@Background Pony #E66A  
“Bully HER”?
 
Allow me to laugh loudly and cruelly in your face. We’re talking a woman in her 30’s that still acts like “BOYS HAVE COOTIES!”, has victim-blamed rape victims, rabidly defended a story about the sexual assault of a child that was later proven to be a LIE (as in, was also one of the people who thought the person at BABScon (the liar) was in the right for not going to security because “the girl didn’t want her to”, even though THAT WOULD LITERALLY BE ENDANGERMENT OF CHILD IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, AND AN OFFENSE WORTHY OF ARREST). Do I even need to get into the fact of her using someone’s intellectual property to spread beliefs that the creator is openly AGAINST? HELLO: Lauren Faust wrote the “Equal Fights” episode of The Powerpuff Girls. And to boot, she has been PROFITING OFF OF THIS.
 
Oh oh, and then there was the time a single rule 34 blog reblogged a piece of her “artwork”, to which she childishly responded that she was going to watermark all of her “artwork” in the future with “BRONIES SUCK!” going across the front of it. Again, this woman is in her 30’s.
 
And this is not even a FRACTION of her bullshit. She is the epitome of someone who uses the very gender biases she claims to be against in order to be the bully she always wanted to be, because “YOU CAN’T QUESTION WHAT I SAY, BECAUSE I’M A WOMAN, AND SOCIETY WILL AUTOMATICALLY SIDE WITH AND SYMPATHIZE WITH ME, AND I CAN ACCUSE YOU OF WHATEVER I WANT, AND THEY’LL BELIEVE ME, JUST BECAUSE I HAVE A UTERUS”.

@Background Pony #D60B  
OK, let me reframe that as a question: How would you feel if someone working on the comic included a portrait of a Limbaugh-inspired pony in a comic, as a portrait hanging in Twilight Sparkle’s study, as though he were someone to look up to?
 
(And the last part of that question isn’t tacked on just for fun; per Ted Anderson’s own annotations for the issue, “[Cuteosphere’s OC] is a great, tough pony character, so I figured, where better to put her than among superheroes?”)
 
Plus, his career is far from “ruined”; he’s lost one gig where he was writing 3-4 issues a year, but it’s not like he’s proven to be unreliable or a poor writer or an impossible-to-work-with jerk. He’s got some well-written stories for his portfolio, and there’s a lot of people in the comics business who’d consider it a good thing that he lost this job due to insulting bronies and making/reblogging misandrist feminist remarks.

@Darth Sonic  
Yeah, he’s actually a cool guy, though to be honest there wasn’t much “complaining” about him in the first place.

The one good thing about the little flamewarv in the comments here is that no one is complaining about Dusty anymore. I like the guy.

@Background Pony #E66A  
>She is only a “symbol of hatefulness” to people who hate her so passionately for her evil opinions that they can’t tolerate any sign of her existence
 
You’re talking about that one blogger who populates 90% of her feed with “All men should die” and “Bronies are pedo scum”, right?
 
I think it’s reasonable to say that most people wouldn’t like a cameo given to someone like this anymore than they’d like a cameo of Hitler.
 
Because, you know, most people don’t like Hitler. Which is unfair, because, after all, he killed Hitler, which ought to count for something.

@Background Pony #E66A  
You live in a fantasy world where DD is a poor, innocent victim just defending herself against a mass of evil oppressors and all her purely defensive actions are directed only at them.
 
That is not the real world.

@TexasUberAlles  
If you’re comparing the Holocaust to someone who doesn’t like being bullied, it is. She is only a “symbol of hatefulness” to people who hate her so passionately for her evil opinions that they can’t tolerate any sign of her existence, and claim that anything involving her is automatically hateful just for involving her even if it actually isn’t.
 
These people tried to make the comic crash and burn because of a one-panel cameo, and they think they’re in the right because the cameo somehow victimized them.
 
These people use the fact that she’s angry at them as an excuse to bully her, while showing no such sympathy for her own anger with them, and excuse their own hate with “I only mean the bad ones” while calling her a monster for stereotyping them as hateful.
 
These people don’t care that she’s also an artist, or anything other than a “symbol of hate”. Their anger in this case is based on the premise that otherwise innocent actions (like giving a cameo appearance to a fan’s OC) become hate crimes because she’s involved.

@Background Pony #D60B  
“Analogy” is not the same thing as “false equivalence”, Drax. To compare one use of a symbol of hatefulness to a better known symbol of hatefulness– in a clear effort to illustrate that such symbols have power beyond their actual graphic representation– is not the same thing as accusing the lesser-known symbol of having literally murdered twelve million people in extermination camps. Sometimes a cigar is a metaphor.

@Background Pony #E66A  
Alot of fans (even admins on this site) wanted to boycott even the issues he didn’t write. Some concerned parents who found out the negativity were even reluctant to have it in school libraries.
 
It was a lose-lose situation honestly… Despite the controversial things he said (and reblogged) I still feel a li’l bad for Ted, but if he didn’t get taken off the book, fans/parents would’ve continued to protest/ban the book, and that might’ve hurt the series, or convince Hasbro to not renew it’s license if parents/kids/fans stop buying/supporting them, therefore killing the series.  
So Ted would’ve eventually “lost his job” anyways.

@Background Pony #E66A  
I suppose it would be ridiculous for people to be outraged at Ebony magazine if they stuck a “non-political” picture of the Grand Wizard somewhere in there.

@Background Pony #E66A  
I wasn’t talking about why “we” wanted to cut him loose. I’m talking about why IDW cut him loose.

