I've been a brony for a really long time. so this is going to be long. Growing up I was kind of a social reject so I played with my sister a lot, and she had a lot of ponies.(I mean like fifty) At first I was kind of annoyed that all she wanted to play with was her ponies but I didn't complain because I got to make my transformers and dinosaurs attack the girly pink things. Eventually I learned to tolerate them, when she got the MLP Friendship Gardens video game I would watch her play it over her shoulder (and when the house was empty I would play it myself.) When she grew out of her ponies and baby dolls stage I just grew with her because she was my only playmate and the closest thing I had to a real friend. (my "friends" at school were all douche bags) When my youngest sister got to her pony stage I was kind of excited (although I would never admit it.) I never played with her ponies because she was six and I was sixteen and that's just creepy, (and I had moved on to other things) I was really only exited because of nostalgia. When FIM came out I was surprisingly reluctant to watch it even though a close friend of mine had recommended it. One day my sister (the one I played ponies with as a kid) decided to watch the first two episodes on netflix so I sat down and watched it with her. I decided if she watched the rest of the show then I would watch it with her, but she didn't so I just watched clips and fan animations on youtube for about a month. About a week and a half before season three came out I just decided to dive in head first and stop fighting with my overly masculine self image. So I guess I've been a sleeper brony all along but I only recently acknowledged it.