Something that baffles me is that a lot of MLP 'fans' will look at the older gens and call them ugly for looking even SLIGHTLY more horselike han the weird fox/deer/cat things in g4. I love the g4 ponies but come on. God forbid the EQUINE has a slightly elongated face 😭 (literally what)
Regarding the HC about Changelings trying to emulate ponies, what do you think of changelings celebrating Hearth’s Warming to enjoy the celebration of “pony history” as Ocellus read in guidelines from Hearth’s Warming club?
The Changelings were basically stripped of their cultural identity when Chrysalis was run off, and instead of having a thoughtful arc of self-discovery, The Pony’s Burden swept in to mould them into Ponies Lite. The “haha, Twilight has cultural myopia and left out key concepts she thought were a given” aspect of the gag made me laugh, but I wish they had their own holidays instead of their entire pre-missionary past being defined solely by the awfulness of their abusive parent.
I celebrate Christmas non-religiously myself as a family/food/presents event, and it would have been fine for the ponies to invite the changelings over to join in the celebration (everyone loves a good celebration). In that hypothetical self-discovery arc, the changelings could have tried out Hearth’s Warming at home to see what it’s like, and decided to make their own holiday that’s a better fit for them.
Why are y’all sleepin' on Stygian? Like, I get it, he was this big ol angstball and Starswirl omg !!!!! But like, he’s got a lot of potential and he’s a fuckin cutie and just, the boy needs more love!
My best friend and I really do want to go see the MLP movie together in theaters. Problem, he says, and I understand, is he doesn’t want to be seen as a brony. Now before anyone blows up my ask box with “dude your friend sounds like a narrowminded jerk” hear me out. I’ve shown him the show and he’s a passive fan. He’s not like me and in the community. But he’ll watch what I show him and enjoy it and laugh.
But the other day he seemed to have changed his tune and said “I’ll take you to see the pony movie if you want.”
So there’s been a post I’ve seen floating around about how toxic and bad the MLP fanbase is, and I’d like to make it clear that it absolutely is. Unfortunately, I think that post is lacking in some important context regarding that fandom, how it started, and why it is the way it is.
I’ll put my card on the table now: I used to a brony. A long time ago, when the show first started, I really dug it. It was cute, funny, moving, and sometimes surprisingly dark. Lauren Faust had worked on one of my favorite cartoons of all time, The Powerpuff Girls, and this new cartoon just jumped with that energy, and an energy all its own.
It was the fandom that got me to watch the show, and for a time it was the fandom that kept me watching. It’s easy to look back now and just see the worst aspects of it, but that fandom did a lot of good too. It raised money for charity. It made genuinely cool fanworks, from a weirdly intricate post-apocalyptic sci-fi fanfic to a bouncy cartoon fighting game that Lauren Faust herself would join over time. As an ex-fan, I’ll stand by these and other really, actually exciting pieces of fanart.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic also actually helped its fans. The show was lighthearted and sweet. Everything always worked out. I can’t tell you how many slightly-saccharine stories about people dealing with depression who found the show and found that it helped them. That’s beautiful. Fucking fight me, I don’t give a shit. And just as a lot of young queer folx found identity in the furry fandom, I suspect a lot of them did in the MLP fandom as well.
But things started to take a turn. It became increasingly clear that the MLP fandom was cracked in half, straight down the middle...and that’s because the fandom started on 4chan.
See, the MLP fandom is a joke to a lot of people, but the meta bit is that it was a joke to the people who started it. 4chan, being the Irony Bros to End All Irony Bros, decided to start watching it as a gag...and some of them actually liked it. The fandom grew from there, but it always had that 4chan DNA--that sexist, harassing DNA.
If you’re wondering how such a lighthearted, sweet show could end up with such a disturbing fandom, that’s why. A lot of us couldn’t see this from the inside of the fandom--at least, for a while--but there was something rotting inside of the fandom.
Yeah, the porn. I guess we should talk about the porn.
The porn always weirded me out, but I don’t really care too much about it existing. You do you, and I’ll be busy not being anywhere near your jerkoff fantasies about Fluttershy. It’s fine. Mostly harmless, as the man said.
The issue was the volume. Equestria Daily (the center of the fandom) posted regular fanart updates, which were cute...until they weren’t. NSFW images started creeping into them. And I began to notice the fandom beginning to crack in two.
The text of MLP was a show about girl power, helping your friends, etc. But the toxic segments of the fandom were somehow completely missing this. I had always assumed the MLP fandom would embrace this girly stuff and rethink their own masculinity, dropping the toxic bits to become better people.
They did not. They doubled down.
The insecurity of the fandom, combined with the 4chan DNA, ate it alive. Its need to try to be manly in the context of a show about candy-colored fucking cartoon ponies was cancerous. You wanna know how MRAs could possibly come out of a show like this? That’s why.
And as it happened, all the members of the fandom who weren’t toxic left. The creator of the show did, too. Whatever good the fandom could’ve done, that good was gone.
Frankly, coverage of the fandom didn’t help either. With every new report about those wacky Bronies, the fandom grew more toxic and more insecure.
So...why am I writing this? I don’t really know. There’s just a lot of stuff I needed to get off my chest, on one hand. On the other, I don’t think it’s fair writing off the fandom as just being a bunch of creeps. They had the potential to be so much more, and--again--this show actually helped people. That’s cool.
I haven’t looked at the fandom in years. Don’t really want to. Don’t really know what there is to gain from this story. But I needed to say something.
