How Bronies won the internet

In 2010, Hasbro launched a new generation of My Little Pony toys, and debuted a nice little television show to accompany it. It was called My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and over a million people tuned into its premiere. Although perhaps not the kind of people Hasbro big wigs expected. No, instead, the “Brony” was born — guys who might have seemed kind of innocent in the beginning (although even that is debatable), but Bronies grew into an unstoppable force of fully grown men looking “respectfully” at a bunch of cute, big-eyed, flamboyantly colored, personified horses that were designed for kids. PJ Vogt joins us once again, despite knowing what he signed up for, to learn more about this subculture built around elaborate lore, conventions, tasteful art, “clopping,” tulpas, a certain interesting project involving a jar — and how Bronies have impacted broader internet culture. Our guest PJ Vogt hosts the podcast Search Engine. Check it out on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonuses & exclusives, and access to our members-only Discord? Sign up for a membership for just $6.66 a month at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Production Coordinator: Josh Fjelstad - Researcher: Adam Bumas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:31Ryan Broderick?

  Bronies were an unstoppable force that we all got wrong. It seemed like something silly that maybe even represented something positive. And meanwhile, something toxic was brewing that, looking back, we can see infected culture as a whole. That's today's episode. Bronies, what's the deal?

• 0:53Ryan Broderick?

  So, do you have any idea what we're talking about today?

• 0:56Speaker 03

  No, I've walked into this room, as I walk into so many rooms, completely clueless.

• 1:00Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, let me show, let me share my screen. And I want you to kind of just talk me through your first reactions emotionally to what you're looking at.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  I always forget that this is what happens when I come here.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  I don't like this at all.

• 1:29Ryan Broderick?

  So describe it for our audio listeners, what you're looking at right now.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  It's like,

• 1:38Speaker 03

  it looks like the rear end of a stuffed animal. Uh, that sort of seems like, it's hard to say, but it could be a My Little Pony. It has, it's light blue, it's different shades of light blue. It's got a harp, like it almost looks like a harp tattoo embroidered on its end. And the thing that I'm,

• 1:58Speaker 03

  regretfully have to add is that like the, the hole for the butt is, is, is big enough that a human could put their body part in it. And it seems designed for a human to put their body part in it.

• 2:10Ryan Broderick?

  It's interesting you think it's the butt. That's interesting. Um, so.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Is that not the butt?

• 2:14Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it's a.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 2:17Ryan Broderick?

  It could be, you know, it's a hand puppet, essentially. And I, I hope, I don't think this has been modified. I think this is like fairly innocent. We'll learn more about it soon, but this is Lyra Heartstrings. She is a My Little Pony. And yes, the My Little Pony characters all have a different emblem on their back leg.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Sorry, this wasn't made for sex. It's just that because of the context of Panic World, I, I put that on it. Or because of the context of the picture, the picture's a little bit suggestively angled, but.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  I thought this was made for sex.

• 2:49Ryan Broderick?

  Well, if this is not, then I disagree. Then I do. I don't think this was made for sex. I don't. I think this is a hand puppet. I'm going to choose to believe that, but it is ominously photographed.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  The opening looks small for a hand.

• 3:02Ryan Broderick?

  Um, yeah, you know what? I actually Googled this. There is, no, they don't make a hand puppet of Lyra Heartstrings, so.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, I feel like, I feel like I got about my read on this. All right, let's continue.

• 3:11Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so the reason I showed you that horrible image, uh, is because today we're talking about My Little Pony and we're talking about Bronies. A topic that in the course of two years of doing this show, we have actually not touched.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Really?

• 3:24Ryan Broderick?

  Um, no, we saved it for you. We're going to get into that, but first let me just do, uh, the proper setup here. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me as always is my producer, Grant Irving. Grant, what would your, what would your pony be? What would your pony sona be?

• 3:39Speaker 04

  That's a worse question than being asked what my first sona is.

• 3:42Ryan Broderick?

  What would your pony sona be?

• 3:44Speaker 04

  So out of depth here.

• 3:46Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, okay.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  It'd probably have like a headphone emoji on the butt. I don't, what's a good, what's a good answer, Ryan?

• 3:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you could be like a, you could be, you could be Grant the Clopcaster.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  That's, that's actually pretty cute.

• 4:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, well, clopping also means jerking off in the Brony community, but yes.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  I know. I made this hotline.

• 4:05Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so, uh, this is Panic World, a show about how the internet works our minds or culture, and eventually reality is brought to you by Garbage Media. And with us is our favorite guest to terrorize, PJ Vogt. Welcome to the show. PJ, what would your pony sona be? Can't use Clopcaster.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  What about like, uh, kind of like HR, HR professional?

• 4:27Ryan Broderick?

  Like an HR rep?

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, like an HR rep pony.

• 4:30Ryan Broderick?

  Is that a thing? Horse relations?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, horse relations.

• 4:33Ryan Broderick?

  That also sounds like a sex thing, yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  I feel like all roads lead to the same place here.

• 4:38Ryan Broderick?

  Have you gone down this rabbit hole before? Do you know much about the Brony world?

• 4:42Speaker 03

  I really don't. I mean, I know that back one million years ago, when I was, uh, working at Reply All, we did a thing about this, but I, my brain, which sometimes deletes necessary information, has definitely deleted this unnecessary information. Um, so I don't know, I know that, I know who My Little Ponies are, and I know that there are people on the internet who have more complicated feelings about My Little Ponies than their creators probably intended. But that's about where my file stops these days.

• 5:11Ryan Broderick?

  I went to a, a New York City Brony meetup in 2012. It is, to this day, the worst smelling room I have ever been in.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  That says a lot.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Can you give us your top three worst smelling rooms?

• 5:23Ryan Broderick?

  I used to play Magic the Gathering. I have been to like Super Smash tournaments and this was worse. Yeah, it smelled really bad. That was sort of my major takeaway. Like, uh, and none of the creepy stuff was happening. They were, they were just like adults who liked My Little Pony a lot.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Was there a gender ratio that you recall?

• 5:40Ryan Broderick?

  Fairly 50/50, actually.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Interesting. And were they, do they dress up like, uh, the way like furries would? Or are they just, do they just, they're just people?

• 5:49Ryan Broderick?

  They can. At the event that I was at, it was a lot of just like accessories. Wearing like a Rainbow Dash wings or something, or like a Pinkie Pie tube two. Those are both ponies from My Little Pony. The reason we wanted to talk about it is because I think in a lot of ways, the Brony community blew open the door for basically the way all of culture works now, which is like, you're kind of an embarrassing fanatic of it. And companies now know that these mainly adults will be that way and sort of want to foster that. Like, I would argue that Swifties and Bronies are functionally the same concept.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  I, I want to say like, I do already agree with one of these observations, which is that it's become more socially permissible to be a fan. The way once only teenagers were allowed to be fans, like millennials brought fandom into their middle age. And corporations, which maybe would have kind of ignored, because super fans can be off putting to just like normal enthusiasts of a thing. But corporations have started to cater to these like adult fans of things. Is that, is that the theory?

• 6:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, in fact, like we touched on this in your, I think it was your last episode, which was Gadget Hackwrench, the Russian cult around a cartoon mouse. Which is like, a lot of the fans of Gadget, you know, spent the eighties and the nineties complaining that as adults, they could not get access to basically children's media. And they wanted to be catered to. And so the, you know, in fact, literally just this week, I saw like a report that for the first time ever, toy sales are now predominantly selling to adults, not children.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  That's good. That's a healthy society.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  How are we supposed to feel about that?

