(I didn’t, largely since I’ve never watched a single episode, but the psychic damage and whiplash of Wholesome Pony Show having said this line was too fuckn much for me)
EDIT: More replies than upbears now. It’s probably an official struggle session now (although most of it is that one person). One must imagine SisyFEWs happy.
The hatred of My Little Pony’s was the precursor to modern online fandom discourse. People’s online response to this show (good, bad, or indifferent) warped how the internet talks about fandom in a major way and online culture as whole in a lesser extent.
On a positive note, though, I think it was also legitimately a gateway to questioning gender norms for a lot of people.
If the My Little Pony fandom was your gateway to questioning gender norms and eventually realizing you’re a trans woman…
…Does that mean you got horsefemmed?
Who is this character? [genuine]
It’s the bottom from the bottom speak comic.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2394598-pleading-emoji-🥺-bottom-emoji
Anne Boonchuy
By Jove I really am falling out of the loop with the popular cartoons nowadays, aren’t I?
The MLP fandom died because all the people who liked it because they were closeted eggs realized they could just be trans and all the people who liked it because they were closeted furries realized they could just be furries and all the people who liked it because they were closeted fascists realized they could just be fascists.
It was a weird path to a win, but a win regardless! Living one’s truth because a cartoon helped get one there is just as valid a reason as any other in my book.
I think a lot of the backlash was rooted in misogyny. “Oh no, how dare men like girl thing”
Remember that a big chunk of the historical fandom was weirdo fascist edgelords who wanted to fuck the ponies and wrote horny violent fanfics about them. One of the longest fanfics about anything (FOE:PH) is basically “Made in Abyss but it’s ponies and set in a post apocalyptic wasteland.”
Oh God, I remember hearing talk about how terrible this was and having a peek out of morbid curiosity. I made it maybe a quarter of the way through the first chapter before I had to dip out at the exhaustively described fever dream of what MRAs imagine a society run by feminists would look like.
Wasn’t there also a Fallout crossover fanfic that completely missed the humor aspect that was always present in Fallout and was sort of edgy for edginess’ sake? I never read it, but its fandom was pretty
at a glance.
That was all of the Fallout crossover fanfics
The most infamous of those is the one I mentioned, Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons, but the original Fallout Equestria was also pretty bad just much, much more tame than FOE:PH was.
You said it’s related to Made in Abyss so I take it there’s a lot of
factor too. 
It predates it, but it is similar in tone and grotesqueness. Although thinking about the full depth of the problems with Made in Abyss that I covered exhaustively in a post last night, FOE:PH isn’t as bad. It’s a gratuitous, edgy spectacle that handles problematic themes poorly, but it’s merely making an exploitative spectacle of them while Made in Abyss is even worse. AFAIK most of the characters in Project Horizons are adults though, though I think there’s some nonce stuff in there too.
I have no idea why you read it, but I assume it was something like this as a situation.
It’s also written for 5-year-olds though.
Mario and Pokemon are for children too and nobody gives a shit if you like them as an adult
Mario is the tale of a union man taking mushrooms and rescuing his side piece from a human trafficking dinosaur. Pokemon is about a kid winning a series of cockfights and taking down the mafia. For kids? Hardly.
Tell me how good Dragon Tales is next.
Removed by mod
You clearly don’t actually know anything about the show and you’re just going off of either your own assumptions or what other people have told you. I’d explain why you’re wrong, but I’ve dealt with enough people like you to know you’d just double down. You don’t have any good reason for believing what you believe. You just want an excuse to feel superior to other people.
Removed by mod
There’s the misogyny! Thank you for helping prove the point of my original comment
As @[email protected] already put it in this thread, the response to that show in retrospect does say a lot about the people making that response.
There’s plenty of room to criticize its ideology and its political messages, but “X IS FOR BABIES” dogma is just… exhausting. And feeds into so much bullying-adjacent reactionary hog shit.
Jeez, someone needs a reeducation in the magic of friendship and harmony…
In one line you managed to present an adolescent-like preoccupation with performative adulthood in a bullying way and added some misogyny!
No, I spelt it the non-sexist way. Histerical. Treatlords, begone.
Honestly, unless you’re talking about MLP as it existed before or after the 2010s, I just don’t see how you can conclude that so confidently. Friendship is Magic was better written than half of the shows that adults are supposed to like.
“X IS FOR BABIES” dogma. Not even once.
I didnt watch all seasons of it but the first 3 seasons are a pretty fun kind hearted show. Gonna finish it one of these days.
The end of Season 3 just feels like such a great place to stop watching. Twilight learned all about friendship and became a princess, The End. Perfect. 10/10.
It was originally written by the same person who wrote Powerpuff Girls and a lot of the humor is similar in the sense that it appeals to both kids and older viewers.
