Another Cringe Thread About Bronies in General. (Possibly NSFW)

PUBLIQclopAccountant
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@Pulse Wave  
Thank you for making one epic effortpost! I hope you appreciate the comments and asides I have in response. Forgive me for live-thinking, as the conclusions to some of these responses were discovered as I typed them.
 
They didn’t even trust AO3, inclusive as it may be. Either that, or they didn’t want to risk the bad rep coming with making “that fanfic archive with all those pedo fics” that AO3 is known as their main fanfic archive.
 
IIRC, AO3 either did not yet exist or was still invite-only when FiM debuted. It didn’t matter whether bronies wanted to use AO3 or not, they simply couldn’t join in large enough numbers to make it the de facto English-language pony fiction repository (I know of Russian and French language pony fiction repositories: not sure about other languages, but they probably exist).
 
A side-effect of this was that bronies who were looking for pony fan works wouldn’t have to wade through tons of non-pony to get their pony fix. At least this must have been the motivation behind FiMfiction.
 
Good catch. All horses all the time is a major draw to Fimfiction. There’s no Superwholock slash or thinly-veiled retellings of Pokémon Yellow with an OC as the protagonist to clog the home page.  
This is also why I use this site and its knockoffs to enjoy my pony art instead of e621 or the source websites that you mentioned.
 
A big problem is always material that can barely be found or filtered out because its creators or uploaders can neither be bothered to write descriptions that could be searched nor add the necessary tags. (We’re on Derpibooru here, I guess most of you know how utterly undertagged many pictures are even here.) Now go find pony on dA without searching for specific artists. Or imagine looking for pony on some manga/anime booru if every other pony pic doesn’t have one single tag that says it’s pony.
 
The line between undertagging and e621-style species tagging is a discussion best served for another thread but it’s an important point to bring up. Because this is a pony booru, everything can be assumed to be pony, humanized, or EqG unless otherwise noted. There is no need to have a classification system that can handle any furry OC out there. It would be excessive if tagging unicorn Twilight also implied quadruped > mammal > ungulate > odd-toed > equine > pony > unicorn (unless she was drawn as a classical art unicorn, in which case she’d get the implied tags of quadruped > mammal > ungulate > even-toed > unicorn (classical)).
 
Why not furry sites? Because let’s face it: Many bronies firmly deny that pony is furry. And so do many furries. There are bronies who don’t want pony to be lumped together with “yiffers and furfags”, and there are furries who want to keep pony out of their fandom because they still find “grown-ass men who like little ponies for girls” sick. It’s a wonder that FurAffinity tolerates pony.
 
The topic of “are bronies furries?” has been endlessly litigated elsewhere. However, here are some meta-thoughts I have:  
¤ “Are bronies furry?” and “are bronies furries?” are distinct questions. Much of the debate is due to a (deliberate) conflation of the two.  
¤ No one seriously goes and claims “pokémon fans are a type of furry”. Pokéfurs exist, but there is no assumption that you would like furry art simply because you like art of the pokémon.  
¤ As you noted, even if the answer to “are bronies a furry fandom?” is yes, the answer to “are bronies a subset of the furry fandom?” is clearly no due to mutual repulsion.  
¤ You pretty much nailed the bronies saying “I’m loyal to my pony waifu and have zero interesting in yiffing to a genderfree sparkledog or a musk masc Inceneroar (or anything else bipedal, for that matter)”. I’d add on to the furry’s repulsion to annexing the brony fandom the following thought: “We’ve spent so much effort working to end our reputation as dog-fuckers by booting out the zoophiles. We will not let effort go to waste by letting in a fandom full of [bronies who call themselves] proud horsefuckers.”  
¤ I don’t know if you also feel this way, but I have the gut feeling that those who are most strongly in favour of “bronies are furries” are, on both sides, are those who wish for an annexation to civilize the bronies into respectable furry norms. There are a slim sliver who hope for the opposite such that the fandoms merging brings back the laissez-faire and all spaghetti all the time to the furry fandom.
 
In general, the only genre-wide, franchise-independent fandoms with dumping places for fan works of their own are manga/anime, furry, science-fiction and fantasy. Pony doesn’t fit into either of them.
So AFAIK there’s no general western animation booru (change my mind). Even if there was one, I’m not sure if would accept all the smut that comes from this fandom.
 
When I wrote my original post, the Fandom™ I had in mind was the Superwholock and the general live-action Fandom™ (with the capital F). I didn’t think too much about other western animation fandoms.
 
From an outsider’s perspective, they (capital-F Fandom™) don’t seem to care for boorus, even though they do make fan art to post to Tumblr, DA, & (mostly these days) Twitter. They do, however, produce volumes and volumes of fan fiction: formerly on LiveJournal and FF.net, later on Tumblr cross-posted to AO3. My feeling of them is kind of like generalized Anime fans: they’re less so a fan of the specific works as they are a member in a community and fan of the real-life actors and writers behind those works. It’s why they equally have zero personal appeal to me. I enjoyed Doctor Who and may enjoy an anime, but I’m not joining those communities.
 
sites for fan music (I mean, which fandoms have fan music archives of their own) and even web radio stations followed.
 
Another blind spot of mine. I never got into pony music in its heyday because it had a reputation of being mostly brostep and hardstep and I didn’t care for those genres. No idea why I never got into pony metal, as I enjoyed metal considerably more than the dubstep-influenced genres back then. Enough about me.
 
