How's life been Rob?

If liking MLP makes you a brony, then brony be I.
I've also loved some of Lauren Faust's other work: Powerpuff Girls and Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends. I think she has a great sense of humour and art style, and I enjoy all of her cartoons with disregard to any intended age bracket and without care of reprisal =p
I actually got into MLP by seeing a music video (or pmv as they call it) which combined System of a Down with the cartoon in obvious humourous ways.
I've mostly just watched the cartoon and a fair amount of the funny 'pmvs'. Though I do have an artistic friend who has shown me some of her favourite fan-art of the show.
I'm not about to say the show is groundbreaking, or teaches lessons that adults wouldn't generally already know, but it is amusing and adorable, which suits me fine.

I almost died.

I started laughing as soon as the fort names started.
Fort of the Flies gets me every time. From that point it was just nonstop laughter.

Decent, but it's not compared to the original parody Pony series:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94A83DC128CC6B4B

i need more horse cartoon parodies
i need them all
also fiw is better then x.mov.

Friendship is Witchcraft has some advantages though, like being funny and entertaining.

I guess if you really hate Ren and Stimpy, sure.

In true brony fashion this thread has managed to combine vocal love for girls' TV show with casual homophobia, because nothing good must be allowed to come of it

as a casual homosexual, i do feel uniquely targeted by this thread.

I actually really kind of do. Never could stand that show.

As someone who engages in casual saberopusery, I don't think I ever saw enough of Ren & Stimpy to form an opinion on it.

Cow & Chicken, on the other hand...

I never liked Ren and Stimpy because they constantly pushed the boundaries of gross. It just seemed like a non-stop visual experience of throbbing veins or the constant need to explore what was up their nose / mouth.

And I've never seen an episode of My Little Pony, I assumed it was a show for little girls but after this thread has generated so much discussion on the topic- I'm wondering if it wasnt created for a more adult audience. Although I'm still not planning on watching it.

No, it was pretty thoroughly made for selling toys to little girls.

It's cute, it's colourful, and it's not challenging. It's okay to enjoy something like that sometimes.

It's really nice to be able to watch after a day of watching the world eat itself.
Which is every day.

2edgy4me

Thing is, even though the initial target range was still young girls, it's made by Lauren Faust. This is not the first cartoon she has made that appeals to all ages and genders.
In an interview (yes I have actually read an interview) she talked about how much she hated girls cartoons when she was a kid, they were always sickly sweet and talked down to their audience to such a degree she felt insulted at 7. She swore she would never make a show like that, so when they approached her to make MLP she had a few conditions of her own. The characters are actually based on the characters she gave her MLP toys when she was a girl, rather than the original show's, which she found herself hating as she grew up.
From what I have read elsewhere on the internet (which may of course, be complete crap) the MLP craze started because someone posted a link to the new one on 4chan or Reddit or whatever talking about how horrible the company was for bringing back such a lame, merchandise orientated, degrading and obnoxious cartoon. People followed the link to the video and the thread soon became filled with posts talking about how the show actually looks pretty good, and soon a devoted fanbase was born.
I, like many here, found out about the fanbase and thought "what the hell?", it made me doubly wary of the show, because not only was it a show for little girls, it was now one with a cult-like following by deranged followers who insisted the show was a revolution and how it had many layers and etc etc
Don't get me wrong, there are most definitely deranged followers who take the whole thing far too seriously and make everyone else uncomfortable as well as making the fanbase look a lot worse than it is. But as I've said before, it's cute, it's amusing, and I like it.


And now I've made a fairly long post that probably makes me look like an apologetic fan, but oh well.
The pilot episodes of season 1 and 2 were quite boring in my opinion, but the rest were good. Lauren Faust stopped working on it halfway through season 2, but thankfully they've mostly stuck to her vision and resisted descending into the cliche childrens cartoon it could have been

I'm just waiting for the next supposedly-weird-that-it's-really-popular thing to which I can say "haven't watched/whatever'd it" as well.

(Previous ones including that Avatar/Korra cartoon, Firefly (even though technically I've watched all of it), Invader Zim, Spawn, Transformers etc.)

"Brony", the term, definitely originated on 4chan (There's a screen cap of the post in question out there.)
What I always got from it is people thought it would be terrible, so they watched it to make fun of it, instead finding it was actually quite well done. This would be in early 2010. Then sometimes later, around the Winter Wrap Up episode which debuts the first musical (Which has an amazing level of quality and effort put into it.)the show turned out to be fantastic and unique, and thus the fandom exploded in every direction simultaneously when said musical went viral.

I originally hated the show on principle because like, It's aimed at little girls and I'm a man! Any man that likes it must be a bad person! Also bronies are weird and should all die! Logically then I was doomed to eventually watch some of it, since in my mind I had to be this pandoras box that would magically make me a worse person if I enjoyed it.
So I watched the pilot, and enjoy it I did. Over the next 3 days I basically went through the whole damn thing on a binge and then engaged in some retrospective. I enjoy the show, a lot, does that make me a bad person? The answer is no. It was wrong of me to think that way. I think it made a slight improvement to my life based on that. I've smiled a lot more since I watched the show, become a little less up tight and judgemental.

So yeah basically we went down the same path, it's weird. I'm really happy that this show is making Hasbro megabux and will probably run for a good long time.

Furthermore I'm legit curious to see what they are going to do with Twilights character now that she's a princess. One of the things that makes the show special in my opinion is that the characters develop over time, examples of this being the obvious (Twilight getting more powerful with magic and becoming a more skilled leader over time) to the subtle (Everybody gets a pet, said pets become an episodes plot. Luna comes to grips with her duties, and later enters somebodies dreams to help them, Fluttershy slowly becomes more assertive, eventually culminating in her telling Discord off, etc.). I can't really think of any other cartoon that does this, except maybe Avatar. Canterlot Wedding/Crystal Empire are together at least as well made as any given Disney movie from the 80s/90s, and I have to give Meghan McCarthy megaprops for screwing with conventional gender roles in them.

I could literally write pages and pages on recurring elements and character development subtleties going on in the background.

Also that plushie noise that occasionally is used when somebody smiles makes me giggle literally ever single time.

If you were able to send this post to me two months ago I would probably have gotten mad at my future self for becoming "One of them". It's been an odd couple of months. I literally do think the show has layers and layers, and is (in a small way, a subtle way.) revolutionary. It's not a great work of art that changes the direction humanity is going in, nor is it anything to base political treatise on, but it is special.

Oh yeah, the princess thing. That was an episode I disliked. It seemed quite rushed.
The main characters have their cutie marks mixed, a song is sung and oh btw Twilight has wings now, the end.
I do adore that plushie noise you've mentioned though. It's my favourite running gag of the show, even better than Derpy.

Just randomly, this scene absolutely slew me and sold me completely on the show.
Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2036tCmnsv8

They obviously intended to do this plot as a two part season finale but hasbro commissioned that dumb movie and derailed season 3. I still really like Magical Mystery Cure though because it's 18 minutes of pure cartoon musical bliss, for me. I feel robbed of 13 episodes.
Season 4 has been said to contain 20 musicals, can't waiiiit.
The absurd backlash against Derpy/Ditzy (Twins?) is the worst thing in the world.