The Men Who Stare at Horses - Part II

What do you get when you cross a bunch of mentally ill loners with a cartoon about magical ponies? I'll tell you what you get.

“A child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

- African Proverb

Now, I have to preface this here - this resurgence in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’s popularity is not - I repeat, not - directly tied to some burgeoning Neo-Brony movement.

Part of it, I believe, is that the newest incarnation of the franchise is currently kicking off in earnest on Netflix with a new animated series. Dubbed the New Generation - a stunningly original subtitle that has only been used two dozen times before in other, more venerable franchises - and designated as Generation 5 by the community, the plot of this new season is a direct follow-up to Friendship is Magic, and, er…

Yeah, look, I know I’m not the target demographic, here, but it’s a bit sad to see Bean Mouth Cal-Arts disease claim another victim. It truly is an abominable aesthetic that is years past its sell by date

Almost every animated series post-Adventure Time has looked like this. Some have been decent. Most… not so much.

I digress. Obviously, a new season of anything is going to drum up a bit of interest in previous seasons, but, from what I can tell, no one is particularly enthused about The Next Generation. In fact, I looked up reviews from the brony community, and the general consensus is that it isn’t good.

There, I just saved you ten minutes of your life.

The only people that seem to have anything nice to say about it is parents with small children who, y’know, don’t really care about anything other than watching cartoon ponies do cartoon pony things. Shocker, I know.

But, there is a fandom around My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and My Little Pony in general, that is separate from the brony community. They are, so far as I’ve seen in the research I’ve conducted, two separate groups with dramatically different attitudes, levels of conduct, interests, and, most pointedly, demographics. If you aren’t heavily engaged in the world of fandoms, it may seem a bit weird, but fandom is often a broad term applied to many disparate groups that unite around one common interest. It’s a little like religion - and I don’t mean that because of the fact that some individuals within certain fandoms do treat the object of their obsession like idols of veneration with slavish devotion. More to the point, you have Catholics, Orthodox, Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and more - they’re all nominally Christian, but you’d be hard pressed to say that a Mormon and a Traditional Catholic are going to see eye to eye on much. Though, I’d make the argument a Trad-Cath and a Mormon would probably get along better than a Classic Sonic Enthusiast and a Modern Sonic Fan, because something about that little blue bastard is worse than crack-cocaine to the developing minds of children.

Images that changed the world.

That being said, the surging interest in Friendship is Magic seems to be largely borne from a crowd of young women who were the children during the show's original run, and are now old enough to feel nostalgic for the show and the characters. As much as it doesn’t feel like it - at least, to me - Friendship is Magic debuted an entire decade and change ago as of this writing, and girls who might have been ten at the time and firmly within the series' target demographic would now be in their twenties.

Despite the bronies being the most visible consumers of Friendship is Magic merchandise, all sources on the subject I could find suggest that the series audience was still overwhelmingly young girls. I wish I could find exact numbers, but it seems as if the brony community, big as it was, was still only a fraction of the franchise’s audience, and only disproportionately loud. Probably has something to do with the fact that seven year old girls weren’t posting on 4chan or going to anime conventions, but, believe me, back in 2010, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the show’s primary audience was goony, 20-something year old manchildren.

There is a distinct difference in the way that this other side of the My Little Pony fandom talks about the series and the fan content they generate than the overwhelmingly male brony community. There’s a degree of maturity to it, which, given the subject is magical, technicolor ponies, seems a bit ridiculous to say, but allow me to explain.

Newer fan content is much more… grounded, is a word that I keep returning to as I write. There’s more art to the fan art than fan, if that makes sense. You can tell just from the quality that the artists behind it are artists, first and foremost, with an understanding of the basic fundamentals and rules of visual art, rather than just someone who only draws ponies in Lauren Faust’s style and just got really, really good at it through rote repetition. There’s even a sense that it’s more respectful towards the source material. It’s difficult to articulate, especially without showing more than just one example, but, from what I’ve seen, much of it seems more… sedate. Thoughtful. Wistful, almost. A lot of it gives me the distinct feeling that the people behind the art are a lot like Lauren Faust, re-imagining something they adored in childhood with their own, unique flavor added to it. It all feels very sincere, appreciative, and affectionate towards the source material, and, in a way, I find it rather endearing.

Of course, some of it is also eye-searingly terrible, but, I’m trying to be positive, here. At any rate, it’s different.

Content generated by the brony community, on the other hand, always had a manic and rambunctious quality to it. It was obnoxiously loud, garishly colorful, utterly ridiculous, and often proudly annoying - stick a pin in that last point. We’ll come back to it.

If the subject matter of a fan work was comedic, it had to be turned into a meme or an inside joke that would be parroted ad nauseum until it lost all meaning and evolved into something else. Memes had memes had memes, and it's difficult to tell which meme spawned which meme. And often the content would be crudely sexual, excessively violent, and indulgently graphic in a shock jock kind of way.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah! And then - oh, get this - and then, Pinkie Pie cuts up Rainbow Dash and makes cupcakes outta her meat! Ain’t ‘dat da funniest shit ya ever did hear?”

