The Secret Reason For Bronies

Tags

addiction, animation, art, baby schema, brains, bronies, brony, cute, cuteness, friendship is magic, my little pony, oxytocin, toys

Well, I began my research a while ago now, and I think I’m ready to present my findings.

The show is fine. Every episode has at least one line that is recognizably clever, and it occasionally makes me laugh out loud.

I didn’t find it to be brilliant, though.

Basically, it’s just a cute kid’s show that doesn’t suck.

Sure, people will argue that I need to watch more, and maybe I will, but honestly, I didn’t see anything to obviously explain an enormous fandom of adults, including adult males.

…Except for one thing.

The CUTENESS.

Because, I admit, it is very, very, very, cute.

Sickeningly cute.

Like, “I can’t believe how shamelessly adorable they have made this” levels of cute, from the character design to the little life lesson that comes with every episode.

Now, I have always found My Little Pony to be cute, even back in the days when the ponies actually looked somewhat like real ponies.

But the new anime-style ponies are DISGUSTINGLY cute.

They took something that was already pretty adorable and they ramped up the cuteness by about a zillion notches.

I don’t know if they consciously followed the baby schema, but it worked.

The baby schema is a sort of list of characteristics that scream “baby” to mammals, and which is proven to trigger our instincts for parental affection. It includes characteristics like big eyes, tiny noses, large heads, small bodies, big foreheads and so on.

So, this, basically.

Teddy bears over the years have evolved to fit this schema. They went from looking like this:

…to this:

Well, let’s go back and look at that 1980s My Little Pony again.

Big eyes, big head, short nose… pretty cute, right?

Now look at the modern version:

Next to the Friendship Is Magic version, the eighties one looks positively adult.

So, here’s what I think happened:

The most famous emergence of Bronies as we know them today came from 4chan, of all unlikely places.

A bunch of dudes from 4chan started watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with the intention of mocking the show, after getting all riled up from a post about how children’s shows are made just to hock toys (as if that’s anything new…).

Except the guys got hooked.

They started posting pictures of ponies everywhere.

It started a whole 4chan flame war, largely one sided, where people mocked the Bronies, and the Bronies just responded with pictures of adorable ponies.

Someone has even graphed the emergence of pony presence of 4chan.

And after watching the show, I think I know what happened.

The cuteness messed with their brains.

I’m telling you, after watching a few consecutive episodes, I had serious Pony Brain.

All the next day, unbidden mental images of ponies flitted through my mind on adorable little wings.

And I’m not the only one to report this phenomenon.

Sites like My Little Brony seem to acknowledge it as known fact.

We’re all programmed to fall for cuteness. That’s how babies avoid getting hucked out the window after the third hour of consecutive midnight misery.

The excellent flash animation and the Baby Schema of the character design in MLP: FIM is like Cuteness Crack.

Our brains can’t help but get addicted the sheer adorableness.

Anyone who has fallen in love slowly with a newborn baby can understand this process. At first it’s like “yeah, ok, it’s cute,” and then you’re like, “let me take another look,” and pretty soon you’re like “my child is the cutest thing ever I can’t stop looking…”

And that’s what I found happened to me.

I started craving ponies.

And why did it happen to all of these 4chan males?

Well, honestly, how exposed is the average 30 year old man to cuteness?

Boy toys are much less cute.

GI Joe has adult features, so do Transformers. Most adult men don’t go to cute little baby movies. Most don’t even watch Disney flicks.

So imagine you take this population of people who are completely unexposed to cuteness on a daily basis and then expose them to multiple hours of this:

I think they get hooked.

It’s like exposing the Aztecs to the European diseases of the Conquistadores – they’d just fall in scads.

And I fell prey to it too. All I wanted to do was look at pictures of ponies, especially Rainbow Dash, who I like primarily because she is blue, but also because she’s not girly.

I wanted a little pet Dash to follow me around and live in my pocket. I wanted a little toy one that actually looks like the character instead of like the lifeless, personality-less plastic Hasbro crap.

In other words… I began to know what it is like to be a Brony, and to see why some of these Adorableness Addicts are willing to pay literally thousands of dollars for a toy pony.

And that explains, too, why Bronies have such a reputation for being positive and friendly, for responding to trolls with ponies instead of insults, and even for charitable donation.

Oxytocin (which is released in response to cuteness) makes us more trusting and kind to others.

So, they can justify it all they like by saying it’s the character development, or the voice acting, or the plot, or the humor. All of that is… fine. It’s not a BAD show. It’s cute. It’s occasionally funny.

But I think that the main reason that they like it is that Bronies are just addicted, just the way I am hooked on this face:

And I can tell you that I love Owl because he’s funny, and smart, and loving, and lots of other great things.

But really, I love him because of the oxytocin.

