Bronies
	For the past two years, I’ve been part of a growing subculture called “bronies”. This isn’t a subculture you’d hear about every day—in fact, I’d say most of its popularity is on the Internet. It has only just started becoming a physical subculture. A brony is someone who watches the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic regularly that loves the show. The term is a portmanteau of “bro”—because an overwhelming majority of the people who watch the show are full-grown men—and “pony”. Although the term seems to be applied only to males, it can also be applied to females who watch the show. This subculture stems from the culture of people who browse the Internet—specifically, a site named 4chan—because that’s where the fan-base started in late 2010. Since then, it has grown a lot, branching out to sites like Reddit, Youtube, Funnyjunk, Tumblr, 9Gag, and others. There are even sites made specifically to talk about the show, like Ponychan and EquestriaDaily.
	Bronies are definitely a subculture. To say that they have their own language would probably be an understatement. In fact, there’s an entire website called Bronyspeak dedicated to brony jargon so that outsiders or newcomers can understand it better. Bronies even have local meet-ups with other bronies based around the show, and even have a yearly convention, beginning with the first BroNYCon, held in New York City in June of 2011. Since bronies are such an opposite to the way we see everyday men—nobody would believe you if you said you know a group of men who get together every Saturday to watch a show made for little girls—bronies even have a “slogan” they use when met with people who criticize them. They say “love and tolerance” and try not to be offended by whatever others have to say about them. Likewise, nobody outside this subculture would understand me if I tried to explain to them who “my favorite pony” is. This is something that bronies “argue” about often. In order to understand “favorite ponies”, a little bit of background about the show is needed:
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic –commonly coined as MLP:FIM or MLP—is an animated show about six ponies’ adventures together. The demographic for the show is young girls, so every episode is basically the ponies learning another moral. There are six “main” ponies in total, commonly called the “mane six”. Two are unicorns, two are pegasi, and two are just regular ponies. Twilight Sparkle is a unicorn bookworm, Applejack is a rodeo pony, Rainbow Dash is a pegasus comparable to a modern-day Olympian, Pinkie Pie is the all-around fun party pony, Rarity is a fashionista unicorn, and Fluttershy is a very timid, introverted pegasus. Obviously, each pony has a completely different personality from all the others, and because of that, bronies tend to usually have a “favorite” pony. There are a million other examples I could use, like “the elements of harmony”, “everypony”, “brohoof”, or “the royal Canterlot voice”, but if you want to understand those, you’ll just have to watch the show, won’t you?
As for physical, tangible components of this subculture, I would say that all of it is basically merchandise or custom-made things from fans of the show. A lot of bronies sell artwork that they’ve drawn or things they’ve made themselves to other bronies. I’ve even seen some amazing handiwork plush ponies sell on eBay for over $1,000, and the highest bid I’ve seen for one plush pony was over $4,000. It just goes to show that we’re crazy about our ponies and truly love the show. The other kind of physical culture for bronies would be official toys—Toys or figurines you can actually buy at stores, like Toys R Us or Wal-Mart. The difference between the two, and the reason why custom plush ponies go for such a high price, is that sometimes the official toys completely and utterly suck. A lot of the official toys don’t look anything like the ponies in the show, but recently it’s been getting a lot better. I personally have my favorite pony, Pinkie Pie, sitting right next to me now on my desk. I consider her my good-luck charm.
	One symbol that all bronies have to understand is the cutie mark. A cutie mark is a marking that a pony will get on her flank when she has found her “calling”. In respect to humans, you could say that a cutie mark is comparable to a vocation, except it can be physically seen. A cutie mark will represent whatever it is that that particular pony will want to do for the rest of his or her life.
	Since bronies typically have a “go-with-the-flow” kind of attitude, we don’t really have any social control. The only kind of social control I can think of is that we try to convince people outside of our subculture to become part of it. However, sometimes we do this to such an extent that we unintentionally “create” people who hate bronies, and then come to hate the show. I wouldn’t say we have a ranking system much, either. The hierarchy would be this from top to bottom: “Lauren Faust”—the creator of the show. She’s kind of like God to us—and then “bronies”. Most bronies today all find the show in the same way: They hear about it from a friend, or –since we bronies are a little bit overbearing—they’ll see a load of images all over the place on the Internet and decide to give it a shot. However, for the “original bronies”, something I can say that I definitely was and be proud of, we all found out about ponies together on a site called 4chan. Someone on the site posted a picture of the show, and in two days it grew exponentially by the second. Soon after, I decided to give the show one chance and I started watching it on Youtube. I went through the five stages of grief when I watched this show: At first, I was in denial. I thought, How could anyone ever like a show like this? It’s made for little kids! Then, I was angry and ashamed at myself for liking the show. Stop watching it! Your parents are right in the other room! What if they hear the girly theme song? I bargained with myself, Well, maybe just one more episode. Finally, I came to accept that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is probably the best show I’ve watched in a long time coming. I only reached the depression stage when I realized that I had watched all the episodes and would at that time have to wait for season two.
	There are a few main differences between the subculture of bronies and the culture of people who browse the Internet. Bronies go through a lot more hatred and are degraded a lot more from people than people who just browse the Internet. The one time we made it on the news, it was a Fox News segment where they described bronies as, “grown men who stay home from work and start filing for disability…because they’ve become obsessed with My Little Pony.” This actually couldn’t be further from the truth—Although, what else would you expect from Fox News? An academic study taken from Dr. Patrick Edwards, a psychology professor at Wofford College, actually shows that from 9,000 bronies, the average age for the older fans was around 21, that approximiately 86% were male, and that 63% were currently pursuing a college degree or higher.
	Although we’re different from the main culture, we also overlap it. And when I say “overlap”, I basically mean, “You can’t use any popular website and not expect to find ponies plastered on it.” I suppose this is different to everyone because I consider most of the websites I frequent as “popular”—generally having more than a million members. Like I said, some bronies are like Jehovah’s Witnesses, but not all of us are so determined to “show the world what a great show this is”.
I’d like to think that all bronies believe in being open-minded to others and believe and giving everyone and everything at least one chance. We also believe in not reacting to hatred and always trying to listen to the other side of the story. We understand that not everyone will “get it” or want to be a part of our group—although that probably won’t stop all of us from trying. Bronies come from all races, ethnicities, denominations, and many different countries, but together we all share our love of six animated ponies.