And if you think I was exaggerating the depravity of some of these people, I’m really not. One particular example that still sticks with me is the Princess Molestia fiasco, which, for the sake of brevity and your sanity, was a widely circulated series of comics and memes within the community that portrayed Despotic God-Queen of all Pony-kind Princess Celestia as a sexual predator that openly stalked and violated various ponies. Usually minors.

Someone call PPS (Pony Protective Services).

It says a lot about the people who found this concept “funny”, I think, that they find “comedy” in twisting a maternal mentor figure for the audience insert character and perverting her into a duplicitous, malicious, and mentally unstable child predator. I don’t think you have to read between the lines very hard to understand the implications. This “joke”, concept, meme, whatever you want to call it, was so pervasive that one dipshit even tried to get the voice actress behind the character to comment on it. I’m not sure if it is fortunate or unfortunate that we have video of the event for posterity, but I think it perfectly illustrates the state of things at the time and why it was so easy to dislike these people.

To be perfectly fair, however, the artist responsible for running the Tumblr blog that started the trend was bullied - rightly so - both off the site and out of the community. Yet, like the lingering stench of a bad fart in a hot, cramped car, the Princess Molestia gag still remains as a tried-and-true gag within certain, less savory elements of the community, who still think that the subject matter of sexual abuse is hilarious. For some reason. I’ll let you make up your mind on that one.

Another less repulsive but no less obscene example, was Cupcakes, which I referenced in the caption in the .gif above (hopefully you read those, I put a lot of thought into them!). Cupcakes was the most popular specimen of a whole brony subgenre of internet creepypasta produced by the community, in which Pinkie Pie was re-imagined as an unhinged, psychopathic killer that murders her friends and uses their flesh to make baked goods, because I guess ponies really are made out of sugar, spice, and everything nice.

Yeah. That ain’t frosting, buddy.

If you want to see a prime example of what was considered absolutely hilarious by the brony community, here’s a short, four minute animation that will get the point across.

I won’t lie - me and my friends thought this one of the funniest things we’d ever seen when we were nineteen.

So did the brony community, but what they didn’t realize is that the entire .MOV series, as it would come to be known (and yes, this is a series - every one of the main ponies got an installment), wasn’t laughing with them; it was laughing at them. This was lost on them, by and large, so it became common sights to see gaggles of young men in pony swag bouncing around convention halls, spouting lines from the above video like, Crush, Kill, Destroy, Swag or, Hey, hey, hey - stay out of my shed!

Loudly. Really, really loudly, usually.

Needless to say, it was only funny for the rest of us for a lamentably short amount of time before the jokes got so stale you could crack a tooth on them. If the brony community was good at anything, it was beating a dead pony until it was pulverized into glue.¹

So much of the humor and resulting content came from warping, twisting, perverting, and, in many cases, sexualizing the source material. And, don’t get me wrong - parody and satire is a perfectly valid way of expressing one’s affection for something they like. But there is this… distinctly skeezy feeling to it all. I really can’t find a better way to describe it. The creative output is largely covered in an almost tangibly slimy, greasy residue that betrays the lurid and obliquely sexual intentions of the people behind it. It feels less like a crass but harmless inside joke you’re not in on, and more like sitting at the bar beside some middle-aged sleaze making obscene comments to the waitress who’s only tolerating his presence for tips. He plays it off like a joke, and she laughs it all off, but you know that you should probably make sure she doesn’t walk to her car alone when she gets off her shift.

For example, say you saw one of the Princess Molestia comics posted on 4chan, because, of course you would, back in the day. You might say, wow, that's pretty bad, even for 4chan. There would be at least a dozen people replying, Hey, man, it’s just a joke. Don’t be a prude. The artist is actually fine. He’s a cool guy.

And, no matter how much they protest, you’d be left wondering…

And, if the art was meant to be taken seriously, it was so overwrought and over-dramatic it came off as silly and gauche. Now, believe it or not, I do think that you could probably make a serious subject matter with little colorful talking horses as the characters work… but these guys didn’t have the chops to make it happen. Quote-unquote serious pony fiction and art is covered so many layers of finely aged cheese that even the worst daytime soap operas would look tactful, tasteful, and restrained in comparison.

When the zaza hits.

Looking back, it all gives off the impression of a raucous gentleman’s club, filled with a bunch of rowdy young men. Brimming with that kind of creative, masculine energy unique to males at their most virile and energetic, but rather than channel said energy into something productive, it was all funneled into one giant, roiling clusterfuck of ponies, hormones, pastel colors, and total perversion the likes of which is almost endemic to the internet’s most lurid locales.

Yeah, it basically all looked like this to me.

