This type of brony?

[Misty Shadow 7,940]

I've begun to find the term "brony" to be an ambiguous term as of late. I remember reading a comment from a guy who claimed to have grown up with the older generations of MLP saying that he considered bronies the fans who got into the franchise because of Friendship is Magic. It gets so confusing...

[Fhaolan 4,484]

To be fair, my conter-question to that would be: If you're so enamored with the fandom and artistic community, what earthly reason to you have to not watch the show? I mean, isn't it just as silly to read fanfics about a show when you've never actually watched the source material?

 

Possibly. Given that they're up on YouTube, it's not that hard to watch the source material. Not many bronies seem to *like* them though. Oh wait, you mean watching Lauren Faust's My Little Pony's fanfics, not the G1 movies that inspired her.

 

Nah, I'm kidding, don't mind me. It's late here and I'm getting punchy. I know what you mean. What I'm getting at, is if they did watch the show, and just didn't like it as much as they do the comics, say? Many bronies think the comics are just published fanfics, so to them it must not count. But the DHX staff work with the IDW staff to make sure the comics are at least semi-canon. So... can someone be a fan of the comics *over* the show, be counted as a brony?

 

I'll give another other-fandom-example, using Doctor Who. A lot of people who consider themselves Whoovians have never seen the original series. They've just seen the new one. In fact, it's actually not possible now for new fans to see all of the classic series, because many early episodes were destroyed by the BBC, along with a lot of other shows at the time.

 

Any case, there was a long gap between the classic series and the new series. And during this time the BBC hadn't released what episodes it did have on videotape or eventually DVDs when they became popular, because that's just not the way things were done back then. So people couldn't see the original series at all. But new fans still came about, thanks to fan-based reconstructions of the old episodes, novelizations, and fan-produced content such as fanzines and the like, usually distributed at sci-fi conventions (because the Internet was still new and not quite as ubiquitous as it is now). And these new fans were considered Whoovians with just as much right to be there as the old guard.... well, except for some crotchety geezers who said that they couldn't be 'real fans' because they weren't old enough to have seen all the shows when they first transmitted, but still.

 

Same thing happened with Star Trek. Huge gap between the classic series and the Next Generation, with a strange side-path with an animated series that nobody seems to want to admit existed. And still new fans showed up, mainly attracted by fan-produced content such as the Star Trek novels and comics. Right now we have people who are fans of the last two movies, but not the original series. Many Trekkies say that those people aren't 'real fans'.

If there is no line, then there is no definition for the fandom. What it's really about gets lost and fuzzy. And I'd imagine even you have a line. Would you consider someone who just looked at one piece of MLP fan art once and liked it, to be a brony?

 

Some people join groups like bronies because they want to be part of something bigger. They want to be in on the cameraderie without really being interested in what it's about. That's why they come across to me as rather insincere.

 

Besides, if you say you want to be a part of the fandom but you can't be bothered to watch a 30 minute show, how badly do you want to be in it in the first place? Is it really that hard to watch a couple of episodes?

 

If they want to call themselves a brony, I've got no right to stop them.

 

It's not that hard to watch a couple of episodes. My point is that if they don't like the show as much as they like the comics, or the fan-made radio plays like the Vinyl Scratch Tapes, or one of the four different Doctor Whooves YouTube series, I don't feel it's my place to say to them "You're not a brony! You're a faker!"

 

It would be hypocritical of me to do so. I've been a fan of the original Prisoner TV series for many years, but I only remember seeing three or four of the 17 episodes until relatively recently when my wife and I sat down and watched the entire series through Netflix. Before that, my fandom was really based on several fanfics I'd read, and fan-art I'd seen.

 

So I can't, in good conscience call someone out for being a fan of My Little Pony just through fanfics.

 

Be seeing you. <-- in joke for any other Prisoners out there...

Edited September 1, 2013 by Fhaolan