• 7:34Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so I have a fight, I have a fight with my girlfriend about this that has been going for like a year. And it's largely like based around like, where did children focused spaces go? And she believes that like the Apple Store basically killed the McDonald's playroom. And there's some evidence to back that up, that like private equity after the Great Recession, turned all of the like child focused fast food restaurants into Apple Stores to chase a different clientele. My theory is that, not necessarily that that didn't happen, but that it has continued and sort of gotten worse over time because there are just less children.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  It's a side effect of, um, just like lower fertility rates overall. Like just people not having kids.

• 8:14Ryan Broderick?

  Or, and it, but it's not, and I want to be careful. It's not lower fertility rates overall. It's lower fertility rates for demographics that corporations would care about.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's like the affluent people that corporations are going to target. Fewer of them are having kids. And because they're not having kids, they also have more money to spend. And because they're more attached to their sort of signifiers of childhood, it's like they become the demographic where. X amount of decades ago, their kids would have been a demographic.

• 8:40Ryan Broderick?

  That's a theory I've had for a while. Yeah, and I wish I had more data, but there isn't a lot of data to explain where did the McDonald's playroom go. But I think around 2010, as the brony fandom is coming to focus, the media landscape is changing, the recession has greatly changed the economy, and Marvel is basically firing up. You have Iron Man in 2008, The Dark Knight as well. So all of a sudden, there is this sense of like, wait a minute, adults will go see baby stuff. And so we don't need a sexy Harrison Ford crime thriller. We can put a guy in a cape and blow stuff up. And then the adults will also buy the action figures.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  It's hard to talk about without sounding like such a pretentious jerk, but as somebody who will go see a Marvel movie,

• 9:29Speaker 03

  I feel like there was a taboo against continuing to enjoy the things you enjoyed as a kid, and the taboo kind of sucked. But then we knocked down the taboo and like, I've been watching movies from the 90s lately, and it's like watching movies from the 70s. It's like, adults talk about things and they don't shoot any lasers.

• 9:45Ryan Broderick?

  It's awesome. I have also been watching, basically, any movie I can find made before 2008.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:54Ryan Broderick?

  Or maybe go even further back to the Michael Bay Transformers is probably like another. When did that come out? Hold on, let's see. 2007. So yeah, basically, all of these companies pre-Great Recession are making adult movies for adults. And then the recession hits, and it's like, let's all go look at baby stuff and buy baby stuff and be babies forever.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  This also feels like Ron Paul was a part of the soup here.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Why was Ron Paul so bad for this?

• 10:21Ryan Broderick?

  Was Ron Paul in Michael Bay's Transformers?

• 10:23Speaker 04

  The timeframe of it, of like, let's turn everything into a super fandom. Or like, maybe the fandom for Ron Paul was such an indicator that this was coming.

• 10:33Ryan Broderick?

  Well, actually, let me set this up, because that's not totally crazy. Also, I am imagining what would happen if you had like a giant Bitcoin transformer that transformed into a robot version of Ron Paul.

• 10:45Ryan Broderick?

  Which would be pretty cool.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  Let's cut that and actually, let's make it merch.

• 10:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Let's IP that.

• 10:50Ryan Broderick?

  If you want to buy action figures. So yeah, actually, let's set this up. So 2010 is a really interesting year. You have a bunch of industries kind of realizing that adults will engage in fandom behavior, and they're not growing out of it. 2010 is when 4chan sort of becomes the epicenter of the My Little Pony Friendship is Magic reboot. So My Little Pony is like He-Man or Transformers. It's a toy line that became a multimedia franchise, right? And it starts in 1981, and there are a bunch of different TV shows.

• 11:32Ryan Broderick?

  In 2010, My Little Pony Friendship is Magic launches. And that is when the, that's what the brony's latch on to.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 11:40Ryan Broderick?

  It's the reboot, Friendship is Magic. Our researcher Adam gave us like a gigantic ticking clock of like, all the things leading to, like, it almost reads like a history of World War II. But if I can condense it very quickly, basically, from like, February 2010 until like, the end of the year, there's all this different stuff happening in the animation world, and 4chan is sort of acting as the home base for it. So that's where you get the fandoms springing up for adventure time.

• 12:19Ryan Broderick?

  Adult Swim launches their flash game Robot Unicorn Attack. The entire website is redecorated as the game Robot Unicorn Attack.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Wait, 4chan was?

• 12:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they used to do like events and like do takeovers and like kind of, and mess with the website CSS and stuff.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  But this wasn't like, American corporations like, doing a sponsored activation?

• 12:41Ryan Broderick?

  This is happening on the fandom side. You also get like Minecraft becoming very big out of nowhere. So it's like, the world as we know it is sort of being born in 2010. In October 2010, the Hub channel starts broadcasting in the US. It's a new channel that's co-owned by Hasbro. And it's basically just like a way to like dump a bunch of ad dollars into different Hasbro stuff. And part of this, the Hub's, oh yeah, it's co-owned by Discovery and Hasbro.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:12Ryan Broderick?

  It's 24-hour cartoon channel. They launched My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. We can only find a few examples of chatter from its like immediate launch date, which would probably prove that it wasn't a huge hit with like, older fans?

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Right, right. Because if they were there waiting to be activated, this signal should have been good enough.

• 13:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. We found what looks to be the first ever 4chan thread about the reboot Friendship is Magic.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm looking at your screen.

• 13:46Ryan Broderick?

  So this is a section of 4chan called CO, or Comics and Cartoons.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  So do you want me to read it?

• 13:51Ryan Broderick?

  I want you to read the first three comments here.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Okay. So somebody says, first episode is up, and they've got a screen grab of these innocent and adorable little ponies. Somebody says, le bump, just like, I'm bumping this thread. And then the third comment,

• 14:11Speaker 03

  which really only, it was within eight minutes of the first one, somebody says, this is not sexy. What were they thinking?

• 14:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. There's some further chatter down where someone says, are you saying you found the original sexy? Then, so the big thing here also for context is that these characters have been redesigned. So this is not the original animation style. They have bigger eyes, I would argue, kind of a flirtier appearance.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:36Ryan Broderick?

  Almost like they're asking for it.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  I wouldn't go that far. It feels like more, it feels like kind of anime-ish, manga-ish?

• 14:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I would say so, yeah. And it's a lot of people talking about My Little Pony as a kid, watching it. So these would be like, young adults in the 2010, in 2010.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Can I just say, like, I, so I never really went on 4chan. I was like, I was told it was a website for the bad kids, and I stayed off of it. And my understanding, one, is that many of the internet culture people I know and love were, at minimum, reading the board and understood earlier than I did how much of culture was being influenced by it. But also, I understand people are talking about wanting to like, fuck the ponies here, but I'm surprised the degree to which it's also people just being like, I like My Little Ponies. Like, I didn't know it was also a normal fandom board. I thought it was much more just like trolls being trolls.

• 15:33Ryan Broderick?

  It becomes that later. But there's also sections, so like, the LGBT board on 4chan is extremely aggressive, but it's like, full of discussion. You know, the fit board, the sort of weightlifting board, there's a lot of discussion. It's people just talking. They're trying to troll each other and mess with each other, but it's not like, you know, there's a lot of boring stuff on there. The two kind of last comments from this thread that I would like to sort of point out, which I think are interesting. There's one person that says, I think this is, it's blacked out, but I think it says, fuck you, I think I'm having a crush on a cowgirl pony. The little nerd heroine isn't too bad too. I hope there's gonna be some-

• 16:11Speaker 03

  They mean heroin. They spelled it heroin like the drug, but they mean heroine like a female hero.