Star Wars and Doctor Who both have plenty of filk. I have no idea if a Star Wars-only music repository or Radio Free Gallifrey exist (OK, they probably each have a radio station or two, but I don’t think they have enough to create separate radio stations by genre: pony metal vs pony chillout vs pony hardbass vs pony free jazz).
 
It actually seems like Derpibooru outclasses some manga/anime boorus in terms of numbers of uploaded images, and all this comes from only one single show that started in late 2010 instead of an entire genre that has been around since even before 1990.
Any fandom that reaches a critical mass will create its own fan site infrastructure, possibly even with its own archives for creative works.
 
You now have me wondering how many Pokéboorus exist or if there are active dedicated archives of Pokémon fanfiction and music. The Pokémon fandom is even larger than ponies and is probably larger than non-poké furries. I have a general feeling that the Pokémon fandom is so large that it is silly to call it a singular fandom. Instead, each sub-fandom could function as an independent fandom: there are fans of the games for Nintendo handheld systems, fans of the TCG, fans who played Pokémon Yellow and returned in their 30s out of nostalgia (a.k.a. Pokémon Go addicts who are not yet old enough to be retired), pokéfurs, fans of the animes, and probably other slices I’m forgetting because I’m not part of them.
 
As one final miscellaneous thought, I wonder if the reason furry boorus don’t mind floods of pokémon art but do despise the ponies is primarily because of the diversity of pokémon species compared to the singular body plan of the ponies.
doloresbridge
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@Pulse Wave  
Wow, long post! I could say a lot but I’ll stick to a few points that stick out because I’m tired.
 
For one, the first thing the bronydom encountered along with the non-brony outside world was backlash. Hatred. Prejudices. Check pony threads at non-pony message boards from the early 2010s or YouTube comments under pony videos from the early years, and you’ll see the haters easily outnumbering the bronies. The farther you go back in the fandom’s history, the more bronies will be closet ones.
 
This is true but we also were obnoxious with it ourselves. Peek 2012 was viewing us as a social movement that would change the world. Within “Bronypride” And external studies and long academic pdfs on neo sincerity giving us a inflated ego.
 
Besides, the bronies didn’t fit in anywhere, and they still don’t. Pony isn’t manga/anime. Pony isn’t science-fiction/fantasy (where “fantasy” means Tolkien et al; anthro/animals + fantasy = furry and not fantasy). Bronies don’t want pony to be furry, and neither do furries. I’ll come back to that.
 
Funny thing is I’ve seen different people explaining us to the outside world use completely different terminology. Naturally some variation is to be expected by having one essay state:“FiM is essentially a shoen anime” and another link us to furries and some say we are the ultimate meme and what have you all without mentioning any of these other supposed links or factors really hit that point home for me. I think there is a lot of truth to all those links some make but not in totality.
 
Yeah, some fandom stuff was organized by furries who jumped on board hard and help organized it. Yeah, you can detect some anime influence in FiM. Yeah, ponies were perhaps the ultimate meme to exist if you count influence on peoples lives and what not, but the fandom can’t be reduced to it. What I am still trying to decide how much of a “spark” or single factor you could use to easily explain it but it it just feels like we were the just a bunch of small factors that kept us isolated and relatively independent. Like a death by a thousand cuts.
 
More recent fandoms, i.e. fandoms born in times when the Web 2.0 or even social media were already available (the tipping point must have been around Kim Possible), are as isolated as the old ones. They had the means for self-isolation at hand right away, and with the possibilities given to them by search engines, early social media and existing forums for whichever topics, it was much easier to gather fans and join them all in the same places (“Hey, you’re a fan of $SHOW? We’ve got a fan forum, y’know! Wanna join?”) than in the 90s.
 
I actually have had the opposite perception. Newer fandoms I have always considered to be a little more closer together. Social media feeds allows a lot of different fandoms to interact and be in loose groups. Though I admit that I don’t have a lot of experience with other fandoms but I do have some experience with outsider critique and observations and I’ve seen stuff said of us like: “You know? I have seen Ponytubers hope off and drift away into Steven Universe and like story driven animated shows but I have never seen anyone from there pick up FiM.” Or “You guys really do have your own culture, Most new fandoms I’ve in have a less stronger identity do to social media.” I would still agree with larger fandoms forming there own culture and you certainly can find devotees to just one fandom on social media.
 
I mean, which fandoms have fan music archives of their own) and even web radio stations followed.
 
I think the Touhou fandom may but you still hit a major point that our fandom has overbuilt on institutions. I can still find Pony alternatives for a great deal of things from paste, social media and video uploads, though some of these more niche ones don’t always take off but its easy for someone to stay isolated within the ponynet.
 
@PUBLIQclopAccountant  
“Are bronies furry?” and “are bronies furries?” are distinct questions. Much of the debate is due to a (deliberate) conflation of the two.
 
Agree 100% and this was something that confused me with that conflation. Though too most forget of a subset of furries who reject that conflation as well for various reasons but that’s a topic for elsewhere.
 
I don’t know if you also feel this way, but I have the gut feeling that those who are most strongly in favour of “bronies are furries” are, on both sides, are those who wish for an annexation to civilize the bronies into respectable furry norms. There are a slim sliver who hope for the opposite such that the fandoms merging brings back the laissez-faire and all spaghetti all the time to the furry fandom.
 
