The Last Bronycon: a fandom autopsy

so some of you might know that i like my little pony i'm so subtle about it as a longtime horse girl i pretty much played indiscriminately with all kinds of horse toys grand champions briars and some my little ponies thrown in for good measure but when i was around 11 i discovered the online fan communities around my little pony i was so intrigued by the older ponies that they made before i was born there was a mystique to them which was only amplified by their extremely humble internet presence all of the fan sites were like angel fire and geocities pages and then to move on to the next one you would have to try to navigate the web ring at the bottom web rings still existed i would just go on a chain from one to another and i felt like an archaeologist exploring a lost culture so i became a full-fledged pony fan like not the normal level of a kid liking my little pony but like the nerd freak kind of level i was deep in it i went on forums i scoured the new york toy fair posts every year to try to find anything i could about the upcoming ponies most of the other collectors at this time were in their 20s and 30s so i thought of them as old and mom aged depressing but kind of apt because the early fandom was a very cuddly place it was very pg very friendly almost entirely women eventually i even went to a couple real life fan meetups accompanied by my mom because i was a minor i know i'm really cool in those days pony conventions were a single ballroom rented in a hotel or convention center they'd have folding tables set up everywhere and like roughly 200 attendees would quietly sell vintage ponies maybe hold a raffle since those days a very different fandom has sprung up the bronies the adult male fans of my little pony and in august of 2019 i attended the last bronycon the last one they're ever going to have an event which was viewed by some as the death of the brony fandom as a whole so today i am going to dissect the entirety of the brony fandom it's birth life death i'm going to make you feel like you were there i am going to make you feel like you birthed and lived with and killed it yourself i don't know what i mean by that i feel like there's a lot to unpack here so i thought i would organize this into an internet friendly numbered list part one how did the bronies happen i will try to make this super abbreviated my little pony the brand has existed for decades but in that time roughly every 10 years they will reboot the series and redesign all the toys to keep it fresh this also means rebooting the tie-in cartoons for the fourth generation of my little pony animator lauren faust was put in charge of the creative vision this newest series was called my little pony friendship is magic and it debuted on october 10th 2010 on the hub network if you haven't heard of the hub that's because it doesn't exist anymore it was a joint venture between discovery channel and hasbro to rebrand the discovery kids channel into a new programming block which heavily featured hasbro toyline tie-in cartoons this included littlest pet shop pound puppies and my little pony the launch of the network inspired an angry op-ed on the animation site cartoon brew titled the end of the creator driven era in tv animation the writer detailed their disappointment that a creative lady like lauren faust had debased herself by taking on a vapid toy commercial project for little girls this is an unfair assessment i guess a bad take you could call it lauren faust being the creative director for the show meant that she was building the world from the ground up with her own concepts it's true that people are tired of reboots and it's nice to see original ideas get financial backing but if they really have their heart set on making a new my little pony cartoon if anything i'd take it as a good sign that the network is willing to shell out for an established creator with good credentials and it's not like they forced her to take the project she had some ideas that she wanted to make anyway this article did the rounds it mentioned several shows that were going to be on the hub but my little pony was the standout probably because its full title is my little pony friendship is magic which is just so painfully trite and adorable this article went up only 9 days after my little pony premiered and it drove some adult attention to the show people wanted to see it for themselves some looking to defend it because they were mad at the tone of the article and others excited to roast it i guess but what's important here is you have a whole demographic of people who might not otherwise watch in my little pony cartoon who are now tuning in to see what all the fuss is about and by people i mean 4chan i think a lot of people try to sweep that under the rug that the brony fandom came from 4chan but like it did so here we have four channers watching my little pony with probably fairly low expectations my little pony has fun characters and nice looking animation it also has good fun writing but i i wouldn't say necessarily in a particularly remarkable way there were a lot of solid cartoons airing around that time and they had catchy songs and jokes put in for the parents to enjoy phineas and ferb is a big one that comes to mind but my little pony is the one that 4chan was watching and they came in with their own expectations and i think that really reframed the way they looked at the show and i am not a 4chan native but i think any millennial or gen zer or whatever we're going to call the one after that can understand the concept of ironic fandom and the way that went a group of people decided to real time together as an activity watch a thing they wouldn't usually engage with the thing isn't as bad as their rock bottom expectations and they unironically enjoy parts of it so they now get to revel in how unexpected it is that they like this thing 4channers already seem to have this image of themselves as i don't know hacker rebel shadow the hedgehog boys so to them it's double amusing to see this unfold but we're 4chan the most cynical bad boys on the internet we should be posting about racism or anime but instead we're fans of ponies how novel how intriguing there's an image of twilight sparkle making an angry face like she's going to go to battle but instead of the text saying something angry she threatens to love and tolerate you this meme got passed around so much that the phrase love and tolerate became kind of a slogan for the brony fandom and some claimed that it was the motto of the show but they never say that in the show at least they didn't say it in earlier seasons the later seasons incorporated a lot of brony in jokes and memes and consequently were much worse and i didn't watch them it's fully possible that they said love and tolerate in one of those and then pinkie pie dabbed or something but the whole meme the whole slogan is really just a remnant of the fandom coming from 4chan because if you're an internet edgy big boy shadow the hedgehog i don't remember what i called them that makes it really funny if you threaten to love and tolerate someone because one would expect you to say something mean and nasty but instead you aren't how novel how hilarious that's irony culture and that kind of sums up the whole 4chan phase of the fandom the term brony was coined again presumably with a level of irony it's no wonder it caught on because it's honestly just an inherently funny word gold star to whoever came up with it we'll never know because it's anonymous bros who like ponies it's obviously a self-deprecating intentionally silly word a joke name for a joke fandom right so pony memes started completely taking over the board everybody wanted to talk ponies they wanted to repost screenshots from the show or contribute their own art to people who had watched the show and been in those original pony watching threads and were in on the joke i'm sure this was all extremely funny to everyone who wasn't it was super annoying and pony posting was quickly banned by the mods even just saying the word pony was forbidden but there was way too much energy behind this thing and all this energy had to go somewhere part two the growth of the fandom a 4chan user who went by the online alias sethisto responded to the band by creating his own brony website called equestria daily the site officially launched in january of 2011 and visually it basically looked like a wordpress blog but whenever there was a piece of pony news seth would reliably post it most importantly whenever a new episode dropped equestria daily would round up links of where to watch it online the hub network didn't come with all cable packages and the show hadn't made a deal with itunes yet so it was very difficult for bronies to watch the show legally even if they wanted to pay for it but they knew that every week if they went to equestria daily there would be a post right at the top of the website with a dailymotion link this really cemented the website's place in the fandom because many fans were reliant upon it even if they didn't check it every day they would at least come back once a week so this made equestria daily a very effective platform for fan content anybody or sorry any brony could draw fan art of a pony or cut show footage into a music video and then email their work into eqd if it's chosen for a feature you're guaranteed that hundreds maybe thousands of eyeballs will immediately be on your work so as you can imagine this inspired a lot of people to start creating fan works at an incredible pace it was totally symbiotic people would get attention for things that they put hours into and equestria daily would have never ending content seth brought on more moderators and they could post tens of times every day and then the more content they posted the more often bronies would come back to check the site because they knew there would be something new to see and more content meant more competition it was harder to get featured and that meant people started stepping up their game and the fan art started being higher and higher quality do you see how the cycle started perpetuating itself so with this ever increasing quality and quantity of fan content it's no wonder that people involved in it started thinking hey this thing that's happening right now this could be really big and guess how that feels that feels exciting and and what do you do when you're