Sure why not. (Photo: Equestria Daily)

Though members of the brony community are no strangers to drama, once united in the name of friendship and rainbows and glitter, they can be a powerful force for good. Now, fans of the show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic are channeling their obsession with cartoon horses into philanthropy by pledging to donate money to Los Angeles's Wildlife Learning Center in the name of MLP characters.

Equestria Daily, the go-to source for brony news, published a post this weekend about a special offer the learning center has extended to the brony community. In order to encourage them to donate to the wildlife fundraiser, the center has promised to name various animals they sponsor after pets in the MLP show. They'll even be commemorated with a naming plaque!

Writes Equestria Daily:

• At $10,000, we get Angel, a bunny.

• At $20,000, we get Tank, a Sulcatta tortoise.

• At $30,000, we get Owlowicious, a great horned owl.

• At $40,000, we get Gummy, a victim of ironic naming when the center skips the multiple tooth extractions.

So far the bronies have already reached "Angel tier," donating over $10,000--enough to name a bunny "Angel." If they reach their ultimate goal of $48,000, the wildlife center will throw a party for them, hosted by actress Tara Strong, who does the voiceover for Twilight Sparkle.

Giddyup, y'all.

(Screencap: YouTube)

Tonight is a big night for television. Not only is it the series premiere of Bravo's much-anticipated Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, but the internet's favorite fandom is finally getting its own primetime TV commercial. Giddy-up!

The Daily Dot reports that The Brony Thank You Fund, a nonprofit that encourages fans of My Little Pony to demonstrate their gratitude to the show through charitable giving, has filmed its first 30-second TV spot. The commercial features bronies of all ages--some in military uniform!--stating why they're thankful for the show. At the end, viewers are urged to give toys to Toys for Tots this holiday season. The commercial is set to debut during primetime on the Hub TV network.

The Brony Thank You Fund used Indiegogo to raise over $16,000 to film and air the commercial, which fund board member James Turner told the Dot is the first ever fandom-sponsored commercial.

First came the feuds, then the Walmart t-shirts, then the commercial. If the cycle of Hollywood is any indication, a high-profile Brony member must soon be embroiled in a dark sex scandal in order to launch the bronies fully into the mainstream. Good luck, ponies.

Homestuck cosplayers converge on NYCC.

"What is... going on here?" asked Betabeat's confused cab driver, as we bore left onto W. 37th street and the entire block began to fill up with people in costumes.

Since we had never been to ComicCon before, we found ourselves at a loss to explain to him the scene that was unfolding before us. Halal carts and hotdog stands swathed Lolita cosplayers and superheroes in heavy meat smoke. Girls in thigh-high boots stumbled out of an event hall decorated with Pokemon characters. Homestuck fans, cosplaying as trolls with orange horns protruding from their heads, scurried across 10th Avenue towards the Javits Center.

"It's... a convention for people who like comics?" we offered by way of explanation. Our cab driver shook his head with a mixture of bemusement and disgust.

"Enjoy?" he called after us, as we stumbled out of the cab and into the street, immediately sucked into the hoards of costumed convention goers.

This was Betabeat's first time attending New York ComicCon. Though we admittedly own both Wonder Woman and Sailor Moon costumes, we had spent the better part of a week fretting over what to wear. We were going to don those Necomimi brainwave-reading cat ears, but a fellow Betabeat reporter who has attended ComicCon before gave us a stern warning: "If you wear cat ears to ComicCon you'll get creeped on by the dudes who are into lolita anime girls & they're the WORST."

We eventually decided to just wear our normal clothes, much to the chagrin of our boyfriend, who failed to keep himself from drooling the entire time we meandered through the convention center.

Mr. Inman

Upon entry into ComicCon, we could not stop saying "OMGOMGOMG" under our breath. 90 percent of attendees--old, young, big, small, "nerdy" and not--were dressed in costume. We immediately wished for our cat ears, if only to help us blend in. "Do you feel like you've found your people?" we asked our boyfriend, whose history with video games and old Macintosh computers and science fiction extends far beyond our own. "Kind of, yeah," he said, a smile creeping onto his face.

Mostly, Betabeat just felt overwhelmed, worried that we might trip and be trampled by people in Ghostbusters costumes. Like ComicCon vets had warned us, the whole event was pretty commercialized. We stumbled past some video game booths and a book publisher selling copies of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Sauntering by the Hi-Chew table, we sated our budding hunger with free sour apple candies as the droves of costumed kids descended on the table like vultures picking at a rotting carcass.

