Bronies: Appendix

History of Bronies

• In October 2010, near when My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic premiered, a few guys who stumbled upon the show or were forced to watch it with a daughter or a niece, posted on the 4chan boards that the show was actually quite good
  • They became a micro-community, discussing and praising the show
• Soon, others came across the group and decided to check out the show to see if it was as good as they said it was. Then they started posting about it, too.
  • So the name actually comes from where the community started, on the “b” 4chan message boards.
• Many users of 4Chan, a popular image board, latched onto the show during this debate. Users began to excitedly post thread after thread of endless pony pictures.
  • At one point, images of ponies had to be banned from the site due to abuse.
• Many believe it was this “anti-pony” movement that made bronies what they are today
• Bronies soon began to create their own websites.
  • After seeing so much opposition from 4Chan users, bronies moved on to create PonyChan, an image board just for My Little Pony related content.
• As the brony community grew and expanded into the rest of the internet, 4Chan later created a brand new board just for ponies and welcomed the community back with open arms
• “What we realized when filming this is that Bronies isn’t about guys liking a girl’s show—it’s about the community they’ve created,” Brent Hodge, the filmmaker behind A Brony Tale, tells The Daily Beast. “That’s a big line for the Bronies: ‘We came for the show but stayed for the community.’

Brony extended thesis

Bronies view themselves as sensitive outsiders who are born into a system and society of overbearing masculinity that has been forced onto them by the weight of the world. There’s something special about them that’s different than the “other guys”—their sensitivity and rejection of traditional masculine norms is heroic.

1. Bronies are outsiders but they’re proud. There’s a ‘fuck you’ perspective from bronies—they’re misunderstood, and of course ‘casual normies’ (like us) wouldn’t understand. In a way, they’re the genesis of outsiderdom. I asked myself throughout my research if Bronies were pushed out because they were weird, or if they chose to become weird to set themselves apart. Ultimately, I wanted to know if this fandom was just about the show and its animations and plotline

2. Bronies are going against a traditional masculine discourse in preaching love and acceptance. In doing this, they attempt to create autonomous identities. I imagine much of a Brony’s inner dialogue goes something along the lines of: “Not only are we going to be different, but we’re going to make our own community about love and acceptance/anti-masculine elements”.

3. In a way, this has allowed tribe members to open up and take advantage of the platform as a space to talk about very personal problems (see image one of “Interesting Findings” section in this dossier). But the kicker is that in doing this—in rejecting masculinity and pursuing a fandom of MLP—Bronies often reproduce masculinity in incredibly toxic ways. The extension of the bronies’ ‘loving and tolerating’ is that they expect to be loved and tolerated back. They are often unwilling to change their own perspectives, which they view as just as valid as others. Bronies can be viewed as using post-crisis masculinities to maintain their masculine privilege.

4. A defining characteristic of Bronies is that they’re “not like the other guys”. Note image two in the “Interesting Findings” section, where the author of an article detailing why he is a Brony encourages the reader to “be a rebel” by joining the tribe, promising to keep it a secret. I mentioned this in my presentation, but Bronies talking about how “they’ll treat a girl right” unlike the “other guys” who are generalized to be alcoholic, violent, abusive men is rather problematic

5. A final thought relates to the masculine reproduction of the tribe evidenced by their fetishization of the MLP franchise. It seems that most Bronies who consume and produce this content don’t actually want to have sex with a horse. Instead, they use the fetishization and sexualization of the Mane Six as a way to dehumanize the woman’s body and distance it from an actual human. What does it mean that they use a woman’s body parts on an animal?. The objectification of the main characters into passive, mute, sexual ‘objects’ in subreddits such as /r/clopclop shows that there are elements of hegemonic masculinity of MLP fandom. Some of the academic research I encountered suggested that this was because MLP facilitates the “ultimate goal of the mastery and appropriation of the feminine nature” while placating viewers’ anxieties (Black, 2008). I include further analysis here:

   “This facet links to a trend in kawaii or cute appreciation by men in Japanese culture, as noted by Black (2008). Black proposes that the essence of kawaii aesthetics has its appeal in the plactation of anxieties about the human form and character. Black writes that (2008, p40); The kawaii body is a diminutive, rounded, passive, tidy body, almost or entirely lacking in orifices and appendages of any kind, implying an inability to exude anything (vomit, excrement) or act upon the world. It is a body which appears passive, but also hygienic.” Source