• 16:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. I hope there's gonna be some reverse furry art of this, so I can delude myself with that remorse. That would mean like, you turn the pony into a human girl.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  So by reverse furry, they just, you could delete reverse and furry. Like, a reverse furry image is just an image.

• 16:34Ryan Broderick?

  Well, no, yes, yes.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Because in this world, every image is a furry.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  PJ, you're not getting the nuances.

• 16:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, when you live in this world, everything is already furry art. And then this one, I think, is the most interesting, because, you know, and it's sandwiched around a whole bunch of people being like, you want to fuck this pony. But there's this other guy that writes, Jesus Christ, it's like cocaine. I'm a 24-year-old man, I should hate this, but I watched it. I watched it all. I love the animation, I love the voices, I hate the story, I can't fucking stop, damn it. And I think that's a really useful insight into kind of the proto-brony culture where it's, but it's a lot of older men who are sort of becoming like, very hypnotized by this show and don't totally understand why.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  For them, it's, I mean, it's like a classic guilty pleasure, where their understanding of who they are in the world is that they should never enjoy this thing, but they're enjoying this thing. And it feels annoying to them, or worrisome, or uncool, but like, there's some part that is deeper than reason that is just enjoying it.

• 17:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I would say so. Have you ever like, really fallen for some baby shit and like, not known why?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  You know, I actually have this experience with like, the current crop of mainstream Spider-Man movies, where as a person who like, makes stories for a living, the most recent one has a full hour that is narratively indefensible, where they're setting up a sequel. Like, they're not, they're for young people. Like, the fact that I, that my smart brain sees what's wrong with them is like, not some great credit to me, but they totally emotionally move me in a way that is really strange.

• 18:14Ryan Broderick?

  I didn't get to go to my usual movie theater for both Project Hail Mary and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. So I ended up going to this one like in Burrum Hill that's like, more of a family.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  We saw it at the same place. I know exactly where you go.

• 18:27Ryan Broderick?

  Cobble Hill, right? Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:28Ryan Broderick?

  So I saw both of these movies that are kind of all-ages, general-audiences movies, just so happened to see them at this theater.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:35Ryan Broderick?

  I was so taken aback by like, being thrown into child world.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:41Ryan Broderick?

  Like, it's like, oh, I'm supposed to be watching my like, baby stuff for adults in adult world, but now I'm watching it in child world, and I'm realizing that like, I'm a, at this point, decades-long fan of a baby show about Spider-Man. And like, it was an interesting, it was an interesting experience. I liked it, actually.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  I think there's actually something kind of deep there, or like, relevant there, which is, you talk in your work, I talk in mine, so much about how the internet changes and supercharges and like, makes fandom stranger. But one of the things the internet does that didn't occur to me, or I wasn't reminded until you said that, is like, you're not always in an actual, physical room with the other people enjoying the thing. And so you're not being reminded that like, your enjoyment of it is sort of abnormal.

• 19:32Ryan Broderick?

  You know what I think it was? Because this actually kind of happened to me around the same time, which is like, Culture, music, movies, TV shows were something that I experienced communally with friends or with my family or whatever. There's suddenly enough people on the internet in the back half of the 2000s that I'm starting to develop hobbies and interests totally on my own.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:55Ryan Broderick?

  And I'm able to socialize with people online without ever having to explain myself to people around me. And it feels like there's a breaking point with My Little Pony where it's a bunch of people who are just like, wait, I like this. And I don't know how to just explain like, why I like this. And then there's like the crushing weight of reality when you finally like, go to a brony meetup and you see everyone else who feels the same way.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Because that 24 year old in the thread, before the internet, he might have been channel surfing and seen the show and liked it. But, okay, there's no one in his friend group he can talk to. With the internet, he realizes there's a bunch of other adults. But then he goes and meets the adults and he has to decide, these other adults, do I want to be in a group with them or not?

• 20:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's my theory. And we're gonna go further into how, you know, 4chan sort of shapes this initial fandom. Right after a word from our sponsors, Hasbro. I think they would love this episode.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  Hello, hi. Have you ever wanted to experience Ryan Broderick and the Garbage Day experience in person? Well, you can do that in New York City or in Washington DC. We will be at Babies Alright, October 27th in Brooklyn. Ryan will be in Washington DC doing a Garbage Day Live on November 18th at Pubkey. If you would like to see Ryan's fleshy, fleshy meat suit and shake his corporeal hand, you can do that. You in Washington DC or New York City

• 21:34Speaker 05

  can see and maybe touch Ryan appropriately in person, in flesh. Have I sold this well? I think so. Okay.

• 21:45Speaker 00

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• 22:17Ryan Broderick?

  Let's do outside of 4chan first, then we'll go back to 4chan. So by the time we hit like December 2010, Miss Magazine or MS Magazine, yeah, Miss Magazine, they have a takedown article about My Little Pony titled, "My Little Homophobic Racist Smart-Shaming Pony."

• 22:38Speaker 03

  What year is this?

• 22:39Ryan Broderick?

  2010, which feels like really overkill for this.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  It feels, yeah.

• 22:44Ryan Broderick?

  They're mad at My Little Pony because it teaches girls that magical white ponies are suited for leadership and black ponies are suited to be servants. It teaches them that they shouldn't learn anything, that they should just rely on their friends. There's a bunch of weird shit in this, in this article. There's a bunch of like, political stuff that they're mad about, like, the idea that My Little Pony has like a monarchy system, and so they're mad about that.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  They think Curtis Yarvin has gotten into the writers' room.

• 23:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, exactly. This is like, one of those things where like, it's not even woke one, it's like, it's like woke point one.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  It's prehistoric. It's like, I mean, it's an article that you, if you were like, oh, it's like 2019, I'd be like, yeah, it seems like 2019. It doesn't actually seem like 2010. The bomb is still present.

• 23:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, this is like, this, I can't even make heads of tails of this.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, the creator Lauren Faust, she actually responded point by point, I won't belabor this, but like, she was saying, you know, the, the purpose was not that girls should not be studious, but rather they should live a balanced life. And there, there's endless ways to be a girl. But I, I put this here in the outline because I think it shows that this was a show being taken very seriously by some adults. And there was something seeping in, and that the show was like, interactive and like, talking back and forth in a way that was very of the time. And like, I think really sets us up for where all of this is going.

• 24:09Ryan Broderick?

  But inside of 4chan, it is becoming very popular. The CO board I showed you before, the Comics and Cartoons Board, they're talking about every episode as it comes out. They're also pirating the show and uploading it to YouTube. They're obsessed with making fan art. They find out that the creator and showrunner Lauren Faust is a DeviantArt user herself, which is a bit, you know, we don't, we don't talk about DeviantArt a ton on this show, but it is, we should do like, a whole episode about it. Very important website. But she's answering questions about the show that she's getting from DeviantArt users. And there's, I should explain, in 2010, DeviantArt, Reddit, 4chan, and Tumblr are all kind of orbiting

• 24:53Ryan Broderick?

  the same, you know, like, they're all in the same constellation, I would say.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Okay. Do we know if she knew that her fandom was living, some of her, the fans of her work were 4chaners?

