Brony fandom
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is an animated children's television series produced by Hasbro that ran from 2010 to 2019 as part of the My Little Pony toy franchise. The series tied in with the 2010 relaunch of dolls, play sets and original programming for the American children's cable channel The Hub. Lauren Faust was selected as the creative developer and executive producer for the show based on her previous experience with other animated children's shows such as The Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends on Cartoon Network. Under Hasbro's guidance, Faust developed the show to appeal to the target demographic of young girls, but created characters and settings that challenged formerly stereotypical norms of "girly" images, adding adventure and humorous elements to keep parents interested.
The series initially received widespread praise from both television critics and parental groups. It also found a large audience of adult Internet users in late 2010 and early 2011, forming a subculture. These fans, mostly consisting of adult men, were drawn to the show's main characters, stories, animation style and the influence of the show's propagation as an Internet meme. The fandom adopted the name bronies, a portmanteau of bro and pony. The term pegasister, a portmanteau of pegasus and sister, is sometimes used to describe female fans of the series, though the majority of female fans prefer to identify themselves as bronies and reject the label of pegasister. Though initially considered to propagate the humorous and ironic concept of adults enjoying a show intended for young girls, the fandom gradually showed over time a deeper, genuine appreciation for the show far beyond this concept, a trend that has come to be known as "new sincerity". Fans have created numerous fan works in writing, music, art, gaming and video based on the show, have established websites and fan conventions for the show and have participated in charitable events around the show and those that create it. However, the fandom has drawn criticism from the media and pundits who have derided the older demographic's embrace of a television series marketed towards young girls as well as mass amounts of fan-produced pornographic artwork and literature by bronies.
The appreciation of the show by an older audience came as a surprise to Hasbro, Faust, and others involved with its development, but they have embraced the older fans while also staying focused on the show's intended audience. Such reciprocity has included participation in fan conventions by the show's voice actors and producers, recognition of the brony fandom in official promotional material, and incorporating background characters popularized by the fans into in-jokes within the show. As a result of these efforts in part, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has become a major commercial success with the series becoming the highest rated original production in Hub Network's broadcast history.
History
Origins
One of the first critical reviews of Friendship Is Magic, which was published shortly after the initial broadcast in October 2010, was written by Amid Amidi of the animation website Cartoon Brew, who wrote that the show was a sign of "the end of the creator-driven era in TV animation". Amidi's essay expressed concern that assigning a talent like Faust to a toy-centric show was part of a trend towards a focus on profitable genres of animation such as toy tie-ins to deal with a fragmented viewing audience and overall "an admission of defeat for the entire movement, a white flag-waving moment for the TV animation industry." The article said this concern was over the fact that more and more shows seem to be driven by company executives who want to sell their products, rather than creators. Though the show had been discussed on 4chan's 'comics and cartoon' board before the essay's publication, the alarmist nature of the essay led to more interest in the show, resulting in a positive response for the series for its plot, characters, and animation style. This reaction soon spread to the other boards of 4chan, where elements of the show quickly inspired recurring jokes and memes on the site. Some of these included adopting phrases from the show like anypony, everypony and nopony, instead of anybody, everybody and nobody, or jokingly stating that they watch the show for the plot, a reference to the ponies' flanks.The number of Friendship Is Magic posts drew attention on the site. Fans of the show defended it against various trolling attacks from other 4chan boards, leading to a temporary ban on the discussion of anything related to ponies. Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan, briefly acknowledged the popularity of the show on the site at the 2011 South by Southwest festival. On February 16, 2012, Poole created /mlp/, a dedicated board for discussion of the show and its fandom. Though the discussion of the show continued at 4chan, fans created other venues to discuss it, and the fandom spread to other Internet forums.
Growth and popularity
The adult interest in the show is comparable to that of Looney Tunes, Animaniacs, Tiny Toon Adventures, Rocko's Modern Life, Phineas and Ferb, The Powerpuff Girls, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Yo Gabba Gabba!; older audiences appreciate jokes aimed at adult viewers and a sense of nostalgia for older cartoons and animated films. Many of the aforementioned shows had attracted college-aged fans who, when Friendship Is Magic was airing, would be raising children of their own. The show references works that older viewers would recognize, such as I Love Lucy, The Benny Hill Show, Jaws, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Diamond Dogs, The Big Lebowski, Ghostbusters, Star Wars and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Most of these fans are surprised by their fondness for the show. Shaun Scotellaro, operator of Equestria Daily, one of the main fan websites for the show, said, "Honestly, if someone were to have told me I'd be writing a pony blog seven months ago, I would have called them insane." He commented that the spread among adults was accelerated by its presence in online gaming. Mike Fahey, an editor for the gaming website Kotaku, noted that the fandom was "building friendships among a diverse group of people that otherwise might have just sat on either side of the Internet, flinging insults at each other". Dr. Patrick Edwards, who performed several "Brony Studies" to survey and analyze the fandom, observed that the brony fandom, unlike most other fandoms which "aren't welcoming to people who are different", promotes the show's message of love and tolerance. Further interest came from the furry community, which includes a large number of animation fans. One contributor to "The Brony Study", Dr. Marsha Redden said that the adult fans are "a reaction to the US having been engrossed in terrorism for the past ten years" in a manner similar to the Cold War, and are "tired of being afraid, tired of angst and animosity"; the show and its fandom are outlets from those strifes. She compared the brony fandom to that of the bohemian and beatniks after World War II and of the hippies after the Vietnam War. In a similar vein, Amy Keating Rogers - one of the show's writers - believes that the fans have come to like Friendship Is Magic due to "so much cynicism and negativity out there in so many shows" while the show "has such a positive message" that counters this.Decline