A gangly college-aged kid with a machine gun laugh attempted to engage us in conversation about a Stormtrooper's costume. "He has the VOICEBOX!" he exclaimed, accidentally elbowing us really hard in the boob. Paralyzed by the awkward interaction, we just laughed and popped another Hi-Chew.

Some well-dressed zombies.

We stopped by a booth selling My Little Pony t-shirts to take a picture, then headed over to The Oatmeal's booth, where Matthew Inman was dutifully signing copies of his new book, How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You. Since we're admittedly pretty clueless about comics, he was the most "famous" person we could pick out of the crowd.

"I like your costume," an adorable little kid dressed as one of the doctors from Doctor Who said to an old steampunk with stringy hair walking behind us. "Thanks! Take a picture with me and I'll put it on my blog," the dude said, as the kid's father hesitantly raised the camera handed to him.

A ComicCon noob, Betabeat didn't realize until we got there just how integral photo-taking is to the whole experience. Everywhere we turned people were approaching others and asking them to take pictures of their awesome costumes.

"I kind of get it," we said to our boyfriend as we picked our way through a family dressed as the Ghostbusters. ComicCon is kind of like going to a gigantic family reunion, where every family member shares similar interests and enjoys dressing up in wacky outfits.

People at home or at school or at work might not get you, but at ComicCon you can be yourself--even if "yourself" is this guy.

(Photo: Equestria Daily)

Yesterday Walmart announced that it is beginning to test same-day delivery, much to the chagrin of its former partner Amazon. But you know what you can now get delivered from Walmart, hopefully same-day? Brony-themed t-shirts!

According to Equestria Daily, the #1 news source for all things brony, Walmart has begun to sell women's t-shirts with "I love Bronies" emblazoned on the front. The only trouble with this, as the Daily Dot points out, is that Walmart has used the image for the old vintage 1980's My Little Pony cartoon instead of the modern day update, which most bronies far prefer.

"This is the biggest fail in history," wrote one brony, who does not possess historical perspective.

"Going to Walmart to buy these...then burn them," wrote another.

A spokesperson for Walmart refuted the bronies' claims that the company was just trying to troll their subculture. She told the Daily Dot that they chose the old school '80s show "since that is what our customers respond to."

The Daily Dot also reports that the shirts are already in 1,000 stores and will soon spread nationwide. Who wants to make a trip to Secaucus?

(Photo: John Joseco, DeviantArt)

My Little Pony is known for espousing virtues of love, tolerance and friendship, but sometimes its fans forget how to play nice.

Purple Tinker, a transgendered LGBT advocate and founder of BronyCon, published a post to her Tumblr yesterday alleging that several staffers working at the Canterlot Gardens MLP convention in Ohio made false claims about her. Purple Tinker claims that she was slandered and libeled when staffers at the convention spread rumors that she was arrested for being hopped up on meth and wielding a knife.

According to her Tumblr, where she has documented four separate people who have confirmed the slander, Purple Tinker alleges that staffers told fans in attendance:

1) That I was arrested, in Ohio, on the convention weekend...

2) That I was found to have a knife on my person (I don’t own any knives except kitchen utensils, box cutters and other utility knives.).

3) That I am a meth user, or in some iterations even a meth dealer (I have never done meth, nor have I done ANY other illegal drug, nor have I taken legal drugs to excess, and in fact I have never even partaken of tobacco or nicotine— much less marijuana, and FAR less meth!

Purple Tinker avidly denies each claim pointing to the fact that she was running a LGBT charity event called "Tink in a Box" during the time of the Canterlot Gardens convention. To raise awareness about LGBT issues, she locked herself in her room for 72 hours with no Internet access save a webcam where interested users could watch her progress. "My only moments of privacy were for attending to my personal hygiene and sanitation behind a folding screen," she wrote. The event would have made it impossible for her to have been in Ohio in time for the alleged arrest.