• 25:03Ryan Broderick?

  But you kind of have to remember that like, 4chan wasn't the like, bad word it is now. So.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  It was a website that some like, strange, mostly male nerds hang out on, but it wasn't like, it wasn't the enemy of the internet, of like, the internet of good thinking people.

• 25:22Ryan Broderick?

  Not in the same way. Yeah. So like, and also like, it was really hard to sort of tell the difference between what was coming from 4chan, what was coming from DeviantArt. But this is where we have to talk about background ponies.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 25:37Ryan Broderick?

  So, background pony is a term that bronies use for the cartoon ponies that appear as extras on the show.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Right. What they would call on a film set if they saw extras, they would call them non-furry extras.

• 25:52Ryan Broderick?

  Non-furry, non-pony background actors. Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:57Ryan Broderick?

  Now, because, you know, there's a bunch of technological things that have happened that have created like, a very unique situation here where they are ripping the show straight to the internet, so they're able to watch it over and over and over again. They're, they're making fan art, they're obsessing about every single frame, and they're also naming background ponies. So like, if a random pony is drawn in the background of a scene, there's an entire fandom that springs up around it.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 26:22Ryan Broderick?

  And the show and Lauren Faust was like, very quick to sort of feed into that. So this is how we end up with a, probably the most famous background pony, Derpy Hooves.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Derpy Hooves?

• 26:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. I'm just gonna say this now, if there are any like hardcore bronies listening to this, and I'm seriously messing something up, feel free to yell at me. But if you're gonna be like, pedantic about any of this, like, I'm just, you can email Grant, don't email me about it.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  It's reasonable.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  We will respond if you pay $6.66 for our Patreon.

• 26:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, if you pay us, right. That's the rule. If you pay us, you can yell at us.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  I like rage baiting your way into higher subscriptions by being like, right-ish. I think it's a really, I like this business model, and I might steal it.

• 27:11Ryan Broderick?

  We have a rule at the Garbage Newsletter that you can't leave a comment unless you're a paying subscriber, because like, that's, that's labor. I gotta read that, you know? I get a, I get a push alert.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  So much more satisfying.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  There's somebody who's given us like, $100 to call us libtards, like, pretty much every episode. And like, I love that guy.

• 27:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he's, he's cool.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  That is a little bit close to sex work.

• 27:34Ryan Broderick?

  The creator economy and sex work are basically the same thing. So when you asked, like, was Lauren Faust on 4chan?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:42Ryan Broderick?

  This is like, a good bit of evidence that, yes. Because the name Derpy Hooves comes from a CO thread. It's a background pony with derpy eyes. So they're just like, okay, that's Derpy Hooves. But it's like, kind of hard to pull apart, like, you know, at what point did the My Little Pony team see the fan art? Was it because of DeviantArt? Was it because of 4chan? Was it because of Tumblr? It's kind of hard to tell. But Derpy Hooves like, basically starts to show up more and more. And like, kind of graduates from background pony.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  So it feels like the show is aware that the internet likes this thing that was supposed to be incidental to the show. And you can just feel the, that conversation between the thing on the TV and the thing that's commenting on the thing on TV.

• 28:24Ryan Broderick?

  Which is, at this point, still very novel.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:27Ryan Broderick?

  I, I've heard similar stories about sort of, the Simpsons writers discovering that their fans had VHS tapes of episodes. And that they started to make jokes on the show that you could only spot if you were illegally taping it and watching it on a VHS.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  That's cool.

• 28:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. By January 2011, the pony fandom is so big that it needs to sort of create its own web portal. It's like, it, it sort of took over 4chan as a virus. There's two ways to look at this. One is that like, it's legit, and there's just a ton of bronies on 4chan in 2011. It could also be that like, a lot of the meaner, more acerbic 4chan users thought it would be funny to act like adult My Little Pony fans.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:15Ryan Broderick?

  Either way, it's kind of functioning the same. So that's how we end up with the launch of Equestria Daily.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Equestria Daily?

• 29:23Ryan Broderick?

  So this is, you know, I think still to this day, probably the biggest web portal for My Little Pony stuff. There's a whole bunch of drama written about in this February 2011 thread, or this February 2011 post, basically complaining that Moot, the founder of 4chan, and the janitors of 4chan were deleting pony content.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah.

• 29:46Ryan Broderick?

  And then Moot, who, Grant was nice enough to point this out in our, in our outline, and I should share this. All of this is happening one year before Moot meets Jeffrey Epstein. Just, just for anyone who's keeping track of the timeline there. Moot is at South by Southwest, back when that was a thing that would be like, normal to happen. And he says in a quote, "Ponies are really popular on 4chan right now, for whatever reason." Adam found this. This is, this is interesting. I hadn't really considered it this way. But basically, this whole thing of like, banning ponies, then unbanning ponies, disciplining the mods that tried to ban the ponies, all this is considered one of the only times that

• 30:29Ryan Broderick?

  4chan has like, actually lost a fight.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  Really?

• 30:33Ryan Broderick?

  Like, even 4chan users kind of see it that way.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  That 4chan lost a fight with the pony people because they fought back and got unbanned?

• 30:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 30:44Ryan Broderick?

  Like QAnon couldn't do that.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. QAnon got kicked off and stayed kicked off.

• 30:48Ryan Broderick?

  One of the very few groups of people to ever be kicked off of 4chan and successfully petition their way back are the bronies.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  What does that say about the bronies?

• 30:56Ryan Broderick?

  There's an interesting thing to be said about the psychology of a brony and the psychology of a 4chan user. The sort of like, you live in a fantasy world, you know, 4chan is itself a message board that largely started about anime and anime pornography in particular. So it's like, I could see this as like a a real manifestation of the 4chan type.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like kicking them off is like a, you could imagine it happening. Like you can imagine a punk website that like hates ska music or whatever, but.

• 31:31Ryan Broderick?

  I could never imagine that.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Me neither. But it's like, it's, they're in the spirit of the way, the reason the thing was created.

• 31:38Ryan Broderick?

  Right. 4chan launches in 2003 or 2004. So it's like, it's sort of like seven years of 4chan culture was going to build to something like this no matter what. In a way. At the same time that the ponies are taking over 4chan, they're also taking over the mainstream. By April 2011, a friend of our show, Emily St. James, is recapping it for the AV Club. And the first mainstream write-up of bronies as a concept that Adam, our researcher, could find was in Wired in June of 2011. And it's about a out-of-work computer programmer named Luke Allen, who self-medicates, quote-unquote, by watching animated ponies have magical adventures.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Not my definition of medication, but I will allow it.

• 32:22Ryan Broderick?

  This is a real like, oh, this is gonna be a problem later, isn't it? Luke Allen tells Wired that the show is a perfect storm of 80s nostalgia and cultural irony. I think that's another important piece here is that like the show is extremely earnest, but also very in on its own kind of joke. It's a funny show. I've seen it. I've seen parts of it. It's funny. And then Laura Faust, the creator, ends up saying that she's very proud that adult men like the show.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 32:52Ryan Broderick?