I have seen sentiments hinting at annexation and I do share that feeling, though, never seen it to the level that some allege of an active plot being hatched in super secret furry Discord servers far and wide.
 
 
As one final miscellaneous thought, I wonder if the reason furry boorus don’t mind floods of pokémon art but do despise the ponies is primarily because of the diversity of pokémon species compared to the singular body plan of the ponies.
 
I think its that would make sense to me.
Pulse Wave
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A side-effect of this was that bronies who were looking for pony fan works wouldn’t have to wade through tons of non-pony to get their pony fix. At least this must have been the motivation behind FiMfiction.
Good catch. All horses all the time is a major draw to Fimfiction. There’s no Superwholock slash or thinly-veiled retellings of Pokémon Yellow with an OC as the protagonist to clog the home page.
This is also why I use this site and its knockoffs to enjoy my pony art instead of e621 or the source websites that you mentioned.
 
Fanfic archives are actually less problematic because you’re basically forced to put your fics into a matching category and, at least in AO3’s case, add certain tags, otherwise the mods will step in.
 
Boorus, on the other hand, aren’t split into categories. They have to rely on tags. And as I’ve already mentioned, undertagging to the point of pictures being almost impossible to find is wide-spread.
 
The line between undertagging and e621-style species tagging is a discussion best served for another thread but it’s an important point to bring up. Because this is a pony booru, everything can be assumed to be pony, humanized, or EqG unless otherwise noted.
 
Especially since this is not only a single-fandom but even a single-franchise booru. If you look for Fist of the North Star fanart on a booru that doesn’t force its users to tag it Fist of the North Star by flat-out blocking uploads unless a source franchise is tagged, chances are you can be glad to find half of it because the rest lacks the Fist of the North Star tag.
 
Why not furry sites? Because let’s face it: Many bronies firmly deny that pony is furry. And so do many furries. There are bronies who don’t want pony to be lumped together with “yiffers and furfags”, and there are furries who want to keep pony out of their fandom because they still find “grown-ass men who like little ponies for girls” sick. It’s a wonder that FurAffinity tolerates pony.
The topic of “are bronies furries?” has been endlessly litigated elsewhere. However, here are some meta-thoughts I have:
¤ “Are bronies furry?” and “are bronies furries?” are distinct questions. Much of the debate is due to a (deliberate) conflation of the two.
¤ No one seriously goes and claims “pokémon fans are a type of furry”. Pokéfurs exist, but there is no assumption that you would like furry art simply because you like art of the pokémon.
¤ As you noted, even if the answer to “are bronies a furry fandom?” is yes, the answer to “are bronies a subset of the furry fandom?” is clearly no due to mutual repulsion.
¤ You pretty much nailed the bronies saying “I’m loyal to my pony waifu and have zero interesting in yiffing to a genderfree sparkledog or a musk masc Inceneroar (or anything else bipedal, for that matter)”. I’d add on to the furry’s repulsion to annexing the brony fandom the following thought: “We’ve spent so much effort working to end our reputation as dog-fuckers by booting out the zoophiles. We will not let effort go to waste by letting in a fandom full of [bronies who call themselves] proud horsefuckers.”
¤ I don’t know if you also feel this way, but I have the gut feeling that those who are most strongly in favour of “bronies are furries” are, on both sides, are those who wish for an annexation to civilize the bronies into respectable furry norms. There are a slim sliver who hope for the opposite such that the fandoms merging brings back the laissez-faire and all spaghetti all the time to the furry fandom.
 
I’ve explained this elsewhere already, but I don’t see the furry fandom as one all-encompassing block. It’s basically split into two “degrees”:
 
On the one hand, there are the core furries, the furries by self-declaration. If you’re a fan of the genre itself, if you say, “I’m a furry,” if you strongly identify as a furry (including subsets), if you have a generic fursona that is not based on any comic or cartoon or film or whatever, you’re one of them. If people talk about furries, they mean these furries. If media show furries (usually fursuiters, of course), it’s these furries. It’s also furries of this kind who keep giving the furry fandom a bad reputation, and it’s furries of this kind who try to restore the reputation of the furry fandom as a whole. And it’s these furries whom bronies mean if they say, “Bronies aren’t furries!”
 
On the other hand, there are the fringe furries, the furries by definition, often called the “subsets” of furry. They don’t identify as furries. They aren’t necessarily interested in the genre as a whole. They’re just fans of something specific that’s furry. They’re “technically speaking furries” and have become so involuntarily just because the definition of “furry” applies to them. If you’re a Zootopia fan, you’re one of these. If you’re a Redwall fan, you’re one of these. If you’re an Animalympics fan, you’re one of these. If you’re a fan of Disney’s Robin Hod, you’re one of these. The fringe furries have exactly zero impact on the furry fandom and its reputation because even many core furries don’t know that they exist, and because many of their own don’t know they’re furries. And, again, technically speaking, the basic definition of “furry” does apply to bronies — again, without lumping them together with yiffers, furfags etc.
 
When I wrote my original post, the Fandom™ I had in mind was the Superwholock and the general live-action Fandom™ (with the capital F). I didn’t think too much about other western animation fandoms.
From an outsider’s perspective, they (capital-F Fandom™) don’t seem to care for boorus, even though they do make fan art to post to Tumblr, DA, & (mostly these days) Twitter.
 
Understandable, since it’s quite hard and takes a lot of talent and practice to make good fan art of live-action shows.
 
