I think Kal is on to something. If you're the kind of subtly homophobic bloke who divvies the world into masculine and feminine activities and you also happen to be nerdy and like watching cartoons, enjoying a show that so clearly caters for women is going to make you insanely insecure in your masculinity. The bronies attempt to manulate the show when they talk about it among themselves by injecting manly man themes into it like total war or apocalypse fiction purely in order to defend their self perception. When people criticize them, they sleep easier knowing that they're really into the grim and mature aspects of a cartoon for children, and thus they cannot be fags.
Zsa Zsa, December 13, 2013, 04:41:22 pm
That's really a driving force in the brony movement and a point I'd wanted to touch on. There's this sort of sub-movement amongst bronies of them trying to talk themselves up as "challenging traditional gender norms" (Because of course a bunch of sweaty nerds in fedoras watching a children's cartoon is equivalent to, say, women disguising themselves as men to serve in the military) but they're also usually the ones who go out of their way to try and present the show as being "Mature and sophisticated for mature and sophisticated individuals such as myself"
As part of the Nazi Brony doc I submitted I included a link to
this flow chart some brony made as a crash course in the general insanity of the fandom (Before delving into a very special individual that combined cartoon horses with white supremacy). The portion of it I want to call special attention to is the little bubble about the original My Little Pony animated cartoons from the 80s and 90s:
G1-G3
Old versions of MLP. Very small fraction of Bronies care for it due to its femininity, lack of intelligence and maturity. Plays a very small role in Brony culture
Emphasis mine. It's pretty indicative of the entire Brony mindset: MLP can't be for girls because it's not poorly written. They equate feminine with bad and since they don't think MLP is bad it obviously can't be feminine.
And that's sort of the part of bronies as a whole that kind of piss me off so much: It's one thing to enjoy something that is not aimed at your target demographic (I'm a guy who loves the fuck out of children's cartoons after all), it's another thing entirely to try and completely take that thing over and try and kick out the people it was originally created for. Cartoons for girls are, frankly, crap. And it's not because of their target demographic: It's because the companies making them don't give a shit. They put all of their resources into stuff marketed to boys but when it comes time to make shit for girls they just figure "Just shove some shoes and rainbows and shit in their, the little bitches'll eat it up". The new MLP series was actually kind of a cool thing in that it was a cartoon made for girls aged 6-12 that actually made some efforts to be a decent cartoon in its own right rather than a 22 minute commercial (It still was a 22 minute commercial, but it was one that gave a shit). That's actually a pretty big step in the right direction and one that could potentially lead to better cartoons for little girls.
Then cue the Bronies waltzing on in: They take a look at the cartoon, like it and immediately decide that this cartoon is no longer for little girls: It's for them. They build this whole stupid movement around it, extoll the virtues of how masculline and refined it is and then have the gall to paint themselves as heroes for "Going against gender roles". Claiming that the show is actually made for them, the adult male nerds, does a pretty big disservice to the cartoon's original target market and, even worse, just sort of helps to reinforce the idea that girls cartoons have to be crap and that pisses me off. It's basically the equivalent of walking up to some kid playing with an RC car and saying "Hey, that's a neat toy...I think I'll take it!"
As an aside I am also constantly amused by the fact that if you bring up the fact that MLP is a cartoon for six year old girls Bronies will single-mindedly focus on the girls part while completely ignoring the six years old part. Because they have no problem with people knowing they watch children's cartoons but how dare you say it's for girls!
