I'm quitting......

Aimoperative wrote: »

....to quit this game. Anyway, what happened to everybody from 2009-2011? Did they all name change?

Aimoperative wrote: »

Didn't read the my post properly again? yeah, the English language can be hard to understand can't it?

[MOD]Hi wrote: »

Well I'm right here.

Aimoperative wrote: »

This is a rough draft. (I advise copy and pasting onto a word doc. Otherwise your eyes will melt.)

Bronies, Bronies everywhere!

Every TV show has a fan base of some sort and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is no exception. Yet unlike other shows, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic or mlp:fim as it is called by its fans, has extended its fan base well beyond the its demographic group of 3-5 year old girls. Most noticeably in attracting a massive group of fans known collectively as “Bronies”. Bronies are term used to dub older fans who have literally been taken with the show, they are pretty much the sole reason why mlp:fim has become so well known on the Internet because of their extrovert loyalty to the show.
The wide spread popularity of the show can be attributed to the infamous Internet forum 4chan, where the first threads started discussing the show. After a short but intense “Internet civil war” on 4chan between haters and Bronies (a war the fans won), mlp:fim spread across the internet via fans migrating to other social websites. From here, the popularity of the show has increased, giving rise to it’s own sites like Equestria Daily, RainbowDash.net, and Ponychan, websites dedicated to the discussion, fan-fiction, and fan-art of the TV show. Reviews from Common Sense Media give it a four out of five stars for it’s positive role models and messages. The older fans claim that it is the script, the animation, the producers response, and the close knit community formed by the fans that are what attracts them to watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, or any good TV show for that matter.
The story revolves around a studious unicorn pony named Twilight Sparkle as she is tasked by her mentor Princess Celestia to learn about friendship in the town of Ponyville. Twilight becomes close friends with five other ponies: Applejack, Rarity, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie. Each pony represents a different facet of friendship, such as honesty, generosity, kindness, loyalty, and laughter. In the series, the ponies share adventures and help out other residents of Ponyville, while working out the troublesome moments in their own friendships.
Unlike other shows with similar content, mlp:fim does not follow the customary path of infantile characters and a cheesy plot, rather it’s stories, while simple in moral, are complex and realistic enough for average everyday people to relate to, as one Brony named Christian Leisner attested too, “"They have flaws, they have backgrounds they're ashamed of."” (qtd. in Vara). An interview with Luarn Faust, the shows genius, reveals Faust’s devotion to a great story,
I champion character-driven stories and humor because character-driven stuff is just what I like to watch and what I like to do. I think making your audience experience an emotional reaction is the core of good storytelling, and you can’t evoke emotion without likable, relatable characters. Some shows focus on gags and written jokes and have an exclusive goal to get laughs, but I prefer comedy that has a sincere emotional core...and humor that comes from characters, not one-liners… (Tekaramity)
Thanks to Faust’s insistence on great character, mlp:fim has garnered one of the largest fan followings on the Internet, a great example being the Equestria Daily, a fan made site about the show, getting up to 1.4 million page as of now and growing every three seconds (Strike). This is just one website among many others that have a similar function, to talk about the episodes, post fan-art/fiction, but mostly to compliment the characters of the show, the ponies themselves.
Equally important to mlp:fim, is the appearance and acting of the ponies themselves, in fact, many of the fans are attracted to the show simply because they find the characters visually adorable, not to mention easy to replicate for fan-art. The ponies are drawn in 2D shading free-flat colors, with their tails and manes, one of their most distinguishing features, as curving surfaces lacking depth. The most appealing aspect of the entire animation, however, is the head, with massive expression-filled eyes that fill a head relative to the body-size, complemented by a small muzzle that disappears when seen head on (Strike). Apparently, 2D combined with bright colors, bouncy hair, big eyes, and ponies are enough to convince an adult to become a Brony.
Unlike other TV shows, where much of the acting is focused on the voice acting, mlp:fim does a lot of visual acting, with the animators experimenting with facial and body expressions. Griffiths sums it up quite nicely saying,
The Flash-based reboot is characterful, dynamic, has a palette simultaneously bolder and less emetic (than it’s predecessor) and, notably, inspires some really impressive creative work, including animations, song videos, 3D models built using technology designed for first-person shooters...the amount of ingenuity currently dedicated to getting Rainbow Dash to lip-sync to popular hits is probably roughly equivalent to the amount used to put a man on the moon…
Because the Flash based animation is considerably easy to edit, Bronies are able to create huge amounts of their own fan work with edited episodes of the show.
The largest endorsement for mlp:fim is not in its ads, but actually from the creation of fan made mash-ups of the show, something the show’s producers have encouraged (Griffiths). Almost all Brony music videos, movie trailers, or any type of video are expertly lip-synced with footage from the show, allowing tons of interpretation for practically every second in any mlp:fim episode that airs. A lot of the Brony made videos is actually how mlp:fim attracts many of its fans, as regular YouTubers are browsing videos and stumble across a fan mash-up, usually exploring the animation behind the mash up then watching the TV show.
The show’s directors also are very receptive to the Bronies, incorporating fan made ponies into the actual show itself, characters like Derpy Hooves, a cross-eyed pony, and Dr. Whooves, a ponified version of the British icon Dr. Who. These ponies were originally background ponies until the Bronies had picked out and personified them. According to supervising director Jayson Thiesson, once the crew had discovered the Brony-created ponies, they re-used those ponies as “little Easter Egg(s) for people to catch” in the show (qtd. in Strike). In essence, the producers allowed the fans to create their own “canon” ponies, something rarely done in TV shows in general because of the inherit problems fanon (fan-made) characters can make for the canon ones.