excited you make more content and you make better content and it just keeps going part three my little pony irony becomes sincerity get it it sounds like the title of the show kind of so here's where it gets real i'm like sweating i'm sweating with excitement because we all knew this whole thing couldn't just stay on 4chan forever people on other sites or on the internet have obviously noticed this crazy influx of pony fan content and it's making them curious about the show but what's important about these new bronies is they are entering the fandom without the ironic context they're just watching the show because they heard it's good and they're thinking yeah it is good they love it in a totally uncomplicated way so now the overwhelming vibe in the community is just people unironically loving the show and the fandom is even bigger and is starting to establish an identity as a community and in all cases fandom begets fandom some people become interested in fandoms in a way that's totally removed from the piece of media they're supposed to be a fan of a lot of people just enjoy the feeling of belonging to an n group it's a shorthand way to make friends and joining a fandom means inheriting references inside jokes even physical social events without having to do any of the usual leg work i'm not trying to say the show didn't matter at all i don't think this kind of fandom could have happened with just any show i think there were parts of it that resonated but like why my little pony right many shows have online fandoms but why did this grow to this scale because think about it how many fandoms can support their own dedicated large-scale conventions a couple of cultural juggernauts like harry potter or star trek but for the most part nerd franchises are lumped together the furry fandom covers a whole genre and comic cons have just become a catch-all for every kind of genre fiction there is so what what is it about my little pony is it just the best show ever of all time no of course not my little pony when you really examine it is almost tailor made to support a fandom and you can see similarities between it and other large franchises firstly the character designs they're cute but more importantly they are very simple and they're all drawn from the same template variations in body type aren't unheard of but they are very uncommon mostly the characters are differentiated by eye shape hairstyle and color so once you learn how to draw a pony you can just draw everypony in the show this definitely had a hand in the extremely high output rate of fan art this template format of character creation also made it really simple to create your own original character this reminds me of the sonic fandom or the general furry fandom where you'll see all these different character designs but they're all clearly unified by a common art style and this ties into the next point the show has its own universe with a large cast of characters different settings and its own mythology many locations villains and magical concepts are mentioned only in passing this sets the stage for a lot of fannin and speculative fan fiction and it also makes it extremely easy for people to envision their own stories and characters existing in this world and that kind of circles back to harry potter and star trek people are fans of the characters and plot but the main component is world building and having a cool atmosphere that you can project yourself into also artists and vendors really love the brony fandom as i said before most conventions you see cover a wide swath of fandom so imagine you're packing up your wares to go to a convention and you're going to sell t-shirts or art prints or shot glasses what inventory are you going to prioritize anything you don't sell you're out the money but you also have to pay to ship it back home so are you going to print out like 100 batman shirts 150 lord of the rings shirts maybe a couple hundred harry potter brony conventions are just ponies and the show has six main characters if you want to sell something of a secondary character that will be someone's favorite but if you want to play it safe you can just make hundreds of prints of each of the six main characters and you're probably going to sell out your stock i mean you might have some apple jacks left over this was again a kind of symbiotic phenomenon the vendors get to turn a profit by going to these brony conventions but for the bronies having this huge smorgasbord of merch at every convention made the fandom feel bigger and then non-bronies see people with brony t-shirts and hats and plush and shot glasses and the word spreads further and the fandom gets bigger it just keeps going part four so is it a weird sex thing why yes i'm just kidding kind of it's undeniable that many many people are attracted to these ponies it's not just like there's dirty fan art out there if you look for it it's like if you look up my little pony at all you will find dirty fan art even if you try to avoid it i'd imagine that initially a lot of the saucier pony fan art was done ironically and posted like lol i'm going to hell yeah i went there deal with it whoa and then people would pass it around like lol we're so depraved look at us we're going in the sin dumpster or however fandoms talk in the early days of the fandom openly admitting that you were attracted to the ponies was actually pretty taboo go figure remember we're all internet cool guys here we're only watching this show ironically and yeah it's actually pretty good yeah it's got some solid jokes and that music is catchy you've gotta hand it to them but we're not weirdos we're not freaks like the furries the problem is as the fandom got bigger and more mainstream a lot of the bronies just were furries active participants of the furry fandom found out about this new popular cartoon with anthropomorphic animals and they wanted to check it out and obviously they liked what they saw those freaks but for the first couple years it was very hush-hush it was unthinkable to be a furry there would be saucy fan art for sale at the conventions but it was largely sold under the table and you'd hear about it in like a joking way like oh my god i heard they're actually selling horny fan art of the ponies who would do that we're not furries right guys right and it was just a joke right the guy that drew it and made prints of it uh he was just joking the guy's paying money for it they're just kidding around you're going to be really shocked to hear that that only lasted a couple years over time it came to light that just most bronies were furries in fact a lot of the fan artists and convention founders and podcasters who had vocally pretended to be anti-furry in the past were revealed to be furries and i'm not just saying like hey it seems like that guy is a furry i'm saying like oh here's a picture of that guy four years ago in a fursuit at a furry convention and his last podcast was about furries and so over time people just stopped caring because what else were they gonna do was the entire fandom the bronies coined the term clopping which is um it's uh when you when you enjoy the more risque pony art you are clopping and like the word brony this term was probably invented to be ironic and intentionally absurd and nobody's really doing this right guys but then just like brony it evolved far beyond the point of irony so i would imagine that many people liked this show for totally non-sexual reasons but if they were in the fandom especially in later years they were probably in the minority and i also think there might be a separate very weird phenomenon at play i think a lot of people began watching the show and initially were drawn to it because it was funny and well paced and yeah the art style is appealing it's not sexy it's just appealing and the characters are well designed and they're endearing and i speculate that maybe in a broad general sense men are not socialized to recognize uncomplicated unsexual fondness for a female character so they liked the ponies for a little while and then their brains started going but can i have sex with it and if there are people in the fandom who are already furries and are already making this kind of content that's just going to push you right over the edge let me make a chart of how i think it all shakes out like maybe 30 of bronies are not attracted to the ponies at all and honestly that feels like a generous number another 30 i would say were not furries when they entered the fandom but then mlp made them furries they were furry radicalized i guess and then the remaining 40 were just furries all along i guess it's mostly harmless and i don't care that much i mean these ponies don't exist and nothing that resembles them exists none of these guys are attracted to real horses because real horses don't have big anime eyes the ponies are anthropomorphized to the point where they barely resemble horses at all all the nightmarish characteristics of a real horse have been totally scrubbed clean the hard skull crushing hooves have been replaced with these squishy stumps that pick things up like hands the long protruding snouts have been smooshed down to look more like a cat head it's like when i see furries that think this is attractive i don't think they're attracted to real wolves so you know no animals were harmed etc i still get to think it's weird and kink shame them though oh you can also draw a judgmental conclusions about people's personalities based upon which of the main six ponies they have a crush on it's like hogwarts houses but weirder part five the birth of bronycon so we know the why now let's look at the how the stage is set the my little pony fandom exists and with the online fandom growing larger and larger people started eventually setting up their own in-person local brony meetups if you lived near any major city there was probably a bernie meetup group the nyc chapter started calling themselves bronycon with the nyc in the middle capitalized get it their first meetup consisted of 30 people through 2011 the group continued to meet under the name bronycon and over time they started to secure some of the actual show staff to show up to the meetups and do autographs and such you have to understand that while the first season of my little pony was airing the people working on the show had no idea that this fandom was becoming the thing that it was mlp was a kid's cartoon on a new