They do, however, produce volumes and volumes of fan fiction: formerly on LiveJournal and FF.net, later on Tumblr cross-posted to AO3. My feeling of them is kind of like generalized Anime fans: they’re less so a fan of the specific works as they are a member in a community and fan of the real-life actors and writers behind those works.
 
You’ve got a point here. I guess the vast majority of Doctor Who fans aren’t classic British sci-fi geeks but young women with a crush on whoever starred as the Doctor when they discovered the show and who thus churn out tons of shipfic.
 
In the Star Trek fandom, the sci-fi geeks still seem to be slightly in a majority and mostly discussing continuity porn and how things could be technically possible in real life. But the many changes in canon and retcons drive them increasingly away. Most fanfic, however, is written by girls who think “guy on guy is hot” and who only want to see Kirk and Spock fuck like rabbits, regardless of whether they stay in character or not, just to jill off on their own fics.
 
As one final miscellaneous thought, I wonder if the reason furry boorus don’t mind floods of pokémon art but do despise the ponies is primarily because of the diversity of pokémon species compared to the singular body plan of the ponies.
 
I rather think that, while the Pokémon fans may be uncreative or sometimes obnoxious (the Sonic fans even more so, what with some 99% of their OCs being edgy Gary Stu recolours of main characters and 97% of their fan artists being utterly untalented pre-teens), the bronies count as generally very disturbing even for core furries. I mean, while furries are fans of what the general public considers “for little kids”, the bronies are fans of what the general public considers “for little girls”.
 
@doloresbridge  
Besides, the bronies didn’t fit in anywhere, and they still don’t. Pony isn’t manga/anime. Pony isn’t science-fiction/fantasy (where “fantasy” means Tolkien et al; anthro/animals + fantasy = furry and not fantasy). Bronies don’t want pony to be furry, and neither do furries. I’ll come back to that.
Funny thing is I’ve seen different people explaining us to the outside world use completely different terminology. Naturally some variation is to be expected by having one essay state:“FiM is essentially a shoen anime” and another link us to furries and some say we are the ultimate meme and what have you all without mentioning any of these other supposed links or factors really hit that point home for me. I think there is a lot of truth to all those links some make but not in totality.
 
It’s extra funny if you consider that, if FiM was actually anime, it’d technically be at least shōjo. Or used to be until the show pandered more to the bronies than to the original target audience.
 
Yeah, some fandom stuff was organized by furries who jumped on board hard and help organized it.
 
I know the occasional furry expat. It was mostly them (next to a few collectors) who taught us to nope away from mass media’s interview/report requests before any damage could be done.
 
More recent fandoms, i.e. fandoms born in times when the Web 2.0 or even social media were already available (the tipping point must have been around Kim Possible), are as isolated as the old ones. They had the means for self-isolation at hand right away, and with the possibilities given to them by search engines, early social media and existing forums for whichever topics, it was much easier to gather fans and join them all in the same places (“Hey, you’re a fan of $SHOW? We’ve got a fan forum, y’know! Wanna join?”) than in the 90s.
I actually have had the opposite perception. Newer fandoms I have always considered to be a little more closer together. Social media feeds allows a lot of different fandoms to interact and be in loose groups. Though I admit that I don’t have a lot of experience with other fandoms but I do have some experience with outsider critique and observations and I’ve seen stuff said of us like: “You know? I have seen Ponytubers hope off and drift away into Steven Universe and like story driven animated shows but I have never seen anyone from there pick up FiM.” Or “You guys really do have your own culture, Most new fandoms I’ve in have a less stronger identity do to social media.” I would still agree with larger fandoms forming there own culture and you certainly can find devotees to just one fandom on social media.
 
Maybe some very recent fandoms are somewhat less independent because they didn’t create a complete online infrastructure all for themselves. Maybe they didn’t grow big enough quickly enough, or maybe there simply wasn’t anyone who could be bothered to launch a first stand-alone message board, and so the whole fandom just lumped together on Discord because that was what everyone™ already used anyway.
 
My earlier experience comes from the Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers fandom. I’ve been a fan since 1991 (premiere in Germany), in the fandom since 2006 (haven’t even had my own Internet access before 2001), but I’ve researched the fandom’s history all the way back to its beginning. It’s basically supposed to be as old as the show itself which premiered in 1989 after what would become the pilot had aired a few times in ‘88 already. That was not only before social media but before the World-Wide Web itself. College and university students could access the Usenet, everyone else had to rely on dead trees and happening to stumble upon anything fannish in printed media or by hear-say.
 
Until way into the 90s, the CDRR fandom had to piggyback on the greater Disney Afternoon fandom along with the fandoms of DuckTales, the Gummi Bears and later shows such as TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck etc. So there was one newsgroup, alt.fan.disney.afternoon, and one fanzine, Where The Fun Begins, for all these shows combined. Before the days of WWW, Web 2.0 and social media, fan groups were much harder to find, thus harder to join and therefore smaller. CDRR got its first very own fansite in 1995, and the fandom didn’t become fully independent until 1998 when it launched its first own forum.
 
That said, larger single-franchise fandoms could afford to stand alone in those days, but they used to be just a few (e.g. Star Trek).
 
