The Men Who Stare at Horses - Part I

Fedoras dawned, plushies in hand, pride flags unfurled; the call to cultural battle has been issued, and the men of Equestria ride once more.

“The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places.”

H.P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep

Time is strange.

The older I get, the more I realize that it has an almost elastic quality to it - no matter how much of it gets put between myself and the past, those events in the rear view mirror never look as far back as they really are. Sure, some events, some periods are more clearly defined than others, but even the most vague and blurry recollections feel as if they’re only a small handful of years removed from the present. It’s almost as if there was a time where it feels like my internal clock just stopped. I think it was 2011, maybe 2012. It’s a bit difficult to describe, but to elucidate to the best of my abilities, I feel as if my mind, my body, my soul, whatever, is like a computer that always has its internal date set to 2012. Every time, it has to be manually re-calibrated and reset to the present year.

Maybe this is some universal constant in humans, and we all have some year in which we find ourselves moored to in perpetuity as some sort of grounding baseline from which the rest of our lives can be measured against. Perhaps it’s just some quirk that will disappear when I’m fifty, iffin’ the good Lord sees fit to let me go that far. Sometimes, I wonder if the timeline I was born into actually did come to a fiery, destructive end in 2012, and I, as well as everyone else who remembers the Bearenstein Bears, were unknowingly shifted into this God forsaken Bearenstain Bears universe, where we’ve languished with all of you freaks ever since.

Now that I think about it, I do remember first encountering the Mandela Effect around that time.

My own mental hiccups aside, the era between 2010 and 2012 was a fascinating one. This, I’d argue, was a period in which we were seeing a total sea-change in the broader culture, the likes of which we wouldn’t see until present, where now, the general tension is quite palpable, the apprehension strange and brooding, and if someone whispers one more warning or prophecy to me, I’ll deck them right in their pale and worried face.

Think about it like this - you might say that the advent of Donald Trump’s presidency was a marked change in the cultural zeitgeist, and no one can deny that, but I’d argue that it merely set into motion the actual tectonic shifts we now feel beneath our feet as of this writing, where it feels like the right side of the political spectrum has finally awoken in earnest and began, however slowly, to hit back in the cultural conflict we’re embroiled in.

Conversely, Obama’s election circa 2008 set into motion the shift that would come into its own in 2012. After so many years of having non-stop GloboHomo agenda blasted directly into our eyeballs at every turn, it’s almost hard to remember a time where the term transsexual was still novel to most individuals, and Pride month wasn’t even a thing. Curtis Yarvin is correct when he says Cthulu swims slowly, but he always swims to the left, but Cthulu definitely picked up inertia from a leisurely wade and broke into a no-holds barred breast stroke around 2011, because things got weird, and they got weird fast.

I started going to comic and anime conventions regularly around this time, and I can tell you that there was always one or two transsexuals you’d see bopping aboutt, even at conventions held in states so politically red that they’re hot to the touch. Now, though, I’d say that transsexuals make up a good quarter, sometimes close to a third of the crowd at these events. According to friends who are more involved in the video game scene, this quotient goes even higher at events such as fighting game tournaments, speedrunning events, and general gaming conventions. In one case, almost all of the most prominent players in Guilty Gear wing of the professional fighting game community - yes, that is a thing - are trans. Don’t believe me? Here’s a snippet of their top dogs.

And that’s just the most prominent example. This tweet I recently saw describes the phenomenon best:

Looking back, it’s incredible to remember how fast things changed. How, seemingly overnight, demisexual and grey aromantic entered the lexicons of terminally-online individuals everywhere, a panoply of striped flags began to appear on every surface like virulent strains of fungi, and even looking at someone the wrong way became a microaggression worthy of a public struggle session.

I know that this change in the headwinds of culture had been building for a long time. As I said, it wasn’t as if transsexuals were some unknown quantity that came screeching out of the wastes like the Umman Manda across the plains of the Fertile Crescent. They were always present in fringe communities like the anime fandom and fighting game scene. But, like most things, their sudden ubiquity was one of those gradually, then all at once matters.

You didn’t even realize it was happening until it had already left you flat on your ass, dazed, confused, and sore all over.

This is to say, the signs of the shift were all around us - we just chose not to acknowledge them, or told ourselves that the winds of change whipping against our homes and rattling our windows would die down. We figured normalcy would return rather than require reevaluation.

In my own little slice of the American cultural pie, in comic conventions, gaming arcades, and anime con merch halls across the country, there seems to have been one indicator of the coming storm that, in hindsight, glows so bright it could be seen from Jupiter. Yet, at the time, we all just shook our heads dismissively, laughed, and walked away.

For years, they slunk about convention spaces, bedecked in bright colors in a classic display of aposematism, always both with and apart from the community, outsiders among outsiders, as most would still snicker and chuckle behind their backs as they passed, plush toys in hand, fedoras atop their greasy, thinning hair, and proudly defiant, as if to tell the rest of us, Laugh at me now - you will kneel in time.¹

We couldn’t have known.

Even if we did have some inkling of what was to follow, I don’t think there was anything we could have done to stem the tide.

For anyone who wasn’t there, you must understand that the nerd community was (and still is) infamously lush with furries; now, these days, with the dark scrying mirror we have called Tiktok, which can allow us all unfettered access into the minds of some of the most unhinged, unstable, and socially maladjusted individuals to ever darken the face of the planet, it seems like an understatement to claim that a bunch of dorks who dress up in expensive mascot costumes were the paramount of weird on the internet. For over a full decade, these guys were basically the poster children for what too much time online could do an impressionable mind.

God, how I actually miss these guys being the weirdest people at any given convention. In my experience, they were oddballs, but they were always nice if nothing else.

I don’t think we could even comprehend how much darker it was going to get.

Now, over the course of history and human civilizations, there have been a lot of people who have been wrong about a lot of things. It’s easy to do, and most of us, whether we like to admit it or not, are usually wrong more often than we like to admit.² Some individuals have been very wrong about very important things. Here’s a short list of some humorous examples:

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." — William Orton, President of Western Union, 1876

“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.” - Charlie Chaplin, 1916

“I predict that the internet will go spectacularly supernova, and in 1996 it will catastrophically implode.” - Robert Metcalf, inventor of Ethernet, 1995.³

“Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will. Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you." Saint Peter, speaking to a certain Nazarene carpenter, probably around 32 AD

Now, these are some pretty stunningly poor calls, and I could have filled this article ten times over with other great examples of some of the brightest minds in history wiping egg off their face or shoving entire crows down their throat. But, I can safely say that all of us - every single one of us - can take solace in the fact that, regardless of what we do, or what we say, or whatever shots we may call poorly, not a one of us will ever, not in our entire lives, be as wrong as one anonymous poster on 4chan’s Comics & Cartoons board one late October night in 2010, who I distinctly recall said the following in the very first thread ever posted on the site about the subject matter at hand:

“They’re just doing it to be annoying. Ignore them and they’ll stop posting about it in a month.” - Anonymous, the most wrong person in human history

The they in this statement?

The Bronies.

Part fandom. Part social movement. All legendarily bizarre.

This motley collection of social pariahs were an almost ubiquitous presence on the internet for years. You could quite literally not go anywhere, especially on certain sites, without seeing a pony plastered somewhere it didn’t belong. On 4chan, the problem became so endemic that even mentioning the show on any board outside of their own containment zone was grounds for a perma-ban from the site. Even Reddit had to implement rules to keep the damn thing contained and seeping into other subreddits like a leaky septic tank. From the most remote and obscure forums to your grandma’s Facebook page, these multi-colored equines of a small stature were fucking inescapable.

Even outside of cyberspace, like a nightmare manifesting in the waking world in the manner of some sort of Lynchian mind-screw, you were liable to see an obese, fedora-wearing man wearing cargo shorts and a graphic tee waddling down the toy aisles of your local Target, Wal-Mart, or Toys r’ Us, perusing the shelves for another piece of pony merch to fill out their collection of rainbow plastic ponies. At conventions, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting someone wearing a shirt that was either far too large or far too small for their frame, bearing the crest and colors of their patron pony. And trust me, you couldn’t miss them. They didn’t want you to miss them. The cadre of misfits and their rainbow equine muses clawed their way to the top of the nerd culture and loudly, proudly, and unashamedly proclaimed -

YouTube was flush with hours upon hours upon hours of cringe compilations purely of socially maladjusted young men spilling nautical tons of spaghetti over their favorite cartoon. The only thing they were producing more of than cringe compilation materials was fan works. Fan art, fan fiction, fan music, fan video games, fan clothing, fan animations, fan movies, fan interpretive dance, fan weed strains (yes, seriously), fan fucking cars - if there was a creative outlet of any sort, you could be damn certain someone was diligently working to shoe-horn little pink ponies onto or into it.

Believe it or not, I’m actually friends with the cousin of the individual that owns this car. He would drive it to every anime convention in the state of Texas. I have seen it in real life, many, many times. And yes, I did always really, really wanted to key it every time I did.

She and her cousin are not on the best of terms, if you couldn’t tell.

And if you knew what IWTCIRD stands for on the license plate, you’d want to join me in lighting the fucking thing on fire. Maybe with the owner inside of it.

If you think this certain breed of nerd is extinct in the wild, think again - the brony community, though diminished in size, is still alive and well.

Numbers are difficult to gauge, but believe me, you still see people rocking pony merchandise at conventions regularly, and their output of fan works is still going strong. If anything, one of the reasons I wanted to write this article is due to the fact that the scene appears to be making a sort of coming back. Or maybe we shouldn’t call it that - they never did leave, after all. After years of languishing in obscurity, I’m seeing more and more of the bronies once again creep in both the public sphere, the convention circuits, and the internet at large. Just when I thought I was done with these little equine beasts, I see them in my peripheral vision - colorful smears of motion, darting behind corners like ephemeral shadows, and feel the malicious gaze of colorful eyes upon my back from unseen hiding places, where cruel smiles curl upon fuzzy muzzles.

“Did you really expect the nightmare to end when you were never asleep?”

My same friend who’s cousin owns the car above? Yeah, this is a picture she sent me in late May of this very year.

There’s a quality to this that makes it feel like the Patterson-Gimlin Photo.

This is still happening. These people are still out there.

There’s a joke that’s been going around certain nerd circuits for a while - well, maybe not a joke, but a humorous observation, perhaps: If you were a brony in 2011, now you’re either trans, or a neo-nazi, with no exceptions.

While it’s a bit hyperbolic, it is still based in reality. Having spawned on 4chan just as the right wing blowback against what was then called Social Justice Warriors was beginning to foment in earnest, around the time that /pol/ was beginning to develop into the memetic and cultural juggernaut that would influence the course of the 2016 Presidential Election and veritably alter world history in the process, the brony community always had more than its fair share of Wehraboo types and people with an edgy sense of humor. Some of these individuals grew out of that phase of their life. Some didn’t. Many went on to be trans, just like the other half of the brony population. Even though I distinctly remember the vehement protestations of, It’s okay for a grown man to like a show for little girls!, it seems as if something went in a much different direction between 2013 and 2023, and a lot of those grown men decided they weren’t exactly men.

Pictured: The staff of Everfree Northwest, a large brony convention. As of 2025, it’s still being held annually.

It’s a fascinating dichotomy between the ultra-right of the Obama years, many of whom are today part of the ultra-left.

So - how did it happen? Where did it come from? What was the attraction, and why do they seem to start returning like some aggressive fungal rash that just won’t go away? More pressing still, was this bizarre collection of outsiders and pariahs inverting gender roles by playing with pony toys a harbinger for the Rainbow tidal wave that was come in the latter half of the 2010’s?

I invite you to join me into this dive back into the early 2010’s to explore this fascinating subculture that so doggedly sticks to the internet like a bad case of fleas on a horse’s ass.

But, before we can get into that story… first, I need to tell you this one.

- Humble Beginnings -

The seed of the bronies first began to germinate in 1981, when one Bonnie Zacherle, an illustrator for Hasbro Toy Company, pitched an idea to Hasbro’s R&D department in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

She also designed Mr. Potato Head. Just in case you ever encounter that question in a trivia game.

As a child, Ms. Zacherle was possessed by the uniquely female desire to own a horse as a pet, which never really made sense to me, but, then again, I also still wish that I could have a tiger as a house pet, so I guess I can sympathize with every little girl who ever yearned a pony of their own. Ms. Zacherle, tapping into this universal female desire for equine ownership, did some simple math, and realized that if little girls loved horses, and they also loved Barbie dolls with soft, brushable hair, they were gonna go nuts for horse toys that had soft, brushable hair.

In another stunning case of poor judgement, the R&D team at Hasbro was less than impressed by the concept. BBlinded by typical male myopia and chauvinism (men, amirite?), they rejected the pitch multiple times before Ms. Zacherle’s dogged tenacity and determination won through. Truly, a #girlboss if there ever was one. Oh, how we stan.

So, two years later in August of 1981, My Pretty Pony trot ever so gayly onto toy store shelves, with sculptor Charles Muenchinger bringing to life Ms. Zacherle’s illustrations in a ten-inch long plastic pony figure.

“Yeah, it ain’t fun bein’ a pretty pony, but it’s a living.”

And it was promptly cancelled and rebranded as My Little Pony. Because ten inches was just a tad too big to qualify for the little quantifier. That and, quite frankly, the first pony looks like it should be My Prozac Pony, with the face she's pulling. But this was before the rainbows and sparkles and magic were added to the mix, so, I suppose I can sympathize with the Pretty Pony. I'm also rather bitter that I live in the post-magical age where all the dragons and unicorns are dead and I have to work in an office filling out spreadsheets instead of go on rousing adventures with my motley band of friends and rescue comely damsels, slay fearsome beasts, and rescue fearsome yet comely beast-damsels.

I digress.

Ms. Zacherle did some more calculations and, in her inimitable genius, discovered that if little girls liked pony toys with soft, brushable hair that were small in size, and they also liked soft, pastel colors, they were gonna go ape-shit for pony toys that had soft, brushable hair and were also soft, pastel colors. And little.

Thus, the Age of the Pretty Pony was put to pasture, ushering in the Age of the Little Ponies in 1982.

“This is your realm, and the heart of the greater realm that shall be. The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what must be preserved, Lickety-Split.”

What’s interesting is, according to interviews with Ms. Zacherle, the My Pretty Pony line was intended to appeal to both girls and boys. Very young girls and boys, by her own admission, but still, she intended the product to be gender neutral. Now, Ms. Zacherle seems keenly aware of what makes little girls spend their hard-earned allowance money, but not so much little boys. After all, do boys like horses? Sure. I have a great respect for equines. They’re fun to ride. They’ve got distinct and profound personalities. I especially like the pictures of them taken from the side.

I love this picture so much that I want it framed on my living room wall.

Hilarious.

Cowboys, knights, samurai - they all ride horses, right?. Every badass needs a loyal steed to ride into battle on. But, what Ms. Zacherle must not have realized is that no questing knight of the realm nor a lone gunman on the high plains is going to ride a pretty pony when they go to fight the Comanche braves. Not unless they want to get laughed all the way back to Fort Worth. Or scalped.

Or both.

Besides - why would you want to play with some dumb itty-bitty pastel pink horse with flowers or some shit tattoo’d on its rump when you could be playing with a super awesome jet plane that transforms into a gun-toting robot?

Hell yeah.

So, I find it funny that she re-tooled the entire concept to lean more heavily into what qualities would appeal more to girls, not knowing exactly what kind of stage she was setting, and for who.

This would begin what fans of the franchise would dub Generation One, which would run until the year 1992. Prior to 2010, these were the ponies that came to mind when most people thought of the franchise. This stable of colorful mini-equines would go on to synonymous with childhood in the Reagan years, alongside the aforementioned Transformers, G.I. Joe, Teddy Ruxpin, Rainbow Brite, and, of course, the G.O.A.T.s - the Care Bears.

Yeah, these guys just got a fresh coat of paint recently. Stuck culture, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, as I’ve said before, I could be classified as a 90’s kid, and my sisters never bought any toys from the later lines of My Little Pony, but even I was exposed to the franchise because my grandparents had a drawer full of VHS tapes at their house from the 80’s. It included movies like Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, The Secret of NIMH, and a whole lot of product placement ads with The Movie tacked on the end. Not to say that Transformers: The Movie and Care Bears: The Movie weren’t enjoyable when I was six, but, they were still basically glorified toy ads. I also remember a copy of Sleepless in Seattle being in there, too, for some reason.

Of course, among them was the My Little Pony movie from around the same time, which I remember liking well enough. I wasn’t clamoring to watch it every time I was at my grandparent’s house, but, after getting through Transformers for the umpteenth time (though, that bitchin’ theme song never gets old) and watching The Last Unicorn enough to commit half the dialogue to memory, My Little Pony was something that would keep me quiet for ninety minutes.

In the 80’s, even the ponies had gloriously feathered hair.

They actually did fight monsters and dragons and a wizard voiced by Danny DeVito, if I remember correctly, which made them a little more exciting than the Ursines of Excessive Affection, who seemed to live very comfortable lives and fought no dragons, so far as I recall.

I will say, though - there must have been some serious beef behind closed doors up in Care-a-Lot, or whatever their palace made of clouds was. Imagine being Friend Bear, who’s entire schtick is being a good friend, and then, one day, this bitch shows up with the audacity to call herself Best Friend Bear. Like, excuse you? Who the hell do you think you are, coming into my house and calling yourself best friend bear?

Care-a-Lot’s powder bath is about to get a brand new purple toilet rug.

Even as a kid, this bothered me. Who was Best Friend Bear to do that to Friend Bear? Aren’t they supposed to be, y’know, Care Bears? Call me crazy, but one-upping another bear who’s defining personality trait is being a good friend like that doesn’t seem like something someone calling themselves a care bear would do. What had Friend Bear done to deserve that? You know who didn't have these kind of problems? Yeah - the ponies. Twilight Sparkle never had to cope with Twilight Sparkle-er trying to muscle in on her domain of Twilight and Sparkles. There was no Best Optimus Prime or Best Snake Eyes, either, for that matter.

So, yeah - I was down with the ponies, I guess. Call me ahead of the curve. Maybe even a trendsetter.

But that was about all the exposure I ever had to the polychrome ponies until much later in life. I was perfectly okay having no more of them in my life, and, really, I'm pretty sure I didn't need anymore of them, either.

But, like so much of the human experience, I didn't really get much of a choice in how many pretty ponies I would be exposed to.

So, after Gen 1, when most of the original incarnations of the big hitting Reagan-era toy lines were getting a bit long in the teeth and nearing the end of their shelf life, Hasbro did the first of several relaunches to try and inject new life into the brand. Like many 90's reboots of these properties, Gen 2 was an attempt to take the ponies and make them cool in a distinctly 90's way.

Like, this was not happening in the Gen 2 animated series.

I know this was edited and comes from a Nostalgia Critic video but it’s too funny not to share.

Rather than frolic in enchanted groves, gallivant with human children from suburban Chicago, and occasionally liberate one another from actual, chattel slavery at the hands of dark sorcerers, the Gen 2 ponies were very modern. Their biggest problem wasn't some dragon burning down their flower field, but what dress to wear to pony prom. They liked to do things like talk about boys, and clothes, talk on the phone about boys and clothes, play sports, go the arcade or the mall, shop, and, uh…

Ponyoga?

Yeah. You get it. Modern ponies for modern girls.

Needless to say, it didn't last long. Turns out girls who were old enough to go to the mall or care about boys were also too old to want to buy plastic pony toys, and the girls that did want to play with plastic pony toys were too young to care about boys or go to the mall.

Shocking, I know.

Generation 3 followed in 2003 after the brand went on a brief hiatus to retool for the twenty-first century. This was the incarnation I remember from my youth, and, you know what?

Rosemary’s Pony.

I have no idea what the fuck was going on with this Generation. It seems as if it was all over the place. It’s like someone at Hasbro said, Hey. Little girls like, uh - tea parties? And babies? Cool, cool. Make baby ponies. Who have tea parties. Who gives a fuck.

As one brony I interviewed - yes, really, we'll get to it - for this article, told me:

If you took any given boy from the 80's with a little sister, asked him to describe My Little Pony, what he'd tell you would probably define G3; lame, girly, boring, stupid. You know. There wasn’t a story behind it or any characters to follow through an animated show or books or comics. There were some movies, some cartoons, but they weren’t really connected and didn’t have an overarching mythology behind [Generation 3]. Hasbro was really just throwing everything they could think of at the wall and hoping something would stick, but it was all very shallow and devoid of substance.

I think that was the reason so many people were so confused that anyone who wasn’t a seven year old girl could enjoy My Little Pony. G3 was what our generation grew up with. That’s what the series was to us, and when it changed, most people our age couldn’t believe that something of any quality could come out of something that had been so stupid.

And, yes, this individual is self-aware enough to understand that statement sounds patently absurd to anyone who isn't a self-styled Pony Historian, which is one reason I reached out for his opinion rather than pitching the question to a more general crowd of bronies. That, and I've been friends with the guy since high school and we were both at Ground Zero of the impact of My Little Pony's next and most popular incarnation - Generation 4.

In 2007, Michael Bay’s Transformers film breathed new life into that sagging franchise, which had been in need of a tune-up for some time. Say what you want about the film itself, but the box office results speak for themselves:

Forever enraptured by the siren song of the almighty dollar, Hasbro set about raiding their attic in search of other 80’s has-beens that could be repainted and repackaged for a fresh pay-day. First on that list was My Little Pony, which, as stated above, was not exactly in the best place with Generation 3.

Now, at the time, Hasbro had just inked a deal with Discovery TV to change their similarly flagging Discovery Kids channel into The Hub, which would be the place where they could dump all sorts of new revamped intellectual properties. In a stroke of genius, the movers and shakers between Hasbro and Discovery looked at what they had with My Little Pony’s third generation and had an epiphany - if we market to both boys and girls, and appeal to a larger demographic, we’ll make more money.

Pretty incredible revelation, right?

Well, that’s all fine and good, but, the real question was, who could make it happen? Who could take this notoriously juvenile and cloyingly feminine intellectual property that was literally about sparkles and rainbows and, somehow, work enough magic to make it palatable to a crowd that wasn’t both female and still learning to spell their names?

Fortunately for Hasbro, just the right person had quite literally fallen into their collective laps.

Enter Lauren Faust.

Ms. Faust was a well-known entity in the world of animation. Since the early 90’s, she’d worked on a number of illustrious, successful projects, including the seminal classic The Iron Giant, the underrated animated musical Cats Don’t Dance, and most notably, and the television shows Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (which, as an interesting aside, were both creations of her husband, animator Craig McCracken).

When it comes to cross-over appeal between young boys and young girls, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find something that bridged the gap than Powerpuff Girls.⁴

This may seem hard to believe if you weren’t there at the time, but this show was controversial for the level of violence and graphic imagery in it.

I think Ms. Faust was qualified for the job.

But, Ms. Faust didn’t want the job. In fact, she came to Hasbro looking to shop her own original project called Galaxy Girls, which she’d been developing for years on the side. Obviously, you must know that didn’t happen, because we’re not here talking about Galaxy Girls.

Like every other channel she’d tried to pitch the project to, Hasbro turned Ms. Faust down.

An original project? Pft. Yeah, right. Who’s interested in that? Silly Ms. Faust didn’t realize that if an intellectual property doesn’t have at least thirty years of history behind it, nobody gives a fuck. And it certainly wouldn’t move toys.

No new IP since the 80’s has ever made money. Not a one.

Anyways, we all know that new, original intellectual properties that have no built-in fanbase or come from other countries are never successful in America, so Hasbro wanted no part of Ms. Faust’s pipe dream.

But, hey. That pony thing? Yeah, she could take a swing at that, if she wanted to. No pressure, or anything. And, y’know, the craziest thing of all? If she took a stab at this little pony project and it started in raking in the dollar bills, well… a little spot on the Hub’s programming might just open up. Maybe they might fill it with something of Ms. Faust's choosing. Maybe a little something about Galaxies… And Girls…

It was just a thought.

“So… what’s it gonna be, Ms. Faust?”

So, Ms. Faust ended up taking up the task of retooling My Little Pony for the twenty-first century. Not an enviable one, and even she was aware of it. According to Ms. Faust, the original My Little Pony toys had been some of her favorite when she was growing up, but she’d never been too fond of the animated programs or movies. If anything, she was more of a G.I. Joe and Transformers kinda girl, which she liked to watch with her brother. And, apparently, she incorporated more elements from those shows into her pitch for the My Little Pony reboot, which was much more heavily focused on characters and world-building than what Hasbro was looking for. During development, they brought up the fact that, hey - we ain’t made out of money, Miss Faust. We’re animating the damn thing in Flash studios, for God's sake. Maybe we tone down the adventure part here. They’re fuckin’ ponies, after all.

Trouble in paradise, right off the bat.

But, Ms. Faust, being nothing if not tenacious, picked her six favorite ponies from her childhood, re-imagined and redesigned them as the core cast, and set to work.

The end result would be known to posterity as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

This isn’t even a fraction of the characters, and each and every one of them has their own name, back-story, and at least fifteen Tolstoy novels worth of fan-fiction behind them.

The show did a lot for a lot of people - obviously - but it never did much for me. I will admit, I think the designs are nice and Ms. Faust’ unique art style gives the show a look that is both distinct and much more visually appealing than a lot of what would come out afterwards.

I only ever watched bits and pieces of it on my own, despite some of my friends protestations that I really, really should watch the entire series. I saw more clips than I really cared to just from the sheer ubiquity of the show's presence in online culture at the time, and I was suckered into watching most of the first season with a friend of mine who caught pony fever something fierce. Hell, just for the sake of this article, I went back and revisited some episodes, just so I would have them fresh in my head.

Yes - I am just that dedicated. Also, I was bored at work and let them play in the background while I attended to more important matters, but, all the same, just remember the things this ape does for the sake of giving his readership only the most honest and raw insight into these incredibly important matters.

And, in the end, after watching a handful of episodes, what is my official simian opinion?

It's fine. It's a perfectly competent show for children. It certainly seems like something that both girls and boys could reasonably enjoy, and the writing staff was smart enough to litter the episodes with visual gags and jokes that will amuse attentive parents who may be watching it with their kids.

“This isn’t Vietnam, Smokey, this is Poneyville, and we have rules!”

The bounds imposed on Ms. Faust's ambitions for a more action-adventure oriented, plot-centric and the limitations of the Flash animation program⁵ resulted in the scripts being rewritten to lean more on character interaction and clever dialogue. A competent writing staff gave all of the main cast and even a good deal of background or one-off characters distinct and colorful personalities that can be fun to watch bounce off one another.

One of the selling points the brony was adamant about was that, no, man, you don't get it, it's actually, like, really mature. This, I must conclude, is a patented lie they were telling themselves to make themselves feel better about obsessing over a cartoon about rainbow-colored ponies. Maybe I just watched the wrong episodes, but I'm fairly certain that the thematic content never gets more complex than Don't be a dick and Friendship is good, which, given the series subtitle of Friendship is Magic, isn't particularly surprising.

Cormac McCarthy, this is not.

But, we're really not here to talk about the quality of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I say this mostly to make the point that the series was not without its merits. There's certainly a lot worse animation you could let poison your kid's brain, and, at least in the episodes I watched, I can even see why some adults might find it charming. There's media out there where you can feel how much fun the cast and crew or creator had with the project, and this is one of them.

Now, from what I've read about the show's decade long production, that changed, and it changed fast, but, again - that's for later.

Ultimately, all I can say is that the series is just an above average animated program that is very obviously for a younger crowd. Nothing more. Nothing less.

So, that begs the question -

How is it that an innocuous show for little kids would end up spawning some of the most premium, unadulterated, military-grade displays of social ineptitude the planet has ever seen? More wretched still, how did such a simple show generate uncontested examples of the worst deviancy, debauchery, and degeneracy to ever grace the blasted hellscape of the internet? After all, there's a not insignificant chance that just by posting this image:

And this image:

May very well have you retching as dark, half-forgotten horrors resurface in terrifying detail from the deepest annals of your memory.

Well… the answer, it seems, is a bit too long for one article. So, please, do join me again as we cut away at the overgrown, rainbow mess of thorny vines and gnarled weeds, and take a look at the slimy, pulsating, blackened heart of the matter - the brony collective itself.

1. As if the rest of us dorks were so much better. Which, I mean, we were, but still.

2. Except for individuals such as you and I, dear reader.

3. We’d probably be better off if he’d been right about this one.

4. I can personally attest to this, as Powerpuff Girls was one of my favorite shows at the time.

5. Which, to the credit of the creatives behind the show, was stretched far beyond what other contemporary series being animated in the same program, resulting in a more vibrant and visually unique product.