Whatever makes them happy.
So, I’m lost again.
Can someone please explain all the /b/rony, /b/ro, /b/tard, /co/?
What in God’s name is that all about?
I haven’t seen the show— do the ponies have freakishly large eyes and breasts too?
My daughter’s Virtual Fiance* is, like her, a brony. (She explains that the Pony philosophy of love and tolerance has made “brony” describe females as well as males.) Turns out that VF’s mom is also a brony, so I figured out that when he was little his mother parked him in front of the TV and he grew up watching MLP 1.0, making him vulnerable to MLP: FiM.
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- Nothing set in stone until he gets his doctrate. His DOCTORATE, ferchrissake. He’ll get his masters this spring. Bronies aren’t all living in their mothers’ basements. Well, he is, when he isn’t traveling the world studying ponds.
The popular imageboard 4chan.org (which I’m not going to get into) has many subforums, like how we have “General Questions” “Cafe Society” etc, 4Chan has boards like “Cartoons” and “Random,” they’re usually referred to by their extention, for instance, /co/ is 4chan.org/co/, and the random board is /b/ is (/b/ is NOT safe for work, however). The typical ways of referring to people who hang out in /b/ is coloquially /b/tard (from retard, “fag” and “retard” is just like calling someone “guy” or “person” there), a lesser used moniker is /b/ro (from “bro” in the frat boy sense). Then, from /b/ro and pony you get /b/rony which is a /b/ro (denizen of /b/) who is a fan of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Eventually the /b/ was changed to just ‘b’, and “brony” became a general term for any fan of the show outside the primary demographic.
Thanks, Jragon! That puts me ahead of my kids in the Internet Meme-athon.
Thank you.
I think.
Same reason Smithers collects Malibu Stacy dolls?
Freakishly large eyes, yes, breasts no.
Also, full episodes of the show are posted all over Youtube, which has been a big boost to all of this.
Okay, maybe this is the wrong thread for this, but seriously, wtf is up with the “big eyes” criticism of anime.
America is not exactly shy about big eyes. It’s no wonder – eyes are possibly the most expressive feature on people. Goofy has a (singular, I might add) GIANT FREAKING EYE BLOB fer chrissake. Even Donald’s eyes are freakishly large by any standard. In fact, the mice may be the only Disney characters that really escape it. Look at Violet from the Incredibles. It’s especially common in baby characters.
And it ain’t just Disney, Pixar, or WB. Here’s Dexter from Dexter’s Lab, or the Powerpuff Girls. And, as noted, My Little Pony. Not to mention eye size varies wildly between anime. Sure, there’s the extreme end like Azumanga Daioh, but Bleach (which is very, very popular as anime goes, even if it isn’t that great) doesn’t have huge eyes (though they’re bigger on the girls). Even some anime like Fullmetal Alchemist or the girls and boobs anime Strike Witches have eyes that, while big, really aren’t THAT big compared to, say, Ariel in The Little Mermaid.
They’re maybe a bit more prevalent in anime, but I don’t see it. Especially since there’s so many OTHER good arguments you can make against anime such as: overuse of walk cycles or stock footage – especially in lower budget weekly anime, the inability of many animators to draw more than one face and stack different hair and eye colors on it, hell the inability of some animators to draw more than three distinct bodies, period; poor characterization in the heavily syndicated, long running garbage (with exceptions); doing dubbing separately from animation (no dope sheets?). Some of these complaints can be valid stylistic choices and up for argument as well, but they’re certainly a much better argument than “anime has big eyes, big eyes are dumb,” since that alienates a large amount of the very paragons of American animation people frequently compare it against.
It’s grasped onto by all the same people who take up and bond over every other internet meme in lieu of having a personality or something interesting to say. I would say the overlap between “bronies”, people who use cliche meme-based image macros, and say “FAIL!” to everything is roughly 97%.
Yes, liking My Little Pony makes you a cookie cutter person who has nothing interesting to say, you’ve truly divined the secret, good for you. You’d be right that there’s significant overlap, but I find your assertion that just the fact that a person uses image macros (which are silly and overdone) makes them instantly vapid and uninteresting… dubious. I’ve seen you go off on this in the Game Room, and I can get dislike, but seriously Beef, I like you, but chill; you have some bizarre seething hatred of memes. I mean, overused memes certainly get annoying, but “in lieu of having a personality”? Did somebody spraypaint a lolcat on your car or something?
I don’t actually hate memes. Every once in a while they’re funny. But there’s a huge internet subculture of people who pretty much rely on internet memes for communication because they’re so bad at it. So they hook up with other people of the same persusian and they become this mass of boring losers who do nothing but repeat memes at each other. I hate them. They ruin the internet.
A big part of the appeal of the SDMB is that unlike most internet forums it isn’t filled with socially retarded meme culture.
Now it’s possible that there are people who appreciate the show for valid merits and aren’t mindless meme spammers, but the whole phoenomina of the show is basically the same as an O RLY image macro - it became something that those retards have latched onto.
I have maybe 100-120 people on my friend lists on steam or various IM media, and I was able to predict with pretty much 100% accuracy which of them would be switching to a my little pony avatar. If the show were just great on its own merits and not just something that meme spammers mindlessly cling to, how would I be able to do that?
It’s been described before that trends come in waves. Now, for the last og-knows-how-many years, it’s been fashionable to be sarcastic. Badass. Uncaring.
I think that the attraction to My Little Pony is that it shows how wonderful it can be to be heartfelt and compassionate. All that, and still the characters are still cool, sometimes a bit dorky, and know perfectly well to take care of themselves.
I think Lauren Faust has created a wonderful set of characters the fans can both identify with and look up to.
But you’re seeing the people who you already know latch onto memes, and they changed their picture. Yes, people who like memes generally hang out on sites where MLP took off, but more importantly, they’re already predisposed to having flavor of the month avatars. I’m not going to hazard a guess as to the proportion, but I’d say there’s plenty of people who like My Little Pony and don’t feel the need to go around changing their identity around it, ESPECIALLY if they weren’t obsessive about such things before.
It’s like saying 97% of religious people are proselytizing evangelists because those are the people who actually talk about their faith all the time; there’s a non-trivial number of religious people who believe what they believe and only mention it when appropriate. I suspect the overall proportion of pony fans who are the annoying ones who couldn’t produce unique content if they stole it from the future with a time machine is definitely greater than the proportion of quiet religious people, but I don’t think it’s fair to say a ridiculously high percentage of them are just based on the people you already know are the kinds of people who jump on memes.
FTR, for my next (fingers crossed) job I will regard my daughters as sources for The Next Big Thing, though Hasbro has already been written of by all and sundry as too stupid to cash in on the bronies.
Twas a time when Hasbro and Mattel owned Saturday morning.
AFAIK it’s a 4chan thing, not an SA thing. Obviously there’s as much cross-pollination as seething spite between the two communities, but for the most part bronies seem to be mocked or rolleye’d at in the areas of SA that I lurk.
Maybe there are more honest to god bronies in the tentacle rape (aka anime) subsection, I dunno.
Well, I just bought season 1 off iTunes yesterday.
It’s a well written cartoon! What’s there not to like about it? To be honest, I thought it was a fad as well, but after watching a few clips…
I’d be overjoyed if my kids grow up on this stuff. It’s like the muppets, or Cars, or Toy Story. Ostensibly aimed at children, but good enough for everyone.
Wtf? How did we get from liking a perfectly innocent, completely sexless tv series to tentacle rape?!
Remember everyone, it’s NOT COOL for a man to like something that was made for women. Women’s entertainment is inferior and liking it means that you’re messed up in some way. You’re either a perv or a fag or a wimp.
It’s okay to like it ironically. “Ha, ha … this is so stupid, let’s pretend it’s good!” Just make sure that everyone gets the joke so no one thinks you’re a perv or a fag or a wimp.