Given the absolutely staggering, borderline incomprehensible amount of pornography generated by the community, it is painfully apparent that the overwhelming bulk of the community consisted of young, hormonal men with no other sexual outlet than the internet. Like, I know that nice piece of fan-art posted near the beginning had to be drawn by a woman, because if it had been drawn by a brony, they would have found a way to give each of the ponies huge, honkin’ horse titties and smokin’ double-wide dumptruck butts.²

And, while I don’t doubt every single self-proclaimed brony genuinely liked the show… I don’t think they all loved it.

Yes. Even this guy.

But we’ll come back to that.

So, I’ve clearly illustrated the stark divide, if not abyssal fault-line, that divides the larger, more down-to-earth My Little Pony fandom from the brony community. Even though the resurgence in Friendship is Magic may be tied to the first group, given the inherent and inseparable existence of the brony community and the show that made it possible, it was nothing short of a guarantee that any renewed interest in Friendship is Magic would, by proxy, shine a searchlight on the brony community after years of being overshadowed as the weirdest people on the internet by the current crop of absolute freaks polluting TikTok.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this mini-renaissance the series is currently seeing is the apologism for the brony community across the broader internet. Even though they were the punching bag for just about everyone who knew of them for years, it's now fashionable to make the claim that they were simply… misunderstood. Socially awkward. A little weird, but otherwise harmless.

As hard as it is to accept that after being exposed to some of this depravity again for the first time in years and reopening old wounds³ in the process, I do know it’s true.

For the most part.

I know guys who considered themselves bronies. I knew others who enjoyed the show and refused to associate with the community because of things like Princess Molestia and the community’s seeming inability to conduct themselves in a normal, socially permissible manner. Both parties would have been the first to admit that the community harbored some truly vile characters and played host to some of the most grotesque deviancy to ever play out across computer monitors. And that’s fine. If they admit to it, and they’re aware of it, and they avoid it… well, every group has its undesirables. The larger the group, the more chance you’re gonna rake in some unsavory characters. I get that. This kind of dynamic, on some scale, is present in any and all fandoms, social groups, and subcultures.

But, while it’s relatively easy for most people to balance the benign aspects of a fandom or group from the malignant, it seems as if I and many others have trouble being so objective with the brony community.

You do not have to dig deep into Google image search results to start getting some very questionable images that you do not want on your search history. It was a not insignificant amount of the community engaging in perversions and producing graphic content the likes of which I cannot, in good faith and good taste, recount here, and in truly staggering quantities. I’ve given you the barest taste of what horrors lurk beneath the candy-colored surface of the brony community, and even if I could recount more here in every lurid detail, it would be a Herculean task to catalogue even a fraction of it. There are more stories of pony perversion than could possibly be committed to paper.

This young man tried to legally marry the Twilight Sparkle plush in this photo. He also spent years sending illegal C&D threats to anyone and everyone who made any fanwork with her in it that he didn’t approve of. You do not want to know what kind of images he posted with this plush toy.

Yet, despite it all, you can see the mythology of the brony community being rewritten at this very moment. Yes, the positives of it all are being emphasized; the fact that it brought people together, offered lonely and isolated young men a community, so on and so forth. How good that was is a subjective matter, but, objectively speaking, it was probably a net benefit for all involved. But I feel like much of the worst aspects of the community are simply being brushed aside and downplayed, if not ignored outright.

Furries have had a similar rehabilitation in the public eye, which is fitting given that the parallels between the demographics of the two groups are stunningly similar. These days, it seems like the popular perception of furries has evolved from sexual degenerates and deviants with perversions so grotesque that they truly beggar belief, to a band of eclectic eccentrics with unconventional tastes that, at the end of the day, aren’t really bothering anyone outside of their bubble.

This has been a protracted shift in perception that has taken place at an almost glacial pace. So much so that I feel like so much time has passed that most people forget why furries were so widely reviled in the early days of the internet. Quite honestly, the furry community probably deserves a deep dive of their own, but, to say the least, furries were not ostracized by adjacent social groups because they were misunderstood and unfairly maligned victims - often times, they were shit-stirrers that went out of their way to cause problems, inject their sexual deviancy where it didn't belong, and then cried foul when people told them to stop being creepy, in a classic kick the dog until it bites maneuver.

You had to be there.

I’m of the opinion that both the furry community and the brony community are two manifestations of the same phenomenon. Different names, different specifics, different obsessions, but the bog-standard brony and the rank-and-file furry have a lot in common. I know I’m painting with a broad brush, here, but I don’t think anyone with a degree of familiarity with either group can deny that the following describes the lion’s share of both communities:

• White Male, Middle Class Upbringing, between 16 and 30 years of age at the time of their peak involvement with the community

• Autistic, Socially Maladjusted, or Both

• High IQ, Low Social Awareness

• Hobbies: Video Games, Anime, Other Cartoons

• Little Conventional Female Interaction

• Most Free Time Spent on Internet or on a Computer

• Heavy Consumption of Pornography

• Small to Nonexistent Peer Group in Real Life

I don’t say this to pick on anyone. I’m just stating facts. And, yes, of course, there were portions of both communities that were either not male, not white, or both, but if you were going to take a random sample of both groups, the above is what you’d most pull out of the herd.

