The 2010 reboot of My Little Pony, titled Friendship Is Magic (or MLP:FiM), exploded beyond its target audience, gathering a large number of older, male viewers. This fan community (self-titled “bronies”) serve as a case study of an interest group with strongly participatory culture. This paper will analyze public expressions of My Little Pony fandom in light of the McArthur Foundation whitepaper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, in an attempt to see how the brony community serves or does not serve as a media-literacy-centric participatory culture, and how it might differ from a more archetypal participatory culture.
The part of the My Little Pony fandom that will be discussed here largely originated on 4chan’s comic board, /co/. MLP:FiM’s release was awaited with some interest because Lauren Faust (a favorite on /co/ for her involvement in Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends) was developing and directing the My Little Pony reboot. As the season progressed, interest in MLP:FiM grew in /co/, to the point that moderators forbade more than one concurrent ‘thread’ (conversation) about ponies at once. This posed a problem; many times, pony threads would hit the maximum length within just a few minutes. Feeling unwelcome, much of the brony community moved off 4chan to other venues, the largest (and arguably most important) being Equestria Daily. Other important venues are ponibooru, Team Fortress 2, deviantart, IRC channels, FiMchan, and 4chan.
Jenkins’ whitepaper establishes four forms of participatory culture, and points to five elements by which a participatory culture can be identified. The first concern (is the brony subculture a participatory one?) can be addressed by examining the five elements of a participatory culture. First, there are low barriers (or no barriers) to artistic or civic involvement. Second, there exists strong support for content creation and sharing. Third, there’s some form of informal mentorship. Fourth, participants believe that their contributions matter. Fifth, participation creates some sense of social connection and solidarity.
Equestria Daily routinely demonstrates a number of these elements; one example is the June Newbie Artist Training Grounds project. Every day for over a month, a topic would be posted on Equestria Daily’s page with a submit link. Every image submitted would be posted at midnight. The project was intended to teach in a trial-by-fire manner; complete newcomers were encouraged to participate. To quote: “This event is about learning how to draw. If you start off with stick figures, that's perfectly fine. The only way artists improve, is by actually doing it. Everyone has the ability. Some are more naturally talented than others... but that doesn't mean you can't acquire it.”
What elements does the Newbie Artist Training Grounds contain? It had no barriers to entry, for one. This is exemplified in day 1’s images, which ranged from Microsoft Paint ponies, to literal stick ponies, to blob ponies, to production quality vector ponies. The event served mainly as a reason for content creation, and a venue for distribution; the images are paired with their creator’s screen name, names often shared between IRC servers, game servers, and pony discussion boards. The social connection occurs in the comment threads after a day’s roundup, as well as in personalized comments to the authors about their images.
However, the Newbie Artist Training Grounds is lacking several elements of Jenkins’ participatory cultures. For example, the Training Grounds’ mentorship is nearly non-present, consisting of self-improvement through repetition. Additionally, by itself, the belief that contributions matter is present, weakly, in the rhetoric of self-improvement. However, this was reinforced by a simultaneous meta-game “achievement” system added to the site. Users would be rewarded with points for content creation, scooting up a leaderboard. Interestingly, the achievement system strongly emphasized media literacy in many forms and amateur content creation; points could be earned by drawing, sculpting, writing, game creation, music performance, remixing, mashing-up, and generally exhibiting media literacy, without regards to some standard of ‘quality.’ Additionally, earning a significant amount of achievement points required a diverse portfolio of fan content. No rewards were given other than an acknowledgement of the users’ contributions to the community (and a way to round-up all of the content created by an individual brony).
It thus seems that the July content (Newbie Artist Training Grounds and the introduction of achievements) serves as a strongly participatory model, if lacking in mentorship. The achievement system serves to highlight the role of media literacy in the MLP fandom, as do the routine Equestria Daily community involvement events (such as the Training Grounds).