I don’t know if you also feel this way, but I have the gut feeling that those who are most strongly in favour of “bronies are furries” are, on both sides, are those who wish for an annexation to civilize the bronies into respectable furry norms. There are a slim sliver who hope for the opposite such that the fandoms merging brings back the laissez-faire and all spaghetti all the time to the furry fandom.
I have seen sentiments hinting at annexation and I do share that feeling, though, never seen it to the level that some allege of an active plot being hatched in super secret furry Discord servers far and wide.
 
There must have been attempts at annexing the bronydom from more than one side.
 
For one, there may be those furries who indeed see the bronies as furries (fringe furries as I call them or a subset as others call them), but who have a problem with bronies behaving vastly different from your typical furries, and who therefore want to teach the bronies how things are “done right”, i.e. the traditional furry way.
 
Besides, at least early on, the MLP collectors wondered why we’d start our own fandom as there was already one. Some took the bronies for collectors specialising on G4 because they’ve never heard of the show and only ever seen the toys. Not only did they want the bronies to join the existing MLP fandom = the collectors’ scene, but they also expected us to do as they’ve done ever since at least the 90s, including liking or even preferring the older generations. The irony of this is that the much larger bronydom has in turn become a major driving force for the collectors’ scene, at least as far as keeping ponycons alive (not to mention growing) or inviting collectors to brony conventions where there are no ponycons is concerned.
doloresbridge
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Maybe some very recent fandoms are somewhat less independent because they didn’t create a complete online infrastructure all for themselves. Maybe they didn’t grow big enough quickly enough, or maybe there simply wasn’t anyone who could be bothered to launch a first stand-alone message board, and so the whole fandom just lumped together on Discord because that was what everyone™ already used anyway.
 
That has been my perception though I do stress that I am far less experienced with most modern fandoms so I could be wrong on that.
 
Until way into the 90s, the CDRR fandom had to piggyback on the greater Disney Afternoon fandom along with the fandoms of DuckTales, the Gummi Bears and later shows such as TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck etc. So there was one newsgroup, alt.fan.disney.afternoon, and one fanzine, Where The Fun Begins, for all these shows combined. Before the days of WWW, Web 2.0 and social media, fan groups were much harder to find, thus harder to join and therefore smaller. CDRR got its first very own fansite in 1995, and the fandom didn’t become fully independent until 1998 when it launched its first own forum.
 
Interesting on the history there and I can see why you see greater social media = independence.
 
 
@Pulse Wave  
Besides, at least early on, the MLP collectors wondered why we’d start our own fandom as there was already one. Some took the bronies for collectors specialising on G4 because they’ve never heard of the show and only ever seen the toys. Not only did they want the bronies to join the existing MLP fandom = the collectors’ scene, but they also expected us to do as they’ve done ever since at least the 90s, including liking or even preferring the older generations.
 
I don’t blame a lot of them having some negativity towards us. You know the feeling when something goes mainstream and you feel a bit alienated from it on? Our fandom was like that for MLP. To see us mocking the earlier gens would certain ramp up some bitterness not to much that even the more SFW areas of the fandom being a bit edgy in comparison to what they were used to.
 
The annexation attempt, if I would call it that, I would characterize a bit differently than a furry one in my experience do to it attempting to characterize us a harmful rival or invasion as opposed to playing a game of definitions with “Bronies our already furries, now, alter your behavior!” Though finding the boundaries between the collector crowd and some who while were vastly critical of the fandom but still technically part of the G4 wave a bit hard to define as you had a lot who had all of those critiques but were still participating in G4 fandom structures and you had others that were, as you pointed out, perplexed or disliking fan expression outside of the toy scene.
 
@Latecomer  
I think in some cases, yes, it was do to compensation or insecurity but I think a lot who genuinely did look back at it and just saw it as inferior girly trash, right (G3.5) or wrong (G1).
Pulse Wave
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They did. It was indeed an attitude of “It’s not FiM, so it sucks!”
 
It’s almost a wonder that we named background ponies after G1 ponies early on already (Bon Bon, anyone?).
GrimDarkSurvivor
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He won’t be their for long, after all, “Twitter” has been exposed as a platform that supports real life “Terrorism”, “Pedophilia”, “Zoophilia” and so much other shit that would get you considered a “Degenerate” in my book. hell before long the same thing that happened to “Tumblr” is gonna happen to “Twitter”. “Reddit” has been exposed for the same exact stuff.
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Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Twinkling Balloon - Took part in the 2021 community collab.
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2020) - Took part in the 2020 Community Collab

Videomaker with da booty
@Kiryu-Chan
 
Immature art theif, that either shuts down criticism or uses his autism as an excuse. Has been exposed for taking and tracing over people’s works and YCHs aswell being borderline sociopathic by making fun of someone who recently passed away or wishing death to his critics. Not only that but has also shown some pedophilic behaviour by having an underage OC that had some fetishes and being into foalcon.
PUBLIQclopAccountant
Magnificent Metadata Maniac - #1 Assistant
Solar Guardian - Refused to surrender in the face of the Lunar rebellion and showed utmost loyalty to the Solar Empire (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Magical Inkwell - Wrote MLP fanfiction consisting of at least around 1.5k words, and has a verified link to the platform of their choice

IRL 🎠 stallion
@Ponyvideomaker @Kiryu-Chan  
And now this thread is back on-topic to the classic discussion: some “literally who?” spills spaghetti all over Twitter and then it’s time for pointing out how they’ve been an asshole who likes foalcon. For me personally, it’s too predictable and boring to cringe at any more. I can’t wait for this pandemic to be over so we can go back to having live-action spaghetti spillage at Q&A panels. Video of someone being genuine but fatally clueless is way more cringe than someone being an ass on Twitter.
 