In the pantheon of American brony conventions, Canterlot Gardens is second in size only to BronyCon, which Purple Tinker started. Hasbro, the maker of the My Little Pony franchise, also sends representatives to this conference. Purple Tinker claims that several months ago, a handful of BronyCon staffers split from the group after she refused to give them "logistical and financial control" over the event. One post on the bronies forum from May 2012 states that Purple Tinker has a grudge against Canterlot Gardens, as it was primarily established by ex-BronyCon staffers that forced her out of her administrative role at BronyCon.

"Of course I have a grudge against them," Purple Tinker told Betabeat over email. "They've been spreading rumours and lies about me, feeding information on me to 4chan (who mocked me for being a "tranny"), and trying to discredit me, off and on, for seven months. Their con org stole from me (and then he stole from someone else!), then his buddies tried to convince me to give him access to the convention finances."

"These aren't upstanding citizens. They've done terrible things," she added.

Purple Tinker has started a petition on change.org asking Hasbro, Everfree Northwest and Equestrian LA to cut ties with Canterlot Gardens following the alleged conduct of some of its staffers.

According to the petition:

I do not believe that any honourable organisation, much less an internationally-known toy company such as Hasbro or respected conventions for fans of Hasbro’s products, should be affiliated with a convention whose staffers-- including higher-level staffers (“the person who ran the con”, “The Chair”)-- openly slander an unaffiliated third party by accusing her of heinous criminal activities including possession of a knife with intent to murder.

Looks like some little ponies are learning that life isn't always sunshine and rainbows.

Update:

Purple Tinker wrote on her Tumblr that she has called a truce with Canterlot Gardens and has taken down the Change.org petition.

(Photo: Mamapop.com)

It's a question that has plagued us during many sleepless nights: What is a brony, really? We already know that fans of the rainbow-ridden My Little Pony series enjoy attending conventions and having public cybersex on Twitter, but little else has been scientifically revealed about the psychology behind the mystical brony culture...until now. (Cue Law and Order cut music.)

The Daily Dot pointed us to a study done by two researchers named Dr. Patrick Edwards and Dr. Marsha Redden, who conducted a survey in an attempt to classify the personality traits of bronies. Their findings may shock you.

Just kidding, they're pretty much exactly what you'd expect.

According to the study, the average profile of a brony is a 21-year-old male student who is heterosexual and single. Compared to non-bronies, bronies are more introverted, agreeable and tend to get "lost" in experiences--like a My Little Pony subculture, for instance!

"Given the MLP theme of “Love and Tolerance” it is not surprising that the Bronies scored significantly higher on the measure of Agreeableness," notes the study.

The study also broke down bronies into several different types:

• The Social Brony (29 percent): "Are dedicated and engaged fans and are publically open about their “Bronyhood."
• Secret Brony (28 percent): "Are dedicated and engaged fans, however, they do not share their “Bronyhood” with family."
• Independent Brony (7 percent): "Do not display dedicated and engaged fan behaviors (not seeking positive social interactions with other Bronies)."
• Hidden Brony (8 percent): "Do not display dedicated and engaged fan behaviors (few outward signs). They are unable or unwilling to share their “Bronyhood” with family and friends and tend to discovered MLP by accident."
• Mixed Brony (28 percent): "The hardest to pin point, they represents a blend or mixture of two or more of the other types."

Judging from these findings, it seems like bronies would make awesome boyfriends/friends, but terrible party hosts.

[shakes mane] [hooves you a bowl of guac and a beer]

Illustration by Walter Newton

On a recent sweltering Saturday afternoon, a group of young men gathered in a dance studio in midtown overlooking Eighth Avenue. The room, oddly but appropriately, smelled faintly of hay.

A grand piano had been pushed to the wall to accommodate a series of folding tables, and a fan was rotating lazily, attempting to combat the 98-degree heat. At the door, a volunteer handed out raffle tickets and solicited pizza preferences for lunch. The guests—mostly in their 20s and overwhelmingly in favor of facial hair and cargo shorts—milled around, but no one strayed far from a table at the front of the room, which was covered end-to-end with My Little Pony merchandise.

Lording over the spread of glittering pastel wares was a stocky man with graying hair and glasses who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a pink pony and the words “HATERS GONNA HATE.” Hello, his name tag read, My name is Cupcakes.

Welcome to the world of the Bronies.

