new Quinnspiracy thread continued, I'd come to the realization that my perspective wasn't wanted there, and I'd decided to cut my ties to the site. I haven't visited the site with a serious interest in browsing images or discussing in the forums for several weeks, and so far I'm entirely happy with my decision. But that brings me back to JesuOtaku. At around the same time I'd first gone onto the TGWTG forums and the other pony imageboard to complain, I'd also done something that I'm really not proud of. I don't feel at all comfortable admitting what it is I'd done exactly, but it was something that ended up causing a serious rift between her and a former friend, which I'd only learned later she'd been trying to reconnect with for some time. I could have potentially caused her very serious emotional stress by bringing up something very personal that wasn't any of my business to be bringing up. It was only when GamerGate came into full swing and all the horrible things started happening that I'd come to realize what and asshole I'd been, and what sort of people I'd been surrounding myself with. I saw someone who was saying a bunch of really harsh things, and I overreacted to it, to the point where I was willing to hurt her with something very personal and surround myself with total assholes. And for what? For a hobby. For something that, in the grand scheme of things, isn't really even important. And when I look at GamerGate, I see much of the same thing happening. I see a bunch of people getting indescribably upset over their toys, to the point where they're willing to cause serious emotional harm to others and in some cases even threaten their lives. It was like looking into a mirror and discovering that I'd been the monster all along. I still don't agree with JesuOtaku about bronies. I do think that she was being too harsh. But that doesn't excuse the way I reacted, and it doesn't mean that I was in the right to respond in such a disproportionate manner. GamerGate as a whole simply does not understand this, and until they do I'm not going to see them positively. Because while in many ways I can understand their motivations, I cannot see their actions as excusable.