programming block on a channel that most people had not heard of there was practically no behind the scenes content and most of the people working on the show didn't have a social media presence either this added a certain mystique to the whole production and just put the bronies into more of a frenzy to try to get close to the people responsible so when a bronycon meetup in january of 2012 announced that they would be hosting three of the voice actors and the director of the show it quickly outgrew its space hundreds of bronies lined up for hours in the halls outside the meeting room so the organizers decided maybe it was time to start an actual convention in an actual convention center so they did they dropped the capitalized nyc in the name became just bronycon and moved to baltimore to become a full-fledged convention so what i'm saying is that bronycon in june of 2012 was essentially the first bronycon it was the first actual con but i knew if i didn't say any of that other stuff all these bronies would be in the comments like actually that wasn't the first bronycon and they would call me a fake fan of bronycon anyway first real bronycon of 2012 was a smash success it was on a lot of the local news stations the showrunner lauren faust showed up the majority of the voice cast and over 4 000 attendees so that's it the era of the brony convention had officially begun and after bronycon there were imitators boy were there imitators there were a couple of large ones and then just a thousand small ones it's like when you hear about that economic thing of like the bubble like the housing bubble this was the bronycon bubble part six horsefamous i talked a little bit about the frenzy around the show staff but i don't think i even painted a graphic enough picture this phantom interest didn't just extend to the showrunner and the voice talent it was everybody if you worked on the show in any capacity and i mean any capacity you were a celebrity in the brony fandom i find this really heartwarming to be honest a lot of love goes into making children's animation but these jobs are usually very thankless but but not in the brony fandom you've voiced one supporting character in one episode well guess what that's 100 brony's favorite character and they want you to sign the plush they commissioned of it you're one of 12 staff writers or a storyboarder well the bronies all know you by name and they want to put you on a panel when i worked for screen junkies they knew i liked mlp so they surprised me by sending me to the premiere of the my little pony movie and i don't think they use this footage but on the drive over the producer was like so you know enough about this show right like do you know the names of anyone that's gonna be there and i was like well well yes yes of course andrea libman is fluttershy and pinkie pie ashley ball is applejack as well as rainbow dash tara strong as twilight sparkle kathy westluck my favorite is spike the dragon and they were like surprised and it's like you guys you don't understand you don't know how deep this thing goes after the success of bronycon lots of other cons started springing up all over the world many of them smaller in scale but some of them just as big as bronycon and this brony obsession with everyone from the show really helped because they had a really large pool of talent to try to invite to all the smaller cons but they weren't even limited to just show staff with all the fan art being churned out every day there were loads of bronies who were famous among bronies just for being bronies there were celebrity fan artists fan podcasters fan animators voice actors but at the very top of the pyramid you had the brony musicians the brony fan music scene started off with primarily remixes of songs from the show usually remixed to be dubstep or something but before long bronies also started posting their own original music inspired by the show again mostly dubstep brony music was hugely popular even when the fandom was young a popular brony song could get hundreds of thousands of views on youtube and a little bit later that would jump up into the millions so with numbers this big the brony musicians were celebrities in their own right they were superstars at cons they'd get swarmed by brony fans asking for autographs do meet and greets and they'd even perform full-scale live concerts in the evenings this phenomenon got its own ironic label if you were a brony famous in the brony fandom you were horse famous horse theme was extremely funny to me because obviously it spawned some disproportionately huge egos featured convention guests would like wear their sunglasses inside they'd get hustled over to the green room by security they'd hide away in the green rooms backstage and complain about how difficult it is to be swarmed by your fans it was absurd because all these people were completely unfamous for the other 360 days out of the year i'm not talking about everyone a lot of horse famous people were just like people who wanted to be creative online and they were completely nice but i can't even really begrudge the people who acted like weird arrogant rock stars because isn't that kind of exciting in its own right they added spice to the bronycon experience so you know what good the horse famous were also an important part of the con ecosystem because they were yet another large pool of guests to invite and use to promote your con not every con can get tara strong but if you can get one storyboarder and one minor voice actor from the show and five popular brony musicians that's going to be enough to be a huge draw for loads of people part seven my dark brony double life okay so this will be a fun story time strap in my visit to the last bronycon was not my first bronycon experience back in the day when the fandom was new my friend and i made a parody series of my little pony friendship is magic called friendship is witchcraft because that means the same thing but it sounds creepier so that's funny we would take the existing visuals of an episode and twist them around so it would be about something totally different and shots would be rearranged there would be new animation a totally new audio track obviously original songs cool stuff like that we wrote the scripts together and i did the voices of most of the ponies i'll put like a compilation it's just that nobody ever stands up to twilight sparkle that gives what we've done a lot less moral ambiguity my own special mission will i learn about magic and friendship i'll cook up a solution with the knowledge i've accrued they say a kitchen time saves nine but i'm just saving two what but you just sold that to me for like 10 bucks whoa applejack how did you get so little look ziggity i'm finally beautiful on the outside and whatever happened to your old torso it's in the bag [Music] it was most of them and these videos did numbers i can't even really tell you how many numbers they did because they were regularly taken down by hasbro and at this point only fan re-uploads exist of most of the episodes but even those fan re-uploads appear to have millions of views i cannot tell you how many times someone has watched my new videos said i sounded familiar and then much later realized it was because i sound like twilight sparkle from the pony parody so that's right i was horse famous did i give that away when i was like saying how people act in green rooms because i knew that because i was in them sometimes not all the time they were pretty boring honestly at every convention all the fun stuff was not in the green room it was out on the convention floor and just to be clear there was no money made from this or like very little money the songs were monetizable but the episodes were not and we had a patreon like near the end but after three or four years of making this stuff i think we probably only pulled in like five thousand dollars and that's split between two people so what i'm trying to say is that this was very much a labor of love i am not suggesting you go and watch this series i don't think it holds up there are individual jokes that i like but mostly i find it really cringy to try to look at now but if you are determined to watch an episode watch the wedding episode it's the best one but worst of all we had this whole meta joke where we put in a bunch of references to the hunchback of notre dame we snuck entire hunchback song lyrics into the songs quotes from the dialogue and one of the ponies was literally frollo i think our original reasoning was that there is a breed of horse called and the hunchback of notre dame is all about social tensions with so we had a character who was supposed to be like the esmeralda character and it was like really present through the whole series and like a big part of the character's arc it was in two of the best known songs and even in the title of one of them i don't know if you haven't figured it out the reason i'm not saying the word in question is that this word is actually considered a slur to the romani population we kind of thought it was a neutral word and it turns out it's not also i don't think this is caught on in north america yet but apparently there's a movement to rename this breed of horse to the tinker horse which is very adorable but anyway our dumb disney nostalgia selves didn't realize that we shouldn't be saying this word until way too late in the game we stopped having them say it in subsequent episodes but all the previous stuff was still there and you're probably like well bronies are over and nobody watches those episodes anymore anyway right so it's not like you're you're getting a lot of reach with this well one would think it turns out that a lot of the friends of his witchcraft songs have had some recent viral success on tick tock because their upbeat character voices singing about dark things which you can like emote to and that's exactly what tick-tock loves so now there are loads of teenagers who have never seen friendship as witchcraft merrily dancing and lip-syncing along to these songs that have slurs in them and that's my legacy isn't it wonderful i mean it's not the tick tocker's fault they didn't make the songs and it seems like there's also a lot of tick tocks of people like doing discourse about why they shouldn't be doing tick tocks about the songs while dancing to the songs tick tock has a lot of layers it's very interesting anyway that was a