On a warm Saturday afternoon in April, Jacob Karvonen sits surrounded by a group of young men in the food court of Concord Mills mall. They eat sushi, pizza and homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. After lunch, they plan to head to a nearby park for a game of Frisbee in the gorgeous spring weather.
At first glance, the guys — all in their late teens and early twenties — look and act no different from the rest of the young shoppers milling around Concord Mills on a busy Saturday. They’re white and black, Latino and Asian. Some keep their hair short; others wear it shaggy. One of them recently dyed his blue, hardly unusual in this day and age.
But a closer inspection reveals an intriguing hobby that might surprise more than one onlooker. Many in the group wear T-shirts featuring characters from the cartoon show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Small pony figurines instantly recognizable to any young woman are scattered around the table, and a stuffed pink pony’s head pokes out of someone’s messenger bag.
This is an official meeting of Team Brony North Carolina.
AS A FRANCHISE, My Little Pony has been around since 1983 as a line of plastic toy ponies marketed to young girls. Through the years, the toys have given rise to four animated television series. The most recent, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, was developed by Emmy Award-winning animator Lauren Faust and debuted on The Hub Network on Oct. 10, 2010.
Shortly after its premiere, Amid Amidi, editor in chief of the blog Cartoon Brew, wrote an article criticizing Faust and the show for being toy-centric. Amidi called the program “the end of the creator-driven era in TV animation” and said it was “an admission of defeat for the entire movement, a white flag-waving moment for the TV animation industry.” The article’s alarmist nature began to fuel interest in the show, particularly among male users of the Internet forum 4chan. They began to watch and discuss its characters, plot, pop-culture references and animation style on the website. A new demographic of viewers had emerged, and they began to call themselves Bronies, a portmanteau of “bro” and “ponies.”
According to the 2013 State of the Herd, an online census of 21,637 Bronies worldwide, almost 66 percent identify as exclusively heterosexual, their mean age is about 20, and Chile is the hot spot for Brony activity in South America.
In the first episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a purple unicorn named Twilight Sparkle is sent to the town of Ponyville by Princess Celestia to supervise the Summer Sun Celebration. She grudgingly accepts her assignment but scoffs at the ruler of Equestria’s suggestion to make some friends while she’s there. Twilight is a devout student of pony magic who’d much rather have her muzzle stuck in a book than interact with other ponies.
Back at Concord Mills, Karvonen, 17, can relate to Twilight’s hesitance to make friends. Before finding the Bronies, he said he “found it hard to accept people’s friendship because I thought it would interfere with my lifestyle. I enjoyed staying in my room, writing stories and playing guitar. I didn’t feel like I needed to share my time or interests with anyone else.”
By the end of the second episode, Twilight has a change of heart. While in Ponyville, she meets five wildly different ponies who fearlessly stand by her side and help her defeat Night Mare Moon, an evil winged unicorn who wants to bring eternal night to Equestria.
KARVONEN, a native of Harrisburg, started watching My Little Pony last year after encountering posts and memes referencing the show on the website Funnyjunk. After some additional online exploration, he found the Bronies and the beginnings of a new group of friends; last summer, he started a Facebook group for local admirers of the show. Team Brony North Carolina has grown to more than 200 members who are constantly posting pony-related pictures, fan fiction and general news about their favorite cartoon equines. Most of its members are young adult males, but a few teenage and young women, or “Pegasisters,” also participate.
The group hosts monthly get-togethers, and it is at the meeting in the food court of Concord Mills that I have my first real-life encounter with Bronies.
As much as I tried to keep an open mind about hanging out with a group of guys who are die-hard fans of a show made for little girls about magical ponies, I couldn’t help but arrive with some preconceived assumptions. I scoured the tables of the mall’s food court, expecting to find a socially awkward group of men. But a few conversations in, I realized they were just like any other group of friends: they’re loud, play pranks on each other, and complain about being broke.
Brendan Gorman, 17, is on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout. One of the things he likes about My Little Pony is that it doesn’t recycle the same plot like other cartoons and that it is wholesome and full of positive lessons.
Twilight Sparkle and her friends each represent an element of Harmony — honesty, laughter, loyalty, kindness, generosity and magic — the most powerful force in Equestria, used by the ponies to defeat evil. Gorman can relate to these principles because three are part of the Scout’s law.
“So much of TV today is full of sex, drugs and violence that it’s refreshing to watch a good show that teaches good values,” he said.
Across the table from Gorman are friends Adam Cheatham and Derek Kinney, who went to high school together in Southern Pines. Cheatham is dark-skinned and sports plastic-framed glasses. Kinney is tall and thin with long hair that he perpetually swipes from his eyes. They are both 20 and in college. Kinney started watching the show in January after casually catching a scene of an episode his younger sister was enjoying. He thought it was funny and liked the animation, so he started watching more and more until he’d finished all three seasons on Netflix. He told Cheatham about it, and after some convincing, Cheatham decided to give it a chance. In one week, he finished all 26 episodes of the first season. They both said they like the show because it’s well-made, funny, and they feel emotionally connected to the characters. Cheatham and Kinney are also both fans of Breaking Bad, the definitely-made-for-adults TV show on AMC about a high school chemistry teacher who starts manufacturing and selling meth to pay for chemotherapy. They agree that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is just as good as that award-winning drama.