This just in: Lauren Faust being Craig McCracken’s wife was a conspiracy all along; she is actually his drag persona
I thought she was a writer for that as well though?
I had tried to edit with a clarification that she wrote for both series but that McCracken was the actual creator of Powerpuff Girls, but maybe that didn’t load on your end.
Ah, ok. In that case I should clarify that while she wasn’t officially the show creator, I do think a lot of the writing and jokes are similar between the two.
From what I’ve seen, you’re absolutely right about that.
The show’s sudden widespread popularity always felt like a western version of Japanese otaku culture to me. People were making their own comics, fanart, radio plays, etc. It was like doujin circles. They even would stalk the voice actresses like creeps.
It’s always been interesting to me how closely otaku and western nerds will come to imitating one another without significant contact with the other. There’s like a platonic ideal of weird creepy nerd they’re all drawing from in the ether. They even have their own weird fascist contingents. Japan invented incels too like in the 80s.
Really makes you wonder. This has to be the latest iteration of a longstanding phenomenon, yeah? Cus I just cannot imagine that sort of personality was just spontaneously generated by access to the internet.
I mean this painting exists
I’ve always thought there had to have been weird obsessives in like 1850 who spent too much time on the telegraph
You’re always clacking away at the teleprinter, why don’t you go out and make some friends?
My hypothesis is that Japan just figured out how to turn fandom into an obsessive toy-buying culture earlier than America did. If you go back to something like, for example, the early days of the Star Trek fandom, there was a lot of friction between the creators of that show and its consumers. They were trying to ban fanfiction and conventions and shit.
Meanwhile Japan figured out that you could capture the fandom pretty easily, sell them infinite low quality figurines and posters, and turn them into a massive army of free advertisement and hype. Nowadays it’s standard practice to do this stuff, although the American version of it ups the ante from the Japanese version, with fandoms developing not just for specific shows and characters but franchises and entire companies.
Look in this thread. The old tiresome “X is for babies” symptomatic
wriggling is on display. 
What the hell have I wrought
I think it’s so inevitable that even bringing up that particular show is going to churn out a similar vibe to what happened in the early 2000s if someone so much as brought up furries.
Has any other fandom reached the peak that MLP:FiM did? Maybe Rick and Morty, right before the Szechuan Sauce incident embarrassed everyone who liked that show so much that they stopped wanting to be associated with it.
At the risk of setting them off again, I argue that Gambo, at its height, was like that, and unlike FiM or even R&M it had painfully mainstream saturation. It was basically impossible to exist in public anywhere with a line or a waiting room, where a TV or a magazine could be found, without “WHICH MURDERFUCKER IS ON THE IRON THRONE THIS WEEK?”
headlined everywhere, for years. I had to involuntarily learn a lot about that show during that time.
Gambo! Can’t believe I didn’t think about that.
Come to think of it, that one also crashed spectacularly like the R&M one did, although it was from a failure of the show itself rather than the fans embarrassing themselves in thousands of McDonalds all across America. MLP:FiM for all its fandom’s excesses just sort of faded out.
The banker-born sexpest failson creeps that ran that show had everything going for it and still drove it into the ground with sheer fucking hubris with a side order of resentment toward Emilia Clarke because she started pushing back and didn’t want to just be their (CW: SV)
spoiler
actually-weeping-because-of-contractual-coercion SV plaything on camera anymore so they character assassinated the character then had her murderfucked as petty retaliation.
Maybe it’s rooted in weird gender coding stuff? I do find it odd the selective salty-ness of the net being weirded out by one children’s animated television show but not another. I’m not even on the “let people enjoy things” tip, but it’s just weird the show about unicorns, rainbows, and friendship gets mad hate but if it were a show about kiddos fist fighting against the forces of evil and you get a pass.
It’s always just “You are grown, you are watching a show for girls.” It’s never any valid leftist critique one could probably make in a integrious way like the original poster talking about centrism for example.
Personally I don’t rock with MLP. However, I dig lots of the new generations cartoons like “Adventure Time” and “Rise of the TMNT” which are “for boys” but no one bugs out about that. Which is kinda telling to me.
As if we all didn’t go see Barbie by the way. A movie about a product “for babies”.
A lot of it is, “girly” media are constantly ridiculed and villified to an extent that hypermasculine Vin Diesel shlock never is. but ima be honest here, what put me off in regards to MLP where the fedora guys fantasizing about horse ass all day.
I think a recent version of “X IS FOR BABIES”
came from people that didn’t just not see Barbie (it’s fine, no one has to watch it) but made “didn’t see Barbie” into some badge of maturity (or in some cases, performative masculinity) in contrast to Oppenheimer (it’s fine, you are allowed to watch it, or not) as, once again, MATURITY™ discourse.
I feel like I’ve seen both of these films by way of people’s reactions to them
I’ve actually seen neither
This is how I see most films these days