tangent my point is that friendship is witchcraft was popular and we got invited to a lot of cons it was wild there were so many bronies that you'd be doing a panel for like a comic-con sized room like thousands of people i even had an impersonator at one convention most people didn't know what i looked like because i did voiceover my name is ellie mint and i do the voices for friendship as witchcraft so she like showed up and was on panels and stuff and then i had to tweet like hey that's not me i'm not at this convention and then she fled into the night a mystery to this day my very first bronycon was june of 2012 the first real bronycon and my very last bronycon was in 2019 the last bronycon all told i think i went to at least 10 cons over the years so i truly got a taste of the fandom a big sampler of brony flavor which i think is such a unique position to be in so let's look at how that went part eight the anatomy of a brony convention every bronycon had its own venue and its own vibe but they were all basically cut from the same cloth you'd have one super large panel space which would host any panels with the show staff or any of the more popular fan panels then you'd have hallways to smaller panel rooms for community guests i always sought out the small panels because they had much weirder topics some of them were no-brainers there would be like an art advice panel a panel of fanfic authors but then you'd read through the schedule and see like psychology for your oc brony standup comedy the guide to tumblr ask blogs so that stuff was my jam panels were also great for people watching because everybody held still so you could just look at the crowd you see a fair number of fursuits at bernie conventions and also a little bit of cosplay but it's more common among female attendees male fans are more likely to accessorize so you'll see a meme t-shirt or something like a crazy cape or hat i remember at my first bronycon somebody was selling these fleece hats that looks like the top half of a pony's head like it had the ears and mane and the big cute eyeballs and they were everywhere at this convention i remember i loved the panels because i could look across the top of the crowd and see these big unblinking pony faces i got so nostalgic remembering these hats that i wanted to wear one for this video and i like looked on ebay to see if any former bronies were selling them but no luck i guess that's another thing that's kind of special about these brony conventions though like the person who made those hats probably only did it for like two years and then they stopped so it was just a weird product of its time and now no one can get it anymore it exists only in my memory and like probably the back of some bronies closet bronies also like to carry things like a sign or a prop and of course plush are huge figuratively and literally in the early days of the show there weren't any official plush available when hasbro finally did start rolling them out they were kind of oddly proportioned and didn't really look like the show i still thought they were cute just you know big lumpy pony plush but i guess if you want them to look like the show because you're attracted to fluttershy this is a problem so fans started making and selling their own plush but not only were they kind of a high skill level handmade item they were also in extremely high demand so if you had a nice looking plush one could assume that it ran you anywhere from 300 to 700 dollars this made pony plush essentially a status symbol at these conventions which i find extremely charming bronies wanted to cart them around all weekend which is even funnier considering how massive these often were in case you couldn't tell i am a plush loving person and as such i am in full support of this plush-based clout culture moving through the con then there was the dealer hall lots of fan art for sale and body pillows these are um some pony pillow covers a lot of body pillows some more body pillows oh look a body pillow here's perhaps the largest selection of body pillows here are some more body pillows oh body pillows and from one booth selling body pillows to next door where they are also selling body pillows oh body pillows okay oh more body pillows oh look body pillows oh over there body pillows and body pillows let's get some body pillows they're going to run out of body pillows before and get one but there were also some rare treasures to discover probably the most popular brony fanfic of all time was the fallout equestria series it was exactly what it sounds like it was original pony characters having adventures in the world of fallout the video game i don't know how necessary it even was that they'd be ponies for this story to be told i never attempted to read it but it had its own huge following in the early days of the fandom you would commonly see bronies at cons with their hardcover copies of fallout equestria but the fanfic was really long and then it had spin-offs so these things were the size of encyclopedias and spread across multiple volumes fans dropped hundreds of dollars to complete this set of books i guess maybe this physical fanfic practice caught on because at phonycon 2019 there was a whole table dedicated to a brony vanity press with a big display of brony books including a book that was like a brony send-up of a choose-your-own-adventure book i was so upset that it sold out before i happened upon this booth i really wanted it one thing i did score was this this is a factory made mass-produced unlicensed plush of a character from fallout equestria because how could i not right i want to say this is the strangest thing i own but let's be real it's not even the strangest thing that's in frame right now you can look around these vendor halls and find pony soaps pony candles pony jewelry you also tend to see booths set up of bronies advertising their own upcoming brony conventions this was even the case of the last bronycon because a lot of the smaller cons are still trying to hang in there i would have been a little surprised if any bronycons made it much past 2020 but i'm pretty sure the coronavirus pandemic is going to be a much more definitive end for a lot of these beyond the con booths there are other booths that are just taken over by bronies who want to show people a cool thing they made some people promote their tumblr blogs or youtube videos i saw this cool booth where these guys had built an actual functioning sweetie belle robot sweetie sweetiebot oh my god which is a reference to a joke from friendship as witchcraft where sweetie bell is a robot and kind of became a meme in the fandom so this booth was just to demo their cool robot for everybody and explain how it worked one unique fixture of the brony convention is the aforementioned brony musician rock concert [Music] this tradition was started at bronycon and became an expected component of every con big or small a few of the popular musicians even spent like an entire year just touring together and going to various cons it's really impressive the links these guys went to to set up proper professional concerts and the fan music was so big in the fandom that everybody knew the words and would be singing along [Applause] it would be so surreal to be at what superficially looks like any rock concert until you look to your left and somebody sent their three foot pinkie pie plush crowd surfing past you another cute thing about bronycons is that everything became a meme at like light speed so it's really common to be at day two of a convention and start seeing cosplays and fan art and signs making memes out of things that happened earlier at that same convention bronycon 2012 had a light fixture explode in the ceiling and set off a fire alarm the overhead lights one of the light fixtures has caught fire [Music] everything was fine but they had to clear the building until the fire department could check it out and by the time everyone filed back in afterward there were literally dealers in the vendor hall tacking up fan art of the bronycon fire another con held their brony rock concert in a ballroom on the second floor of a hotel and so many bronies were jumping in time to the music that hotel management was afraid the floor would cave in for your own safety for the safety of the equipment and for the safety of the musicians performing tonight we are asking you to refrain from jumping so don't jump became a meme in between songs when people wanted to cheer they would instead just chant please don't jump please don't they love chanting dude you're right that is amazing all right guys it's also a staple of brony conventions that they always have a charity auction fan artists donate some of their wares to the convention or attendees donate sought after pony merchandise any show staff who are featured on panels sign items to increase their value or offer services like voice acting lessons or meet and greets a combination of brony mania and peer pressure leads to bronies dropping insane amounts of cash on these auction items and you know what good everybody wins in this situation the final bronycon charity auction raised eighty thousand dollars for children's cancer research in like a three-hour auction it's another tradition that was started by the first bronycon and became an expected component of every subsequent con and that's great to me the most interesting part of a brony convention was always just like the hallways the panels are interesting and there's stuff to see in the dealer's hall but whenever i get nostalgic i think about walking around the spaces between panel rooms or the hotel lobbies or even like the elevator that was always the best way to stumble across weird organic things happening like bronies would bring musical instruments and sit in a circle and have jam sessions or you'd see a pony fursuit chilling with their head off i just liked that the juxtaposition between like a hilton check-in desk and a man wearing a bulbous paper mache fluttershy head part 9 brony propaganda if i may go on a little tangent here i have an interesting story for you there has actually been an entire documentary produced about bronies and specifically bronycon it made it onto netflix and everything i don't think netflix was running trailers for it but still i'd say it being on netflix makes it at least a little bit mainstream so for a lot of people i'd imagine that this is where their