Meet 'bronies' -- grown men who are fans of My Little Pony

boom hooves

#savekerpy

I would read a Hungry4Ass brony tumblr all day

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9hwyfX0W81qaecjjo1_500.jpg

oh man

60.

I Googled patriotpony1986's OKCupid profile and the rest of it, and it just gets sadder and sadder and sadder.

It's also probably a hoax: the pic's connected to a Norwegian dude on a MLP site.

yea i didn't think it could be real

lol i just came here with that

59.

Here's more of the profile:

My self-summary
I am a proud conservative American and brony (male My Little Pony fan). I work very hard to enmesh the philosophy of Ayn Rand within the framework of tolerance and love espoused by Pink Pie and friends. I'm something of an intellectual, and would love to discuss politics or cartoons with somepony near me in the future. Please understand that if we were to meet, I AM THE MAN in the relationship.

What I’m doing with my life
Trying to finish the first draft of my e-book entitled Serfdom in Equestria, an expose on the liberal agenda slowly eroding freedom in the My Little Pony universe.

I’m really good at
Fashion

The first things people usually notice about me
My swag.

Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food
My Little Pony, The Fountainhead, The Bible

I spend a lot of time thinking about
The war on men's rights currently taking place in the United States.

On a typical Friday night I am
Arguing with imbeciles on the Internet.

The most private thing I’m willing to admit
I have a rare penile deformity. Ask me about it! If only Dr. Paul would start seeing male patients...

I’m looking for

--Girls who like guys
--Ages 20–31
--Near me
--For new friends

You should message me if
You don't mind supporting a high functioning autistic who has been on social security disability for seven years.

Ah, I just saw that screencap on tumblr. The full profile makes the fakeness clear.

I did see a kid who looked very similar to him (wearing a fedora and a my little pony t-shirt) when I was out last weekend -- I know we have joked about the fedoras but I didn't really expect a brony to be that stereotypical-looking.

did you see the group shot at the top of the thread

I was near a anime/comic convention last weekend and saw not one, but two young men wearing brony shirts, and I can safely say that 2/2 were exactly as you imagine (#1: fedora, #2: very long hair & short beard)

did you see the group shot at the top of the thread

Sure, but not every one had a fedora! Maybe that's how they are able to identify each other in public? ¯\(°_o)/¯

every last one of these people has a fedora

every

single

one

society judges belittles them for their tastes, so it's how they show their class, sophistication and rejection of modern values outwardly

the worst thing that "nerd culture" ever did to itself was to fetishize poor socialization.

nerd = poor socialization

culture = what we call a pile of fetishes

stop smokin so much w33d man, help you think clearer

i mean to say what is nerd culture other than fetishizing poor socialization

it's a good point, but I think there's a way for the whole nerdy fandom popcultural milieu to exist w/o letting its adolescents grow up into adults who are still proud of how bad they are at getting along w/ people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDS_YABbh6w

atheist, nod, wisdom, frankfurters, little, pony, chimney, santa, burp, guadeloupe, brassiere, nimrod, candelabra

i mean to say what is nerd culture other than fetishizing poor socialization

― the late great, Wednesday, August 29, 2012 8:51 PM (14 minutes ago)

fetishizing other stuff to soothe the pain of poor socialization

^ this is the pure shit, first principles. actually fetishizing poor socialization and "nerd culture" itself comes later, when late capitalism fucks its own third eye.

powerful image

nah fetishizing is poor socialization

example

1) fetishizing the tit
2) good socialization = not treating all girls like mom
3) ok gotta find non-mom figure
4) fetishizing the pretty girl that's nice to you, then getting pissed when you find out she makes out with jocks
5) good socialization = not treating all girls like virgin/whore

it's a chicken and egg thing

now go back to sci-fi where everyone is either mother, virgin or whore ... are you soothing pain, or just seeing the fantasy world you want to see

i think one of the big things in nerd culture is this idea that 1) other people don't understand me 2) i have a fascinating story to tell you

hence the line between star wars fans and star wars nerds where you have to cross the line into understanding every single back story and going deep into the fascinating story of who that imaginary person is

oh yeah, sure, but fetishizing fetishization itself is troo kvlt wormhole shit

i have a lot of big ideas on nerd culture and socialization if you guys want to start that thread, i might be working one-on-one with several aspergers kids this year instead of running a classroom so i'll have lots of data points

i don't know enough anthropology to imagine what fetishizing the fetish looks like

i was at a neurobio presentation awhile back and world famous professor was showing us how baby birds recognize a mother's beak via a pattern of light and dark areas, and how you could simulate that with a stick, if you painted it in the right way.

and then in his veddy biddish indian raj accent he was like: "the baby bird loves the stick! he worships the stick! they begin to FETISHIZE the stick!!"

crowd could not contain LOLz

i guess i see old school sci-fi freaks as being like trainspotters, or rock polishers, ham radio junkies, avid fly fishermen, numismatists, bird watchers, etc. weirdos who happened to fetishize this one weird thing, but who weren't, for the most part, fetishizing their own ostracism (consequence of poor socialization). if anything, they seemed to be trying to escape it. perhaps that's an overly romantic notion.