I’ve been off of My Little Pony for a week or two now, and my brain is returning to normal. The pony cravings have stopped.

But will I go back?

Yeah, probably. Even though I don’t think it’s that fantastic.

Just because it’s DARN CUTE.

Happy Face

Tags

art, development, drawing, happy face, toddlers

Owl LOVES drawings of faces. It is his favourite thing. “Draw happy face!” is a command heard multiple times every single day.

He wants us to draw happy face, after happy face, after happy face.

This kid may be an extrovert. He may need a sibling.

And now he’s trying to make his own happy faces. He has seen us draw them so many times that he has the steps down pat:

1. Make circle.
2. Make dots for eyes.
3. Make smile.

Sometimes he adds ears or a hat, when he’s feeling elaborate.

Now, Owl’s artistic skills in general are on par for his age.

He can draw a straight-ish line, or squiggles. If asked to draw, say, an apple, he’s likely to make a single line and say “dere!”.

But his happy faces are getting quite good.

Is it just me or does this look like a tamagotchi?

this one has ears and a “hat”

Smug face

Sad, hunted face

A Rebozo for Easter! And a Giraffe!

Tags

art, baby wearing, chocolate, Easter, gifts, giraffes, rebozo, sewing, short wrap, wraps

Look what my mother made for me! Isn’t it purtiful?

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She made that fringe herself by picking apart the fabric and painstakingly braiding the strings.

Also, Curiosity sent me my prize from her big giveaway! On top of the chocolate bar and surprised-looking giraffe that I was promised, I also recieved a sketch of my family with a disinterested badger. That photo didn’t quite come out, but I’m including it anyway.

The creepy thing is the giraffe looks exactly the way I imagined it. What do you call deja vu with a giraffe?

Spot the Dog

Tags

art, dogs, pictures

Whenever I’m in an art gallery, as my husband and I were today, I am always drawn to the way that dogs pop up, like Waldo, in so many old paintings, especially crowd scenes.

My relationship with dogs is a fairly unique one, nowadays. Thanks to the nature of my job, spending a day in the mall with a dog at my side is just another day. Everyone has to take their work home with them now and then, but when I have to bring work home with me, I end up dragging it along on grocery shopping excursions and to the movie theatres, too. Just as someone will check their wrist for the time even if their watch broke a week ago, I sometimes reach for a dog who isn’t there. Even now, though, when having a Labrador with me at the movies or in a restaurant is just like having a bigger, more active purse… I still get a kick out of it. There’s just something which feels inherently right, even natural, about having one dog or another constantly by my side.

Service dogs are one of the fortunate few in today’s society, because they get to go everywhere and spend every day with their favourite person. Most dogs, beloved pets though they may be (as my own pet dog is), are relegated to spending eight or more hours alone every day, while their human companion lives life without them. While women have been fighting to get out of the home, and into the workplace, dogs have been taken out of the workplace, and trapped in the home.

But when I’m in an art gallery or museum, I am reminded that it wasn’t always so.

There are very few depictions of dogs in art alone. While the aesthetic appeal of a bowl of fruit, a loaf of bread, or a statuesque stallion seems to be ageless, man’s best friend does not get many portraits to himself. But he is everywhere. In almost any room of any art gallery, I can almost guarantee you that a dog will be hanging out at someone’s feet, in a rich lady’s arms, prancing around the heels of a horse or even…

POOING in a mural IN THE LOUVRE

Dogs are everywhere. Next time you’re in a museum, look for the dogs, and you’ll wonder how you missed them before. Today, in a Dutch Artists exhibition in the art gallery, I saw a small boy being dragged along by his spaniel, who had clearly found a fascinating rabbit trail. I saw another young boy with his arm draped around a greyhounds neck. I saw a small terrier on a kitchen floor while a mother searched for nits in her child’s hair. I saw a puppy being cradled in a lady’s arms. In a picture of a horse fair, I counted no less than nine dogs dodging around hooves and feet. Almost anywhere where there were people, there were dogs. They weren’t the subject of the piece, and almost never even worth mentioning in the blub that the museum posted next to each picture describing the artist and the relevance of the particular work. Dogs weren’t beautiful or exciting enough to be the subjects of much art, but they were so intrinsically linked to people that artists couldn’t paint a crowd scene without adding dogs.

And now we leave them at home alone, and they are forbidden to go in public places, unless they are classified as police or guide animals. Even in outdoor parks and streets they are allowed ON leash IF you clean up after them and have them properly licensed. They used to be our constant companions, something not even noteworthy – just there- but now there are many stores and churches who allow even qualified service dogs with very bad grace.

Have we forgotten so quickly?

The dog may be man’s best friend, but he has been the friend that we take for granted, and never even notice until he isn’t there any more.