Someone on Skype got me nostalgic about it, so here's an article I wrote back in college about 8 months after I became a brony (so around November 2011) about the show.
I'm not changing anything, even the references to my then-beginning problems with alcohol, so as to preserve my feelings at the time, and not give into the temptation to rewrite it completely.
So, here, after the break, unedited and unretractable, is
ON THE MAGIC OF FRIENDSHIP (or, how I learned to stop hating myself and love ponies)
I’m taking a big risk, here, appreciate that. I mean, the subject matter not only means a loss of about a thousand “man points,” but also opens the door for a world of teasing that I haven’t had to endure since middle school. I’m painting a huge target on my back. Listen, if you had come to me a year ago and told me I’d be a diehard fan of THIS, I’d have probably laughed in your face, or, depending on how serious you were, picked a fight with you. Still, I need to be honest here.
I’m a total sucker for the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
Yeah, get it out now, “Creep.” “Weirdo.” “The @%#! is wrong with you, that’s a show for little girls!”
But here’s the thing. I’m far from alone.
It’s not what it looks like at a first glance. And it certainly isn’t your older sister’s My Little Abomina—ahem, Pony from the 1980s. Don’t believe me? Go nose around the internet for a while. It’s qualified as an internet subculture on Know Your Meme, a website considered the authority on anything internet culture creates. The blog central to the fandom, EquestriaDaily.com, has long surpassed 50 Million hits. YouTube suffered a deluge of fan videos and mashups. Hell, even Stephen Colbert gave a shout-out to the “Bronies” (nickname for MLP fans) on his show. How did this happen, you may ask? What could drag a bunch of college age guys to a kids’ show, much less start an army of devoted fans?
The answer, as always, is the internet. The show itself didn’t really have an explosive release. It begins sometime back in 2010, when Lauren Faust, best known for her work with her husband on creating Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, was called in to give the show a reboot (specifically speaking, its third). About a week after the first episode aired, an editor for a group called Cartoon Brew wrote an article, “The End of the Creator-Driven Era,” decrying the fact that Hasbro was sucking up talent like Mrs. Faust for franchises. Even more, his concern is that these talented animators would be forced to “paint by the numbers” by executives, as it were. The implied end was the death of any suitably good mainstream animation.
Oh, the irony.
See, the article published on Cartoon Brew eventually came to the attention of a board of the internet giant 4chan, known as /co/, or cartoons and comics. Being the cartoon-loving type, they decided to investigate the show itself. Slowly, one by one, people were hooked. The number of threads started to grow exponentially. By the time February of 2011 rolled around, it had leaked to the rest of 4chan. It wasn’t long, in true internet fashion, before a flame war erupted. The diehard fans and diehard haters of the show let loose on each other, slowly sucking everyone down with them. For those have never heard 4chan, it’s a nexus for the internet. Everything you’ve ever heard about memes or internet ‘counterculture,’ it came from there. Some consider it to be ninth ring of hell. Either way, it’s got some weight. What’s big there slowly creeps to the rest of the web as its untold number of members carry with them what they’ve found. The rest, as they say, is history.
“Yeah, yeah, memes. Internet. We get it. What’s your point?”
Well, here’s the thing. That’s how the show became popular. But that doesn’t tell us the why.And any fool with half a brain who likes to call himself a journalist (i.e. me) can tell you that is what’s important. It’s the million dollar question. Why did it strike a chord with 20 year old guys more than 6 year old girls? Why do so many get hooked on it? Why is Fluttershy so goddamn adorable?
Knowing a lot of bronies (and I suppose, being one myself), the most common response will be the amount of work that went into it. Lauren Faust is a master when it comes to producing shows, and had an amazing crew. It’s character-driven, the animation is fantastic and innovative (especially considering it was all done in the adobe program ‘Flash’), and overall glows with quality. Mrs. Faust said in particular that she always aimed to make the show enjoyable for adults, something they wouldn’t mind sitting down with their children to watch. Granted, no one expected the audience the show actually got, but that’s beside the point. In contrast to Cartoon Brew’s fear, they were given almost free reign with the show. Hasbro only changed things when it saw a marketing opportunity.
