A History of Brony Drama

[Sergios117 191]

Right now, I'm going over all the times the brony fandom had a massive rage moment as well as the results of the drama. Note that I've been a brony since spring 2012 so I haven't lived through all the drama personally and all these numbers are estimates.

 

I'm assuming that the brony fandom is around 5-9 million strong based on youtube views, netflix memberships, deviantART, and itunes downloads/

 

 

1. The message of 'Feeling Pinkie Keen.'

 

Basically, all bronies were like 'this episode promotes religious fundamentalism over rationality." Many bronys even threatened to leave the show but once Faust explained the show wasn't trying to promote anything and the bad lesson was bad communication, every brony calmed down.

 

2. Lauren Faust leaving the show.

 

"NO!" cried the bronies as they smashed their computers. "Now the show will never be as good.". Then the new episodes came out, and we realized that show lost no quality at all. While no brony left the fandom, it did create some bronies who were like "Oh season 1 is amazing but everything else was crap."

 

3. A Canterlot Wedding

 

Bronies were basically fuming because they thought the episode was going dissolve into stereotypical pretty princess junk. Not to mention every brony was angry how we wer introduced Shining Armor and Cadance without any previous mention.

 

Then Chrysalis showed up, drawing bronies everywhere from her villainy and it turns out Shining Armor and Cadance aren't bad characters at all. No bronies left the fandom, but some were still disgruntled about the lack of explanation of the married couple before their premiere.  

 

4. Princess Twilight

 

Seriously, the fandom went atom bomb at the moment of the reveal. Every brony was banging their heads saying that Twilight will be turned into a Mary Sue and the show will be ruined for ever because she will be put in a higher status and Hasbro is changing characters to sell toys.

 

Then when the episode was released, MOST of the fire was blown away. While the episode was criticized for being rushed, the songs were awesome and we got to see some of our favorite characters make appearances. Also most bronies were relieved that Twilight would not outlive her friends and would remain adorkable.

 

While most bronies accept it as a normal change, around 3% of the brony fandom was claimed to have left the show (although only a fifth of those deserters became actual haters.). I think it's even safe to say another 15% of the fandom considers MMM to be the finale of the show out of fear that the next seasons will make the show a franchise Zombie.

 

5. Removal of fighting is magic.

 

A lot of bronies felt that this marked the beginning of Hasbro's new corporatist attitude. There was the sudden fear that if fighting is magic was removed, so would fan art and fan works. Around 1% of the fandom deserted although since no further removals were ordered, they basically came back.

 

Also the fandom pretty much sut up once it was revealed the team and Lauren Faust were making a new project.

 

The real casualty of the situation however was that most bronies started to boycott the company by not buying merchandise that directly went to hasbro.

 

- Now between MMM and Equestria Girls, there was a sudden uprising of new bronies thanks to the fan works of Double Rainboom and Snowdrop. Seriously, people joined bronies by the hundreds of thousands once they saw the potential of the fandom. I think it was a miracle due to all the flame wars that were happening at the time.

 

6. Equestria Girls

 

Once again, bronies went nuclear fission. So did I. We basically felt that hasbro had once and for all stopped caring about the show and only cared about toys.

 

We thought the film would be utter trash due to the fact the designs were horrible and uncanny valley, it used a cliche high school setting and was clearly made only to sell toys.

 

Before the film was released, a significant 3% of the fandom left because Hasbro was clearly no longer caring about quality. Most of these came back however, but are ignoring the movie as non canon. The rest became passionate haters.

 

But once the film was released....turns out it wasn't bad at all.

 

Despite the high school setting , the story was not about Disney channel sitcom drama, but instead a 'Twilight can't fit in.' story which was acceptable. Also the animation was better then expected, proved to us Twilight was still the same pony/person and the music was again spot on.*

 

However, the brony fandom still has mixed views about the film, but now it is half liking it while half ignoring it as opposed to half feeling neutral about it and half hating it.

 

Believe it or not, the movie actually brought in a few thousand bronies. Not because of the content of the film itself, but informed the public of how huge the show was.

 

 

 

 

*I should note however I do not actually listen to MLP music because it is not my taste, but I can still feel the quality of the sound.

