In defense of bronies

My journey into ponydom began the summer of my freshman year. I finished season one of “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” over the three days it took me to unpack into a leased room and continued to catch up during breaks from my internship. The interest continued into the school year; when I blew out the candles for my 20th birthday in winter, it was in an Equestria Girl Twilight Sparkle cosplay at my pony-themed party. 

I’ve taken a weird route here, all things considered. I recall watching “Rainbow Rocks,” the 2014 Equestria Girls movie, in middle school but didn’t watch much else from MLP. Though part of the target audience who grew up alongside the more famous airing of “Friendship is Magic,” I don’t even remember seeing it on TV, only noticing the occasional toy on store shelves that didn’t interest me much. I wasn’t even a horse girl. It just so happened that at 19, something clicked, and I became a magical horse enthusiast as an adult. 

It’s a little weird, being a grown MLP fan in a post-brony age. I remember the hay day of bronies, a fandom term for (typically adult) male fans of “FiM” and its spin-offs. They were close to internet bogeymen for a tween discovering fandom spaces like myself; a group of adult men deriving enjoyment from kids’ shows was often framed as sinister. I couldn’t seem to make manes or tails of it: I was just entering my “children’s media is below me, a double-digit-age-haver” era and couldn’t wrap my head around how a show for babies was seemingly regarded as highly intellectual but also profane. I, of course, also stumbled into erotic fan-made art of the ponies, posted mostly as a gotcha punchline against bronies as a whole. It confounded and upset me so I left it alone for a much saner alternative: Superwholock.

Jenny Nicholson’s brony autopsy is a great first-hand account of the phenomenon, and she helps explain a lot of the edgy and perverted corners of the bronysphere. She boils down the overt sexualization of the ponies as being caused by men, particularly the ironic fans that began posting about the show on 4chan forums. She argues that, as users adjacent to the manosphere, men “are not socialized to recognize uncomplicated, unsexual fondness for a female character,” so they warped their genuine interest and investment in the show into a sexual fantasy to justify liking a girly show. However, though loud and the easiest to point and laugh at, Nicholson notes this was not the general makeup of the fandom nor did it reflect all fans’ (regardless of age and gender) interactions with the franchise; this toxic minority is ostracized from the general community.

Nevertheless, the image persists. I recently became uncomfortable watching the Bob’s Burgers episode “The Equestranauts” which parodied bronies (here called “equesticles”); the eldest daughter in the family goes to a Bronycon and is the only little girl around with all the other attendees men pushing 40 in horse costumes. To stress how pervasive this image had quickly become, the episode aired 10 years ago in the middle of “FiM’s” run; this wasn’t a quick topical joke but the basis of an entire episode, that’s how much pop cult weight the subculture held. Though not vilifying the equesticles as a whole, a casual viewer unfamiliar with the fandom but aware of the phenomenon would walk away with the conclusion of, “Wow, those guys are weird. They should leave enjoying this show to the real audience, the children.”

So, if not bronies, who is Canterlot for? Who is the platonic and ideal audience member? A young child — possibly a horse girl — and other long-time MLP fans. To this day, I see licensed newly-produced original debut MLP merchandise in stores sold for nostalgia. These girls and women connecting with their childhood are the acceptable targets.

I don’t take up the brony label, but I don’t feel comfortable sneering at it from my vantage point in the future. I am an adult fan with no childhood connection to the show, who, one day, out of nowhere, became invested in the horse show. I have my little OCs, I doodle Rarity on my notebooks, I get annoyed at Rainbow Dash every single episode because I simply do not like her. I do not care for Rainbow Dash — she insists upon herself. She’s rude to her friends; that’s not very magical of her. I dislike the new generations’ decisions to turn their leads into alicorns; I’m a huge G5 fan and will argue online about it ad nauseam. But I’m also closer to a brony than what the acceptable, palatable fan “should” be. If I were an adult 10 years ago, I would be right there with them, at a convention, singing along to fan songs and attending panels. I don’t have any standing to look down at the normal, non-toxic fans of MLP. I love the subcultures that emerge from fan connection, the creativity engendered. I would have fallen in love with the brony space, I would have belonged there. I would have been a textbook brony.

There’s been a pony resurgence in online spaces. Tumblr user punkitt-is-here’s horse comix series brought people back into the space and encouraged others to enter. On TikTok, a new AU rose to fame as more and more artists added their spin on what the mane six would look like zombified. On Instagram, artists took to redesigning character models, some even joining the fandom to participate. A typical, bumbling fandom, now stepping away from the ever-pervasive “brony” label and into greater normalcy.

So what changed? For one, the landscape of what fandom is and can be. With the rise of companies like Funko Pop selling pop culture to a market greater than the franchise’s target audience and greater acceptability of adults indulging in children’s media, a passionate adult fan of kid franchises isn’t as out of the ordinary as it once was. As my editor for this piece pointed out, the “Bluey” fandom would not have been socially acceptable just ten years earlier. But the change didn’t happen overnight. It has been the effect of shows like “Adventure Time” and “Steven Universe” garnering a wider audience and creating online discussions. It’s also been helped by mainstream adult animation like “Rick and Morty” distancing the medium from solely for children.

No one finds an adult wearing a Bandit from “Bluey” shirt creepy. So why did the general public have this perception of a comparable act 10 years ago? Why were bronies so hated? The easiest thing to point at is the toxic 4chan roots and the grandstanding against the target audience of children, but that was not a pervasive, ever-present issue. I fear the answer is simply sexism — just as Nicholson argues, some fans could not reconcile a nonsexual interest in a children’s show and turned to sexualization: The public could not comprehend genuine interest without perversion. The real key is that “My Little Pony” is a show marketed at girls, and toxic masculinity rules that men are not allowed to enjoy feminine things without caveats like irony or sex.

An animated show like “Dragon Ball Z” or “Teen Titans” wasn’t seen as odd for men to enjoy, as they have action components and are marketed at young boys, so interest is assumed to transfer over into adulthood. Women are allowed to enjoy things marketed primarily at men because (though their interests and knowledge are often loudly put into question) the underlying implication is that media for men is better, so women watch it. Inversely, women’s media is considered lesser, so men are neither encouraged nor questioned for their lack of engagement with it. Media marketed at women is mocked in general, and interest shown by men sees them mocked as well, their masculinity put into question.

This effect was multiplied by the fact that “Friendship is Magic” was marketed to very young girls. To reconcile the hierarchy of men’s interests being more valued than women’s against earnest enjoyment of a girls’ show, one must twist the genuine into a perverse desire to justify the breaking of the order. As a tween, I subconsciously accepted the idea that my girly interests were lesser than those I saw valued by adults, typically masculine ones. Just as I saw kids’ shows as lesser since they were for “babies,” my interests were inferior, so I ran from them. Seeing adult men eagerly enjoy what I felt I shouldn’t and they “couldn’t” felt unsettling, and I chalked it up to the easiest explanation as peddled by trolls online.

We shouldn’t let media enjoyment be limited to the audiences they are marketed to, and over the last few years, as seen by the rise of adult cartoon fans, we’ve made strides in that direction. But to get where we are, we need to take a moment to take stock of some of the first to do it: the bronies. I extend a brohoof to them and their efforts. Thank you for your work, everypony. 

Managing Arts Editor Cecilia Ledezma can be reached at cledezma@umich.edu.

The post In defense of bronies appeared first on The Michigan Daily.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *