Neko

This concept carries absolutley no weight but it's been something I've wanted to blog about for a while. The stage is 2010, the Internet is adapting well to its text/image base content creation but it's still at its infancy, memes are nothing more than viral clips off Youtube or simply edited static images with alt-text punchlines. Hasbro, world-renound toy manufacturing company launches My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a serielized cartoon to reve up sales in their reboot of My Little Pony toys. Before the premiere, the show was

To understand how the My Little Pony fandom impacted meme and Internet culture so intensl, we need to turn to its origins and understand the relevance of its source platfiorm online. Though the show was geared to an up-to-12 year old female demographic; the two-part premiere caught the attention of a part of the anonymous userbase on 4chan. For those unaware. 4chan is one of the most succesful internet forums running online. Its wide-spread use is primarily attributed to its anonymity when posting. Needless to say, this platform is a breeding ground for white supremacy, neo-nazism, conspiracy theories and regressive thought. Yet, it has carved itself an important role online as the website's lack pf guidelines and anonymity offer the possibility of complete freedom of speechwith a lack of repercussion(however I'd contest that, as the userbase itself isn't particularly known for being ideollogically diverse, at least in the most prevalent forums such as /pol).

The discourse around My Little Pony on 4chan started as any culturally relevant meme does, ironically. 4chan was still young, and the Internet was not quite mainstream so I don't remember the website explicitley having the reputation it does now due to internet conspiracy theories and intense hate campaigns having tangible consequencies(Pizzagate, GamerGate). Reagrdless, the origins of the MLP:FIM adult fandom shows the website already had a nihilistic and mysoginistic tint. Upon the show's premiere, there was an odd fixation with making fun of the show, to their dismay, young 4chaners found themselves enjoying the pilot episodes. This was particularly amusing to 4chan users as many edscribed themselves as young men(18 to 25) enjoying a show they initially demeened because of it's a "show made to sell toys to little girls". Mindblowng.

There's a cycle I see repeating itself online as I did with the brony fandom, a loud group of people who see themselves as the outcasts of society enjoying fringe media, creating a hostile space, making it inhabitable until it's too broken to mend and is tossed to the side, a small community rests there to lick its wounds, nature is healing.

I vividly remember the first post I saw on the My Little Pony infection AU on Instagram. The MLP fandom has always had a close kinship to horror genres. For one, the fandom was developing simontaneously to the large surge of creepypasta(what I would call amateur horror writting online). Many kids were first exposed to horror through pony horror stories made by other kids. Alternatively, since the brony fandom alsohad it's older side to it, much of the humurous content online hinged off of adult themes with the pony characters; another entrypoint for horror mixted in with ponies. This caused a lot of young kids to find out about gore and horror at a ver young age, on top of it, with characters they were very attatched to, some were traumatized, others were fascinated and thus, spawned a life-long interest with horror. For this reason, I find the ressurgence of MLP Horror content so charming, as it coincided with the coming of age of the kids who grew up watching the show. I have a lot of tenderness to the Brony fandom, but I can't help but feel that many, to feel less self-conscious about their tastes, erased the fact that the show was literally made for kids. Brony spaces both online and offline were primarily catered to adult audiences, even the show itself at many times gave in to its adult fandom. One example being changing the iconic MY Little Pony toys from having brusable hair to show-accutate action figures. Another example was the fandom inside joks sprawled across the show you could only get as a kid if you had unrestricted inetrnet acces. Seeing the forgotten main audience pick up the pieces of a dead fandom, and yet the vestiges of the old fandom remain visible feels comforting to see.

As everyone does to some extent, but I feel a very longstanding kinship to the Internet, I was one of those socially awkwrad kids who felt had no place in the world, I was treated with kindness by strangers, I saw what the world had to offer and sought it out offline thanks to the tools and wisdom I learned online. What I see laid before me is a wasteland. I can't tell what tweets are made by flesh people, bots or trolls, the constaint sleuth of content is nauseating.Everything is a nazi dog-whistle. Earnestness is dead, I miss amateur art. I miss badly written creepypastas with 4 clearly self-instert characters we all get to read about as the young author exercises their most unhinged thoughts and then gets bothered by people commenting they might need psychological help; maybe in some years they'll see their old work with fondness, or maybe they'll ask the audience to dissassociate them from that one thing they created when they discovered ponies, gore and sex mix together well.

Why does all Internet content start with nazis on 4chan? Why do I attribute the creation to my favorite cartoon show and its fandom to nazis on 4Chan and not Lauren Faust? Or Sargent Sprinles? Or Aurura Dawn?