When is your "bronyversary"?

[Paleopony 701]

On 2021-08-29 at 10:04 PM, Luna the Great of all the Russias said:

I believe it was around 25 July 2011; over a decade ago. Decided to watch the show as I noticed users changing their avatars to ponies; did not know whether they genuinely enjoyed the show or if they were all trolling.

What I would be interested to know is how it would have been like to have been a Brony in 2010 when the show just began? Why did those people start watching the show (for those who were not already fans of MLP in general)? Did Bronydom primarily begin as a way for 4chan users to troll moderators?

Regarding your last sentence, I think people were watching the show just to see if it was as bad as it was said to be (by a certain article and people who had negative experiences with the previous generations). Some of the people were genuinely in love with the show but others probably used ponies to upset people who didn’t watch or care for the show.

[J.J 923]

February 13 2013, the first day I dawned the title "brony", I watched my first episode February 11 2013. It was Bridle Gossip, my brother was a "hipster brony" around the time the show was popular in 2012-2013, discovered bronies, thought he was being edge, and then showed me the masterpiece that is FiM, obviously his feigned interest petered out when the fandom hype was dying down, but oh no, not me, this was the creation of a serious "obsession", I have watched "some" of the episodes upwards of 30-50 times, and that actually isn't even an exaggeration, I hyper fixate on certain plots and characters... Anyway, the show only got better for me up until around season 8, I could tell the end was coming, can't say I would have ended it the same way, but I still love what they did, I just wish it could have been the real Grogar and not Discord being the most incompetent creature to ever live lol..

[Starset Twinkle 499]

I started watching sometime in early to mid-February of 2011. I'm not sure I considered myself a brony. I loved the show right from the start, but I never really got involved with the community until very recently, so I guess closet-brony would be the appropriate term.

[Sonic Shimmer 4,132]

I can’t really remember. I know I started watching at some point in 2014 because  season four had already aired. It took me a little while to go from casual watcher to actual fan (Winter Wrap Up was the episode that made that happen).