understanding of bronies starts and ends which is bad because it doesn't really attempt to explain anything i feel like anyone setting out to view the brony dock deserves to have their printer spit out a little fact cheat detailing the circumstances under which it was made see john delancey an actor known best for his role as q in star trek made a cameo in the season two finale episode of my little pony i went in i knocked it off and completely forgot about it but soon his agent started getting hit with requests for jon to appear at brony conventions john investigated this whole thing and appears to have reached one conclusion bronies have cash to burn so john decided to produce a brony documentary and sell it directly to bronies he got tara strong on board as a co-producer because tara was the voice of twilight sparkle and was also making bank off of con appearances i've met both tara and jon in the green rooms of these conventions and heard the way both of them talk to and about their fans both when they're public facing and when they're not and tara really loves her fans she's been working in cartoons for a long long time and a lot of her fans are neurodivergent children and adults and the way she interacts with them is extremely warm and kind jon is the rudest actor i've ever met he hates bronies and he hates doing fan conventions and as of like at least 2013 he still had not seen a single episode of the show so for him at least this documentary is clearly a very cash motivated endeavor the brony dock sent press releases to equestria daily and hyped it up at brony conventions it was financed via a kickstarter of bronies and was allegedly made primarily using cheap labor from bronies within the fandom that's important when you're watching this this documentary was made by bronies for bronies it's not really approached from the angle of trying to explain bronies to the uninitiated it's intended to paint a flattering picture of bronies to sell back to those bronies this didn't really work at all one thing the producers really didn't account for is that the entire foundation of the brony fandom was a bunch of computer savvy nerds passing around file sharing links of the show obviously as soon as the first cut of the brony doc was sent to kickstarter backers within 30 minutes it was on every file sharing website and the entire fandom had watched it illegally the producers were so mad that they announced they would not be continuing work on the project they released what they had to film festivals and streaming sites and they claimed that this version was the product that they had always intended but reportedly there were hundreds of hours of content that will just never see the light of day and remember that thing i said about reportedly using cheap labor from within the brony fandom well the production update specifically mentioned that they had deferred some of the traditional salaries to be paid by post-release sales which seems to imply that they were saying the post-release piracy within the fandom was being used as a justification for why the labor was underpaid so on the whole the project was a failure and ended on a pretty sour note but the circumstances of its production make it an extremely interesting cultural artifact to me at least they wanted to make money from bronies so the film had to be super sanitized and super celebratory of the brony fandom but in doing so they infantilized the bronies in a way that i can't imagine anyone finding flattering makes it hard to know you are my very best friend the documentary obviously can't talk about 4chan or the sex stuff or anything that would warrant critical examination so then how do you explain bronies in your big brony documentary so what they settled on is bronies are a bunch of neurodivergent men who are so stupid that they need a show for four-year-olds to teach them genuine lessons about friendship and that's beautiful isn't it i'm not going to claim that there aren't tons of bronies on the autism spectrum but what a weird and reductive way to examine that i don't think people with aspergers like the show because they're mentally toddlers who need to watch a pink pony bake cakes to learn about the world and i'm shocked that they found a psychologist willing to sit down on camera and imply that it's also served a guidance function because cartoons are little parables and we have begun to call this the wwpd factor what would a pony do you know maybe they just like the show there's so much to unpack i watched this film and i can't help but assume that it would be completely incomprehensible to a non-brony they commissioned a popular fan animator to do these little musical interludes where john delancey sings about bronies from the music to the stories and the artwork and the clapping oh dear and these segments are almost entirely in jokes for bronies while counting down the days from season one to season two the musicians wrote funky little songs like pinkie's brew like how is this going to play to a festival crowd what in the world is pinkie's brew you gonna explain that one oh how silly of me it's a song from friendship is witchcraft that i sang anyway i would say don't watch this if you want to learn anything but do watch this if you're intrigued by the idea of watching cynical brony propaganda which like why wouldn't you be i have watched all the episodes of my little pony in part because when i'm interacting with the bronies i like to know what they mean by terms like 20 cooler part 10 the dark side of bronies so what was the brony propaganda trying to hide crony conventions are largely jovial accepting spaces are they not the media discourse around bronies is always awful because it's always just like isn't it weird that men like a thing that's pink they come out and film brony conventions and it's like men are wearing weird homemade costumes and carrying stuffed animals and singing songs and it's like wow that's weird right and yeah it's weird it's pretty funny but it's not like worthy of scorn it's just people having a good time it's pretty cringy but so are most fun things if a bunch of adult men want to dance in a kick line to my little pony music who are we to begrudge them that activity i myself live in a glass house an adult who wears lightning mcqueen light up crocs but there is plenty of stuff in brony culture that's bad weird everybody's too lazy to do research and find out that stuff so they just make fun of men wearing pink like they're a cartoon bully in an 80s cartoon so okay fine i'll do the legwork for you you're welcome news media and podcasters i'll start off with my most minor point it pales in comparison to everything else but i'll at least give it a mention there was so much gatekeeping from bronies about female fans which i know is a very talked about issue in like all fandom spaces but doesn't it just have that extra edge of bitter irony when it's my little pony i had been an avid fan of this for years when the brony fandom popped into existence and then suddenly i was facing all this scrutiny from bronies who thought i was just jumping on a bandwagon to like i don't know get dates with bronies when i went to my very first bronycon in 2012 i remember our plane landed the night before so we went out into the courtyard area between all the con hotels in front of the convention center because all these bronies were congregating and like talking to each other and stuff and there was a group of bronies standing around talking and one guy was holding a very large expensive looking custom plush pony it was obviously an original character so i said wow that's a really nice plush who's this pony and he turned to the rest of the group at large and said wow she hasn't heard of my oc you know there's real fans and then there's this and i just like retreated in shame because i didn't want to talk to them anymore that was my first moment of bronycon bronies also had such a huge disdain for female fans who had liked ponies before they did you know before it was cool to like ponies and they also just in general hated all the earlier incarnations of my little pony there were loads of fandom memes about how ugly the old ponies were because they were chubby and horse-like and unsexy how dare they and about how unwatchable the old shows were this became such an accepted attitude that the show even started making fun of the old ponies [Music] and yeah those areas of my little pony were definitely less palatable to adult men but i don't think that was the audience they were trying to court the brony doc did it too in their little song just said it like it was fact that the old my little pony cartoons were trash let me first sum up the previous of pony generations generation 1 appeared on tv in the 80s it was made to sell toys plots were hardly very weighty and generation 2 i do not mean to grouse and gripe but these characters fell right into the girly stereotypes what do they mean girly stereotypes i mean for all the things you could say about my little ponytails i don't think that's one of them one of them is an environmentalist one is a roller skater one wants to be a teacher one wants to be a circus clown i didn't know these were the girly stereotypes my little pony tails isn't even generation 2. it re-ran a lot of the 90s when g2 was in stores which is why i saw it a lot as a kid but it was produced during g1 it even had an exclusive to the uk toy line which was in the g1 style and it's kind of whack that it was only in the uk because the series didn't even air in the uk some vhs releases of the series had g2 cover art but the animation of the show firmly resembled g1 hire a fact checker john yeah that's right if they're gonna keep me i'm gonna keep john de lancie the previous generations of my little pony toys had been largely appealing for their collectibility many pony characters would be released only one or two times and each product release would introduce a whole new cast of characters for kids to collect and imagine with but bronies hated that because they only wanted to buy toys of the show characters hasbro responded to this and the toy line pivoted to generally only producing re-releases of the same main six show characters bronies hated the brushable hair a hallmark of my little pony because little girls like to comb and braid it they didn't like it because they didn't know how to style it and it didn't look so accurate enough