Brony, short for “bro pony,” refers to an unusual audience demographic of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, a cartoon that began airing on the new cable network the Hub in October of last year. The show, based on the seminal 1980s toy franchise, was created for Hasbro by Lauren Faust, a former writer and director on The Powerpuff Girls. While it is marketed to children, it has quickly amassed a legion of fanboys between the ages of 18 and 35 who obsess over characters with names like Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, Applejack and Pinkie Pie. Predictably, this has led to some confusion.

“Everyone thought I was a girl,” said a mop-topped young man wearing a Friendship Is Magic T-shirt and a name tag that identified him as Strawberry Spice (Purple Tinker, the head of the Bronies’ New York chapter, calls these alter egos“pony-sonas”). Mr. Spice, 18, was at the Brony meetup partially to establish his gender in person, but also to hand out homemade stickers and pony-themed fruit snacks.

Across from him a slightly older Brony named Sean Levine sat quietly, sketching a series of ponies on a small pad of graph paper. “My hesitation wasn’t that it was a girl show,” Mr. Levine said. “It was that it was a kid show.” Mr. Levine added that he had just finished reading War and Peace. “Being an adult isn’t a bad thing,” he said. “And this show is created by adults who respect their audience. When you watch it you’re indulging in a story you can be vulnerable to.”

It’s easy to imagine such a thoughtful, sugar-coated group originating from convivial Hasbro fan boards, but the Bronies’ origin story is far darker and more complicated. Before there was BroNYCon, which debuted this June in “wonderful Manehattan,” before there was Equestria Daily, a candy-color web hub described by Bronies as the Huffington Post of the community, before there were meetups and raffles and fruit snacks, there was only one major gathering spot for pony fanatics. There was only 4chan.

4chan, a vast image-sharing site created in 2003 by Christopher Poole, who goes by the alias moot, is home to numerous boards where anonymous posters discuss everything from anime to sports to paranormal activity to torture porn. The comics and cartoons board,/co/, was fertile ground for Bronies, many of whom started out as animation geeks. But the “random” board, /b/, famous as the Internet’s ultimate id for its violent and sexual content (think less My Little Pony, more Equus), was also a meeting place.

SEE Also: 4Chan Forever Alone Prank Brings Out the Best and Worst in New Yorkers

The /b/ board, strangely enough, is also a haven for those who enjoy more cute and cuddly fetishes. “Before the whole Brony movement, people were attracted to the cuteness of the pony avatars,” said Riley Kilo, a 25-year-old transgendered woman who, prior to becoming a Friendship Is Magic fan, used 4chan to discuss age play, specifically paraphilic infantilism, or the practice of being an “adult baby.” Many came to /b/ as part of other fandoms. “There were Bronies in just about every single group imaginable, from furries to Trekkies to otaku,” said Nanashi Tanaka, the Bronies’ security chief and one of many who were active on 4chan before the show aired. “You can see how word of pony ended up spreading to every corner of the Internet.”

It’s hard to identify a Patient Zero in the pony fandom of 4chan, but Mr. Tanaka remembers an article posted in October 2010 on the /co/ board titled “The End of the Creator-Driven Era in TV Animation.” It linked back to a post on the site Cartoon Brew that targeted not only Friendship Is Magic but also the Hub’s other toy-themed programming, including Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventures and G.I. Joe: Renegades. “It was pretty alarmist, but it also got a lot of us going over to watch the show,” he said. “We were going to make fun of it, but instead everybody got hooked. And then the first pony threads exploded.” Mr. Tanaka estimates that by February 2011 there were 6,000-plus daily pony threads on /co/.

The trolls descended immediately, especially on the /b/ board, where pony threads had also begun to proliferate, and thus began the Pony Wars.

Ms. Kilo, who admits that she is “not a hardcore Brony” and was skeptical at first, described the Bronies’ appearance on /b/ as polarizing. “There were healthy conversations about how cool the show was, or the importance of nostalgia,” she said. “And then on the other hand there were pictures of big black dicks and dead horses.”

Even on the relatively tame /co/ board, threads were invaded. “Basically we got the cancer treatment from 4chan,” Mr. Tanaka said.

At some point in the fall of 2010, a 4chan moderator decided to take matters into his or her own hands. “They decided that the best solution to the combative atmosphere would be to ban ponies,” Mr. Tanaka said. “‘Ponies’ became a banable word, and posting would get you a one-day ban from the site.” (He added that the ban also affected people from animal boards who were discussing real ponies—a senseless casualty.) But for Bronies who were themselves seasoned tech geeks, the ban proved easily circumvented. “Our saying was ‘Banned from /b/, back in 10 seconds flat,’” Mr. Tanaka said proudly.

