AS SOON as I returned from summer camp on July 22, 2012, I dove right into the brony phenomenon. I used GeneralZoi's Pony Creator to re-create the pony I had seen in my head at summer camp, and I have kept the result as my profile picture ever since. I started binge-watching MLP episodes every night, starting with The Return of Harmony and then going back to watch all of the episodes in Seasons 1 and 2 in order. I found and joined MLPForums on July 24, two days after becoming a brony. Because I knew how ridiculously powerful my interest in MLP was--it had overpowered me after I decided not to become a brony--I thought to take advantage of that interest. I used the raw willpower given to me by my newfound MLP interest to radically shift my interests, thoughts, and mindset. Here's where things get interesting.

 

 

 

This was my mindset regarding anything in my life that was not pony-related. It would either be assimilated, or it would be destroyed.

1) Minecraft: Destroyed

After diving headfirst into bronydom, I never played Minecraft again. I considered it once or twice when I heard about pony Minecraft servers, but I never really overcame the extreme paranoia I held towards Minecraft from how it had sucked away all of my creativity and made me extremely depressed. The last thing that I did in the game of Minecraft was take an airship that I created with the Zeppelin mod and bomb Summerside City, destroying what may have been my greatest Minecraft creation that I created over several months.

2) Youtube: Assimilated

Before MLP, I liked Youtube simply for its own value. I enjoyed watching Youtube Poops about all kinds of subjects, I was a dedicated watcher of Equals Three, I loved watching funny cat videos, and overall I liked Internet humor simply for it being Internet humor. During my Minecraft interest, this became slightly more focused as most of what I watched were Minecraft parodies, Minecraft instructional videos, et cetera. However, once I was into MLP, I was not only extremely paranoid of anything related to anything related to Minecraft, but also was in love with the concept of Ponification. I saw Ponification as a form of Purification, where something as corrupt as the humans could be turned into something as pure as the ponies (I will expand on this purist ideology later). So, with the combined forces of Paranoia and Ponification, I purged my Youtube habits of anything that was not pony-related. I unsubscribed from every non-brony Youtube channel that I had previously subscribed to. I replaced music with pony music, Youtube Poops with MLP Youtube Poops, and Minecraft parodies with MLP parodies. Everything non-pony had to go. To this day, I will still think twice before watching a non-pony-related video on Youtube, and am generally wary of them.

3) Furdom: Destroyed

(This one is kind of disgusting, so I will put it in a spoiler if you want to skip over it).

 

 

4) Christianity: Assimilated

This was one of the crucial components to my MLP obsession, believe it or not.

You see, most of the first videos that I watched about the Brony fandom were the propaganda/history videos that I've taken to calling

videos (the most notable and/or well known of these is Saberspark's "Ballad of the Brony"). After watching enough of these videos, I was completely brainwashed into believing that the Brony 'family' was the purest group of people on the planet. Why?

 

 

 

 

Being exposed only to this beautiful propaganda, I saw the Bronies in their most idealized, purest form: a group of friends dedicated to the high ideals of Love and Tolerance, refusing to descend to the impurity of Hatred. As an INFP, this was a dream come true. Except for one slight problem that this article about Bronies points out very well...

 

 

The slight problem was that, according to my perceptions, the Bronies had surpassed the Christians in terms of moral purity. That seriously screwed with my mindset. Why was it that this group of Bronies was following the Christian values of love and tolerance better than the Christians themselves? Of course, this was based only on my perceptions--the media and the world was feeding me propaganda about how bad the Christians are, and Youtube was feeding me propaganda about how good the Bronies are.

I was very afraid that this cognitive dissonance would cause me to lose my faith in God, which would be the worst possible thing I could imagine. So, in order to preserve my Christian faith, I decided to take my two purest interests and combine them. My faith in God and my faith in the Brony movement became one and the same. This soothed my fears that I would become an atheist, because as long as my interest in MLP survived, so too would my faith in God. All I had to do was never give up my combined Faith.

 

I came to view this as a mutually beneficial agreement. All of my incredible experiences with the Brony fandom could now be attributed to God-given heavenly joy, which ensured that the Nocturnian Revolution would not dethrone my Christian faith, and in exchange, MLP received something that I later christened,

 

 

 

I'm guessing that this sounds familiar to you because of a very similar term called, "The Divine Right to Rule [of monarchs]". The Divine Right to Priority was actually almost the same exact concept. It stated that, because my MLP interest encompassed my faith in God, it had the divine right to priority over everything. "Everything" in this case refers to:

-Sleep

-School

-Health and Safety

-Truth and Honesty

-Anything else that may have threatened my combined Christianity and MLP interest

 

But, there was one more interest that was essential to this prioritized passion.

 

 

 

 

During the Nocturnian Era, I legitimately tried to split myself (psychologically, not physically) into diurnal and nocturnal selves. The former was the person who is me currently, who was focused on schoolwork and his public life. The latter was Night Shine, who was focused on his friends online and private life, as well as his relationship with God. This nocturn-diurn split primarily came from my competing priorities. On the one hand, I had a pretty busy 'public' life, including not only schoolwork (I was, and still am, an A student), but sports like tennis and skiing, Boy Scouts, the school band, and my church youth group. On the other hand, ponies.