Another generous contribution that the producers gave to the Bronies is that they have allowed full episodes of the show to air un-restricted on the internet, especially on YouTube, a policy considered detrimental to most TV shows. This policy, however, has actually increased the amount of fans and has done more to boost the ratings and sales for the show then taking down the videos would ever have accomplished. Because mlp:fim’s massive online presence now, the producers who originally designed the show for parents and their kids to watch, have added some perks for the childless geeks out there ,such as Dr. Whooves and a star trek reference (Weinman), as shout-out for the Bronies support (Griffiths).
All fans like to congregate together and express their thoughts about a show, some even going so far as to create art about it. Bronies have taken fan art to a completely new level, or at least in the sheer quantity of pony art. Henri Yount, a 20 year old who posts My Little Pony mash ups with movie trailers on Youtube and has over nearly 350,000 views on his account, describes the Bronies as, “one of the most amazing/unexpected things to come out of the internet in a long while”, Yount later added to his previous comment to clarify about whether being a Brony was crazy or cool, “When I say ‘amazing,’ I’m referring to the crazy amount of content and the hard-working people who produce material every day, which I haven’t seen in many other fan bases”. The massive amount of artwork toward the ponies can be seen on deviantArt, the massive online artist collective, which has nearly 90,000 pieces of pony art as of June 2011, with 330 drawing and paintings submitted on one random day (Watercutter). Along with fan-art, Bronies create fan-fiction, weaving stories that range from sub-par to novels about ponies from the show. These stories provide topics to talk about during breaks in between episodes and helps unite the Brony community.
Because Bronies buck the stereotypical image of how adults are supposed to act toward kid’s shows, they have received a lot of hateful criticism, or trolling as it is called online, that usually has no basis for the enmity other than the simple fact that Bronies are adults or teens who enjoy watching a child’s show. Because of the hostility, Bronies usually stick together, following the theme of their show, which, as its name implies, is about friendship. The Bronies loyalty to the show and to each other was put to the test when a civil war erupted between the fans and the trolls (haters) on 4chan, the first social website to discuss mlp:fim. Taking the concept of friendship from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the Bronies turned these ideas into pictures and posted them whenever a troll tried to derail a discussion thread, which enraged the trolls because they thrived on negative responses. Eventually, the trolls gave up and the Bronies crowed their victory to the world, literally, as one Brony told a reporter from the New York Observer, “4chan once took on the F.B.I. and won. So you might say that My Little Pony is more powerful than the F.B.I.” (qtd. in LaMarche).
Since then, Bronies have created websites like Equestria Daily, where fans from all over the Internet can gather together and share their ideas and hopes for the show. This has resulted in a very close-knit community that bands together in defense of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, examples being Bronies giving each other “brohoofs”, an Internet twist on the handshake, when they meet and responding to trolls with their motto of love and tolerance, usually by the way of pony pictures or videos.
Naturally, there will always be people who oppose TV shows simply because it does not meet up to their standard of entertainment. Not surprisingly, the majority of the cynics are regular forumers and bloggers simply expressing their opinion on a show, with few factual reasons on why one should not watch mlp:fim. One writer for the blog, Ms. Blog, stated that, “the only black ponies in the TV show My Little Pony are slave ponies to the white pony overlord! How can we expect kids to grow up rejecting racism when they watch shows like this?” (Richter). Richters take on mlp:fim focused mostly on the colors of the ponies as racial indicators, as well as the so called stereotypical depiction of feminists as lesbian tomboys that she thought was embodied in the pony Rainbow Dash.
In response to this blog, Lauren Faust herself stated that the colors were never “depicted as a race indicator for the ponies”, and that the “white pony overlord” was in fact, “the main character’s mentor, her teacher. She’s an authority figure and even a bit of a surrogate parent”. In response to the tomboy accusation, Faust simply stated that there was never any indication of Rainbow Dash’s sexual orientation within the show. The fact that Richter also had only seen the promotional videos for the show further reduced her credibility as a reliable critic for the show.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has attracted many of it’s fans through the its plot, its flash based animation, the interaction between the show’s crew and the fans, and the community that the Bronies have built for themselves. The show has withstood critics from both ends of the spectrum, showcasing itself as a TV show that both children and adults can enjoy. While it may seem strange for a group of older people to have aligned themselves with this show, it should really be of no surprise, it simply demonstrates how far TV programming has fallen in its standards. Sometimes it takes an extremely childish production like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic that has returned to simple morals to show people what elements are needed make up a quality television program.

xSilv3r3agl3 wrote: »

aim, you're falling for it. don't listen to this idiot. just ignore it and keep posting and act like he isn't even here.

Jigabobs wrote: »

that's ironic. considering you're an idiot yourself.

Jigabobs wrote: »

yeah i guess you're pretty used to everyone bullying you at school. i mean not only are you an idiot, but chances are you're obese (since you live in the fattest city in the US). how does it feel knowing no one will ever accept you?

Jigabobs wrote: »

that's a bad thing to say about yourself. you clearly need to see a psychiatrist.