“They are obviously completely different genres,” said Cheatham, “but both shows are the finest quality for what they are.”
I was warned about Ian Vinson’s energy level by some of the Bronies on the Facebook group. He lives in Charlotte and, at 16, is one of the youngest members at the meet-up; he’s also the loudest. For Vinson, My Little Pony has opened up the floodgates to his creativity. He creates art, writes elaborate fan fiction, and is interested in taking up voice acting. The My Little Pony fandom, he said, has provided him with the confidence he needs to pursue his interests by helping him grow a thicker skin. He said he has learned to laugh at himself. But like many of the Bronies at the meet-up, Vinson’s attraction to the show has raised questions and provoked mild teasing from some of his friends and family members. To cope, he’s learned — through the show — to brush them off.
“We are accepting of all people whatever their religions, sexualities or races; our message is love and tolerance,” he said.
Isaac Colon leans in to me and whispers that he’d like to provide me with some background about Vinson’s “love and tolerance” statement. Colon is 17, measured and soft-spoken. He’s been watching the show since January 2011 and wants to join the military once he graduates from high school in Harrisburg.
“When fans started to get called names and receive negative comments about liking My Little Pony on 4chan, they decided that, instead of fighting fire with fire, they would react with kindness. In response to the trolls, they posted pictures of ponies with the words, ‘I’m going to love and tolerate the crap out of you.’ The haters never saw it coming.”
IN AN INTERVIEW for Equestria Daily — the Internet’s leading source for all things pony — Faust, the creator of the most recent edition of the cartoon, said, “My specific dreams are still to make great entertainment for girls. I just don’t think there’s enough truly good stuff out there for them, but I also have kind of selfish reasons. When I think of something I want to say or an experience I want to share, my ideas are usually innately feminine because I’m female — and I refuse to believe that something being feminine by nature automatically means it isn’t worthwhile.”
Even though I often use Netflix to stream cartoons for my almost 4-year-old son, I had never considered showing him My Little Pony. But after my meeting with the Bronies, I tell Lucas that I want to show him a new cartoon. So one evening, we curl up on the couch to watch an episode together.
He is immediately drawn into the storyline and asks me lots of excited questions about what’s going on and why. After the 22-minute episode, he begs me to let him watch another, and when I refuse — he’s only allowed one TV show a night — he asks if we can play a game in which we pretend to be some of the characters. I agree, and he chooses to be Spike, Twilight’s baby dragon assistant and one of the only male characters.
Since then, My Little Pony has been in regular rotation at our house, along with some of his other favorites, such as Thomas the Tank Engine and Dinosaur Train.
As an adult watching the show, I found complex, well-rounded characters, an actual plot, and tons of references to pop culture specifically targeted at me. My kid isn’t familiar with the Coen brothers’ cinematic oeuvre, but in an episode that takes place at a bowling alley, pony versions of the main characters from The Big Lebowski make a cameo. It’s the kind of thing that, as a parent, makes me want to engage in the episode with my child instead of immediately zone out and surf the 'net on my phone.
Recently, I was telling a group of friends about the show and casually said something about it being marketed at girls. Lucas heard my comment and frowned. “It’s for girls? Does that mean I can’t watch it?” he asked. “Of course you can watch it,” I said. “Some girls really like it, but boys can like it, too.”
Our conversation got me thinking about the double standard we have when it comes to gender stereotypes. Why is it more socially acceptable for girls to watch shows targeted at males than for boys to enjoy a cartoon like My Little Pony?
“To state it most simply, masculinity is one of the ways that people access privilege,” wrote Kent L. Brintnall, affiliate professor of women’s and gender studies at UNC Charlotte, in an e-mail. “Masculinity (like whiteness, like American citizenship, like Christianity, like wealth) equals power. So, to pursue masculine things, to excel at masculine things — even if it may be non-normative, and even if it can give rise to accusations about a woman’s non-normative sexuality — will also, usually, be accompanied by a certain level of social approval.”
He goes on to explain that men are vilified for pursuing traditional female things because when they do, they are seen as abandoning their power and privilege. “Insofar as the feminine is imagined and understood as a site of powerlessness in our cultural moment, then it makes no sense for anyone to want it or to pursue it or to emulate it or to desire it as something to be,” he wrote.
In one of my favorite episodes (yes, I’ve seen so many I have favorites), a griffon — half lion, half eagle — named Gilda bullies Pinkie Pie and several other ponies. Instead of seeking revenge, Pinkie Pie decides to throw her a party to, as she says, “turn her frown upside down.” This act of generosity completely disorients Gilda, who ends up embarrassing herself in front of everypony and subsequently leaving Ponyville. She is defeated, not with harsh words or violence, but with kindness and understanding.
If those sorts of lessons are what make the show girly, then I guess I want to raise a really girly son because that’s exactly how I’d want him to handle a similar situation.
