There’s something kind of comical about the Internet. If you weren’t here for certain eras, you just weren’t there. It’s impossible tro explain it to you, what we were on about. But I think I can try.
Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie was a Tumblr Ask blog. It’s something that I think could’ve only existed on Tumblr: you have an inbox, where people can send questions, and you can respond to them. Publicly. Automagically. It was all set-up, in Tumblr’s software.
There was some sort of thing in the fandom where it was alleged, or at least joked about, that Pinkie Pie was a murderer. Cupcakes were involved. Scootaloo is a minor, in the show’s continuity. They’re friends.
I’m not interested in ponies. I also cannot draw. (At the time, I was still affected by how my father traumatized me; as such, I did not want to draw.) So, asking me what this was all about, it seems like an unlikely crossroads.
I fucking loved this Askblog.
Keep in mind, Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie took place— or, rather, was created— over something like a 2 week period, in August of 2011. August 6th to August 18th, if the Ask dates are actually reliable. Sadly, they are not, as, I remember this going on for months. But whatever; I remember Arcadium lasting until 1999. I’m sure my photographic memory is just faulty.
Why’s that date important?
Franken Fran ran from 2006 to 2012.
This period of history was particularly amazing for human content creation. Or, should I say, art. Gore was heavily in style. 4chan pretty much had every kid’s ear when it came to art direction. So, what was in, was in. Mix My Little Pony with Franken Fran; you got dis.
Interestingly enough, Hannibal would not come out for another two years. The tone’s pretty much the same, even if the situation isn’t.
Now, looking back on this something like 11 years later, it’s easy to see it and go, oh, wow, so edgy. But it wasn’t. At the time, the humor involved was pretty much on the fringe of what we considered normal; but it was bleeding-edge. It hit a note, struck a chord, severed a vein. People liked it. They still do.
UPDATE as of June 10th, 2024: As with everything, when I search for this on Google, now, it’s going out of style. Or, it’s simply not being indexed anymore. And the old ways are falling out of use.
In the interest that you all do not forget the face(s) of your father(s), I am, once again, re-uploading this entire article, and updating it, a bit.
Back to what I was talking about: The limited palette; the characteristic square brush, that no one could really emulate; and the combination of the artist’s being, with the relatively-new PaintTool Sai, produced something no one had really seen before. And it was good.
For whatever reason, the juxtaposition of cute pony cartoons for children and horrible serial killer just clicked. And, as you can see, above, there’s some shit in it that just wouldn’t fly, these days.
Interestingly enough, all the murder, fictional as it might have been, wasn’t really what riled people up. Or, at least, as far as I heard, that wasn’t it.
It was that Pinkie Pie kissed Scootaloo in a comic.
Be it true or not, the story I heard was that the artist, or somebody who people thought was the artist, ended up getting plagued about this, in real life. Phone calls; that sort of thing. It was my first experience witnessing what happens to artists, online: they eventually kinda get driven away, if they get popular enough. And, for a time, that seemed to be what was happening, there, too.
Oh, why was it bad that Pinkie Pie kissed Scootaloo?
The idea people had was that Scootaloo was a child, while Pinkie Pie was probably, or definitely, an adult.
To be fair, the mention of rape, as far as I can remember, also received significant backlash. But they seemed to weather it, just fine.
Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie is an interesting part of Internet history. I feel like it was right at the cusp of the Internet becoming very, very reactionary towards ‘unacceptable’ adult subjects. How we went from Deliverance being somehow acceptable to be released theatrically, to I think it’s problematic when a villain does bad things, I don’t know. I really fuckin’ don’t.
Interestingly enough, the acceptability of unacceptable adult subjects, depicted fictitiously, is something that’s still argued about, today, on Twitter. (Tumblr’s audience has largely moved onto Twitter.) En generale I see it as a natural progression of the Human psyche: puzzling out what it wants to deal with, and what it won’t accept.
What do I think about its subjects?
They’re fuckin’ cartoon horses, kid.
I don’t give a shit. I didn’t draw ’em.
And if I did, I’d be absolutely cheesed that my style infected the new show.
An Addendum
Since this entry was deleted off of Margaret Gel’s Apocalyptic Log (due to what I felt was a conflict with my ‘professional’ identity— I’d prefer to leave that blog as something else now), I felt some sort of great and terrifying need to rejuvenate it. People liked this, right? Or at least those two weird kids who were stalking me, thinking that I was Crooked Trees, liked it.
There are a couple of things I need to say. Once again, I am not Crooked Trees. Human beings online have always had this desire to believe that any vehement insistence of mine that I am not someone, is, in point of fact, just the opposite: if I say that I’m not somebody, then I must be.
I’ve gone through being stolen from, before. It’s not nice. It’s not nice to let this happen to somebody else, either. And I’m fully aware of how this fucking happened— it’s the same order of things wherein someone once thought I was JonTron, of all people.
There was a time in my past where I needed to lie, tactically, specifically, to protect my ailing father. I didn’t want what I did online to follow me home and affect him. But he’s been dead for seven years, now, and I no longer have a great and abiding need to conceal my identity. I am, in point of fact, now a published author, with copyrighted work. Hiding doesn’t help me anymore.
If I were Crooked Trees, I wouldn’t hide it. It would enable me to do much more than I currently can. Por ejemplo, it might get me animation work. I might be able to make a movie. I don’t know! I might be able to do something wif it.
But I’m not them.
Years later, after this whole dog and pony show was quite fucking over, I saw an 18 and a 19 year old duo, this pair of kids, who were wildly in love with each other. Whether or not they were LARPing, who’s to say? I’ll never know, maybe. But they seemed to be in love.
And they had taken the part of Scootaloo and Pinkie Pie, from this comic, and were playing it out, quite overtly sexually. And they contacted me, and they asked me—
icze4r, are you the Great and Wonderful Crooked Trees?
No, little babies.
I’m nobody.
An Interesting Final Note
The blog itself was located at http://askpinkaminadianepie.tumblr.com/
The comic itself was called “Ask Pinkamena Diane Pie”.
At least, I think. I mean, this shit was 13 years ago. Without access to my own archives, that’s as much as I can glean.