The National Post reported in early 2019 that several prominent brony conventions like BronyCAN had been over for years and that the fandom was declining due to the show's end becoming increasingly apparent. Unconfirmed leaks of information from Hasbro stated that the show's ninth season, which premiered in 2019, would be the last for the "G4" ponies. The fifth generation of My Little Pony was launched in October 2021 with the CGI animated film My Little Pony: A New Generation followed by the animated series of Tell Your Tale and Make Your Mark in 2022. According to studies of the brony fandom, G5 has failed to capture the "lightning in a bottle" that G4 did, and modern brony discussions still revolve around G4 rather than G5. G5 of My Little Pony was cancelled in 2024.Revival (2020–present)
The brony fandom continues to produce new content in the 2020s, and fan-created works experienced a sharp increase in popularity during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. The music of the brony fandom has evolved from remixes of the show to songs that sometimes have minimal direct references to the episodes, and in-person brony music concerts continue to be held as of 2025. Examples of modern brony fan works that have gained mainstream attention include the Vylet Pony album Love & Ponystep and the text-to-speech website 15.ai. As part of a renewed interest in the franchise due to childhood nostalgia, My Little Pony has partnered with major Millennial and Generation Z brands. My Little Pony fan works have also gained popularity on TikTok. The Chinese brony fandom has also seen a major resurgence in the 2020s. Equestria Daily reported in 2024 that "cartoon horses are all the rage , with armadas of artists, plushie makes, animators, and more all producing piles of pony for a ravenous fandom", and in 2025 that the volume of Friendship Is Magic merchandise distributed across China continued to be "massive."Influence and fan activities
Analysis
Older fans of the show use the word brony, a portmanteau of the words bro and pony. Though this generally refers to male fans, the term is applicable to fans of any gender. Another term, pegasister, has been used to refer to older female fans of the show, though a 2021 study published in the Journal of Gender Studies found that the majority of female fans of the show dislike the term and prefer to identify as a brony over pegasister. According to the study, the use of a separate gendered term is "isolating" for most female fans as it implies that they are not truly part of the fandom; they consider the term brony as more inclusive than pegasister. One female fan commented: "I hate when people call me a pegasister, 'cause I don’t like to separate myself by gender."Two informal surveys of 2,300 and 9,000 participants respectively revealed that the average age of adult fans is around 21, that approximately 86% were male, and that 63% were currently pursuing a college degree or higher qualification. A subsequent 2013 survey with over 21,000 respondents showed similar numbers, and highlighted that the majority of fans were in the 15–30 age range, with the average age between 19 and 20, and over 65% were heterosexual. Further, using the Jungian personality test, the survey revealed that the largest fraction of respondents fell into the "INTJ" classification, which normally only occurs in 1–3% of the population, according to the surveyors. Many in the fandom who had difficulty in meeting others or being treated fairly by others found the fandom as a way to meet people with similar interests and become more social. Hub Network's CEO and President Margaret Loesch, who was the executive producer of the 1980s and 1990s animated My Little Pony television shows, noted that there were male fans of those past shows, but there are considerably more for Friendship Is Magic due to the quality of the show and the influence of social media and the Internet.
A fan-conducted "herd census" suggested that, as of 2012, there were between 7 and 12.4 million people in the United States that would identify themselves as bronies. A more detailed study, "The Brony Study", was being conducted in 2012 by Dr. Patrick Edwards, a psychology professor at Wofford College with his neuropsychologist associate Dr. Redden. The two had initially compiled one of the aforementioned informal surveys and Edwards has presented the results at the ongoing brony conventions. Edwards noted that the brony culture provided "the opportunity to study a fan phenomenon from its inception", and planned to continue the survey to watch the evolution of the culture. Professor emeritus Bill Ellis of Penn State University has compared the brony culture to that of otaku, fans of Japanese anime. Ellis, speaking at the 2012 AnimeNEXT convention, considered that both bronies and otaku fans are "psychologically and developmentally normal" and are simply "non-majoritarian" in their choice of active interests. Ellis noted that fans of both groups often are ridiculed for their interest in media targeted for the opposite gender.
Though the initial growth of the fandom may have come from 4chan participants enjoying the ironic nature of grown men enjoying a show for girls, the fandom continued to grow based on sincere appreciation of the work. Robert Thompson, a professor of media studies at Syracuse University, stated that "It's one thing for guys to like motorcycles and muscle cars and soccer. For a guy to like My Little Pony, it's so out there that it becomes almost avant garde. It has a hip quality to it." According to Angela Watchcutter of Wired, the fandom is an example of internet neo-sincerity, where these older viewers watch the show "un-ironically" and "without guilt" breaking gender stereotypes, furthermore creating new material around it. Prof. Roberta Pearson of the University of Nottingham in film and television studies stated that "This is a level of fan devotion I've not seen before", while Prof. Charles Soukup of the University of Northern Colorado in communication studies suggested that this effort is an indication of the "ultra-cult era" that bronies exhibit, where "media consumers discover extremely unexpected and obscure media texts to cultivate uniqueness and distinctiveness for their mediated identities". Jessica Klein, writing for Salon, noted that the fandom was an especially welcoming space for female fans in comparison to other male-dominated fandoms.