on their shelves hasbro started focusing on sculpted show accurate minifigures and funko display figures which were heavy and had sharp corners they even released a product line called guardians of harmony which swapped the pink and purple packaging for a blue and white color palette and it featured hairless articulated action figures of the ponies which came with missile launchers and angry expressions in early fandom days the narrative around the show seemed to be give the show a chance i know it's for kids but it's actually really good they're really putting effort into it and there are some background gags for parents and other adults to enjoy the longer the fandom went on the narrative became give the show a chance i know you think it's for kids but it's actually made for adults the kids watch it but it's for us and the more the show staff put brony memes into the show the more they encourage this manner of thinking the hundredth episode of my little pony was a celebration of the brony fandom it was broken into various segments and canonized various fan interpretations of the characters like one pony is doctor who because the bronies liked doctor who and decided he looked like him and there's this long sequence where one of the ponies is blasting dubstep because bronies like dubstep and decided this pony likes dubstep there's a fine line between a popular show having a positive relationship with its fandom and allowing the fandom to take over the show and this episode is all you have to point to to be like my little pony was the latter but it's made all the worse by the fact that this show wasn't for grown-ups to begin with at first when i heard about bronies i thought how lovely to see men celebrate and uplift a thing made for little girls a franchise that so many people just write off unseen but the more the brony culture took over the show the less i saw it as celebrating what it was and the more i saw it as taking it away the fans now it's now it kind of belongs to them now anyway we've got some bigger fish to fry here i feel the need to mention homophobia within the brony fandom a lot of bronies biggest fear was being perceived as gay for liking my little pony obviously it's narrow-minded to assume that anyone who likes traditionally girly media is gay it would be super unfair for people to assume that but somebody really needs to explain to bronies that gay is not the absolute worst thing a person can be swagburg not a clever pony on the track though who's that saying fast ever made a whack show a peeping mlp make your harvey to the lactose but i can't front us if we ever gonna lack even as bronies were being extremely vocal about loving and tolerating everyone being an accepting fandom they're the first in line to be like no we're not gay though no homo we just like ponies we're not weird freaky gay guys this was a major major part of the brony documentary with seemingly no self-awareness oh you like a little girl show oh well you know you must be you know feminine and or gay or whatever you're gonna suddenly turn gay are you gonna catch the gay by watching the show i think i asked if they were gay suddenly maybe you're homosexual and then it's a reason to hate you you might be thinking that i'm gay that in fact they are a highly educated group of heterosexual males the bronies they interview are constantly asserting their manliness look this guy has a big manly mustache a novel concept because of how un-gay it is i made a video and put it on youtube and it's called the manliest brony in the world look these bronies are in the military the ungayest thing you can be the most heartbreaking is this through line about the boy named lyle i would go so far as to call this the main storyline of the film lyle wants to go to bronycon but is afraid to tell his conservative father that he's a brony he's conservative um i guess that's the major word i would use to describe my husband conservative his father was very conservative my dad is very conservative lyle's greatest fear is that his dad will think he's gay i was very nervous about my dad finding out he might be thinking that i'm gay and the implication of this is that his dad will be angry or think less of him or generally be unsupportive if lyle is gay the documentary follows lyle and his family as they visit bronycon john de lancie welcomes lyle's dad in the lobby before they go in in a scene that seems to say don't worry i'm a figurehead for these bronies and i'm a cool adult man who dresses well and is not gay at all the producers pair him off to talk with another dad who's there with his brony son and this dad seems like a lovely guy he seems to think little of it that his son is a brony my son has always never been one who follows the crowd you know that's one thing i always like about him he's an individual which is sometimes hard for him and then in the most tragic moment of all this cool dad says we should feel flattered that our sons trust us enough to tell us they like this show and not fear judgment from us the fact that my son came to me and he confided in me and felt that he was comfortable and said i think that's a good thing i think you should take that as a good thing that your son has a relationship where he you know he took a chance and lyle's dad says well lyle didn't tell me i found out through my wife my son was hesitant to mention it to me himself and the scene just ends there which initially to me that seemed like a great end to the scene in a fictional film one would assume that lyle's father would internalize that conversation you would imagine this scene leaves the lyle's dad character adrift thinking on the ways in which he has failed as a dad i may watch the show when i get home instead that is the end of their story i have great sympathy for lyle's father because his 16 year old boy wants to watch a cartoon for little girls it really felt like we needed a final scene of like lyle having a heart to heart with his dad or something but we don't get that maybe it was in the hundreds of hours of footage that were cut because everyone pirated the movie we're later told in mid-credits text that lyle has been sent to boarding school this is framed as a positive because it says he told all his roommates that he's a brony but like we never saw him resolve his storyline and the idea of boarding school has never been mentioned in the narrative and i know boarding school is considered a mark of privilege in many countries but if you're not american i should explain that here in films and such boarding school is usually framed as uncommon and a threat or punishment for disobedient kids like if you don't straighten out i'll send you away the villain in the parent trap threatens it first change i make in that house hold off she goes to a boarding school in switzerland so to a viewer who has received no resolution and has not been primed on the idea of boarding school at all the text seems to imply that lyle's father sent him away in shame that's probably not what happened many kids love boarding school it makes them feel like a boy wizard i've never met lyle or his family i've only seen the brief part of their life this documentary showed me but i'm just trying to point out the ways in which this documentary really fails its audience as a woman do you feel like you're in the minority here i feel like i'm in the minority but i also don't feel like it's like where most minorities kind of feel suppressed it's like oh there's less of us but it's not a bad thing i guess the film at least holds value in that it unintentionally shows this ugly side of the fandom in a supportive and uncritical way and now let's fry some truly large fish you can hardly fit these big huge fish on on the griddle i don't eat fish i have no idea how they're cooked i said earlier that being attracted to the ponies is a victimless crime but that has some caveats the longer the fandom existed the more and more actual children started going to brony convention some cons pivoted to embrace this community acknowledging that they were the target audience to begin with many cons had child-only activity rooms and meet-and-greets reserved the front rows of panels for younger guests and placed more restrictions on the exhibition of adult fan art either by having separate late night dealer hall hours and 18 plus panels or by requiring that all adult fan art be sold only under the table and upon request so the standard kind and the the subversive oh my goodness yeah they said uh we can sell the butt ones as long as they're as long as they're covered initially but an equal number of cons just didn't care or they put rules like that on their site but not enforce them besides there's a whole lot of content which isn't explicitly r-rated but which i definitely wouldn't consider kid-friendly like body pillows some body pillows are just art of a pony lying down printed on a pillow this was certainly the most pg-rated offering i could find i have videos to keep monetized by the way i think this pillow was like 60 dollars so i hope you're really amused by it the body pillows just ramp up in sexuality from there some are outright pornographic but i haven't seen any of those openly displayed at cons i think bronies get them online it's most common to see the ponies looking a little sultry they have bedroom eyes and they're looking a little flushed their legs are arranged suggestively sometimes they're in lingerie or their mouths are like all drooly it's like a furry art thing but the ponies are not drawn with genitals so it's actually fine it's not sexual why are you making it sexual you sick freak my horny drawing of twilight sparkle is presented upon this long pillow with complete neutrality by a weird loophole i guess it's just totally fine to hang these up like a banner in a child-friendly dealer hall and a lot of art prints get by on this exact kind of technicality my next and bigger point of contention is that plenty of fan artists also make display and sell sexual fan art of the child characters in the show now um the thing about these characters is that they're canonically like 10 years old oh he liked it and like i just don't think there's any way to justify that as not being creepy you're not selecting the child characters for your fantasies because of their personalities we all know applebloom is just underage applejack this is so weird but i feel like this is the part of