@Pulse Wave  
Thank you for your essayposts. The random long discussions and microfiction in the comments is, at this point, my main reason to stick with Derpi as my main horse-flavoured booru.
 
Especially since this is not only a single-fandom but even a single-franchise booru. If you look for Fist of the North Star fanart on a booru that doesn’t force its users to tag it Fist of the North Star by flat-out blocking uploads unless a source franchise is tagged, chances are you can be glad to find half of it because the rest lacks the Fist of the North Star tag.
 
I didn’t even consider that idea. When I was imagining some sort of universal booru, my thoughts were for searching Vaporeon and then Rainbow Dash. Searching for MLP: FiM or Pokémon or OC Furry or some other franchise as a whole never crossed my mind.  
That said, I should have thought that some people would want franchises tagged simply so they could filter out crossovers they dislike.
 
In the Star Trek fandom, the sci-fi geeks still seem to be slightly in a majority and mostly discussing continuity porn and how things could be technically possible in real life. But the many changes in canon and retcons drive them increasingly away. Most fanfic, however, is written by girls who think “guy on guy is hot” and who only want to see Kirk and Spock fuck like rabbits, regardless of whether they stay in character or not, just to jill off on their own fics.
 
Now I wonder if anyone has done a long write-up on fanfic in male-dominated vs. female-dominated fandoms. My gut feeling says that male-dominated fandoms have less erotica (as a percentage, of course) than female fandoms by a large margin. IIRC, even for a fandom like ours (where you’d assume femslash clop would reign supreme), gen still wins by a country mile.
 
Until way into the 90s, the CDRR fandom had to piggyback on the greater Disney Afternoon fandom along with the fandoms of DuckTales, the Gummi Bears and later shows such as TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck etc. So there was one newsgroup, alt.fan.disney.afternoon, and one fanzine, Where The Fun Begins, for all these shows combined. Before the days of WWW, Web 2.0 and social media, fan groups were much harder to find, thus harder to join and therefore smaller. CDRR got its first very own fansite in 1995, and the fandom didn’t become fully independent until 1998 when it launched its first own forum.
 
Thank you once again for this context. It suddenly makes sense why “everything Anime” and “everything Disney” are such strong fandoms. There wasn’t the infrastructure or numbers to support specialization, so they grew. I wonder if, for example, there is some schism between the Disney fandom and a separate Lion King fandom that formed later (rather than as a natural splintering of the original fandom).  
FiM was my first fandom. I never had much Star Wars interest as a child (that was—and still is—my cousin’s fandom) and my involvement with Doctor Who was limited to binge-watching Eccleston through Matt Smith my girlfriend at the time (same one who unintentionally got me into MLP) and a selection of my fraternity brothers. If I ever leave ponies, there are better than even odds that I won’t be part of any fandom at all for a long while. Even though I enjoy the occasional yiff, there is exactly zero desire to become a furry and join that community as anything other than a passive enjoyer of the art.
 
 
@lonewolf  
There’s a few write-up over on /r/HobbyDrama of pre-FiM collectors vs. the bronies. There are more recent posts there about DWM and Twilicorn.
 
 
@doloresbridge  
The annexation attempt, if I would call it that, I would characterize a bit differently than a furry one in my experience do to it attempting to characterize us a harmful rival or invasion as opposed to playing a game of definitions with “Bronies our already furries, now, alter your behaviour!”
(emphasis mine)  
That’s a different perspective, thanks for sharing. Was an equine invasion of furry spaces something that was more of a pressing issue in the early fandom before I joined (end of S2, roughly)?
 
 
@GrimDarkSurvivor  
exposed
 
Oh noes! Yet another user engagement-driven social media site is known to be full of all the usual bad actors. “Twitter delenda est” and all, but claiming that it’s been exposed implies that its seedy side was ever hidden in the first place. It’s like when people act shocked that Reddit hired someone friendly to pedos to the admin team. It’s either the first Reddit controversy they paid attention to or they are only pretending to be surprised for greater emotional impact in their rhetoric.
 
before long the same thing that happened to “Tumblr” is gonna happen to “Twitter”
 
Let’s all dream of this better world. Twitter delenda est.
Twiface
Lunar Supporter - Helped forge New Lunar Republic's freedom in the face of the Solar Empire's oppressive tyrannical regime (April Fools 2023).
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab
Non-Fungible Trixie -

Princess of Shitposting
Now I wonder if anyone has done a long write-up on fanfic in male-dominated vs. female-dominated fandoms. My gut feeling says that male-dominated fandoms have less erotica (as a percentage, of course) than female fandoms by a large margin. IIRC, even for a fandom like ours (where you’d assume femslash clop would reign supreme), gen still wins by a country mile.
 
I’ve noticed that women tend to focus on character relationships while men tend to focus on worldbuilding and lore. A lot of women are militant shippers who write stories about two (or more!) characters in a (sexual) relationship. In contrast, a lot of men write more “high-concept” stories with extensive worldbuilding and lore (eg. Fallout: Equestria, Austraeoh, etc.)
doloresbridge
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition

Peace to all
@PUBLIQclopAccountant  
Well, I was actually referring to the state of a lot of the older fans and in some feminist criticism at the time which, rather than claim as their own would reject to varying degrees a lot of the fandom structures and institutions outright. Funny enough though, back in the earlier days it was a common stance among furries that we were an invasion and I have sometimes run into that stance as well.
 
