What is the correlation between TF2 fans and bronies?

[outlaw_f0x 151]

You wouldn’t think this would be the case, but many TF2 players (speaking on personal experience here) I have seen are also into MLP, including myself . Why is this? 

Edited August 3, 2022 by brony_bonk

[Prospekt 11,018]

Some of the popular brony analysis YouTubers used TF2 to make content with their OCs. They'd divide into teams and edit still footage with their 2D OCs. They might still do it on occasion but I haven't watched any of them for a few years now. I guess they just liked the team aspect and thought it'd be easy to create content with.

[outlaw_f0x 151]

29 minutes ago, The Wife of Douma said:

I don't get it. Whatever the reason is, however, the combination is stupid.

idk, i think it seems kinda nice!

Edited August 3, 2022 by brony_bonk

[BornAgainBrony 2,397]

34 minutes ago, The Wife of Douma said:

The thing I don't understand is why so many SFM pony animations include characters from Team Fortress.

Is it because characters from Team Fortress are easy to animate in SFM? Is it because the game has a history with MLP?

I don't get it. Whatever the reason is, however, the combination is stupid.

I think part of it is the characters click pretty well with Ponies. The personalities of the TF characters, even the most agressive ones, are pretty sincere and charming. Like a lot of memes it somehow just works.

Know what I don't get though? Shipping Twilight with that bird who looks like Falco from Starfox.

I think we all have that one meme we don't understand.

[SharpWit 2,613]

TF2 and MLP share the same fan demographic and peaked in popularity about the same time, so a lot of people happened to be enjoying both at the same time. This made crossing over relatively easy, if not inevitable.

[Pentium100 2,120]

I used to play TF2 a lot (for me), but when the unlockable items got introduced, I gradually lost interest in the game. I very rarely play it now.

[Cash In 22,214]

I have noticed that as well. I agree with the notion that it might have to do with them both being very popular at around the same time. Even for me personally, I got into the fandom around the same time I was really into TF2.

[Starset Twinkle 498]

Prepare for my inner-Twilight to be expressed!

It's all tied together in various ways. As is well known, a lot of the Bronies were young males (high school to college age), who were active on the internet. This meant that many of them were also likely to be gamers. One of the most popular game franchises at the time was TF2. This is the surface explanation, but the connection runs deeper.

One place that a large number of Bronies discovered MLP or interacted with others in the fan community was YouTube. Not only were many people posting actual episodes of the show on YouTube, but tons of people were making fan videos. Now, people had been making Garry's Mod videos for years. That community practically grew up with YouTube starting in late 2006. Garry's Mod was extremely versatile and allowed for pretty much anything to be inserted into the sandbox, which meant that when MLP came along in late 2010, it was an obvious choice for many of those gaming fans who also happened to be Bronies. The baseline of making a Garry's Mod video didn't require any actual animation skill, just time and effort. I cannot express the importance of this point, it was an expressive outlet to all the teens and early 20 somethings that didn't feel they could draw, or write, or make music.

Now, this is where TF2 comes in. Obviously, there was a huge amount of cross-over between the Garry's Mod users and TF2 players, but the TF2 population absolutely exploded at nearly exactly the same time MLP started to get really popular. Why? Because TF2 went free-to-play on June 23, 2011. Then there was Source Filmmaker (SFM) which was leaked back in 2007. People had been using it since then, but similar to the free-to-play situation, it really exploded in popularity when two things happened in succession. First, the TF2 trailers (Meet the X), which showcased its capabilities became very popular and kept SFM in the public consciousness. This culminated with the second thing, when Meet the Pyro was released on June 27, 2012, SFM was made officially public. This brought in a huge amount of new people who weren't going to mess around with leaked content but who were more than happy to use a Valve approved tool. Of course, mid-2012 was around the time that MLP was starting to go much wider, the first large scale BronyCon took place just a few days later, starting on June 30.

All of this was a self-feeding cycle, the more popular some of these kinds of videos got the more people associated them with each other. Here's a quote from a YouTube user 10 years ago on a popular TF2/Ponies video, "This video introduced me to ponies and to TF2." There was also the fact that you could do "video responses" on YouTube back then. This was a huge factor in the various MLP fads that went around in 2012 ("When I'm", "Pony Sauce", "Wanna", "Catgroove" etc.), but it also played a lesser role in proliferating pony content and TF2 content back and forth.

All in all, it was pretty much the perfect storm, with TF2 & MLP being right in the middle of a lot of Venn diagrams.

Edited August 3, 2022 by Starset Twinkle