Introduction
Long ago, from the primordial mists of the 1980s, there
emerged a toy line and attendant animated series called My Little Pony. I was a kid
at the time, and I remember being aware that this cartoon existed. I also knew that it was a “girl’s cartoon”,
like Rainbow Brite or Jem and the Holograms; there was no
doubt in my five year-old mind that I would burst into flames faster than a
vampire in a church were I to watch it.1 I have no firsthand memories of the
particulars of the show, but a quick look around Youtube does not reveal it to
be a thought-provoking piece of art.
Like almost all 1980s children’s franchises, My Little Pony existed for a while,
vanished, and then languished in shadowy undeath for a couple of decades; a
lingering specter in the consciousness of former 80s kids. A collector’s market for the original
merchandise existed and periodically a new animated property, such as the
Disney Channel’s My Little Pony Tales would
make a brief appearance, but the franchise’s best days seemed behind it.
Then something unexpected happened – My Little Pony’s owner Hasbro, which was still counting the money
from Michael Bay’s Transformers film
and the subsequent surge in that
property’s merchandising prospects, decided to resurrect My Little Pony in the hopes of hitting another rebranding
homerun. Animator and director Lauren
Faust, who had previously worked on such well-regarded Cartoon Network
properties as The Powerpuff Girls and
Foster’s Home for Imaginary
Friends2, was brought in to develop the new series
with an eye towards steering the franchise away from its ooey-gooey,
saccharine-soaked plots and clichéd depictions of female characters. Thus, in 2010, premiered My Little Pony: Friendship is
Magic.
So why in the hell am I telling you this? My last post was a review of the freakin’ Giant Claw, so what in the world does My Little Pony have to do with anything? Well..not much; BUT while I don’t have all
that much reason to talk about My Little
Pony itself, I think there may be an interesting discussion to be had about
the show’s unintended fan base. As
anyone who’s been on the internet in the last three years or so is no doubt aware, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic,
while aimed squarely at young girls, has also attracted a very vocal contingent
of adult male viewers. They call
themselves “Bronies”, and they are
what I’m interested in discussing.
Maligned in many corners of the web as everything from pederasts
to bestiality enthusiasts to just plain weirdoes, Bronies tend to do their,
well, Brony-ing largely amongst themselves.
They have their own internet forums and their own conventions. Some of them, when posting on Brony-friendly
forums, even adopt terms from the TV series, such as using the phrase “anypony”
instead of anybody”. It’s hard for an
outside observer to get a bead on these guys. On the one hand, they’re fans of what’s probably
the most inoffensive show currently on television and devote lots of effort and
creativity towards generating fan content that is often fairly impressive in
both scope and execution. On the other hand, a Google image search for My Little Pony will quickly yield
results for such creepy items as fan-made erotic artwork bearing titles like My Little Pony: Lingerie is Magic. Frankly, some of the creepy stuff is also strangely impressive in its scope
and execution.
The bottom line is that I want to know who the Bronies
are. How old are they? Why are they so interested in this particular
property? Are the ones pinning chapter
after chapter of erotic fan fiction the norm, or just highly visible outliers
who attract unwanted negative attention to the group? I want to know all that and more.
To that end, I’ve enlisted the aid of a cadre of Bronies
over at the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Brony Forums. They’ve generously agreed to answer my
questions and talk to me about life on the inside of Brony culture. From these surveys and interviews, I hope to
paint a more accurate picture of this subculture than was heretofore available
to outsiders. This post is the beginning
of a multi-part essay during which we
will try to get a firmer grasp on these often talked about, but rarely talked to web denizens, these Bronies in the
Mist.
Hypotheses
To start off, I recognize that the term “hypothesis” may be
inappropriate here, as this “study” of mine is almost staggeringly unscientific
in nature. That said, I’m going to cling
to the delusion that I’m above using the word “assumption”. In any event I hypothesize that my survey
will show the mean age of self-identified Bronies to be between 19-23 and that
the majority of them will have at least some college education. Furthermore, it is my expectation that
slightly less than half (perhaps 40%) will self-identify as members of “Furry”
subculture. I suspect that many of them
will report feeling as though their group is thought of negatively and perhaps
even unfairly treated by other groups present on the internet and that at least
half of them will not be “out”, such as it is, to their non-Brony friends.
In more broad terms, I think we shall see that the perceived
biases of others against Bronies will strengthen the in-group commitment of
Bronies and that this in-group, out-group interplay will contribute to
insularity with the community and may result in some distrust of
outsiders. Likewise, I think we may see
that the creative aspect of the group is likely to be highly valued by members
and may also contribute to in-group solidarity, i.e. “Look what we have generated.”3
Finally, I’m interested to see if the accepting, friendly
message of the Friendship is Magic TV
series is personally important to Bronies themselves. Specifically, I’m curious to see if Bronies
consciously see their interest in the show as something of a statement against
the increasingly hyper-masculine image of males often portrayed in the
media.4<.sup>
Potential Problems
In advance, I would like to say that I foresee huge problems
with any statistics I generate based on what I anticipate to be a vanishingly
small sample size of survey respondents.
The forum on which I have posted my survey questionnaire appears to have
approximately 1240 members, based on the site’s Member List, and I expect to
receive usable responses from less than 5% of them. This would obviously make it impossible to
draw any scientifically meaningful conclusions about Bronies as a whole.
I also expect that there may be some reticence on the part
of the Bronies who’ve agreed to speak with me with regard to talking about the
less savory aspects of Brony culture. By
this I mean such things as the large amount of erotic fan-generated materials
about the show’s characters or the group’s relationship to the Furry subculture. This may be made all the worse by my decision
to administer my initial “survey” as an open thread in a message forum; That is
to say, my respondents are aware that their answers are visible to others.
It also goes without saying that I’m wholly ignorant of the principles of this sort of experimental design, so I think we can safely
assume that gaping holes in my methodology will erupt throughout the process.
Regardless of all this, I expect to have a good time
exploring the world of the Bronies, I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
______________________
1.) The lone exception to this proscription against“girl
shows” was arguably She-Ra. Since she was He-Man’s sister it was okay to
watch her show, although I seem to remember that those of us who did kind of
kept it on the down-low.
2.) And also, weirdly, that old MTV show The Maxx.
3.) See Samuel F. Gaertner’s work on common in-group
identity.
4.) For more on the portrayal of masculine imagery in the
media, I highly recommend Jackson Katz’s short film Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity.
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