Brony

End of the brony golden age? Angst among adult fans of My Little Pony as community declines

The decline of brony culture might have been inevitable, fads tend to fade, but for some unlikely fans of My Little Pony, the novelty is simply maturing

VANCOUVER, B.C. — Max Gardiner watched his first episode of My Little Pony on Nov. 17, 2011. “Don’t ask,” he said. “I’m good with dates.”

It wasn’t the most memorable episode. It was partway into the show’s second season, and the story was about a young pony desperate to have some special talent who learns that good things come to those who wait. The show always offers a lesson.

Early in his last year of high school, Gardiner was going through a rough patch. A fan of routine, he was now applying to university, approaching the moment when he would graduate and everything would change.

“I grew up in North Van, both my parents have degrees, everyone from my high school went to university. It was one of those high schools,” he said. “It was just very stressful.”

So on a dull Thursday night, Gardiner turned to something completely different. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic — the full title of the current series — was happy and colourful and upbeat. He watched an episode, and then another, and then a couple more. “And I just kind of got hooked from there.”

It became a new routine. He’d get up early on Saturday mornings to watch new episodes and dissect them in real time on internet forums with a growing online community of the show’s adult fans. Because the program aired in the U.S. months before coming to Canada, he would sometimes just be watching a livestream from a webcam pointed at someone’s TV south of the border.

Bronies listen attentively to Andrea Libman (image on screen), voice actor for Pinky Pie on the My Little Pony television cartoon show, at the Brony Expo held at West Edmonton Mall’s Fantasyland Hotel in Edmonton on July 5, 2014. Larry Wong / Edmonton Journal

Bronies — a portmanteau of “bro” and “ponies” that refers to the mostly male adult fans of American toy company Hasbro’s latest reincarnation of My Little Pony — emerged as a strange phenomenon in the first years after the show began. What started as a largely online community quickly broke through into the real world as fans organized conventions and began making and selling artwork and toys based on the show. The largest brony convention, BronyCon, exploded from just 100 guests in June 2011 to more than 10,000 in Baltimore in the summer of 2015.

In those early years, the fandom’s visibility was sustained by a barrage of media coverage that ranged in tone from curiosity to alarm. “Is this the end of American manhood?” cried the American Conservative in 2014.

Eight years after Friendship Is Magic premiered on Oct. 10, 2010 (10-10-10, for those in the know), the show still seems to fill a prominent role in Gardiner’s life. The living room of his East Vancouver apartment features a glass display case filled with My Little Pony plushies and plastic figurines. There’s a poster of the main pony characters on his wall, signed by most of the series’ principal voice actors. He can still spend several hours a week watching old episodes, or letting them play in the background.

For 7 amazing years, this fandom has come together to help us host an amazing event. Next year will be our last BronyCon. Join us for a 4-day party, August 1-4, 2019 in Baltimore! Visit https://t.co/k6aY1p950o

— BronyCon (@BronyCon) July 29, 2018

But the brony fandom is now shrinking almost as fast as it grew and conventions, including BronyCon, are shutting down. Eight years in, the novelty seems to have worn off. It’s also widely believed the show’s next season will be its last, and the future beyond that is uncertain.

Now 24 years old, Gardiner doesn’t get up early on Saturdays anymore. He recently finished his master’s degree and has started a new job. He feels more stable. He used to be able to name every episode of every season, but not anymore. And if he just stumbled onto the show now, he said, he’s not sure he’d become a fan.

“I think it’s become more of an entertainment product than a lifestyle. I definitely watch it for fun versus as an escape,” he said. “I’m, like, trying to get into real life now.”

***

A lot of bronies tell versions of the same story. They didn’t intend to like My Little Pony. They started watching to make fun of it, and then they kept watching. And kept watching.

At the centre of this phenomenon is 4chan, the murky online imageboard that thrives on anonymity. The first posts about My Little Pony appeared on 4chan in the days after the show launched, as did the term “brony.” As the legend goes, what started as a joke swiftly turned earnest, and the volume of pony content on 4chan quickly became so overwhelming that one moderator tried to ban it altogether. So the bronies went elsewhere, creating their own internet forums and online communities.

Afion, a Vancouver brony who spoke to the National Post on the condition it refer to him by the name of his My Little Pony character (many bronies create their own original characters, which become the identities by which they know each other online), was one of those early 4chan converts. At first, he found the show “really, really cheesy,” he said. Then he found himself liking the writing and the characters. About six episodes in, he realized he was watching it “unironically.”

Informal surveys suggest that at the peak of the fandom in 2014, bronies were at least 80 per cent male and 75 per cent single, mostly in their teens and 20s and living with their parents, and overwhelmingly white and straight. Some bronies say the community also attracted a large number of people with disabilities, especially autism. Many, like Gardiner, say the show makes them feel happy and comforted.

Bronies often identify with one character, especially from among the six main ponies, all female, with distinct personalities and foibles: Fluttershy is timid, Rarity is a drama queen, and so on. From the start, there was speculation that the interest from young men was primarily sexual — and that’s certainly part of it for some, as is clear from the huge volume of sexually explicit online artwork and stories. Tabatha Hughes, a 27-year-old former chair of Canada’s sole brony convention, BronyCAN, said some bronies come to see the show as a kind of caretaker. “If someone’s a very important part of your life and they’ve shown you kindness, sometimes people will interpret that as sexual desire and romantic feeling,” she said. “So I think that kind of happened with ponies.” But that’s not at the core of the fandom, she insisted. Most bronies really just like the show.