The demographic of the rank-and-file furry fan and brony brother has changed over the years as both communities have waned in size, influence, and visibility. Furries were early adopters of the LGBTQIA+ schools of thought long before it became mainstream. As a community that always existed at the periphery of other, more well-established groups, it has a long history of attracting those at the fringes of them who couldn't quite hack it with the others. Being firmly rooted in the internet as opposed to real life, even those who weren’t predisposed to that kind of progressive thinking were exposed to it before it took to the mainstream as it pervaded sites like Tumblr and certain corners of Twitter pre-2012, which, at the time, were just about the only places you were liable to encounter various esoteric pride flags for unknown proclivities if you weren't looking for them. This is to say, the furry community has always had a disproportionate amount of homosexuals and transsexuals from the word go. Today, however, if you spend even the most brief time searching through “furry twitter”… well, I had the thought that if I took a shot of vodka every time I encountered a username with a trans flag in it, I’d be dead in half an hour. At the very least, I would have done permanent damage to my liver. You see a similar phenomenon in the brony community, where a rough but safe estimate could be made that a good half, if not more, of the “old guard” that is still down with the equines have become trans in the intervening years.

Now, here’s my theory - I think the rehabilitation of bronies and furries largely stems from the large-scale push for acceptance of transsexualism in broader society. There’s a lot of theories that have been posited as to why the overlap between transsexualism and the hoi polloi of nerd culture and its many different domains. There is, I think rightly, a connection between transsexualism and high-functioning autism. Even many of those who identify as trans will admit that a large percentage of their number consists of high-functioning autists, and I think the percentage is simply too high for there not to be some connection. I also think an over-consumption of pornographic content plays a part. As stated many times previously, the brony community was saturated in lewd content from top to bottom; there have been very interesting theories and studies that connect excessive and compulsive consumption of pornography with body and gender dysphoria. This is to say nothing of the way that such material can fry your dopamine reward system and how excessive self-pleasuring can throw a body’s hormones severely out of balance. It should almost go without saying that the depersonalizing effects of the internet, which increasingly seems to foster a divorce between our minds, our phyiscal bodies, and the concrete, material world around us, plays no small part in this shift. It would be absurdly reductionist to try and pin the phenomenon on just one or even a few of these sources, when it’s most likely all of them in some small part and even more that we’re unaware of. But there’s one potential force driving up membership of the Rainbow Coalition within the spheres of nerd culture that is particularly pertinent to the brony community.

Over the years, we’ve also seen a sharp increase in the institutional power of the Rainbow Coalition, but no other constituent among them has gained more influence - and in such a short period of time - than the T's.

They are demanding respect. Often with the threat of violence. People who would have never thought to take them seriously before, are.

Is there a reason that so many people belonging to historically maligned subcultures that were the butt of jokes, even by the butts of most normal people’s jokes, are now throwing in their chips with a movement, a demographic, a coalition that can institutionally demand respect from the very same people that once ostracized them?

It kind of feels like the case of an old general who was disavowed by Stalin, being rehabilitated by the Soviet politiburo - the bronies were always good Comrades, and we were all wrong to have ever doubted their mettle.

You see, it wasn’t the bronies or furries who were in the wrong to act like fools up and down the annals of the internet, the halls of conventions, and the toy aisles of big box retailers the world over; it was the rest of us who were so sorely mistaken. We were so blinded by our own prejudice against these marginalized and mistreated individuals that we actively antagonized what was actually a robust, beautiful subculture.

Now, please don’t punch me in the face…

Let’s revisit this, shall we?

This really is a contender for Most Real Tweet of All Time, in my opinion.

As stated at the beginning of this series, transsexualism has become endemic to various nerd communities. Video games, anime, animation, table-top RPGs, you name it, they’re there, they’re in full force, and they want you to know. What makes the brony and furry communities different, though, is even though they’re experiencing the same whole-sale transmogrification and forceful commandeering as the larger nerd subcultures, they were fringes within the fringe to begin with. How many times have I said that, even among other nerd circles, these people were outcasts?

Again, let me restate: I don’t doubt the bulk of the bronies genuinely liked the show… I don’t think they loved it.

This might seem a bit ludicrous to say, given that these people made liking a children’s show their entire identity, but here’s the thing about the bronies’ obsession with Friendship is Magic - it was never about the show.

It was always about the community around it.

The coldest crew in the convention center.