  Basically, there's like a thing where like the brony audience is complaining about the quality of merch and they want a better quality merch, which is sort of, you can hear the cash register in the background of that, you know? They're realizing that this is a real thing. And then by the fall of 2011, you get the first ever BronyCon and 300 people attend. And I really just cannot imagine what that room was like.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  I think a heavy smell. But it's, it's like, it's a story so far about what the internet of the 2010s was, which was that the people who made things were in much closer communication with the people who consumed the things they made. But all the reasons you might not want to do that, like you could do it for the first time and people were excited to do it. And both sides were excited to be in communication with each other. But like, later, I think, as like things go wrong in different directions, you have a lot of people who make stuff just build the wall because they're afraid of what can happen. But here's the moment of like total optimism about what that can mean.

• 33:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And I think, I think there's a bit of naivety with a lot of this.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:58Ryan Broderick?

  I read a lot of Laura and Faust's comments at the time as like, oh, this is weird and wacky and kind of cool. That's fun. And not really totally getting that like, it is actually probably weird and bad that like, well, there's a census, there's a brony census that's conducted in January 2012.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 34:20Ryan Broderick?

  It's the Brony Heard Census. It's an 89-page report that's conducted by a brony among, and there's 9,000 responders. And here's, here's the sort of demographic breakdown of the brony community as of 2012.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 34:33Ryan Broderick?

  So 85.70% of the audience were male, or at least the responders were male. And the bulk, 89% of them were between the ages of 15 and 29. And 96.74% were not married or had ever been married.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 34:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Seventy, yeah. 79% of the bronies said that they were public about their love of My Little Pony. And then there were, there was like a census on like who the favorite character was. And it seems like a lot of the teenage fans were like Fluttershy, not Rainbow Dash, which I think I find surprising. But as you got older, the older fans were like Twilight Sparkle.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Uh, what does that evolution mean?

• 35:25Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, well, let's, okay, so first, let's do Rainbow Dash. I'll pull up Rainbow Dash for you so you can see. So Rainbow Dash, I think is sort of like the main pony, really, in a lot of ways. Like when I think of My Little Pony.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  I've seen this one.

• 35:38Ryan Broderick?

  I think of Rainbow Dash, you know?

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Rainbow Dash looks like an intentional protagonist. It's like a cool pony with kind of a rainbow mohawk. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:47Ryan Broderick?

  Then we got Fluttershy.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  And this was, this was the young people's favorites?

• 35:51Ryan Broderick?

  Fluttershy was the favorite pony for younger bronies.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Fluttershy looks a little more like a princess who'd be rescued by a hero in a traditional, like, like kind of has like Princess Peach vibes.

• 36:04Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. Yeah, I think you're getting it. And then.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Take her to a ska show.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Take her to a ska show.

• 36:10Ryan Broderick?

  Take her to a ska show. And then obviously the most popular is Twilight Sparkle, who's kind of got like, like a goth e-girl vibe.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's like the girl that Spider-Man dates who's not Mary Jane, Gwen.

• 36:25Ryan Broderick?

  Gwen Stacy.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Don't you think? A little bit? Kind of a Gwen Stacy thing?

• 36:28Ryan Broderick?

  In which iteration of Gwen, which, which iteration of Gwen Stacy are you talking about?

• 36:33Speaker 03

  I'm a Spider-Man casual, so I really, I'm not sure.

• 36:36Ryan Broderick?

  Gwen Stacy is a blond-haired.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  This one, no, the one that's, that was in the animated Spider-Man.

• 36:41Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you're talking about, you're talking about Spider Gwen from the alternate reality?

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:45Ryan Broderick?

  With the cool, like undercut?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's defensible, right?

• 36:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I see what you mean there. Yeah, okay.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  But she's like, she's cool. She's like edgy. She just, she, she transferred to school in the 10th grade and she's like, Twilight Sparkle. Kind of got vibes.

• 36:58Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. 50, 58 of the responders to this had PhDs and 247 had graduate degrees.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 37:07Ryan Broderick?

  Nine out of 10 responders were under 30. But if I'm looking at this right, of the 9,000 responders, that means that the majority, like the large majority, were actually either like bachelors or less, which is interesting to me. Because I always kind of wonder like, if, do you know what a neat is?

• 37:30Speaker 03

  No.

• 37:31Ryan Broderick?

  Not in education, employment, or training?

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Not in education. So just a person with, what type of job? Like, what does that leave?

• 37:38Ryan Broderick?

  Nothing. Like you're just a nothing person. It's a term for that. Or like the, the, the hikikomori kind of subculture in Japan of people who like don't go outside. Like I kind of wonder like.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  The world of people working.

• 37:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I kind of wonder if like a lot of bronies were just like complete, like, crashouts in a way.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  You're picturing like needs, or maybe on the other hand, like Buster Blue's characters where like they're affluent and educated, but they're kind of like looping in education?

• 38:05Ryan Broderick?

  That's what I would guess. But right after another word from our sponsors, Hasbro again somehow. We are going to talk about how this is getting pretty dark and actually has been dark the whole time.

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• 39:24Ryan Broderick?

  Do you think this is just like a nice story about like some like weird adult men who like cartoon ponies? And they are enjoying like the feminist, you know, undertones of a cartoon show for girls?

• 39:37Speaker 03

  I think the fact that there are overlapping circles of permissible enjoyment here, some of them less permissible, like, I'm ironically pretending to watch a kid's show. I'm just an innocent person who likes a kid's show. And I'm eroticizing characters that both represent children and are made for children. I would guess that tent three has either been growing or up to stuff.

• 39:59Ryan Broderick?

  I have a video for you.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 40:05Ryan Broderick?

  Here we go.

• 40:06Speaker 06

  Alright, so I'm pretty sure you're aware of Princess Celestia being portrayed as a tyrant and near natural and god forbid a molester. And Pinkie Pie and Flare Shy on occasion-

• 40:17Speaker 07

  No. I'm not Flare Shy. So I'm gonna let you know from where I stand, the darker side of the fandom is not part of what I will talk about. It's not part of what the show's about. If you choose to do that, that's your choice. It's not why we're here, not why I'm here anyways.

• 40:33Ryan Broderick?

  This weird guy is trying to ask them about like random internet bullshit about a pony.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  So he's almost asking about like pony gossip, but it's lore that 4chan or people like 4chaners have invented. They're like, have you heard all the bad stuff we imagine that the ponies do?

• 40:53Ryan Broderick?

  This guy's also old enough to grow facial hair and looking at the other people in line and like other people in the crowd we can see, I don't think the rest of them can. And like, that to me is notable. He's asking her like, have you seen the way people are drawing the pony that you voice?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  That sentence that he says is so interesting because he says, "You're aware they're portrayed."

• 41:17Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  But he doesn't have a subject before portrayed. Like, a casual listener such as myself would imagine portrayed on television by the writers. But he means portrayed by weirdos on the internet, which he's not saying he is, but the fact that he's bringing this into this space with like kids in line behind him suggests that he is a weirdo.

• 41:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like it's such an unfathomably weird, I'm like so happy we have a document of this existing that like, because this is clearly how people were sort of dealing with this stuff at the time, which is

• 41:53Ryan Broderick?

  the pony that you voice, on the internet, they're calling her a molester. What do you say to this? And it's like-

• 41:59Speaker 03

  How do you respond to these allegations I invented?

• 42:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, god forbid. She's doing this thing in fiction, in subgenre fanfic.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:07Ryan Broderick?

  It's such a weird-

• 42:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's insane. The other thing I noticed in that video is the actor onstage, the woman who does like Princess Celestria? Was it Celestria? She responds, "This is not her first time doing this." She doesn't look shocked like, who's this guy? This is a stock answer. Obviously, obviously this is not happening for the first time.

