The Broney Phenomenon 2: Introspection

NOTE: There's one more question that I forgot to mention in the closing of the previous entry, "How can I use this for personal gain/evil?" Personal gain and evil are the two things I know the most about, so there will be a special entry devoted to this, to cap the end of this series.

On with the show.

Today's topic: "WHAT IS HAPPENING!? IT FEELS LIKE MY SOUL IS DYING!"

Those are my own words, and I meant them. My existing conceptions about my own psychology have been sorely tested by these past three weeks. Watching My Little Pony has induced a crisis of faith that shook me deeply. (Believe it or not, I am actually going to recommend trying it yourself later in this article.)

The American culture is a culture built on marketing. From an early age, numerous groups attempt to influence what type of person we will become, and what sorts of ideals we will strive for, and none of them are as insidious as marketing. In this environment, parents wisely try to teach their offspring to be string willed, independent people, who can resist the mind altering onslaught of Saturday morning's marketing blitz.

I thought my parents had been pretty successful in teaching me to be my own person, and to thumb my nose at other people's ideas of who I should be. They made sure there were dolls mixed in with my collection of toy cars and action figures, and taught me that it was virtuous to be beaten by my peers for failing to fit in(something I did quite often as a kid anyway, so it's good that they approved, at least).

I thought I was immune to peer pressure. However, I see now that I was wrong, and even this aggressive campaign of pro-open-mindedness propaganda could not prevent certain prejudices from taking root in my mind, so deeply that letting them go was almost physically painful.

Here's how it went down.

It all started with a funny YouTube link from my brother.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJbAT1wzS8U

From there, it was trivial to find the actual first episodes of the new series Friendship is Magic (It is YouTube).

You know, so I could see the raw material from which the editor crafted his hilarious trailer re-imagining. Surely, it was some artifice on his part that made this look like it could be interesting, right?

So, I didn't exactly go into this with good faith. I clicked on that link the way a gawker runs to the window when he hears a particularly moist motorcycle accident. It was my intention to watch this video so I could laugh at it, and tell other people how bad it was later.

Then something literally incredible happened.

I didn't hate it.

In fact, I enjoyed it, for what it was. I could address the work on it's own terms, and I had a good time.

There was something even stranger, though: I was absolutely horrified by my own enjoyment of this product, and even more deeply horrified by that horror itself.

"If a product is good," I told myself as I buffered up another episode, "why shouldn't a savvy consumer be able to recognize and absorb that good?"

Nevertheless, I could no longer deny my prejudice. I expected this show to be bad, and I was wrong, and that doesn't seem so bad -- bad that expectation had come from a part of my psyche that said that it was okay for me to love GI Joe Resolute (which was also pretty cool) but that My Little Pony was and would always be bad and ineffable. Somewhere inside my mind, there lived and eight year old sexist, and watching this show brought him screaming out of his hidey hole, to throw a massive tantrum.

That's when I decided to kill him.

I've never been a fan of children.

Seriously though, finding this childish pride and prejudice in myself was pretty disturbing. Real men don't need to fret that their actions are childish, or unmanly, and getting hung up on a childish thing like that triggered an infinite loop of childish shame. Clearly this had to stop.

So, I psychically ripped out my cultural shame circuits, and went back to watching my show. "I like it and there's nothing wrong with that, so what else matters!?"

My little brothers think I'm insane.

I've decided to deploy the fact that I like MLP more tactically, in the future. It's one thing to not be ashamed of your media of choice, and it's quite another to tell your co-workers about them. I mean, I don't tell random about my love of Picasso either, but that's about other people's closed-minded hangups, not mine.

The Broney Phenomenon: Introduction

This idea will probably be broken up into several sections. I'll start with the high concept stuff, and then get down into my personal observations and predictions as the series continues.

Popular culture is a mysterious thing; scientists are still, quite literally, trying to figure it out. Trends spring up in days, and with a little nourishment, can snowball into an edifice to endure or even define a decade.

A trend will is born in silence, with isolated people discovering an ability to enjoy something new--often something nobody would have predicted--but once those people find that they are not alone, and that there are others who share their enthusiasm, a fandom is formed and the trend becomes visible.

Fandoms are iceberg like things, with only the most prominent parts being visible without careful study. Also, like icebergs, they can be dangerous, if you assume you understand the whole thing, by looking at a part of it; many a marketing push has been crippled by a decision based on an overly small sample of the audience. Each has a unique raver to lurker ratio, based on a million unique factors, but each one signifies a deeper trend in the overarching culture, and can be used to collect valuable data points about the trends in that culture. Many of these factors are yet mysteries to marketing science, and new insights into the matter are valuable (for making money, if nothing else) in the right hands.

In this series, I'll be making observations on the growth and nature of the newborn "Brony" clique, and what they can tell us about the unexpected ways that Lauren Faust's My Little Pony reboot is trending in general, as well as what those trends tell us about society and modern marketing.

For those of you who haven't heard, a lot of red blooded, American males, aged 18-35, of both sexualities, are finding themselves unexpectedly enjoying My little Pony. (That's right, you're not alone.) For many, this has been an earth shattering revelation. One group of these fans call themselves "Bronies," keying off the irony that men normally expected to only be interested in beer, boobs and ballgames are unexpectedly finding themselves liking something that was intended to appeal to little girls.

People are asking, "Why is this happening!?" "What is happening?!" "Is this even okay!?" Nobody is asking these questions more than the bronies themselves. The men in question often find themselves horrified by their own lack of irrational bias, or dismissive pomposity. Leading the following question to often be, "If it's actually good, why shouldn't men be able to enjoy it?" or more succinctly, "Why not?"

I'll address each of those three questions in a subsequent entry.