Bronies weren’t drawn to Friendship is Magic because it was some masterpiece of animation; they saw a group of fellow misfists that had rallied around My Little Pony, and they flocked to it. The memes were shibboleths to be repeated in order to show your status as a fellow traveler. The iconography, those were badges of credentials. The paraphernalia, tangible evidence of one’s dedication to the party community. The cosplay might as well be a commissar’s uniform. The pins bearing pony characters, the medals pinned to a war hero’s chest.

Now, the fact that it was My Little Pony, of all things, that they chose as the locus of their gathering, is coincidental, but not unimportant.

Part of why it was My Little Pony, of all things, that they chose to circle their wagons around was largely a case of right time, right place. I think that any children’s show could have served as some sort of beacon for the outliers of the nerd realm at the time - they needed one, and they would have found it in whatever shape it might have taken. It just so happened to be My Little Pony that served as the freshly opened lighthouse.

But, had it been, say, a reboot of Care Bears or Strawberry Shortcake that had come out around the same time, and handled by creatives less competent or experienced than Lauren Faust and her team, I don’t think the phenomenon would have played out the way it did, or proved so resilient. It probably would have happened, but we probably wouldn’t still be talking about them, or seeing them out in the wild to this very day.

Why?

Bronies didn’t love the ponies because they’re dimunitive, technicolor equines; it’s because they loved what they could do with the characters because there was a lot to them. So much of their creative output feels, in a way, like an older boy who got his hands on his sister’s pony toys and is using them to play out his own teenage fantasies, which are a hell of a lot more violent, crude, sexual, and energetic than whatever an eight year girl might cook up.⁴

The expansive cast of characters and relatively large world that Lauren Faust had created gave them a wide canvas to draw on and a lot of figures to play with - kind of like the actual, physical toys themselves. The characters, being well-written and clearly defined with unique voices and personalities, served as easy templates to toy with creatively, and the fact that there was simply so much to do with the designs of the ponies, so many ways you could customize your own, that people were making entire fan series about their own casts of ponies.

For instance, I can envision an alternate timeline - a darker or lighter one, I’m not sure - where a Care Bears reboot gave birth to the Bro-Bear community. I see them being equally annoying, yes, but far less robust creatively, as I don’t think Friend Bear and that presumptuous bitch Best Friend Bear are quite as distinct as, say, the hyperactive schizoid Pinkie Pie and presumptuous bitch Rarity. I could also draw you up an entire colorful cast of ponies with varied and eccentric personalities myself⁵, right this minute, but short of coming up with my own original the character Temperance Bear, who preaches the virtues of teetotalism, I’m not sure I could do the same with Care Bears.⁶

The point is, Friendship is Magic’s best qualities created a deep well from which the brony community could draw from creatively, which, in turn, generated a sort of feedback loop where brony content creators made art, music, literature, and a whole heapin’ load of NSFW material that would draw in more people, who in turn would make more, so on and so forth until, like a pyramid scheme, they just ran out of new suckers to rope in.

And, as they failed to attract new members, the community became much more… weird as a result. As unbelievable as that may be, you really didn’t see some of the most staggering pieces of fan work - whole video games, entire novels, fan screenplays for complete series of movies and seasons of television - until a bit later into the community’s lifecycle. That creative energy turned inwards and became increasingly self-reflecting, focused less on pony content and more about brony content.

This neatly segues us along to our next stop on this train-ride through Ponyville’s most choice offerings of the high weird.

If you think I’m exaggerating just how explosive the creative output from the community was - and how it became more about bronies than ponies - allow me to take a brief aside and introduce you to the absolutely mind-bending, logic defying existence of one of the brony community’s most towering pieces of fanwork…

In case you were wondering, it’s not a PipBoy, it’s a PipBuck.

Yes. This is a thing. Really. Just… soak it in. Really drink it all in. You don’t find a gem of bat-shit bizarre like this every day. Published in 2011 by an author who remains anonymous to this very day, Fallout: Equestria is, as the name would suggest, a cross-over fanfiction between My Little Pony and the Fallout franchise.

It is five volumes long. It is 620,000 words.

For reference:

It has been published. Physically. With multiple editions.

Note the top-most copy, which looks more like a Bible than a conventional book.

And it has not one spin-off.

From what I can tell, this one has a sequel series that is being updated to this day. And it’s longer than the original.

Not two spin-offs.

Not three spin-offs.

I have no idea how many spin-offs it has, actually.

Every time I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of the Fallout: Equestria rabbit hole, I stumble across another tunnel full of colorful ponies covered in bloodstains and guns bolted to their saddles to follow even deeper into the dank, unknowable, and probably radioactive depths. I don’t think it has an end, but, if there is one, I don’t think I need to reach it. I think the point has been illustrated well enough. Fallout: Equestria is perhaps the best example of this incestuous cycle I’m speaking of; it began as a fan-work of Friendship is Magic, which in turn generated fan-work of itself, until it grew to the point where it’s debatable if the entire nebulous cloud of material about nuclear wasteland ponies is even tangentially related to the source it was originally inspired by.