• 42:31Ryan Broderick?

  You know, you know sort of like the accepted wisdom now that like everything is WWE?

• 42:35Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:35Ryan Broderick?

  And that like, there is both the narrative and the meta-narrative. So it's not just-

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:41Ryan Broderick?

  You know, for Marvel, it's not just the story within the Marvel movies. It's also, you know, what Kevin Fagie is doing in the background and whether or not they're gonna give more screen time to your favorite character, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is almost like watching that world come into focus and no one knows it.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're dealing with something for, if not the first time, one of the first times.

• 43:03Ryan Broderick?

  I could imagine that being so completely bewildering.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  But they can't, but they can't be like, you don't get the microphone because they also want that audience.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  Like, they want to sell them toys. So they can't be like, no sir, you cannot be in line with these children to ask your Q and A question.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  That guy would get tackled by an air marshal. Like, he's so, is clearly the guy who's gonna do this. But yeah, it's like, they want these people's money. They don't mind their internet fandom. But they don't want them in a room with the original intended audience for this, who are children.

• 43:35Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, that's like, I would say almost like the core attention of the 21st century. Which is like, we want, we want your deranged fandom and we want to sell products to you via that fandom. And we have no desire to deal with the psychological and emotional wreckage that comes from that level of worship.

• 43:55Speaker 04

  I don't know who to hold culpable in that scenario.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  I agree. I don't think it's like, how dare you, My Little Pony creators, but it's like, nobody, everyone was kind of summoning this thing with this spell and not thinking through the second and third order implications. I sometimes think about, it's like such a corny like boomer reference, but a lot of times when I'm looking at stuff like this on the internet, I'll think about like Dylan going electric. And how prior to the internet, there's more stories about a massively popular person who deliberately says, "I have an audience. I want to carve a section of my audience out. I want to tell these people through the choices I make or the things I say,

• 44:38Speaker 03

  like, don't really consume this." You see some of it, sometimes people decide like, they don't politically agree with parts of their audience or whatever, but like, more often you see people amused that an unlikely sort of fandom has shown up, surprised the demands that fandom has on the thing, and then kind of like unsure what to do. Like, this kind of interaction, it's specific, but some version of it, I feel like was happening a lot around that time.

• 45:04Ryan Broderick?

  PJ, what you're describing is something I think about constantly. Because in the 2010s, it was, "I need to be really careful. I might attract like a goon-brained army of like neo-Nazis who love my cartoon pony show. We haven't gotten to the Nazi thing yet, but there's a Nazi thing coming." Obviously.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  No, of course.

• 45:24Ryan Broderick?

  But I feel like nowadays, there's a bunch of different avenues where if you aren't sort of managing your fanbase or the community that forms around you, they start to sort of take control. And you have to sort of be very careful with who you attract and how you manage them.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:41Ryan Broderick?

  The through line that I see with all of these things, whether you are attracting like weird men or you're attracting like mega woke scolds or whatever, the major thing is like, if you are desperate and you allow them in, it is extremely hard to get them out.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was this really popular cliche in the late 2010s, I think, where it said, people would talk about platforms and they would say, "You can't let a Nazi on your platform because once Nazis enter a bar, it's a Nazi bar." And like, actually, I think that idea was kind of a bad tool, like, whatever.

• 46:19Ryan Broderick?

  You like the Nazis in the bar.

• 46:20Speaker 04

  Makes the mosh pit better.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Well, it just, it was like, who's a Nazi? And like, like sometimes the platforms actually, like, if there's some racist on Substack, it doesn't mean there can't be some other person on Substack. Like, it was more true in some places than other places and it imagined a world where we all knew what a Nazi was. But like, the Nazis don't identify as Nazis, everybody calls everybody else a Nazi. It was just, it wasn't, it made the world feel simpler than it was, even though I think in real life, a Nazi bar does become a Nazi bar. But the other thing that that idea missed is that there's lots of other groups that aren't Nazis that once they get in the bar, it's their bar. Like, if you're like, we have a fun pony show and some guys like to like, watch it erotically, it's their bar. Like, the ones who are going to that bar.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. That can't just be cornered off.

• 47:08Ryan Broderick?

  And I, I look at My Little Pony, you know, Grant said like, "I don't know who to blame. I don't know who's culpable here." Culpable, if you will. And my, my read on it is that it's almost entirely naivety and then maybe greed by the end. It's like, we genuinely do not understand what we have done here. We have a showrunner who's, for the time period, pretty online and they think they're just having fun online. And they're like, this happened with like the author John Green when he was like bullied off of Tumblr in the mid 2010s, when they started editing his posts to be about how much he loves sucking cock. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  I don't, but every, none of that is hard to imagine.

• 47:52Ryan Broderick?

  John Green fans and then John Green anti-fans basically got real weird and he left the platform. And Tumblr had to change the way reblogs worked, because you could edit the post you reblogged? Which was a terrible idea.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  That's-

• 48:06Ryan Broderick?

  So they kept editing his reblogs. If you have a really close relationship with the internet and you're sort of feeding into it parasocially, you have to be prepared for how that could get really weird. And I think 15 years ago, people just weren't super clear on how that was gonna work.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  I was, I was too old for Archie. But like, people talk, I would consume pop culture, like made by people older than me. Where like, there'd be two characters talking about whether they were more attracted to like Betty or Veronica. Like, the idea that things for kids, kids who like might be sort of entering puberty, would have something a little, a little attractive or a little flirty, I think that's actually a runner, you know? Like, I think that idea is old. I don't think the people in the My Little Pony writers' room were like, "We better make sure that our ponies dress real conservatively or people are gonna get weird." Like, it's the thing that changed with the internet.

• 48:59Ryan Broderick?

  Veronica is obviously best girl. Obviously.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  If you said that on 4chan, like if Archie had come out during the 4chan era, that conversation would just go to a much different place.

• 49:09Ryan Broderick?

  I said that I used to play Magic the Gathering when I was like a tween. I would go to Magic the Gathering nights on Fridays, Friday night Magic. And I would play with kids my age and also adult men. And I remember there was like this older guy, you know, I was 11 or 12, so I can't tell if he was 17 or 37 because everyone just looked older than me.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:31Ryan Broderick?

  He had like a card case and on the card case was a picture of the Powerpuff Girls. And I like, I was playing with him and I was trash talking him and I was like, "Why do you have like a Powerpuff Girls sticker on your card case?" And he's like, and I'll never forget this, he said, "I like their big eyes because it means they can see it coming." And I was like probably 11, maybe 12 at most. That culture in the 2000s was being uploaded to the internet. Those, your hobby, your, your, your town hobby shop guys were becoming an internet problem. And they were also early adopters. So not only were they coming online like everyone else was coming online, they were coming on faster. And they were much more savvy about technology.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:13Ryan Broderick?

  Having a pornographic picture of a My Little Pony character is like, not something that would surprise you if you were in like a town comic book store.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  It's not just that they're invading the bar. They started the bar. Like they started the online fandom communities because they were first to those spaces.

• 50:26Ryan Broderick?

  This is why I like having you on this show because you just did the transition to the next section for me perfectly, which is yes. There was a Nazi problem inside the brony community on top of all the weird porn stuff. There was a blog called My Nationalist Pony. Um, this was later, but it got a lot of pickup, you know, in the sort of first Trump era.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  I'm surprised the Nazis were okay with brony's in their midst.

