My Little Ponygraphic Fanbase

CAROLINE REN
Edtor in Chief

Every Saturday morning from the ages of six to nine, I watched cartoons on television with a ritual fervor. Now that I’m older, these shows no longer hold the same appeal to me as they once did, yet somehow, children’s shows manage to maintain large fanbases.

Even more surprising is the consideration that the particular show in question is aimed at young girls under the age of 11 and that portions of its adult fanbase have twisted the cartoon into a means of satisfying sexual fantasies.

In true harmony with its name, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (MLP), is dedicated to teaching its young audience moral lessons through cartoon images and humor. More specifically, MLP emphasizes female empowerment; however, being a fan of the show elicits a certain shame when the sexualization of these cartoon ponies is brought to light.

Searching MLP- related tags on unfiltered websites such as Tumblr demonstrates the graphic nature of the corruption wrought upon what was intended to be an innocent lesson-teaching cartoon.

What is most repulsive is not that adults are watching a children’s show or that they lust after animated horses, but that these adult fans, or “bronies,” utterly ignore the intentions of the creators of the show in order to make everything about themselves. A cartoon about empowerment for young girls, especially crucial in this day and age when societal pressures about image attempt to make impressionable children conform to expectations, has been manipulated into nothing more than an animation to derive pornographic fantasies from.

Certainly not all adult fans of the show view it in such a fashion, but the numerous sexually explicit images floating around the Internet provide evidence of the ones who do. Nowadays, the kind of cartoons we ourselves enjoyed seem to have become less about depth of thought and more about personal, superficial satisfaction.