It also perfectly captures what I mean when I say the bronies were explosively creative. I don’t even mean they were explosive like a nuclear bomb⁷ - it was more like a supernova of passion and pure, unleaded, unfiltered, and unchained creativity.

And you know what? I kind of dig it. I love to see passion. I love this kind of balls-to-wall insanity that just defies belief. Even if it is channeled into… this, I cannot deny any of the authors the fact that they accomplished something. What, exactly, I don’t know, and I’m not sure I can make the claim that it worth doing to begin with, but the fact that it exists is impressive in its own perverted and bizarre right. I find the dedication to the craft commendable. It could have been better directed to a more worthwhile endeavor than mashing together magical ponies and a nuclear holocaust, but the writer in me does respect the hustle. Writing that much is no mean feat. It’s a little like watching one of those little Korean girls on YouTube eat her own body weight in fast food, where, yes, it’s impressive, but is it really something she should have done in the first place? Probably not, but, hey - it’s something, I guess. Just nothing good.

There’s probably been more My Little Pony fanfiction written than there has been on the American Civil War, at this point. Twilight Sparkle probably has more committed to word about her than most presidents. But it was this unique creative output that allowed the community to evolve in the way that it did. Most fandoms have their inside jokes, their iconography, their memes, their fan content, whatever, but most don’t ever even come close to sniffing the brony community in sheer volume of output and white-hot, fervent, borderline insane passion.

To go back to the feedback loop, this kind of creativity was something that could only be bred in such a uniquely insular and fervently passionate environment. The atmosphere of the community inherently encouraged this type of behavior. Think about this - if the author of Fallout: Equestria wrote a simple Fallout pastiche that’s three times the length of Joyce’s Ulysses, would he have ever had the success that he did?

Maybe. But probably not.

But slap some ponies on that bitch? Oh, now you’re cooking with gas, brother. There was an inbuilt audience for it; not fans of Fallout, but the bronies, who would eagerly lap up any kind of content with ponies in it.

I’ve been sitting and staring at this image for, like, twenty minutes, wondering how the fuck the white pony with the cowboy hat shoots a gun with no thumbs, but, given the Mecha-Pinkie Pie and the Frito Bandito biped of ambiguous origin further down the line, I suppose it’s not worth worrying about.

Another example for you;

This motley band of Original the Characters (do not steal) are - were? - known as Bronalysis, which was a collective of loosely affiliated YouTubers that reviewed episodes of Friendship is Magic. At the time, episode reviews and analysis were a very big thing in the community, and there were multiple motley crews of pony fans that would hang out in voice calls together and scrutinize each piece of canon material with more meticulous attention than your average historian. Bronalysis, I believe, was one of if not the most popular of these circles, hosting general discussions and debates about the series and characters, and playing a whole lot of Team Fortress 2. Among other things. A lot of other things. They all had their own niche. One guy was the guy who reviewed episodes… but his pony wore a top-hat. One guy was the guy who reviewed episodes… but he also got piss drunk while he did. One guy was the the guy who reviewed episodes… but he swore a lot. They all had their gimmicks, as well as their little hobbies or side-interests that they'd shoe-horn ponies into, no matter how out of place. I remember one guy who hosted a “brony cooking show”, in which he made food inspired by characters, episoes, whatever, all while a bunch of very flammable plush toys sat preciously close to his stove.

“That’s the bloody Chateau Lafite you’re pouring into the fucking pan, not the cooking wine, you donkey!”

Here’s another example; let’s say you decided to talk about, say, your immense, undying love for corn chips on YouTube under the channel Chippy the Chip Fanatic. Ain’t nobody gonna watch that. You’d be lucky to get a dozen views on their review of Doritos: Baja Blast Edition, just shouting into an audient void. But if, say, you take up the mantle of Corn Pop the Corn Chip Loving Pony and pop in to Bronalysis give the brony community the latest low-down in the white hot world of corn chips? Oh, Corn Pop was gonna get at least a couple thousand subscribers and a vaunted place among the brightest minds in the Brony Food Review Community on the Chip Chomping Union of Bronies podcast.

The thing is, these people all had interests beyond ponies. I always wondered, why must they shove ponies into everything? Well, it’s because they couldn’t fit in with people who shared their hobbies… but they could fit in with other bronies who shared their hobbies. An anime fan who couldn’t jive with other weeaboos could find other bronies to talk shop with. A Fallout fanatic who can’t get anyone to read his fanfiction could certainly get bronies to do so, if only he swapped out the people with ponies. A guy who likes cars can find other degenerates who can sink thousands of dollars into turning a perfectly serviceable car into an itasha with ponies slapped on them.

Oh, you thought there was just one pony-mobile?

You’re beginning to see how this kind of behavior fed into itself, yeah? It was… a culture. One that was… you could say… a bit stuck on the whole pony bit.

But, it wasn’t going to last forever.