[DITR 180]

You forgot about Max Veers, but the less that gets said about him, the better. Google his name if you don't know what I mean. I wonder whatever happened to him afterwords. You also for get Ever Free NorthWest, wonder what it's going to be like this year

[PoisonClaw 8,153]

There was also the censoring of Derpy from the episode "The Last Roundup", jokingly referred by some as "Derpygate" after the fact. People were up in arms at having the character redubbed because someone thought she was "offensive" (even though the VA, Tabitha St Germain stated that that was nowhere near the intended case) and some people went so far to start the "Save Derpy" coalition for fear that she would be removed from all future episodes. 

 

Basically it comes down to neither side, Hasbro or the fans, making the right decisions and acting like complete fools over something so insignificant. 

Edited June 30, 2013 by PoisonClaw

[Shanks 10,811]

1. Here is my message for those people, get a fricken life and stop reading into things that are not there please.

2. She left but the show is still good, as much as I respect Laurent Faust she wasn't the only one who is responsible for making this a great show.

3. I became a fan after this so I missed the drama, but thought it was handled well even if I am a bit annoyed at the fact that Cadence and Shining Armor appeared out of nowhere.

4. So people did overreact that much is true, but there were so legitimate concerns. The concept itself seemed to come out of nowhere, sure there were hints it would happen eventually but very little indication that this would happen in season 3. The season itself had very little actual development and buildup leading into alicorn Twilight with a season finale that was a complete and total train wreck that made zero sense. Due to this and other reasons like my concerns about her becoming overpowered I opposed twilicorn but after seeing Equestria Girls which I didn't expect to do well at all and how they were able to pull that off I am now neutral yet optimistic.

5. That sucked, but that was more the fault of the screwed up way trademark laws work than Hasbro. If Hasbro didn't act than they legally would have lost their trademark.

6. I may not have joined the panic party as I saw no point in going ape over a spin off but I had serious doubt that it would be any good but I saw it and liked it.

[RockinRarity 1,605]

Also forgotten: Las Pegasus Unicon. You may not need to count it since it was not directly related to anything happening with the show (but neither does Fighting is Magic), but that con was a serious, and I mean serious disaster.

 

I concur that Derpygate needs to be added into the list. It was a pretty big deal. It shouldn't have been (much like most of the drama that you posted about), but it was.

[Bendy 1,819]

This is a good thread. We should make future threads like this to record the history of drama within our fandom. To tell future Ponies of bad drama events.

[RockinRarity 1,605]

This is a good thread. We should make future threads like this to record the history of drama within our fandom. To tell future Ponies of bad drama events.

And that there is no reason to have such drama in the fandom?

 

This could probably be the Official History of Drama thread and it can be stickied, so that people can find it and new bronies can know that, yes, if we made it through the Twilacorn drama unscathed, then you can deal with Rarity having a boyfriend who isn't Spike (for example... not saying that this will happen but you know that something like that would cause drama, lol).

[DITR 180]

This is a good thread. We should make future threads like this to record the history of drama within our fandom. To tell future Ponies of bad drama events.

 

There's already something like this, It's called Brony Drama Recorded. You can find it here http://bronydramarecorded.tumblr.com/

 

Would you believe it!? There's another controversy at a convention

[Jammo 986]

I joined after the Feeling Pinkie Keen thing. Man people are insecure. While I agree the message is a little shaky people looked WAY too much into it. Religion is never even mentioned but people get their jimmies rustled so easily whenever concepts like faith enter the question. Lighten up. Honestly I think the bigger flaw with that episode is Twilight being a bit out of character. She's not being skeptical, she's denying what's in front of her own damn face. Made Twi look kind of ignorant. I think she would be amazed that Pinkie can do things like that not stubbornly and angrily prove that she has to be right when evidence to the contrary is right in front of her.

[NavelColt 22,876]

Despite how this has a show fixation, it does contain content regarding the fanbase instead of the show, and at its' core, is about the bronies themselves and how they, as a fandom, are melodramatic to a ridiculous fault :3 Moving to Sugarcube.

 

This is a 25% automated message, by the way.

[Scootalove 10,684]

I think the drama comes from people who oppose the show, the episodes that people like, or just decide to hate whoever likes it. So, we could just sense a pattern of the drama.

[Moved to Elsewhere 11,329]

Great history post about the drama. Sometimes people just can't accept change and overreact to it (though I've seen some who have valid reasons for hating it). Wow I didn't realize that snowdrop, double rainboom, and equestria girls brought in more bronies