Chadborn Daniel P. - Meet the Bronies: the psychology of adult My little pony fandom

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3795-2

2019 Patrick Edwards, Daniel P. Chadborn, Courtney N. Plante, Stephen Reysen, Marsha Howze Redden. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image 2019 Shutterstock

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

This book is dedicated to the brony community. Without your participation, feedback, stories, and interactions, these studies would have never been possible. We also dedicate this book to Lauren Faust and to all of those who work on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (voice actresses/actors, directors, writers, animators, etc.). Without your work, the brony fandom itself would not exist.

There are too many people who have helped us over the last eight years to be able to name each one. Nevertheless, we will try.

Will Edwards, whose membership in the brony community and interest in MLP:FIM spurred the beginnings of Brony Study.

Dr. Jan Griffin, whose work with statistics and large data analysis was crucial in our investigations into the community and whose experience and knowledge propelled Brony Study into what it is today.

To all of the psychology conferences, editors, journals, and colleagues who were willing to hear us out, review our research, and offer us a platform to present our work and who did so with only a few odd looks when we explained bronies to them.

To both BronyCon for inviting us back to discuss our research year after year and to Equestria Daily for helping us pitch our research and ultimately reach fans across the world.

And, of course, our families, friends, and fellow fans of all types who have supported us in our work and development since the beginning of the project. Specifically, fellow fans in the University of Waterloo Bronies Club for being awesome, Susan Bressler Thomas for her technological assistance, and Michael and Jared for introducing one of the authors to ponies and ultimately sealing his fate.

Welcome to the culmination of eight years of psychological research on the brony fandom! You may be asking yourself, who are the bronies, what is Brony Study, and how do a bunch of psychologists wind up doing this with their careers? Worry not! You will find answers to all of these questions! And if, by chance, you find yourself wondering whether you really care about the psychology of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom, well tell you this: If youre a fan of anything, be it My Little Pony, an NFL team, video games, or pretty much anything else, this book will be relevant to you. Why? Because, as youll soon see, many of the same psychological processes weve found in the brony fandom can be found in other fan groups.

Of course, we dont cover everything there is to know about fan groups in this one book. Broader, more nuanced discussions about the psychological processes underlying various fandoms have been the focus of other books, studies, and lines of research. For now, weve chosen to focus on one fandom in particular, the brony fandom, and to follow them from their very beginning to the current day. Weve also chosen to narrow our focus to the psychology of the brony fandom. For those interested in the history of My Little Pony as a show, the 2017 book Ponyville Confidential: The History and Culture of My Little Pony, 19812016 by Sherilyn Connelly is a great start. If youre interested in various fan cultures (e.g., Star Trek) from a non-psychological perspective we might suggest authors such as Henry Jenkins (who is beyond prolific in the field).

But, if what youre looking for is a glimpse into the minds of those who like colorful friendship equines, youre holding the correct book, one chock-full of research studies, data, more graphs and tables than you can shake a stick at, and way too many pony-themed puns.

So if youre still with us, we hope that youre rewarded for your inquisitive nature and your open mind. If youre a brony, some of these findings may reinforce your day-to-day experience, while others will no doubt surprise you. If youre here because youre not a brony, but you just need to understand them, we suspect that youll come to the same conclusion that we have, that bronies are a diverse group of people who, despite seeming strange at first, are just like everyone else, except for their love of a show about colorful ponies.

If nothing else, we hope that by the end of the book you see, as we have, that the show and the fandom are a wonderful influence on the lives of those in the brony fandom. And you dont have to take our word for it: These same ideas have been articulated by Lauren Faust, Jayson Thiessen, Tara Strong, Ashleigh Ball, Andrea Libman, and the rest of the cast. Early on in our book-writing process we reached out to John de Lancie, who voices the character Discord on the show and had originally reached out to Drs. Edwards and Redden for their input in the documentary Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. In 2016 he shared with us some of his thoughts on coming into a fandom he knew nothing about and becoming one of the fandoms most vocal supporters.

A few years ago, I got a call from my voiceover agent with an offer to voice an animated show. I read the script, thought it was good, and accepted the job. As with most voiceovers jobs, I spent a couple of hours the night before preparing the material and then an hour recording in the studio the following day. Job completed, never to be thought of again. Three months later, I turned on my computer one morning and was astounded to discover 300 emails, all mentioning My Little Pony. Not remembering, I asked my wife what she knew about My Little Pony. You voiced it a few months ago, she said, and its a cartoon for little girls. I pondered that statement for a moment and then, with raised eyebrow, responded in my most serious voice, Well let me tell you something these are not little girls who are writing me! Thus, my introduction to Bronies.

Admittedly, I went through the usual stages of disbelief when it came to bronies. Why are twenty-year-old guys watching a cartoon intended for ten-year-old girls? But as I scratched the surface my initial negative opinion changed to acceptance and then to admiration. I even went so far as to produce a documentary on bronies. My hope was that this documentary would provide a visual record of a phenomenon that, frankly, I couldnt quite explain but was willing to embrace. Fandoms are created for many different reasons. Star Trek, a fandom with which Im familiar, appealed to those who were interested in science, and a hope for a better future. Under the Star Trek umbrella, a generation of young adults emerged as the nascent nerd culture of today.