Via My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Orion Peyrol

Staff Writer

If you happened to be on the right side of TikTok last year, you might have seen a resurgence of My Little Pony content on your For You Page, although these ponies didn’t appear as you might be used to them. Artists were having fun designing and inventing what they called “Infection AU’s.” These were fan-made, horror alternate universes in which the “mane six” (the fandom name for the main characters) were slowly infected by a mysterious disease and slowly turned on each other. Thousands of iterations of this concept flooded the internet, creating a temporary boom in an otherwise half-dead fandom. If you’re unfamiliar with the My Little Pony (MLP) fandom, this trend might have come to you as a great surprise, but there is actually a long and storied history behind the use of MLP as a backdrop for horror content.

Most people are familiar with the fourth and most popular generation of the show, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. MLP was an attempt by Hasbro to increase toy sales by making a children’s show (similar to He-Man in the 80s) which worked to wild success. However things didn’t go quite as planned for Hasbro. The show garnered an audience no one could’ve expected: adult men. So how in the world did this children’s show about colorful anthropomorphic ponies learning about friendship become the worldwide fandom phenomenon known as the bronies? Sadly, the answer is 4chan. For the uninitiated, 4chan is an anonymous image board website known for its propensity towards irony, dark humor and incel culture. When MLP was first airing, 4channers all over the world thought it would be a hilarious prank if they all went and watched this show. For weeks after the first few episodes aired, the message boards were flooded with what they called “pony-posting.” The thing is, and if you’ve ever tried to start saying “skibidi” ironically only to find it in your everyday vocabulary, you know this. Irony doesn’t really last that long before you find yourself genuinely enjoying what you are mocking. 

Parallely to the My Little Pony fanbase growing, so did the “Creepypasta” fanbase. “Creepypastas” are an internet term to refer to online horror stories and legends. These stories were everywhere in the 2010s, some of them even garnering their own fanbases, like Slenderman. The first pony-based creepypasta (or pony-pasta if you will) was Cupcake, a fanfiction in which Pinkie Pie drugs, brutally tortures and murders Rainbow Dash to bake her into a cupcake. The horror content didn’t stop at fanfiction, fans made music, art, animations and even video games. On its own there is absolutely nothing wrong with making horror content, it’s a safe way to experience emotional catharsis, especially through something that feels inherently safe, like My Little Pony. However, this content was everywhere in the fandom, rarely accompanied by trigger warnings, and easily accessed by the young children who were also a part of this fandom.

“The horror content was not the strangest thing bronies did. Unfortunately they were also known for sexualizing the show and its characters.”

A lot of the darker sides of the brony fandom — the intense gore and NSFW content — began in a very similar way tothe fandom itself: irony turned genuine. Shock culture was very big on the internet at this time, especially on 4chan, so a lot of the early adult content was done under the veneer of “Haha, I’m going to hell for this. Isn’t it so funny of me to make this? Aren’t you shocked?” But with time, the irony was dropped and these adult topics were no longer considered taboo in the fandom. In a way, it’s understandable why these men might feel the need to adult-ify their love for this show: it isn’t seen as normal for them to enjoy children’s media. No matter what they did people would view them as perverted and unmasculine. I mean, why would a man enjoyanything if it wasn’t hypersexual or hyperviolent? I am in no way excusing the content that has been made for this children’s show, but I can understand why the bronies might’ve felt as if it was a safer way to enjoy it. They might be seen as creeps, but at least they weren’t seen as unmanly for enjoying a girly show. 
The problem with using children’s shows as the backdrop for horror media is that children are not safe from stumbling upon that adult media. On one hand there aren’t really any ways to keep children out of adult-only spaces and, on the other, the Bronies almost flaunted their adult content in the faces of children. They wanted to prove that their love for this show was normal by making it more adult, to their reputation’s detriment. Thankfully, we haven’t seen a fandom quite like this since. Thanks to the normalization of animation as a medium not uniquely reserved for children, adult animation shows are being produced like Bojack Horseman, Rick and Morty and Helluva Boss. Adult admiration for children’s shows is viewed  with less judgement: you won’t immediately get  labelled as a pervert as it happenedfor the Bronies.