my video i'm going to be roasted for above everything else angry artists on twitter are going to mock me for my pearl clutching stance of hanging up sexual art of fictional children for real children to see is bad maybe i'm so sorry furry twitter you're going to have to cancel me and take me to jail for my bad take just put me in handcuffs but try not to do it in a kinky way it just really gets my goat when people make this kind of content and then try to act all coy and stupid about it they like put on a little charade like we're larping in a universe where this is normal like what that sexual that little girl is just lying on her back because she's sleepy i printed it on a pillow to hug and then they fold their arms smugly because i can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this is sexual content and okay yeah i cannot prove to a jury in a court of law that your child cartoon pony body pillow art is sexual but i'm also not trying to do that this isn't judge judy this is a social setting in which people can look at your actions and judge your intentions and i'm going to go ahead and bang my gavel and judge you creepy i sentence you to something really unsexy like the salt mines part 11 the last bronycon so here we are it's time to talk about the last bronycon the swan song the end of an era in case you couldn't tell the idea of the last bronycon happening was less the point of this video and more the frame that it sits inside of but it's still interesting so i want to talk about it it was held at the baltimore convention center which always surprises me in its bigness it feels crazy that a brony convention could justify a space this large but i guess it did because the last seven bronycons were all held in this space in fairness attendance had been sharply dropping every single year since 2016. so at bronycon 2018 the con staff announced that 2019 would be the final year there's a reason we're throwing the party of a lifetime next year as the curtains close on this chapter of bronycon we're also choosing to end the event next year the numbers weren't so low yet that they were forced to make this decision but the writing on the wall was clear and instead of letting their numbers continue to drop until they had to cancel it they decided to go out with a bang which i think was the best choice i hadn't been involved in any part of the fandom in years by this point but when i heard it was the last one i knew i had to go back and i wasn't alone in this the final bronycon drew 10 215 attendees making it officially the most attended brony convention of all time for me the best part was probably during the closing ceremony all the guests from the course of the weekend gave a speech these things at cons are usually just people thanking the con staff for doing a good job and saying goodbye but this ceremony was really a farewell to the brony fandom everyone at the convention wanted to be there for the closing ceremony but the room couldn't hold ten thousand people look at this line so they set up an overflow room in the waiting area outside with a live stream of the panel the live feed had a slight delay so every time anybody told a joke during the ceremony there would be like a three second delay and then you'd hear loud delayed laughter from the other room the head writer mitch larson takes the mic he's been coming to these things for 10 years now and the bronies treat him like a rock star and you know this is a man who works in children's television animation how wonderful that a guy with that job has had this bizarre life for 10 years so mitch starts thanking everybody and then gives a shout out to the other room shout out to the other room over there the audience cheers there's a three second delay and then here's the loud cheer from the other room then everybody laughs at the delay and then the whole crowd just starts chanting that was great you guys [Applause] and mitch is like i love that i love when you guys do that stuff and that's when he starts to get emotional i love that stuff what do you guys do that stuff and i get why that made him emotional because that's what i'll always remember about brony conventions everyone's energy was always running so high at these things man look at whatever's happening here anything even remotely funny would make the whole crowd lose it every small thing would become a meme and a thing to celebrate and bond over bronies make memes out of things like the fire alarm going off or a hotel ballroom that sounds like it's not up to code a crowd could get really annoyed at stuff like that but instead they just made memes it's so extra and it's kind of stupid but it's also kind of sad to get to the end and be like wow i don't know if we'll ever see a community that captures this same level of stupid energy again part 12 the death of bronies some would argue that the brony fandom isn't dying it's going to continue forever and ever and i think to an extent there will always be bronies i think there will continue to be small local meetups and an internet presence maybe there will even be a brief resurgence when the next my little pony series g5 drops in a year so you know if it's good and if the ponies still have big anime eyes but it's very clear that the fandom has been past its prime for years bronycon the largest and most definitive fan convention is over most of the horse famous creators have started applying their talents to other fandoms or original projects or have vanished from the internet entirely my little pony friendship is magic the actual show continued its run long into the decline of the brony fandom but it aired its final episode in october of 2019 nine years after it started it's an impressively long run for any kids show most of which only produce like two and a half seasons and then just rerun those forever the con bubble which had existed for years has popped with many small conventions being cancelled some hastily after they failed to secure funding i had certainly stopped going to fan conventions before this point i didn't even try to keep up with the show and that's coming from someone who's seen every episode of my little pony and friends and my little pony tales except for the quest of the princess ponies i could never really find that on dvd but when i returned for the last bronycon what i experienced was a gentler kinder more celebratory kind of brony fandom than i'd ever seen before the online brony fandom has reportedly been overrun by racists with none of the admins of the popular sites willing or inclined to make any effort to moderate any of this but the online brony fandom is also over if you go to the biggest fan art site derpy booroo today's trending images have all received under 1 000 votes they're doing neopets numbers i don't even really know what that means i'm not going to pretend the stuff these guys are posting isn't a problem but at least in this subculture they are clearly being steadily deplatformed the show is over the fandom is over and none of these people go outside the demographics you see at actual physical gatherings are totally different i mentioned homophobia in the brony fandom well that's not such a big thing anymore cause it kind of can't be after the heyday of the fandom most of the hateful bronies left and graduated to join actual hate groups instead hooray in their absence the brony fandom was swallowed up vored if you will by the loving embrace of the furry fandom maybe not all remaining bronies are furries but they are existing in close proximity to a lot of furries let me bring back my chart from earlier and correct it to reflect modern brony demographics anyone familiar with the furry fandom could probably tell you that furries are overwhelmingly boldly unapologetically gay and by the end of the fandom it was the gay furries who were organizing all the good conventions using their years of furry con experience the straight bronies were outnumbered and if they wanted to keep participating in the fandom they would just have to accept that the furries are very used to being sort of a cultural punching bag so they're consequently an aggressively accepting community if someone is lgbt or neurodivergent or part of a minority group or disabled or for any reason an outcast in any other community they'll probably feel quite comfortable among the furries and remember what i said about the bronies hating the previous generations there were a lot more women at this con selling their early generation ponies and bronies were buying them i even saw bronies with fan art and plush of characters from my little ponytails who's laughing now john i would definitely say that the last bronycon was the best one i've ever attended maybe it was because everyone knew it was the last one that they felt they had to party even harder or maybe it was the changing demographics or maybe it was just my brony nostalgia it was honestly probably all three i'm not sad that the brony fandom is effectively over because it had plenty of issues and if we're being real it probably went a lot longer than it should have anyway but it was nice to be able to return to the brony world and bid it a definitive farewell by the final bronycon there was no irony left just earnest gay fur suitors earnest horny fan art and people earnestly there to make friends there wasn't less energy like i expected just different energy but like good energy at the end of the day the brony fandom had its good parts and it had its bad parts and now it's dead it lived a long time and it died of natural causes so we don't have to feel bad about it i think little tiny pieces of it might continue as ghosts if we're continuing this analogy and i hope it's the good parts i don't know how this video will make you feel about bronies like will you be like oh that sounds really fun or will you be like it sucks i knew it i don't even know what i'm trying to say maybe the propaganda brony documentary was on the right track because now that the brony fandom is dead we'll probably do what people always do with dead things remember the good stuff and not examine it critically at all and be happy about it confident that it will never return never [Applause] [Music] ever [Music] [Music] a gun [Music] 2012 [Music] we've been partying [Music] when you're we'll remember from the special it just came out like a week ago she's already on a bodybuilder it's quick it's quick they work fast you