• 50:49Ryan Broderick?

  It's the other way around. I always want to be like really careful about how I describe this, which is like, in the 2000s, you had Stormfront, which is this massive hardcore neo-Nazi message board.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  I remember.

• 51:03Ryan Broderick?

  And they would raid other websites and they'd just fill it up with hate speech. And they were like, what you'd imagine, like Nazis to look like.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  They were a classic, like whenever everybody talks about internet Nazi as if it's a much more agreed upon category. They actually were that. They were like racial slur using, like in your face, like swastika, everything. They were person at the top of the genre that says like internet Nazi. They were them.

• 51:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And in the 2000s, across different message boards and online communities, Stormfront was both a joke and like, and like something that people would make fun of. And they were losing younger users who were learning a new way of recruiting people, which was through irony, through pop culture. And so it wasn't like the Nazis don't want to deal with brony's. It was like, I am a Nazi on this message board. And whatever you like, I'm going to find a way to convince you that it's tied to Nazism and that you are already a Nazi. You're already a racist, already a white nationalist.

• 52:11Ryan Broderick?

  And what you love has just been a part of our thing forever. So if you like, well, okay. So I, I knew a guy in high school who was really into punk music. And he like was recommended Nazi oi punk music on his blog, on the blog that he got music from. And the guy was like, if you like no effects, you'll love this.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  No, I would have that where like, there would be music I'd like and somebody would play me something that would sound, I mean, sort of like Christian rock, no events of Christian rock where like I just find.

• 52:39Ryan Broderick?

  Exact same, it's the exact same radicalization strategy.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Where you're like, oh, this is a less good version of this thing I like, but they're talking about like Christ or Hitler. Um, but, but yeah, it was like a way to sidle up.

• 52:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And so Caitlin Tiffany, who is a fantastic writer, she published a piece in 2020 titled My Little Pony Fans Are Ready To Admit They Have A Nazi Problem, which might be the most 2020 headline I have ever read. Um, and it's a great piece. It's all about basically, for years, brony's were like, we are not Nazis. We are not porn addicts. We are normal people. And then finally the community was like, yeah, we have a problem here. Um, and it had been a problem the whole time. And I think a lot of it was because the primordial soup that the brony community comes out of is 4chan. They're interacting with all this stuff. They're kind of hoovering it all up. It's a part of their identity.

• 53:30Ryan Broderick?

  It doesn't mean that every brony is a Nazi or every brony is a weird pervert, but it's like very hard to separate that out.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. The detail from the article that stays with me is that someone was from, uh, someone in the community arguing that, uh, was a fan of My Little Pony and like said that they support Black Lives Matter or whatever. And, uh, but that the fan pony of like a pony with a swastika was cute and that you can like that pony without it being a problem. Uh, I think this really just kind of gets at how like my fantasy is more sacred than, um, anything going on in reality and like, don't, that fantasy and like fandom is more sacred than like the outside world.

• 54:17Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, we probably have to turn up with the weird, the weird stuff now.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  The weird stuff now?

• 54:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Okay. Do you guys give me the worst ones?

• 54:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. There's like no question.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  Good.

• 54:30Ryan Broderick?

  Um, okay. So.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Oh God, whatever this is.

• 54:38Ryan Broderick?

  I don't even like looking at this, honestly. No, I don't want to. All right. Look, I'm just going to, I'm just going to describe it to you because I want to look at it and I want to show it to you. Do you know about the, do you know about the cum jar?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  No.

• 54:53Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. So.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  So that was, hold on. That was inaudible. Uh, because PJ has recoiled. He said, no, he doesn't.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  I said, I said, no, I was moving away from my screen, which was getting me away from my microphone.

• 55:04Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. I'm going to just read this to you and I'll spare you. I also like, I'm terrified that Riverside will ban us if I show this. God, it's so fucking gross. Okay. So it's 2014. So we're, you know, about four years into this now, just for our timeline. And it's a user on the newly minted MLP 4chan board. So My Little Pony 4chan board.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 55:28Ryan Broderick?

  And he writes, I assume it's, yeah. I mean, actually.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  That's not even, we don't have to do that.

• 55:33Ryan Broderick?

  For reasons that will become clear in just a second. It's a he.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:37Ryan Broderick?

  Hello, my dearest MLP. I come before you today to reveal a horrible accident to the brony cum jar project. The place where I was hiding my cum jar was actually on top of a kind of radiator that was connected to our furnace. And of course, since it's getting colder, we light it up. So basically the Rainbow Dash figure has been boiled in cum. It's brown now. And for comparison, I have also got another glass of cum that's about a week old. I will probably still bury it someday. Now. There's, there's a couple of things here that I think are extremely important for understanding this. All right. Actually first.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 56:20Ryan Broderick?

  What? How, how are you? What do you think about this?

• 56:25Speaker 03

  I don't like it. I would say first of all, I don't like it.

• 56:27Ryan Broderick?

  Do you have questions?

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. I have, I have an observation and a question. My observation is just like, this kid definitely like existed at a lot of high schools, but he wasn't able to find his brethren online and form a group where they push each other forward.

• 56:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yep.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  And I think in many ways, the internet was a mistake. Secondly, why is he burying it in the yard?

• 56:52Ryan Broderick?

  So there's a lot of great, I'm, I'm really happy you asked that question.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  Why do you bury a seed?

• 56:57Ryan Broderick?

  Oh. One, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first reference to this. So this is like a thing that this guy has just been doing.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  The, the feeling I have, which is I've walked into the middle of a disgusting story that has context. And I'm confused because this guy's starting in the middle of something that he shouldn't have started at the beginning of. This was actually the beginning.

• 57:22Ryan Broderick?

  This is the beginning. That's my favorite part about this is that he was just already doing this.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 57:27Ryan Broderick?

  And from the context clues, it seems like what he was doing was putting Rainbow Dash figurines in a jar. And then, and it's a big jar, dude. It's bigger than you could possibly imagine. And he, and he's filled it up pretty, pretty far. And he wants to completely submerge the Rainbow Dash figurine, kind of like, like a piss Christ kind of deal.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I get it.

• 57:52Ryan Broderick?

  But he's, and then, and then I guess the idea was that once Rainbow Dash was completely submerged, he was going to bury it. Again, don't know why, but then he boiled it by accident.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  It's funny you say piss Christ because I'm like, oh, this is what like a, a deep social conservative feels when they like witness modern art. Like I feel disgusted. I feel angry. I want it to stop. I would support a politician or a policy that would make it stop, even if it might have like bad effects elsewhere. Like I feel like Rudy Giuliani looking at piss Christ.

• 58:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Um, I'll do one more look at this and then I, I actually have to stop because I will gag. Um, and like piss Christ also.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  You guys should, this, this episode should be sponsored by like dude wipes for your eyeballs or something.

• 58:38Ryan Broderick?

  Piss Christ is also a useful comparison because of the color, but, um.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 58:44Ryan Broderick?

  So there's some comments here that I can read through. So someone said, wait, so does this mean the project is over?

• 58:53Speaker 03

  4chan.

• 58:55Ryan Broderick?

  And then the original user wrote, I will probably not be able to add cum to it anymore. So I'll probably just bury it when I get the chance.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  How is that low on your priority list?

• 59:04Speaker 03

  If you've been. Yeah. What else are you doing?

• 59:07Ryan Broderick?

  Like.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  This is just one of your, this is a side project?

