Hasbro started the My little pony brand in the 1980s. The brand has given rise to a large number of toys, and to a number of TV animation shows, created to help promote the brand, and increase awareness of it. In 2010 Hasbro launched a new TV animated series to launch a new line of My little pony merchandise, which was designed to target young girls. However, the show created a new breed of fans, known as bronies. Read on to find out more about what a brony is, how the culture started, and how fast their numbers have grown in recent years.
Hasbro started the My little pony brand in the 1980s. The brand has given rise to a large number of toys, and to a number of TV animation shows, created to help promote the brand, and increase awareness of it. In 2010 Hasbro launched a new TV animated series to launch a new line of My little pony merchandise, which was designed to target young girls. However, the show created a new breed of fans, known as bronies. Read on to find out more about what a brony is, how the culture started, and how fast their numbers have grown in recent years.
Brony is a made-up word, which refers to male fans of My little pony, aged from 13 to 35 on average. The word is a combination of two other words, namely “brother” and “pony”. The word was created by bronies themselves, who wanted to show their appreciation of the TV show, and wanted to come together as a recognizable fan group. One might wonder how it happened that the show attracted an audience so far from the one it targeted. When asked what attracted them to the show, bronies all say that they were attracted by a number of factors, ranging from the sense of humor displayed in the animation series, to the show’s challenging of stereotypical gender norms, to the positive moral messages that every episode sent out, to name only a few.
Bronies made their first appearances on the online landscape on the by-now famous website, 4chan. The brony culture was formed online, as members of the fandom used online boards and forums to spread their enjoyment of the brand and the TV show, through posts, discussions and the creation of memes. The brony community grew exponentially, so much so that one might be shocked to learn that, according to an informal statistical census taken in 2012, less than three years since the show came out, showed that there were at least 10 million people in the United States who proudly called themselves bronies.
The spread of the culture soon came to the attention of Hasbro, who started taking the fandom’s preferences and opinions into account when deciding the future of the TV series. Moreover, the brony movement even attracted scholarly attention: a Woford College Professor of Psychology by the name of Dr. Patrick Edwards conducted “The Brony Study”, in an effort to study the phenomenon “from its inception”, in his own words. The culture is often compared to the otaku, a fandom of Japanese anime TV shows and brands. However, the association of bronies everywhere would soon escape the Internet.
Some fandom members started fan groups for the show. One such group is called “Bronies for good”—they take the positive messages spread by the show on the street, providing a real-life example for children everywhere. They organize blood drives in support of charity organizations, such as the Children’s Cancer Association (CCA).
The birth of the brony http://www.bronycoin.com/Default.asp fandom came as a great surprise even to Hasbro themselves. Bronies http://www.bronycoin.com/Brony_Coin_p/brony-one-bit.htm are vocal in their appreciation of the show, and they help promote the positive moral teachings that drew them to the show in the first place.