I'm almost ashamed to admit when I first saw the ponies, my co-worker and I made fun of them. See, I work at a children's dental office and one day in our supplies for the kids, we got some MLP: FiM stickers and we laughed at them because we had both been fans of G1 when we were kids. My co-worker dubbed them 'donies' (implying they looked like dollar store knockoffs) and we had a good laugh.
Fast forward a month or two and I start noticing a bunch of pony memes on the I Can Has Cheezburger site...strange, I thought, is this actually a show or something? Now their pony site is called 'My Little Brony' and I didn't know what a brony was so I looked it up and I was like "Adults watch this?" I wondered what the appeal was - I like animated shows too, but often anime or Disney movies, things like that. The animation didn't look great from the little that I had seen and so I figured it was a 2nd rate show that wouldn't last past the first season. Didn't know or realize exactly how BIG the brony community was, of course.
It still took a while, but around Christmas of 2011, I was bored during my week-long work staycation and after looking at the memes on Cheezburger, I said to myself: "You know, I'm going to watch an episode just to see what others see in this show...why is this so popular?" So I started at the very beginning - episode 1. The beginning of the story piqued my interest, I lost almost complete interest with the theme song (I have since made peace with the theme song, but it took a while), but I had made up my mind to watch the entire episode. Still wasn't entirely sold by the end, but I did want to see if the ponies ended up in eternal darkness or not and the plot of these episodes brought me back to G1 and some of the adventures there. So, I watched the second episode...not bad, okay, I could see a little of what people were talking about. So, I figured I'd watch a third episode that wasn't part of a 2-parter just to be well-rounded in my final opinion. Before I knew it, I had spent my entire week off of work watching ponies...I was humming the songs, checking out Target's toy section to see what they had, and confiding to two of my best friends that I was into it and suggested they watch the show (they are now bronies).
I wasn't sold on the animation at all - that took a while. There were times I'd look at it and think "that's supposed to be a pony?" However, I was comparing it to G1 and that was wrong because while FiM has roots in G1, they are different generations and really different shows. But once I realized Lauren Faust was the mastermind behind it (and being a fan of the Powerpuff Girls), the animation style then made sense. Now I think the ponies are absolutely adorable.
So here I am roughly six months later with pony toys on my shelf and ponies on the desktop and a Derpy poster on the wall, pony shirts, Derpy keychain...and a ticket to Everfree NW.
Brony and PROUD!!