"All the Pretty Little Ponies": Bronies, Desire, and Cuteness
Justin Mullis2017, The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness
This essay will approach the topic of cuteness by examining the controversial subject of erotic and pornographic fan-art featuring the cute characters of the hit animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010-Present) created by adult male fans, popularly known as Bronies. A fascinating phenomena in the history of pop-culture fandoms, Bronies, who The Washington Post characterizes as the “unusual demographic of mostly 20-something, mostly [heterosexual] white men” who unabashedly love a show about big-eyed, candy-colored ponies made for elementary-school aged girls, have sustained an astounding amount of media coverage in the past five years following their emergence. Such widespread and long term media coverage has thrust the Brony fandom into the public eye and transformed them, as journalist Emily Manuel of the Global Comment puts it, into “figures of fascination and derision in equal measures.” Among such commentators the most popular assertion, made by both supporters and detractors, is that these adult male fan’s affection for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic should be understood as an indication of shifting and generally more egalitarian attitudes among young men with regards to the gendering of pop-culture media. However, I will argue that such a view is at best naïve being derived from wishful thinking and an inadequate understanding of Brony fandom, its origins, influences, history, and practices – most notably the creation, circulation, and “use” of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic erotic and pornographic fan-art featuring the show’s cute female equine characters. In making this argument, I will adopt an intertexual approach thinking alongside a combination of American and Japanese scholars including Hiroki Azuma, Henry Jenkins, Setsu Shigematsu, Joanne Hollows, and Toru Honda, contending that Bronies’ explicitly sexual attraction to the cute characters of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is better understood as an American manifestation of a cultural phenomenon previously recognized in Japan as moé (萌え); originating in 1970s and 80s otaku (i.e. geek) culture in which adult male fans become sexually attracted to the cute fictional female characters found in various pop-culture media such as anime and manga. Like the ponies from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the cute female characters who inhabit “moé culture” are often anthropomorphized versions of such things as animals, machines, or even world nations and typically originate from children’s anime and manga, thus necessitating fans who wish to explore sexual encounters with such characters to do so through the medium of fan-art or fan-fiction. Moreover I will contend that it precisely the “animesque” style of Hasbro’s current My Little Pony series which has made it a prime target for such erogenous imaginings as evident by both Bronies’ summary rejection of all prior non-anime influenced iterations of the My Little Pony brand outside the current Friendship is Magic incarnation and manga critic Itō Gō’s contention that it is only the cute aesthetic unique to manga and anime which possesses the natural eroticism necessary to titillate the imaginations of these fans. Furthermore this understanding of Brony fandom also explains the media’s persistent interest in and often conflicted embracement of the Bronies since any manifestation of “moé culture” can be seen as acting in opposition to what queer theorist Lee Edelman identifies as the all-pervasive American ideology of “reproductive futurism” which views the ultimate aim of adult life, love, and marriage as the production and upbringing of children. However as psychoanalyst Tamaki Saitō notes, because fans, like Bronies, maintain a “persistent attraction to [the] ‘transitional objects’” of childhood – such as cute characters in the form of cartoons and toys – such individuals effectively blur the lines between the cultural categories of childhood and adulthood resulting in them being viewed as an impediment to the narrative of “reproductive futurism” with the logic being that since such individuals are, for all intents and purposes, still children themselves they are clearly neither capable nor prepared to have and properly raise children of their own. Using the theoretical insights of the aforementioned scholars in understanding Brony fandom as an American manifestation of moé in conjunction with the statistical analysis of psychologists Patrick Edwards and Marsha H. Redden (“the nation’s premiere bronyologists”), and my own ethnographic research into the Brony community along the East Coast and from Texas to Chicago, I will argue that what one finds at work amongst Bronies is not an embracement of a more egalitarian view of pop-culture media but rather an attempt to establish what cultural anthropologist Patrick W. Galbraith calls “a space of autonomous [male hetero-]sexuality” via the colonization and sexualization of a show originally intended to empower young girls, an aim which can be seen as both sexist and fundamentally narcissistic in nature, though the question remains if this is necessarily a negative.
