Like in its 3rd year it was bigger than every furry con, and then 3 years later it's fucking dying, 2 after that it's shut down
Honestly, I think it was inevitable? The thing about furry cons is that they're about a community - it's why I think the term "furry fandom" is a misnomer, it's not a space that's about being fans of Furry: The Show - and being a community they have intrinsic ties that are much stronger than what "being fan of a show" can provide
To my knowledge, single-fandom conventions either rely on an immense amount of cultural cache (like Star Trek or Star Wars) or they're a much smaller thing (and I can't even think of that many single-fandom cons off the top of my head, there's Supernatural's Jus in Bello in Rome? then what?)
What I'm trying to say is, "furry convention" is i think more closely comparable to "anime convention" or "comic convention" than "fandom convention" as a frame of reference
yeah
i volunteered at a major brony convention in europe in 2014, around the time of season 4, at the request of a friend
but by that point, we were already on the verge of stopping watching if we hadn't already - the season 5 opener was the last pair of episodes we remember watching around time of broadcast as one last shot. i don't know if we saw all of season 4 before joining in with a different friend's rewatch and exercise project last year.
and that was the last brony convention we attended.
we'd still do meetups with the friends we'd made through the cons we were at or the forum we were on
but there's little point in going to a con where you know going in there's nothing for you in the dealer's den
where very few panels are appealing
where you know there's much better opportunities to hang out with the friends who still attend, at a time where they'll be a lot less stressed.
star wars and star trek are sprawling franchises where you might not like every part of them, but there's probably something you like.
and that doesn't happen when it's a con for one incarnation of a show specifically
(my understanding is the general MLP cons are still doing OK with the audience they always had)