• 59:10Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, it's, you're not busy. It's clearly a side project. Then someone said, oh, well, I guess we had a good run. And then the original user replied again. This little fault shall not stop me from drowning Rainbow Dash. I shall proceed with the project when the time is right.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  It makes me want there to be a draft.

• 59:34Ryan Broderick?

  I do feel like the connection to JD Vance to this is like

• 59:39Speaker 03

  This is short walk.

• 59:40Ryan Broderick?

  And then, you know, there's obviously a whole bunch of gross fan art that I won't subject it to you and sort of homemade fleshlight contraptions that I won't

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:52Ryan Broderick?

  You've got to fill in the blanks there.

• 59:53Speaker 04

  There was a period, there was a slice of this fandom time where it was like being commended as like, oh, look at these guys who are not afraid of like going against masculine trends and are like, like, have we entered a new kind of man who is able to like be sensitive? And it was kind of rewarded in a mass media way. Think we made a mistake there.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  To me, like what it circles is like my, one of my pet theories about our culture in 2026. It's just like, we don't know what a man is supposed to be. Like, anyone who starts to talk about it is up to something really bad. But we don't have a positive articulation of like, do we all agree what like a normal, like non-toxic, like good version of a dude is? Even like in fiction, I'm like, I don't know, like

• 1:00:42Ryan Broderick?

  Over, over 5'9".

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  Over 5'9".

• 1:00:45Ryan Broderick?

  PJ, I think you're right, though. We don't know what a man is. Like, in pop culture, and we basically haven't for 20 years, and everyone's gone completely insane because of it.

• 1:00:52Speaker 04

  During Obama, there was this sort of like, look, shining examples of men, like, and this is all good. And it was like this very positive spin. And it was like, oh, like that some of those adult men are weird is not representative. Don't like, don't look over there.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And also like the guys, the guys who seemed very virtuous, like the guys who were like super virtuous, like we realized like, that was a problem. Like, I don't know. It was, there's, yeah, there was a moment where we were like, let's expand what a masculine man can be. And then you find out some of those guys have jars and like, it gets complicated.

• 1:01:23Ryan Broderick?

  You never know what guys got a jar at home.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  No, you just gotta dig up all their vacuum.

• 1:01:31Ryan Broderick?

  But the last thing we need to talk about is the brony tulpa.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:37Ryan Broderick?

  Familiar with a tulpa?

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Uh, give it to me again. But yeah, we, again, this is a thing like 15 years ago. I knew what it was for 20 minutes.

• 1:01:43Ryan Broderick?

  It's like, uh, I think it's a Tibetan meditation technique where you try to manifest, uh, basically like an imaginary friend kind of thing. I'm

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there's people There's like non-Tibetan, just random Americans who have kind of like thought themselves into an imaginary friend that to them is not imaginary. And it's unclear whether they have a vivid fantasy life or a self-induced sort of psychosis, or a religion that if enough people end up doing it, will all like get a day off work from.

• 1:02:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And so, uh, this user tried to create a tulpa of Pinkie Pie. And they write, uh, actually, can you, can you see the green text?

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Uh, creating Pinkie Pie. It's like, creating Pinkie Pie tulpa. Do it before going to bed every night. Ignore warnings about doing exactly that because it can take ideas from your dreams.

• 1:02:34Ryan Broderick?

  Obviously.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  60 hours in, I've started hearing and seeing her. Her face is deformed as fuck and frightening, and I can't change it. She keeps yelling for no fucking reason, mostly when someone else is talking to me. Can't hear shit when she does. My feeling when?

• 1:02:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  It's weird. This person both seems to have like made themselves possibly schizophrenic, and they can't even have a healthy relationship with a woman who's a tulpa they created. Like, they're like, ah, she won't stop talking to me.

• 1:03:02Ryan Broderick?

  This is like a big trope on 4chan, and it's a one that persists even to this day. They, they really love the idea of like making themselves insane forever.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:14Ryan Broderick?

  They love this. On top of just being a funny thing, this is just another great example, I think, of how closely tied these two worlds were. I also don't think it's an accident that these worlds are getting worse in tandem as they get deeper into the decade. You know, 2014 is the brony cum jar. It's also Gamergate. You know, like, there's, there's something that has gone wrong here. And we are seeing the impact of it the further we get into the decade.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  I don't think it's been fixed.

• 1:03:46Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I think we're fine now.

• 1:03:49Ryan Broderick?

  I think we're absolutely fine. So ultimately, I think that's where we end this. Um, how are you feeling emotionally, PJ?

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  I think if we had stopped before the jar, I would have felt like, oh, people are interesting. And, uh, the internet opens up new possibilities for socialization and culture. And it's not always perfect, but isn't it interesting? And I think the way I feel now is like, it'll take me a really long time to forget this. And I really look forward to the day when I forget this.

• 1:04:25Ryan Broderick?

  It's, you know, I, I think this is very much a thematic sequel to the gadget hat, hack wrench episode. It's another story about what happens when adult men who are fans of children's animation are catered to in any way. And I think that's really the lesson across both of these is that like, we have to stop.

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  As a person who's very live and let live, people should like what they want to like. I wouldn't like go around bullying bronies. But there's a difference between your fandom has people in it you didn't expect, and you're catering to them. And I think people who make cartoons for children should not cater to their adult fans.

• 1:05:04Ryan Broderick?

  My sort of gut reaction is that it's, it's largely a symptom of always on culture. Just to bring it all the way back, you mentioned Dylan going electric, which by the way, for younger listeners, he's talking about a man named Bob Dylan.

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  Robert Zimmerman.

• 1:05:17Ryan Broderick?

  Who used an electric guitar for the first time, and everyone freaked out because he was in a

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  It was crazy at the time.

• 1:05:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it was crazy.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  He had one of those unplugged guitars before then.

• 1:05:26Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, it's kind of like when Kanye West did autotune.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:31Ryan Broderick?

  That worked surprisingly well. But yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:05:34Ryan Broderick?

  So that did not require Bob Dylan to constantly be talking to electric guitar fans or his own fans all the time.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Ryan Broderick?

  And I think that without distance from what you're making or what you're doing, when you break down those walls, the parasociality allows things to get really strange.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Once you know they're there, they're in your head. Like, it's very hard to be a voice actor, knowing that people are like eroticizing you and being like, bah, I'm just gonna push them away. They, you know, the actual normal kids who watch my show, they don't really post on the internet. They're like not allowed to. They're on Roblox. But I'm going to ignore this like hive of horny, like jar, jar barriers because I don't want to think of them as my fandom. I'm not sure that even totally works.

• 1:06:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Yikes, guys.

• 1:06:17Ryan Broderick?

  That was a great episode. I feel really good about it. PJ, um, where, did you have anything you want to plug? Anything big coming up on the pod, on, on your neck of the woods?

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  We just put out an episode I really love. Um, we got an email from a listener who said that either his father was making a Bollywood film, or he was being scammed. And he wanted to know whether his retired former pharmacist father, who was sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India, was actually making a movie or not. And so we investigated.

• 1:06:45Ryan Broderick?

  Was he?

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  You gotta listen.

• 1:06:48Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, well, thank you so much. If you want to follow you on the internet, where can I do that?

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Just subscribe to search engine, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. I try not to post on social media. If you see me posting, uh, I betrayed myself.

• 1:06:59Ryan Broderick?

  Means you're filling up the jar.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Oh.

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