Still, I think it runs a bit deeper than that. I’ve certainly heard that the style is what hooked a lot of early viewers, but it’s not necessarily keeps them around. I think it speaks to the larger effect that the modern age of communication, particularly the internet, has on us. Two aspects in particular stand out to me. Besides the obvious ability to share with millions of people, the internet allows us to be anonymous, hide who we really are. When I said I was sticking my neck out, I wasn’t kidding. Most bronies I know choose to hide it, or just don’t make it obvious. In times past, if you liked something strange, you had to hide it away at home, and never talk about it, or risk being ridiculed. On the internet? People don’t see much more than you let them. You can be an open pony fan on a forum, post tons of pony/movie trailer mash-ups on YouTube, submit your carefully crafted fan fiction to all the fan sites, and chances are no one will ever know about it, or know how you are. All those stigmas society has disappear. There’s no need to appear manly, keep up a façade, and choke out any undesirable part of who you are. It goes a lot further than bronies, trust me.
The other benefit is the rise of nostalgia. Even if no one watched the older versions of the show (and they shouldn’t, I nearly clawed my eyes out), the show would never have gotten the reboot if Hasbro executives weren’t looking to find a way to top off the missile silo full of cash from the Transformers movies. More than that, the kids in my generation grew up with Ren and Stimpy, Animaniacs, Rugrats, and the rise of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. The Simpsons is one of the longest running prime-time sitcoms, and it’s a cartoon. Toy Story grew up with us, ending right as we departed for college. Even the reboot of Thundercats blows the original out of the water by actually being good. If there was ever an age for a cartoon to explode essentially overnight, it’s this one.
But you know, now that I think about it, maybe it even runs deeper than that. See, right around the time my best friend and his girlfriend got me hooked on the show, I was trying to pull myself out of a rut I’d been in for years. The show’s like a shot of rainbow-laced amphetamines. The six main characters don’t live in some dopey happy land, (in fact, most of the time, they end up running around in a forest chock full of monsters), but damned if there’s anything depressing about it. Every brony I’ve talked to identifies with the struggles that at least one of the characters is going through. The backbone of the show is learning to get along with other people, as well as keeping close ties with the people that matter most to them. The joking slogan of the bronies is “love and tolerance.”
And why not? Stop and look at the world around you for a minute. I mean, really look. The nice, campy, glossy future America imagined in the 50s seems like a joke. We’re bogged down in wars. We’ve endured so far one of the worst years of natural disasters in a long time. Budget Crises. Unemployment. Money’s getting tight. Tuition’s up, and that job market looks bleak. Though the disenchantment and anger of Fight Club might be at the core of my existence, it belonged to the generation before us. We’ve grown wary. We aren’t sold on being millionaires anymore. Our dream? Make a half-decent living. Hope we don’t have to pass debt onto the kids we might have someday. In a world that seems so bleak, we’re just praying it doesn’t cave in on us. We just want to make it to the next day. We don’t want to feel alone in a world where we can talk to anyone at anytime. The more we devote our lives to the technology around us, the more we tweet, the more statuses we post, the less time we spend in the real world, it’s all eating us alive. All those relationships we had, the conversations we have, mean less the more we connect. Cold silence throttles compassion.
And then comes this show. Sure, it’s a bit silly, and kind of girly. But it’s clever. It’s well-made. It’s really frickin’ funny.
Maybe that message of friendship sticks with us. Perhaps we envy the sense of community and friendship these six ponies share with each other. Maybe somewhere in the backs of our minds, we want what they want. They don’t all always get along, or even come out happy in the end, but it’s not some gritty realistic tragedy trying to remind me how grim life is. Not that we don’t like it, but it’s a change. Maybe bronies begin to subconsciously emulate the characters because they’re tired of feeling worthless. There’s no need to fit what we’re told society wants to be if it means strangling ourselves in the process. If I want to curl up with a bottle of whiskey on my couch some nights and watch Rainbow Dash or Applejack being awesome, so be it. Damned if I’m going to let anyone stop me. I’ve seen people so miserable, so depressed, brought just an ounce of solace from this show. If it can do so much good, why hate it?
But I digress. What I will say is find out for yourself. Every episode from the first season is on YouTube, and episodes from the current season are usually up pretty quick after they air on Saturday mornings. We sadly don’t get the channel, called HUB, here at UB, (Oh, the bitter irony) but the internet won’t let you down.
Just be warned. It’s addicting. I was half an episode in before I was head over hoof, so to speak. Few people I know who have actually WATCHED the show don’t like it. Most of the objectors I’ve met think of the 80s cartoons–which believe me, they are justified in hating. Chances are, dear readers, that you, like so many others, will find My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, is worth every precious, colorful second.