I joined slowly in 2011 but I mostly kept to myself Oh, and I had a habit of liking a lot of the stuff/people/websites that didn’t catch on so I have been trying to fill holes in myself in some early fandom stuff.
 
Thank you for your essayposts.
 
Ditto to Pulse Wave.
 
 
@Latecomer  
From what I know that has been said of the more female dominated live action fandoms that arose out of the 1990s this is true though my experience is definitely weak personally as the only fanfiction I read is pony 95% of the time.
Pulse Wave
Twinkling Balloon - Took part in the 2021 community collab.
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2020) - Took part in the 2020 Community Collab
Magnificent Metadata Maniac - #1 Assistant

Busy procrastinating
Until way into the 90s, the CDRR fandom had to piggyback on the greater Disney Afternoon fandom along with the fandoms of DuckTales, the Gummi Bears and later shows such as TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck etc. So there was one newsgroup, alt.fan.disney.afternoon, and one fanzine, Where The Fun Begins, for all these shows combined. Before the days of WWW, Web 2.0 and social media, fan groups were much harder to find, thus harder to join and therefore smaller. CDRR got its first very own fansite in 1995, and the fandom didn’t become fully independent until 1998 when it launched its first own forum.
Thank you once again for this context. It suddenly makes sense why “everything Anime” and “everything Disney” are such strong fandoms. There wasn’t the infrastructure or numbers to support specialization, so they grew. I wonder if, for example, there is some schism between the Disney fandom and a separate Lion King fandom that formed later (rather than as a natural splintering of the original fandom).
 
Well, as far as I can see, “everything Disney” refers to Disney’s feature-length animated movies only. I’m not sure if any of them have fandoms of their own (Amblimation’s Balto does as it seems). Either way, if they’re interested in series, then it’s movie spin-off series. If at all.
 
I also think the “greater Disney Afternoon fandom” is more of a theoretical construction which covered several separate fandoms. I don’t know who started alt.fan.disney.afternoon and when, but both the DAFT mailing list (1991) and the W.T.F.B. zine (1992) were launched by Rangerphiles who then invited fans of other Disney Afternoon shows to participate, probably also to have some more activity. Like many other zines, W.T.F.B. depended greatly on fan works, especially fanfic, and except for one story that had previously actually been sent to Disney as a script for a CDRR Season 4 which never came, the CDRR fandom didn’t have any fanfic to offer until 1993 (when a nine-part opus started that’d take until December 1995 to be completed).
 
With the arrival of message boards, nothing of this was needed anymore, and all these fandoms could stand on their own feet, and they have been mostly separate ever since. That is, large parts of the DuckTales fandom were an extension of the Carl Barks/Don Rosa fandom anyway, so that fandom was big but largely unnoticed.
 
What kind of surprises me is how close the fandoms of CDRR and TaleSpin are to one another. Granted, one show followed the other, they both feature anthropomorphic animals (then again, it took Disney a while to make a show with only human characters), and they both have their share of aviation, but the settings should be too different. I was the first to write a crossover (not under the guise of Pulse Wave, though), but that required a dirty little trick.
 
Both fandoms had a certain appeal to techies, I guess, but CDRR was the stronger geek magnet. The TaleSpin fandom also ended up being too conservative (they hung on to a terribly outdated forum as their main hangout), and I guess the fandom almost went under when what little online infrastructure they had beyond personal fansites crumbled apart.
 
Also, both fandoms attracted their shares of women. That said, I dare say that many became Rangerphiles not simply because they found Gadget empowering, but they found Chip cute, Dale funny or both. In the meantime, the main reason why women became Spinners was (wait for it) Don Karnage.
 
@Twiface  
Now I wonder if anyone has done a long write-up on fanfic in male-dominated vs. female-dominated fandoms. My gut feeling says that male-dominated fandoms have less erotica (as a percentage, of course) than female fandoms by a large margin. IIRC, even for a fandom like ours (where you’d assume femslash clop would reign supreme), gen still wins by a country mile.
I’ve noticed that women tend to focus on character relationships while men tend to focus on worldbuilding and lore. A lot of women are militant shippers who write stories about two (or more!) characters in a (sexual) relationship. In contrast, a lot of men write more “high-concept” stories with extensive worldbuilding and lore (eg. Fallout: Equestria, Austraeoh, etc.)
 
The CDRR fandom has always been male-dominated, but the male-to-female rate may have been roughly the same as among bronies.
 
One of the things this fandom is (in)famous for is how it despises porn and even erotic art. Even fanfic rarely ever slips into the PG-13 territory, and if it does, it’s mostly due to violence in action scenes or very intense dramatic scenes. The CDRR fandom is also notorious for its borderline but still gut-wrenching darkfics or at the very least high drama fics based on a light-hearted show. It almost seems like, while other fandoms use fanfic in general as a means for blatant shipping, the CDRR fandom uses shipping as a means for drama and for putting the characters through the wringer. As far as I could see, there isn’t that much of a difference between female and male writers in this regard.
 
There’s next to no (fem)slash in this fandom, but the only writer who ever got famous for femslash (very well-done, though, AFAIK) is female. That said, with only seven main characters, two of whom are villains and only one of whom is female, the shipping possibilities are limited even if you add certain one-shots to the mix. And shipping main characters with OCs is considered very bad style. So the romantic drama mostly centres around two of three more or less popular shippings.
 