tlg, totally start that thread

no actually contenderizer i think you're on to something esp w/r/t bronies

but then i wouldn't exactly put rock polishers, ham radio junkies, fishermen, birdwatchers and numismatists in the same category

a lot of rock polishers are geologists and gemnologists whose hobby is an outgrowth of their work

birdwatchers are nature enthusiasts and might belong in the same category as dudes who make lists of technical bouldering spots in their state they have to hit up

fishermen consider themselves sportsmen and in any case they eat and/or give away the fish they catch

trainspotters and numismatists might be closest, but afaict they're not writing slashfic about their pursuits

i think the comparison to old-school sci-fi fandom might be closest, or perhaps even to comic books. there seems to something about slashfic that is crucial to understanding the brony thing and my understanding is that slashfic dates back to ... the 70s? late 70s?

but slashfic has definitely picked up in popularity, esp if you count something like the millions of licensed novels about every last character in the mos eisley cantina or in the bowels of deep space 9

all those things you mention lack the infantilism of mlp. MLP reminds me of people who dress up like a pirate on "talk like a pirate day" or were in a "ninja" club in college. Scifi nerd-dom or even comic nerd-dom aren't this weird childish thing, they're just things than teenage nerds like as well.

infantilism and wish-fulfilment fantasies

given everything I know about bronyism, dude, it is NOT just about the ponies

Ultimately I think there are a ton of people out there in well-off countries who have strong logical skills but aren't very intelligent otherwise. And all of those people find their way onto the internet. And we've all been through high school, I would guess most of them are outcasts who cynically disregard everything they're supposed to learn and look for like-minded people on SomethingAwful or Reddit to teach them the "true way"; in other words the emotionally stunted teaching the emotionally stunted. You know, the three A's: Ayn Rand, Atheism, and ron pAul. I was the same way for a while when it came to poker; I like to think of it as more useful than watching pony cartoons because I was at least able to put myself through school that way. But the 2+2 boards were like, 10% well-adjusted, intelligent individuals (and many of them were successful) and 90% were your typical goon/brony/Reddit "men's rights" enthusiast, and I doubled down on this by posting a lot on the sports/sports betting forums which were more like 100% these people. You know, people who would screencap girls they show in the crowd on TV, then other idiots who would say things like "her nose is lolhueg, 5/10, I bang chicks hotter than that every week" And you get a thrill out of it, being able to talk in terms that your average person (you know, the people who rejected you in high school or think you're strange) would never understand, about something they probably wouldn't be any good at. Yes I know this is a distorted view of the world. And I know that plenty of people here with frogbs.txt saved on their HD probably think "dude, you ARE that guy". But I always had good friends and people to drink with, and in all honesty that kind of saved my life in a manner of speaking. I was never really an outcast. I stopped being bullied in 4th grade. I always was kind of on the fringe. Like, I've always had good friends on both sides of the spectrum. I look at my stepbrother now and wonder about his future - he's 18, drives a Mustang his Dad bought for him, and spends his life on Reddit and Facebook posting about how much he hates Christians, how he hates his sister talking to her newborn baby "like a retard" while he plays Call of Duty, how his Dad (who has cancer!!) is an idiot, how the whole world is wrong and how people like him are the only ones with any real values. I don't know if he has a single friend that he knows in real life. It's just so much easier to dismiss other points of view than it is to try to learn something from them. Plus, it's good for your ego, and you've got dozens of online friends who will back you up. Like, this guy NEEDS to be a brony right now. Okay, what he really needs is to get wasted and get out of his shell and actually have fun interacting with live people, but in his mind, this is a big ass deal. If my brony-littered FB feed told me anything, it's that they do fetishize poor socialization because apparently to interact with them on a normal (or illogical) level is to sell out part of what makes you better than anyone else. If you do speak, speak only in memes that nobody understands, because that only reinforces how much more advanced you are. And so on.

who have strong logical skills but aren't very intelligent otherwise

???

it happens

idk but this is a nerd culture based specifically around the idea of socialization? it's right there in the show title: "friendship is magic."

it's a community thing

i'd love that general nerd thread

i work in a videogame studio

i got opinions

idk but this is a nerd culture based specifically around the idea of socialization?

socialization with other bronies, sure

I think we mean not "socializing" but "make (someone) behave in a way that is acceptable to their society" (New Ox. Am. Dict. via OS X)

tl:dr

you should r, it was intersting

As a huge computer nerd during my teenage years I really didn't give any thought to how i was perceived by society at large and really didn't give a shit, so long as i could go home from school and make Doom II levels and browse some BBSes then i was totally fine with it.

In a way, maybe i was living in a golden era, before the internet, before i could be friends with other people that shared my interests. Complete isolation and complete immersion in whatever minutiae i was obsessed with.

BBSes are internet!