 

...actually, my decreasingly imaginary psycho-separation was not quite as dualistic as nocturnal vs. diurnal, although it was never very defined--I also constructed several other alternate personalities which embodied parts of myself I disliked. While I hesitate to digress too much, the multiple-personality aspect of my Nocturnian mindset is too important to be mentioned later in the post. Here are the definite alternate personalities which embodied concepts or emotions that I separated in order to keep them organized and respectively unmitigated:

 

 

 

 

To compromise between the desires of Night Shine and of the Person that is Me, I decided to pursue my public interests during the day, and my private interests at night. Nighttime was my chance to unwind and relieve the pain of depression that I had experienced during the day. I used my nighttime ponies and star-gazing as a way to fight my depression (I'd seen the memes, and you probably have as well, that present MLP as an anti-depressant--and I took them seriously).

And believe it or not, I recently found psychological proof of my method's effectiveness in an article about the effects of a bad sleep schedule on depression which you can find at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

  Quote

Another aspect of the association [between sleep schedule and depression] is the remarkable, if paradoxical, temporary improvement in mood seen after total sleep deprivation in a high proportion of depressed patients...

 

[A] well-known feature seen in many patients with severe depression [is] that mood is worse in the mornings and gradually improves during the day, to the point that it can be in the normal range just before bed - only to revert back to depression during sleep. However, keeping patients awake all night is difficult to perform, and once they are allowed uninterrupted sleep all the beneficial effects of sleep deprivation disappear...N[e]uroimaging studies provide some evidence that in depressed patients, the...depression is corrected by sleep deprivation.

Although I didn't know it at the time, the real antidepressant wasn't MLP:FiM or even stargazing. It was the accidental nightly sleep deprivation that resulted from my personal desire to be nocturnal clashing with my public need to be diurnal. Whaddya know.

 

Speaking of the influence of pony memes, one link between my attempt at nocturnality and my love of ponies was the huge encouragement provided by brony culture of my form of nocturnality (which most likely resulted from the fact that most bronies are teenagers or college students, the sleep schedule of whom has been scientifically shown to be much later than that of society). Again, I took the memes one hundred percent seriously:

 

 

 

This combined interest of MLP, Christianity, and Nocturnality, I later deemed "Nocturnianism." It was a Triumvirate of passions that together carried enough weight to overpower any other interest or belief I may have held at the time, and was specifically designed to ensure that it was the most important thing in my life, and would remain so for as long as it could.

 

The quintessence of Nocturnianism as an ideal for me was my passionate faith in Love, Tolerance, and Moral Purism. But wait, you say, isn't that a contradiction? How could that possibly make sense?! Well, I'll explain it; it's a major aspect of the INFP worldview.

  Quote

INFPs live primarily in a rich inner world of introverted Feeling. Being inward-turning, the natural attraction is away from world and toward essence and ideal. This introversion of dominant Feeling, receiving its data from extraverted intuition, must be the source of the quixotic nature of these usually gentle beings. Feeling is caught in the approach- avoidance bind between concern both for people and for All Creatures Great and Small, and a psycho-magnetic repulsion from the same. The "object," be it homo sapiens or a mere representation of an organism, is valued only to the degree that the object contains some measure of the inner Essence or greater Good. Doing a good deed, for example, may provide intrinsic satisfaction which is only secondary to the greater good of striking a blow against Man's Inhumanity to Mankind.

 

Basically, I saw it like this. Hate is bad. Love is good. Purity is defined as the absence of any of the following corruptions that I saw as innate to human nature: anger/hatred/aggressiveness, sexuality/lust, and cynicism/pessimism. Living with this mindset, the ideal of Love, Tolerance, and Moral Purism made sense on a conceptual level. If everyone loved each other and was tolerant of each other, then the result would be purity. Injecting hatred, cynicism, sexuality or cold logic into a situation would thereby corrupt that situation.

 

However, while this may have worked (albeit flimsily) on a conceptual level, you can imagine that it caused some serious cognitive dissonance when I attempted to practically apply it (which was always). The biggest problem was certainly my purist view of sexuality as innately corrupted. For example, I still dislike what i call the Clop Dilemma, which is to say, is it ethical to Tolerate cloppers as an NP would argue or to Purify the fandom by rebuking them as an SJ would argue? And if the best answer is a balance between these views, where do you draw the line? I still struggle with this issue.