However, one interesting aspect of the brony fandom is the one-size-fits-all nature of its media literacy. The fan community encloses people with such a diverse skillset that individual fan work and collaborative projects of all types result. For example, Equestria Daily ran a National Pony Writing Month event the month after the Newbie Training Grounds. Pony Writing Month endeavored to produce amateur pony fan fiction in much the same manner as the Training Grounds produced art. These events result in large numbers of independently authored works being created and shared.
The fandom, however, also produces many collaborative works in less traditional mediums. My Little Pony: Dying Is Magic is an excellent example. One fan produced a mod for the independent strategy game Dwarf Fortress that replaced the dwarves with various types of ponies. A prominent webcomic artist (The Oatmeal) started a thread on FiMchan where he described a game of Pony Fortress as it happened, taking screenshots, illustrating important scenes, and asking the audience for vital decisions about the game’s direction. While the project was short-lived, it drew in an audience and then encouraged the audience to participate in a common interest. The participation had no barriers to entry (and was largely anonymized, allowing for risk-free failure), and included short fiction, images, game decisions, game modding, and short-form creativity, like naming ponies and creating relationships between them.
Another interesting collaborative work is My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic. Fighting Is Magic is a fan-created 2D fighting game, starring the cast of Friendship Is Magic. While this project is not nearly as collaborative as the Equestria Daily events or the FiMchan forum games, all of the positions for Fighting Is Magic were determined through open casting calls. The voice actress for Pinkie Pie (one of the main characters) was recently cast. The team also includes programmers, artists, musicians, and additional voice actresses cast from the fan community. Fighting Is Magic is an interesting project because of the polish and quality of its promotional videos. In some ways, it may serve as a transition from the largely participatory fan community to a more narrowly participatory ‘professional’ community. The stiff barriers to entry and close-knit proto-community differ from the larger fan community, but may represent a more ‘useful’ form of involvement. Content creators for Fighting Is Magic are non-anonymous, and likely developing focused skillsets more applicable to ‘real’ work than fans participating in more open arenas.
It then seems that the brony fandom - as irregular and distributed as it is - is for the most part a participatory culture. It lacks mostly in a mentorship process, largely because of the community’s non-centralized, informal structure. Jenkins identifies four different forms of participatory culture: affiliations (memberships and communities), expressions (producing new content), collaborative problem-solving (completing tasks and developing new knowledge), and circulations (organized media sharing and publishing). The brony fandom’s affiliations are complex; while bronies do self-affiliate, and there are community organizations, the brony community retains a large part of its 4chan culture, including an appreciation for radical opacity and appreciation of anonymity. Pseudonyms are common, and anonymity is the norm in many brony community sites. Expression - content creation - is the glue that binds the community together; since episodes are released weekly, and the season is short, much of the year the fan community has little to cohere around. As such, fan content is as important as ‘real’ content for sustaining interest in ponies. This produces an emphasis on media literacy, creation, sharing, and consumption; amateur content becomes important to sustaining the community. Collaborative problem-solving, however, is a form of participation that the My Little Pony fan community lacks to a large extent. Some projects are strongly collaborative, like Fighting Is Magic, but most of the strongly collaborative projects sacrifice the aspects of the community that define a participatory culture. Barriers to entry are raised, and the sense of community is restrained. Circulations are mildly common, with pony-related blogs, imageboards, and forums; Equestria Daily represents the most traditional circulation, posting regular round-ups of fan content and links to official content and products.
The My Little Pony fandom thus seems like a strongly participatory subculture, albeit one with a weak mentorship system, relatively scarce collaborative problem-solving, and a strange relationship with (public, un-anonymized) affiliations. On the other hand, it has a (necessarily) strong emphasis on media literacy and amateur expression; fan content keeps the entire edifice afloat during months when there’s a dearth of official content.
Works Referenced
My little pony: Friendship is magic - wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved
Jenkins, H. (n.d.). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education
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Watercutter, A. (2011, June 09). My little pony corrals unlikely fanboys known as ‘bronies’.
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