“Do I think that men should learn that traditional norms of masculinity are a limited way of embodying the human experience? Yes,” wrote Brintnall. "And I think that women should learn that, too. I think that both men and women should learn that neither our genitals nor our chromosomes … are our destiny.”
Due to an editing error, this story incorrectly identified Gilda. She is half lion, half eagle.
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This article appears in May 8-14, 2013.
Good article, but just wanted to point out that Gilda is your typical griffon, being half eagle half lion, not horse. Other that that, good stuff!
I’m proud of my group. Love you all and thanks for the awesome review
Very nice article aside from the griffon gaffe and the privilege nonsense. Lucas, you don’t need anyone’s approval to enjoy something you like.
Overall a good article, aside from one thing: Gilda is a griffon, so she is half eagle, half lion, not horse. A half eagle, half horse would be a hippogriff.
Also, one thing I might add concerning the media references bit, is that in the show the vast majority of media references are fairly subtle and underplayed.
Taking the Big Lebowski cameos as example, it was not like in, for instance, a Seltzer and Frieberg movie, where it would probably be something like “Hey look! Those guys look like the guys from the Big Lebowski! That’s relevant and with the times! Laugh at that, it’s funny, we swear!”.
Instead, it was more along the lines of “Hey look, those ponies in the back look kinda like the guys from the Big Lebowski. Anyway, back to the story!”
I liked this article. It covered a lot of ground. Of course, the many fans would focus on the minor mistake concerning Gilda. I would have reconnected the Gilda episode back to the brony repose to trolls and the overall love and tolerance moral concept.
If I had to point an error, it would be the pegasister term. While the term is fairly well-known in the fandom in my experience, it is not popular as a primary identity for female adult fans. As the state of the herd report shows, the term is very unpopular among female fans and many feel that brony is a gender neutral term.
I guess pegasister as a way of identifying only makes sense in how often the female minority of the fandom is forgotten, their perspective completely ignored by fans and journalists. This conflicts, however, with the modified humanism of respecting people because each one is a person. In the popular negative understand of brony moral concepts, one ought to ‘love and tolerate’ a person despite non-basic differences between oneself and another like religion.
Unlike Brony-M, I actually appreciate the privilege and gender Norma portion for that is another. It is a legitimate way of understanding a brony’s engagement with culture and it’s norms, and many fans like me enjoy exploring this aspect of the subculture.
Thanks for pointing that out, everyone. That was my mistake, not Ailen’s. Thanks for reading!
I was a bit alarmed when my son suddenly started skipping past Spider-Man & watching My Little Pony instead. Then one rainy day, I sat and watched an episode with him. And another…and another. It’s a pretty good show! From the minds behind Powerpuff Girls, right? Consider me a grown up fan. A “growny”?
Just read this article, loved it! Having no children, my only knowledge of My Little Pony comes from remembering commercials for kiddie toys when I was already too old for it back in the 80s, but I suppose now I’m going to have to check it out because in my ignorance, I would never have guessed My Little Pony was a bastion of quality characters and stories and art. Anyway, not only do I love when people expand beyond the limitations of their gender stereotypes, I love when people find love in unexpected places. I always thought comic book fandom was probably too geeky, while knowing that there might be the occasional quality find in the genre. Just last year I found myself in love with stories from anime and manga, where I never expected to find myself so deeply enthralled. My family still doesn’t “get it.”
There’s actually a secondary layer to Griffon the Brush-off, which just made me sit back and go ‘whoaaaa’ the third time I watched it. Not every episode has so many layers, but this was one of them, and it was masterfully done. Watch Gilda’s expressions when Rainbow Dash, her former BFF, insists on doing things they did as kids. Are you familiar with the CS Lewis quote about critics who use ‘adult’ as a term of approval and not a descriptor? Gilda is a bully because she sees ponies as childish. She clearly expected more of her former friend, expecting her to ‘grow up’. Her face when her friend wants to do their flight school chant is priceless, and speaks volumes as to the second underlying lesson to the episode. It’s easy to imagine the conflict is that she is jealous that Pinkie is interfering with their friendship, but, their friendship was fractured before she ever returned! She is uninterested in anything rainbow dash wants to do aside from flying. She just uses Pinkie as a scapegoat when she doesn’t get the hint and keeps butting in. Her mentality appears to be that Rainbow living amongst all these ‘soft’ ponies are what changed her for the worse. So, while the primary lesson is dealing with a bully without violence or fear, the secondary lesson is that sometimes, friends grow apart in different ways, and their new differences cannot be reconciled. I thought it was confusing that Rainbow Dash, the element of loyalty, would have let Gilda walk away from her the first time. Wouldn’t loyalty have been to salvage both friendships? But then, the third time around, it’s clearer. Their final fight is Rainbow Dash and Gilda finally acknowledging what was slowly building throughout the episode. They were now too different to be friends. And most of that fractured friendship hinges on Gilda having grown up in a very ‘serious’ manner, and believing things which are ‘childish’ must be ‘bad’ because they’re not intended for adults. Much of her flipping out at the party revolves around this as well. Quite a cerebral lesson for a kids’ show!
Hi, I am looking to help my son connect with some other Bronies in the Charlotte area but he is only 10. Does anyone know of a younger group?