@Darth Sonic  
Not from lack of trying. There are people who intend to boycott everything he ever writes.
 
@Darth Sonic  
While some may be willing to write off the end of someone’s career as “righteous deserved justice” over his angry internet comments, there wouldn’t have been an incident to begin with if people hadn’t attacked him over a non-political cameo. If they make it about how he didn’t handle them with enough care, that’s just an after-the-fact rationalization.

@Background Pony #E66A  
I think him getting cut loose back into the freelance wilds had less to do with the cameo, and more to do with his shitty handling of the situation afterwards.

@Background Pony #D60B  
Again, Ted is a freelancer, so nobody lost their job!

@Background Pony #8ECC  
I’m going to say I want neither a Rush Limbaugh pony in the book, nor a liberal pundit like Rachel Maddow neither.  
American politics really have no point in pony, nor a children’s publication/program.
 
Closest we came was this. >>93458 (Though, it’s hard to say if that was intentional, or not.)

@Archonix  
It does matter that he didn’t actually insert any propaganda in the comics. Because that’s somewhat different from an unpopular person existing. People are claiming they’re being victimized because of a one-panel cameo in which the victim of their hatred didn’t do anything that they hate her for. Her evil opinions are the entire reason she’s being attacked as a political figure instead of being treated like, say, an artist.

@Background Pony #D60B
 
The issue is that she and Ted both expressed beliefs that a significant purchasing demo of the comic - regardless of target - is “bad” and deserves to be put down. They expressed these beliefs quite often.
 
While they were doing that on their own time it was fine. Not particularly nice, but what they do on their private time is their own business.
 
The problem comes from putting DD’s OC (and another OC of another so-called anti-brony) into an official publication. Private sentiments have been carried into a corporate work. Ted was placing IDW in the position of having to coordinate a stance over what should have been his own private, personal opinions. He’s using the comic as a platform to provide support for someone who spends a lot of time railing against the people who buy that comic.
 
That’s the problem right there. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t have the OC leaping around the page yelling “bronies are gross!”

@TexasUberAlles  
First of all, false equivalence. She isn’t responsible for the Holocaust, she’s responsible for verbally expressing misplaced anger. Not a good thing, but understandable if she had to deal with people who use “they think we’re mean” as an excuse to attack others.
 
Second, there is no “pick a side, we’re at war” bullshit in the comic itself, there’s a cameo; if some people hate her so intensely that they consider that an act of war (and consider it “self-defense” to cost someone their job over their internet opinions), that’s their doing.
 
@Background Pony #8ECC  
One-panel cameo. The comic did not attack anyone in any way, it had a cameo appearance. The political issue is that some people loathe her so intensely that any sight of her is offensive.

This whole argument is irrelevant at this point, Ted doesn’t work for IDW anymore get over it.

@Background Pony #E66A  
Would you be defending him this vigorously if he had included, say, a Rush Limbaugh pony as a portrait of a superhero ally of the Power Ponies?
 
I hate that he won’t be working for the comic again over this (particularly since he seemed to be a pretty good writer for the comic), but when someone consistently reblogs posts that portray the adult audience of that comic as misogynists and pedophiles, and then includes a shout-out to at least one of the sources of many of those posts in the comic itself, I really can’t see how the company can keep him on the comic.

@Background Pony #E66A  
There was absolutely no ‘‘wedging hateful beliefs’’ in, there was simply an appearance  
…And if this had been the OC included instead?  
 
People tend to take symbols seriously.
 
@Background Pony #E66A  
‘‘divisive’’ because they have the wrong opinion  
That’s functionally irrelevant, which is why I used the most-people-around-here-loved-it APM as a balancing analogy. It doesn’t matter which side of an adult fandom groupthink pissing match you’re standing on, that kind of PICK A SIDE WE’RE AT WAR garbage doesn’t belong in front of the kids.

@Background Pony #267C  
No, I mean a one-panel cameo of someone whose entire existence is offensive to certain people, who then decided to retaliate by trying to end his career. There was absolutely no “wedging hateful beliefs” in, there was simply an appearance.
 
@TexasUberAlles  
They’re “divisive” because they have the wrong opinion. People are destroying soneome’s career because of his personal politics, which didn’t actually manifest in his work.
 
As for how “hateful” she is, promoting hatred of certain groups is bad, but using victimhood as an excuse to bully people is also bad. Considering the amount of hatred being directed at social justice monsters, it’s probably a self-reinforcing cycle at this point. Maybe she thinks she’s only talking about the bad ones.
 
@Darth Sonic  
It’s a valid concern. People shouldn’t have their lives destroyed for expressing their opinion on the internet.

@Background Pony #E66A
 
@TexasUberAlles  
Just a reminder:
 

 
This is what Tex means by target audience.

@Background Pony #E66A  
Not gonna answer that question. You’d either call me a liar or go “gotcha bitch!”

@Background Pony #E66A  
It’s not “having the wrong opinions”, it’s injecting a highly divisive and polarizing pair of famous/infamous fandom personalities into an official comic, then bragging about it, then tendering a “sorry you’re offended” non-apology on the company forums, then going to a different forum and bragging about it being a facetious non-apology. Spherocutedick’s politics are openly hateful and antagonistic towards the adult fandom in general and adult male fandom in particular, and while a great many of the dudes who get sanctimoniously offended by her may indeed seriously need to sit down/shut up/get the hell over themselves, there’s no mistaking that she sparks immediate drama warfare wherever she goes, and that crap doesn’t belong in front of the Target Audience in an official comic book. If Anderson had directed an artist to add Princess Molestia in the background, he’d need to be sent away for the same reason.