There’s only so much you can say about one series, especially once it’s over and new content ceases to keep the conversation going. There was only so many times the good folks at Bronalysis could revisit episodes they talked to death once the series concluded in 2019. Once the primary source of a fandom’s obsession ends, the community can always rely on fan-generated content to keep the engine running, but even that’s gonna dry up, after a while.

People grow older. People change. Interests, no matter how intense they may be, wane. Passions fade. New things come along. Attentions shift. It’s the nature of things. You have your summers. You have your winters. Ponies grow old and are shipped to the Jell-o factory. Nothing lasts forever - not even the magic of friendship.

Now, each one of these original pony characters you see in the Bronalysis graphic above represent an individual with a story behind them, some so rich and fascinating (in the same way a Greek Tragedy is rich and fascinating) that they could warrant a whole article unto themselves. Some of them would become trans. Some would be outed as groomers, to the surprise of approximately no one. Some would move on to other things. Most faded away into obscurity.

But, for a moment - one brief, glorious moment - they were together. And for that moment, I think all of them - no, I know all of would tell you that this group… they weren’t friends. They’d tell you -

I don’t have to tell you that masculine companionship is something that is difficult to come by, these days. We all know it. I was extremely fortunate to grow up in the same town and spend my entire tenure in public education while living in the same home. I hated it at the time, but I look back and realize that it was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to foster friendships that stretch back to my earliest days of childhood to present. I always had a very strong group of friends that I shared my most formative experiences with, that I would go on vacation with, that I would do everything with - brothers in all but name. Even my father, who attended ten schools in a dozen years when he was growing up, is always quick to remind me how he never had such a luxury, and his friends were always as mercurial as the sea until we moved to the town I grew up in. It’s been the longest he’s ever stayed in one place.

I don’t say this to brag or gloat - I say this to illustrate that, the older I get, the more I realize what an anomaly my upbringing was in an ever-fractured and mobile America, and how blessed I am to be granted such a privilege of strong male companionship. Well, we were unrepentant weeaboos who loved anime and video games, but we were still closer with one another than some of us are with our own siblings.

No man is an island. We all need a tribe. And the bronies? They found theirs. It was odd. It was eclectic. It was weird and the rest of the world didn’t understand. But did the rest of the world need to understand?

Everybody wants a place to rest. Everybody wants to have a home. Don’t make no difference what nobody says, ain’t nobody like to be alone.

But this community wasn’t just forged amongst weirdos who shared common interests.

These young men didn’t just bring their raging hormones - they brought their anger. These young men, by and large, were social pariahs. Do you think they were happy about that? They were angry. Of course they were. Angry at being rejected by their peers. Angry at being ostracized by people who they thought should be their friends, misunderstood by their parents, overlooked by women. There’s an unmistakable sense of rebellion attached to the brony subculture. It’s why I posted that video of the sped screaming BRONIES, ASSEMBLE! in the middle of an anime convention - yeah, you can act like a plum fool, as dear Granny Ape used to say, at those things, but believe me, you don’t sit there and scream in the middle of an atrium without attracting a whole lot of negative attention, even from all the other speds who are also being stupid, loud, and annoying.

But, hey - who cares?

If you were a brony, you had a crew. You had a gang. You had homies that were gonna back you up, no matter how poorly you conducted yourself. For many of these people, this was the first time they had a community behind them. Sure, they may have had friends, here and there, but not a community, let alone one as large and robust as the bronies.

“Fuck with us.”

If you ever wondered why these people felt so confident when they strut down the aisles at Target, snapping up pony merchandise left and right and leaving nothing for, y’know, the little girls who were supposed to be buying it… well, it’s because they knew that, no matter what happened, there was a community of like-minded, pony-loving homeboys behind them - if not physically, then spiritually - and any “normie” that might think they were weird could sit on Princess Celestia’s horn and spin.

Have you ever heard the term let your freak flag fly? I genuinely had no idea that it was a song from Shrek the Musical until this very moment. Apparently, it began as a lyric from a Jimi Hendrix track. Never heard it. Don’t really care. I just know that, back in the day, you heard it a lot at conventions. The idea was that we - we being weeaboos, comic dorks, video game addicts, and others with conventionally unconventional hobbies - were freaks, and, when we were together? Well, we didn’t care what all those fuddy-duddy normies thought. They could all take a long walk of a short pier, for all we cared. We delighted in being weird. It was encouraged (though, oldheads in the scene will tell you the problems the larger community is now facing stem from the fact that maybe they encouraged a little too much weirdness, to which I say… no shit).

This was, in essence, the very same spirit the brony community embodied - youthful, self-righteous, masculine rebellion. Rather than drape themselves in the banners of a nation-state and sing songs in the stands of a stadium as they watch their country’s team decimate some poor sods on the soccer pitch, rather than gather before a pop star and sing along with her as she belts out her most well-known songs, rather than don MAGA hats and cheer for a certain poorly spray-tanned politician, or even just sing Bohemian Rhapsody on the floor of an anime convention, the bronies adopted a litany of colorful, diminutive equines and their iconography as their battle standards, gathered ranks, and declared in a voice that would shake the internet to its very foundations: We. Are. Here.