 

Interestingly enough, in order to 'properly establish' my ideal and make sure that I followed its spirit, I drafted a 'Constitution' of sorts about how my behaviors must reflect my new ideals:

 

 

 

This was the basic groundwork of how I applied Nocturnianism to my own life, although there were other aspects--many other aspects, some so ridiculously trivial that looking back it is kind of hilarious (for example, I only wore certain clothes going to stargaze, only held my phone in a certain position while using it as a flashlight, only visited certain websites at specific times and in specific orders, et cetera). Actions became routines, which became habits, which quickly became sacred traditions. My Nocturnian system was primarily built around a routine that became arguably the most important tradition, how I spent my nightly free time:

 

1) After "going to bed," I would catch up on all of the new content that my subscriptions had released on Youtube. This included Youtube Poops, brony music, brony fan animations, et cetera.

 

2) Next, I would watch exactly two episodes of MLP:FiM on my iPhone. These would hypothetically bring me out of a depressed state and into my purer Night Shine mentality.

 

3) Immediately after finishing the MLP episodes, I would sneak out into my backyard (making extra careful not to awaken my parents) and begin stargazing. Whilst stargazing, I usually listened to specific pieces of music, although I did listen to others occasionally, and I would listen to these at specific times in my stargazing experience. First, as I walked out of my back door and saw the beauty of the night sky for the first time, I would watch (but mostly listen to)

dedicated to Woona and Celestia of a song entitled "Going Home." Next, while stargazing, I would listen to several songs, the first of which would always be what is still one of my favorite songs, CommandSpry's " ." Finally, before returning to my room, I would listen to my own personal favorite composition, " ." However, that's not to say that all I did under the stars was listen to music. I developed an odd tradition of watching videos of MLP con panels in between listening to music while stargazing, which to be honest I kind of miss...but then again, I miss pretty much everything mentioned in this post, so that's irrelevant or redundant or both.

 

4) Once I returned from stargazing, I would go online to my pony websites. First, I would go to MLPForums and send Happy Birthday messages to everypony whose birthday fell on that day and who had logged on in at least the past month.* Then I would go adventuring around and ponying around on the Internet, which later involved messaging friends on Skype but at the time mostly involved watching more Youtube videos.

One interesting and kind of awesome aspect of the way I would spend my nights on the Internet is the way I listened to music. I created one brony music playlist for each approximately month-long period of time in the Nocturnian Era, dividing it further into sub-Eras, if you will. Each playlist had exactly 32 songs, and these songs were arranged to provide an emotional experiences, transitioning from Fun songs to Epic songs to Dark songs to Sad-Feelsy songs to Relaxing songs to Happy-Feelsy songs (not necessarily in that order). I would listen to the playlist for each sub-Era every night that I could during that sub-Era, so I came to associate that music with that period of my life. This provided 2 benefits: 1) it formed a way of storing emotional memories, as I can go back and listen to any given playlist to remember the time period that the playlist refers to, and 2) it was an effective way to consume the huge amount of music produced by all of the brony musicians that I liked.

Please note that, even though I used the past tense in the previous paragraph to keep it consistent with the past-tense nature of this post, I still use this tactic of organizing brony music for its aforementioned benefits.

 

*Clarification relating to INFP vs INFJ in my behavior below:

 

 

 

5) Once done on MLPForums, which involved replying to topics and such as well as sending Happy Birthday messages to everyone, and Youtube, which involved listening to my music playlist and/or watching random videos, I would end my night by going on Equestria Daily. EqD always had to be the last thing. Firstly, I would check out the Drawfriend Stuff post from earlier in the day, and download any of the art which I particularly liked. This led to the creation of an Art folder in my general pony folder on my computer, divided into the following genres of art: Funny, Feelsy, D'aww, Beautiful, Crossover, Dark, Holiday&Celebration, Physical (or IRL), Miscellaneous, and Awesome. If I didn't really know where to put any given piece of artwork, I would either put it in Miscellaneous if I kinda-sorta liked it or Awesome if I really, really liked it.

After checking out the Drawfriend Stuff post, I would read through EqD's Nightly Roundup, and once I did that it was off to sleep. The song I would listen to while falling asleep, which has always been one of the last of the 32 songs in the playlist, was extremely important to me, usually falling into the ranks of my favorite brony songs. Here are the first eight of my ending-playlist-songs (the Nocturnian Era was technically only eight sub-Eras long, although I'm still not sure if sub-Era 9 counts as part of the Nocturnian Era or not, for reasons that I will explain much later):

 

 

 

Before The Fall (which will be explained in the next section), I had another tradition which was not quite as harmless or tolerable in the Synthesian eyes of the law. A few minutes' walk away from my house is a statue of Jesus out in the middle of a large field which also happens to have a cemetery in it. During many of my spiritual highs that resulted from a combination of sleep deprivation, ponies, and stargazing, I would walk out to the statue of Jesus and sit out under it so that I could see the stars better and also be physically closer to my Father, in a sense, even though I've always seen His essence as of the stars so there was really no "point" in such walks. Why I brought this point up was first of all so that I could show the following poem I wrote on the subject at the time which captures my mindset brilliantly, and second of all because it transitions well into the next section: The Fall, or The Octoberan Era, when the Golden Age ended.

 

Here is the poem, "Surreality" (or "Night"):