Mare Fair enabled shady crypto nazis and a zoophile organizer who preyed on horse rescues
by Patch O'Furr
SERIES: Who runs your community? Five stories about predators with powerful friends in fandom.
Corruption behind the record-breaking charity
Florida’s Mare Fair is an adults-only My Little Pony convention. It crosses fandom for a kid’s show with the edgy chanboard culture seen in news reporting about the MLP fandom’s Nazi problem. The con is organized by and for 4chan users, and bounced between 3 venues in 3 years while gaining a reputation for hateful behavior. It keeps raising criticism about swastika displays and racist dogwhistles, while critics face backlash for protesting. One critic tells Dogpatch Press: “Nazis and racists used Mare Fair as a hate safe space, because they couldn’t spread it at reputable cons… it became clear that management did not care.” Defenders have pushed back with denial and apologism about the con raising charity for horses.
Mare Fair is run by Snowpity Inc, headed by Joshua “Corpulent Brony” Hope, who founded it by milking fandom with silver coin sales and his own cryptocurrency. This allegedly ties con finances to shady donors with crypto-wealth, who donate so much that it breaks charity records set by other cons — conveniently buying a PR front. Behind the front of helping horses, Hope and the con management teamed up with Kyle “Lightsolver” Foster to help run Mare Fair. Foster is a zoophile who abuses horses, according to horse rescuers who claim Foster manipulated power over their operations, after keeping a crippled horse alive in pain and using a baby horse for years of sex abuse. On top of that, Hope runs his own website that hosts bestiality videos (evidence below).
Rukis’s HeartTheft is two books: Covenant and Apocrypha, however when I heard about an 800 page hard cover of both books combined I felt an overwhelming urge to pick it up for myself. I am not terribly versed in Rukis’s work, besides having read one of the Red Lantern comics and having ogled their art for as long as I’ve considered myself “in the fandom”. However, this stands out to me as a very strong novel in its own right. My desire to grab up the book was solely because I knew that if it fell from a high shelf it might break a toe or two. I would like to see more of these long form books, unashamed to be dense and worthy of analysis as HeartTheft is. Did the story of HeartTheft require 806 pages to be effectively told? I am not confident in that. Am I endlessly grateful, however, that we get to spend so much time in this world and with these well constructed and lived in characters.