You just know it smells crazy in that suit.

Nothing unites men better than a common struggle.

Episodio delle Cinque Giornate, Baldassare Verazzi, 1848

No one is more impassioned than a group of underdogs facing an insurmountable odds.

The Fall of the Alamo, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk

No group is stronger than a band of men, abandoned by society, despised by their peers, who have no one but one another to rely on.

Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954

I’m not here to justify anything. I’m not here to defend anything. Obviously, I am not attempting to say that a bunch of socially maladjusted nerds are comparable to the men who unified Italy, the defenders of the Alamo, or the Seven Samurai… but I am saying that, in a world so divorced of meaning and purpose as our own, in a world where we are as atomized as we are, and brotherhood is in such short supply… it’s incredibly sad that this is where these guys found their meaning, of all places. But, now, you may understand why the brony community was as strong, tight-knit, defiant, resilient and most importantly, protective of their own as it was.

It is honestly a mystery that eluded me up until this very moment.

Ultimately, I find myself returning to this C.S. Lewis quote - one of my favorites from an inimitable genius.

I think this applies to more than just spiritual endeavors, though, I suppose they may be one and the same. Deny a man community, and he will surround himself with whoever will take him. Deny a man righteous companionship, and he will make friends with pony-obsessed gooners.

Now, to close, where else do you see similar rhetoric? This idea that the walls are closing in. We’re under siege. It’s us and the rest of the world. This group is family, not friends, and we’re up against everything that isn’t us. We can be different, we can be weird, we can be whatever we want and do whatever we want, and everyone else can go to Hell.

Now, to leave you with one last piece to mull over before we depart for Part III, I’d like cap things off by saying that I’d go so far as to say that the brony community, over time, became less of a fandom for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Gradually, it the brony community became a fandom for the brony community. As stated before, the ponies were all window dressing. Little toys that the community could play with in an online sandbox together with. Ponies brought them together, but, in a lot of ways, it didn’t keep them together as much as it may seem on the surface. The entire thing, the further it lasted and the longer it went along, seems like an exercise of a certain kind of venal posturing.

They were angry. They were insular. They were proud to be themselves and not afraid of bucking gender norms. They were proud to be weird and happy to scare normies with their eclectic and unorthodox ways. It turned into an excessive display of…

I’ve laid out enough puzzle pieces for you to ponder over. I'll leave you to put them together as you see fit.

There’s much more I could say on the matter - much - but, I think I risk beating a poor pony into gelatin stock if I do. The parallels speak for themselves. You can draw your own conclusions. I genuinely would like to share more stories of brony depravity with you, if only like a friend at the fireside, regaling old, outlandish tales of high weirdness, but, as I’ve said many a time, now - I simply can’t. Not just because I like you too much, but also, just because it would warrant an entire blog unto itself just to catalogue what weirdness the bronies are getting up to today, let alone over the course of a decade.

But, what I can do is get an insider’s perspective on the matter. As I stated in Part I of this mini-series, I reached out to a friend of mine from high school who was deeply invested in the brony community, from the very beginning. I knew several people who liked the cartoon itself, but he was the only one who actively engaged with the community around it, and I wanted to pick his brain on the various topics, insights, discoveries, and thoughts I’ve stumbled across in the course of writing this. He’s since moved on to bigger and better things, including a successful career and raising a family, but if anyone could speak to the quintessential experience of being a in the community during it’s golden age, it would be him. I’ll also have some parting thoughts, as well, but, to close this piece out, I want to bring back what I said about brotherhood and community, and mention something I think I’m walking away from this investigation with.

Brotherhood is a scarce commodity. Good friends are hard to come by. Purpose is elusive. Fulfillment, more so. Passions run hot. Energy is finite. It’s all currency, in it’s own way. So spend it wisely.

To quote the late, great Cormac McCarthy - Every step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it.

1. My friends attended a Q&A with the animator, Max Gillardi, at a convention one year at the peak of the .MOV series’ popularity, and said the poor guy looked like he wanted to jump out the widnow and into the nearby freeway because every single question related back to ponies, which he categorically did not care about. I think there was a reason he didn’t return the next year.

2. I apologize for making you read that sentence.

3. The jar… the jar…

4. Probably. I mean, I remember my sisters setting up mock executions for their Barbie dolls.

5. Maybe I’ll make my own fan series as a special treat for paid subscribers, if I ever get that far on Substack. Because I know that’s what my audience wants to see… isn’t it?

6. Maybe Friend Bear should consider changing his schtick to Tolerance Bear, just to rebrand and get a new lease on life after that purple thief stole her bit.

7. Ha ha.