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 2,076,324

Rating: 4.9221087 out of 5

Keywords: my little pony, friendship is magic, brony, bronies

Id: 4fVOF2PiHnc

Length: 71min 27sec (4287 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020

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[u/Wildestrose1988]

TLDR: The community became all about furry porn. The conventions catered to adult men to the point they became hostile to women and girls who were fans before them. Gatekeeping as if MLP was made for men, resulting in newer toys/packaging being catered to what guys wanted.

What started as a joke turned into grown men completely corrupting something for little girls to a point that it's unrecognizable

[u/Equal-Ear2312]

porn sick men take something beautiful and innocent and make it ugly and disgusting.

[u/SamuelaTheThrifty]

Male appropriation of female culture.

I think this YouTuber is great, by the way, a really engaging speaker!

[u/coolestgirlyoueverme]

As someone who watched the original my little pony show and played with the figurines as a kid, this is beyond disturbing. There are so many spaces that cater to men already.

[u/misszazie]

Better stay tf away from care bears 😤

I've seen some images of these scrotes. It's so disturbing. Idk why the first one to walk outside like that wasn't immediately committed, given a full psych eval, while authorities went through his hard drive.

[u/[deleted]]

They will legitimately sexualize everything smh

[u/FluffandRainclouds]

Bob's Burgers made fun of bronies a while back : https://youtu.be/vD39_Wd26CA (skip to 2:09). Relevant.

[u/TheSuspiciousChard]

If this isn’t evidence against mental illness and paraphilia caused by porn, what is?