From what I could see, one difference between female-written and male-written fics in this fandom is that women tended to write their fics more around the characters whereas men wanted to drive a story or even a setting forward. The technology porn tendency is on the men’s side, too, and some fics have tech porn that’d make Tom Clancy (and CDRR itself) pale in comparison. I think it’s also the men who were more inclined to write backstories for canonical characters.
 
I think the bronydom isn’t that much different in this regard, except that it sometimes produces much longer fics and expands the canonical lore a lot more; it helps that MLP:FiM has a fantasy setting whereas CDRR takes place in what’s basically our world. The “opus” I’ve mentioned above used to be the longest CDRR fic for about a decade with almost 160,000 words (those were a lot for fanfic 25 years ago), but instead of using all these worlds to build a world around the characters, its setting is early-90s San Francisco.
PUBLIQclopAccountant
Magnificent Metadata Maniac - #1 Assistant
Solar Guardian - Refused to surrender in the face of the Lunar rebellion and showed utmost loyalty to the Solar Empire (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Magical Inkwell - Wrote MLP fanfiction consisting of at least around 1.5k words, and has a verified link to the platform of their choice

IRL 🎠 stallion
@Twiface  
I do not understand the appeal of militant shipping. The pony fandom is no stranger to shipping, OTPs, and waifus. However, the ship wars here are either:  
  1. In jest, perhaps even being a direct mockery of the militant ship wars of other fandoms  
  2. One dude who takes the honor of his waifu way too seriously and then ends up spilling pasta all over the forums and becomes the subject of this very thread for a day
     
    There’s plenty of toxicity to be found here, but it’s very rarely caused by many someones simultaneously going to clinically unstable lengths to seek victory in a shipping war. Then again, even other fandoms often have a secondary target in ship wars:  
  3. The first opponent are those who ship the wrong characters: in a demonstration of the insane troll logic ship wars use, let’s call them pedophiles because why else would a character who is played by a 41-year old fall in love—as a top, no less—with a character played by a 20-year-old even if both characters are canonically the same age?)  
  4. The second opponent is the sane side of the fandom (a.k.a. those who are “don’t like, don’t read” absolutists). In the mind of the extremist shipping warrior, why the hell are they defending those pedos instead of joining the crusade?  
    Pony shipping wars are simply way more chill (or all the ones that were as intense as other fandoms happened before I showed up).
     
     
    The Publiq of 15 years ago would have enjoyed the million-word epics that I now skip in favor of the fan art and TV Tropes summaries these days. Having summer breaks before band camp started meant I could power through about 400 printed pages of fiction in a day. Adulthood has annihilated my ability to focus on long-form fiction. I can still unintentionally lose afternoons powering through non-fiction literature and technical manuals, so it’s not like I’ve totally forgotten how to read. I just can’t keep an entire fictional world in my head without getting distracted by real-world responsibilities. Non-fiction is easier to put down and pick right back up frequently.
     
     
    @doloresbridge  
    That makes you a brony fandom hipster! [RE: your second paragraph]
     
    I have to agree with you on your final paragraph: I simply lack the time (and, these days, interest) to read fanfics that aren’t pony.
Twiface
Lunar Supporter - Helped forge New Lunar Republic's freedom in the face of the Solar Empire's oppressive tyrannical regime (April Fools 2023).
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab
Non-Fungible Trixie -

Princess of Shitposting
@Twiface
I do not understand the appeal of militant shipping. The pony fandom is no stranger to shipping, OTPs, and waifus. However, the ship wars here are either:
  1. In jest, perhaps even being a direct mockery of the militant ship wars of other fandoms
  2. One dude who takes the honor of his waifu way too seriously and then ends up spilling pasta all over the forums and becomes the subject of this very thread for a day
There’s plenty of toxicity to be found here, but it’s very rarely caused by many someones simultaneously going to clinically unstable lengths to seek victory in a shipping war.
 
I suspect that a third type of fanatical shipper exists: activists who will latch onto any somewhat plausible LGBT ship and spam it in the name of “representation,” using the ship primarily as a vehicle for that to the detriment of actually making the ship work. Plenty of these people exist in the Brony fandom, and I suspect they bear responsibility for certain characters being pigeonholed into certain ships by the fandom at large
 
(eg. It’s rare to see Octavia and Vinyl Scratch paired with anypony besides each other, and Lyra is shipped with Bon Bon nearly exclusively (Lyra + male human being the only ‘acceptable’ exception because it was grandfathered in). These two ships only really got ‘canonized’ in the show because they had already been pushed so hard by shippers that any other shipping possibilities for these characters had been crowded out within the fandom’s collective consciousness. Even Lyra + Octavia, another lesbian ship that I happen to like and think is more plausible than Lyrabon, isn’t really capable of standing on its own because somebody will always come along and accuse them of cheating on their “canon” marefriends).
Latecomer

@Twiface  
Well, hopefully that sort of thing in particular will decrease as queer characters and relationships become more common and normalised in canon.
 
As for intense shipping in general… well, I don’t fully understand it myself. But one reason it might have been relatively low-key in pony is the knowledge that there was little chance of any particular pairing ever being canon. So it was mostly acknowleged to be a fun game of “what if?”.
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