“It was a civil war,” Mr. Levine said. “Ponies were all over /b/.” He smiled. “And of course the ultimate way to troll on 4chan is to antagonize /b/.” The Bronies fought back with the one thing the trolls didn’t expect: apathy, tolerance and, of course, a whole lot of pony pictures. “The aggressors became more and more enraged that they couldn’t get what trolls thrive on the most: a negative response,” Mr. Tanaka said.

The white flag in the Pony Wars was officially waved by none other than moot himself, who fired the offending moderator and subsequently mentioned the pony phenomenon in his keynote speech at SXSW in March. “My Little Pony ... is really popular on 4chan right now for whatever reason,” he said. Not exactly a love letter, but the Bronies celebrated it. “My Little Pony is the only group to take on 4chan and win,” Mr. Levine said. “4chan once took on the F.B.I. and won. So you might say that My Little Pony is more powerful than the F.B.I.”

Bronies may feel safer on 4chan now than they did last fall, but many have decamped to sites like Equestria Daily, RainbowDash.net and the thinly-veiled homage site Ponychan, which were created by members of the community as safe, pony-only spaces for those who can no longer abide the trolls of the /co/ and /b/ boards.
“4chan is known for being hateful, but ponies are all about love!” Mr. Spice said.

Mr. Levine agreed. “4chan is the manifestation of absolute cynicism and apathy,” he said. “For that to be the cradle of such a caring movement … ” He trailed off, as if in disbelief, then regained his confidence: “As a community, we’ve become extremely bored with putting up with other people’s shit.” It’s worth noting that the feeling appears to be mutual.

“People on 4chan seem a bit tired of ponies,” said a Brony named Aether Naut. And indeed, when The Observer posted a query about the /b/ board’s current feelings about the show, we received in reply a photograph of a woman’s anus.

“4chan is full of a lot of broken people,” Mr. Spice said solemnly.

Ms. Kilo was more blunt. “4chan is a total fucking joke,” she said. “I mean, a lot of people spend a lot of time on there. If it gets down to the war of net neutrality, 4chan will be the last thing standing. But it’s the worst website in the world.”

Shaun Scotellaro, who runs Equestria Daily under the alias Sethisto, said that he started his blog less as a reaction to animosity on 4chan and more because he worried that Friendship Is Magic needed a unified fan base. “A lot of us were worried that Hasbro would cut the show off at the end of Season 1,” he said (a second season has since been green-lit). “I wanted to keep the pony train going, so to speak.”

The founder of RainbowDash.net, another popular Brony hub, who goes by Cabal, said that he broke off from 4chan “to bring the Bronies out from their anonymous roots and into the open.” (While emailing about scheduling an interview, however, Cabal cautioned The Observer to use his real name when we called his home, asking that we not mention Bronies or anything related to 4chan if someone else answered the phone.)

Any real names in this story are used with permission. But the fact that some Bronies remain closeted raises some questions. Is there a safe place for the sensitive, gender-stereotype-challenging Bronies in the public eye, outside of internal meetups?

“A lot of what happens on 4chan happens because it’s anonymous,” Mr. Tanaka explained. “It wouldn’t be as rude if people couldn’t hide. But by the same token, people wouldn’t be man enough to go out and say, ‘I love ponies!’”

There are some exceptions to this rule, of course, such as the guileless Strawberry Spice, who wears his pony love like a sandwich board. “Everyone who knows me knows!” he said, adding that the pink T-shirt he was wearing—featuring one of the show’s catch phrases—was a gift from his mother. But while being an adult My Little Pony fan has nothing to do with masculinity (despite the moniker, a quarter of the country’s 1,600-plus active Bronies are female) or sexuality (while 5 percent to 10 percent of female Bronies are transgendered, Purple Tinker says that she has never met a gay male Brony), many still grapple with their love of the brand.

We approached a young man with close-cropped blond hair and a vaguely frat boy vibe—Rainbro Dash, according to his name tag—who explained that the merchandise table at meetups is popular because it is the only way many Bronies are comfortable buying pony products. “I’m not sure these guys want to be walking around a toy store carrying My Little Pony merch,” he said. “Dude—it’s bad enough we like the show.”