Still, if it was the show that attracted young adult fans, it was the community that kept them. “I probably would have only lasted maybe not even till the third season if it was just about myself,” said Afion. “It was mostly because of the friends.”

In the show’s heyday, that community grew like wildfire. Gardiner can remember a time when the main My Little Pony discussion page on internet forum reddit was gaining thousands of subscribers each week. Increasingly, he said, this is what the fans of many popular shows want — not just to passively watch, but to feel like they’re part of something, too. “Engaged viewership,” he called it. “It’s the idea that big series like Game of Thrones, people don’t just watch it and then go away. They watch it and then they want to go discuss with all the other fans.”

But online communities offer more than that. Trapa Civet, BronyCAN’s former treasurer, a 38-year-old who used his character name, became a furry — a member of a much broader community for fans of a whole range of animal characters — after seeing The Lion King when he was 17, at the start of the internet era. For Trapa, facing the shame of feeling that a Disney movie had changed his life, the internet offered a lifeline. “Suddenly I have a place to belong,” he said. “Suddenly you have this group of people who are ostensibly validating your existence.”

When Friendship is Magic ends, then, it won’t just put a stop to the flow of new content. It will take away a massive online community’s raison d’être. On the forums today, the angst is clear. “Just because a show ends doesn’t mean all these friends you’ve made and things you have built will disappear,” wrote one user on Equestria Daily, the largest My Little Pony fan site, in December 2017. “As long as we keep celebrating pony, we can keep this going long into the future.”

Still, things are already changing. Trapa said he’s lost contact with a lot of his former brony friends since BronyCAN ended in 2017. “It’s not due to lack of desire. That’s just the way life works,” he said. “Real life starts to sneak in there.”

Rob Harrison dressed in a Rainbow Dash costume from My Little Pony in North Vancouver, B.C., on Sept. 15, 2018. Mark Yuen/Postmedia

***

In the food court at Metrotown, an enormous shopping mall in suburban Burnaby, Afion and a dozen other bronies cluster together on a few couches, eating and chatting on a Saturday afternoon. Several are wearing My Little Pony T-shirts. Some carry plushies of their favourite characters. They seem largely immune to the looks of passers-by.

“A lot of people watch the show to cope, that’s one thing,” said Adrian, a 16-year-old with a pair of headphones slung around his neck and a small plushie of the character Rainbow Dash. He rocked back and forth nervously as he spoke. (He asked that the Post not use his last name out of privacy concerns.)

Adrian is a relative newcomer to the brony fandom — he only began watching the show in 2017, after his father died. There was an episode about grieving that helped, he said. Before he died, Adrian’s dad used to tell him that My Little Pony was a little girls’ show, but Adrian now believes it’s for everyone. “Actually give something a try before you judge it,” he said.

In the early days, the brony community existed mostly online, but with the advent of conventions, internet bonds turned into real-life friendships. Between conventions, groups of bronies often gather at local meet-ups like this one.

A lot of people watch the show to cope, that’s one thing

The devotion of younger fans like Adrian is tinged with regret at having missed the peak of the brony fandom — the “golden age,” said 22-year-old Aric, who was wearing a BronyCon T-shirt from his first Baltimore convention last year, which he said was one of the best times of his life. Though he’s been watching the show for years, Aric didn’t have the money to go to the conventions until recently. Now, it feels like his last chance. BronyCon will end this year due to declining numbers — attendance has halved since 2015 — and Vancouver’s BronyCAN is already gone.

Aric, whom the Post is also referring to by his first name because of privacy concerns, credits the show with getting him some more friends and making him a little less shy. “During summer break in high school, I used to sit in front of my computer for 17 hours a day, doing nothing, browsing the internet. It was really sad,” he said. “I can’t ever forget this.”

Many older bronies have their own stories about how the show and the community changed their lives. Hughes was working in a restaurant, “making minimum wage, tossing salads and chopping carrots,” when she discovered My Little Pony. She was introduced to the show by her boyfriend at the time, who got her to help organize the 2013 BronyCAN. Two years later, she was chairing the convention. “It just taught me what I’m capable of,” she said.

Today, Hughes works as operations manager for a tech company, a startup whose CEO is also a brony. She and her boyfriend live in a small house in New Westminster. She recently finished her diploma, and things are busy. She thought she’d last watched My Little Pony around Christmas 2017, but she couldn’t be sure. “I think a lot of people might have had that grow-up moment,” she said. “And it could be that a lot of these people required the fandom in order to kind of have that change in their life.”

***

It can be expensive to be a brony. Travelling to and from conventions alone can cost hundreds of dollars, but many devoted bronies have also amassed large collections of merchandise, including plushies, artwork, figurines and sometimes full pony outfits. These aren’t just children’s toys. Hughes spent $300 on a watercolour of Rarity, her favourite character. Gardiner has a custom-made plushie of an original pony he designed called Maxwell Citybuilder, which cost him $400. It’s a bit of a status symbol at conventions, he said. He and his friends all have high-end plushies. “We called ourselves the high-rollers.”

As the bronies have gotten older, Gardiner has started to see a different type of merchandise appearing at conventions, including bath towels embroidered with pony symbols. “It’s kind of the march of life, right?” he said.

This is one of the peculiar quirks of the brony fandom: the show’s adult fans, apparently drawn to it for its messages about friendship and acceptance, are also obsessed with accumulating stuff. Expensive stuff. This, of course, is the whole point of the show. Hasbro created My Little Pony for girls in 1981, and has released four generations of the toys since then. The accompanying TV shows are simply clever marketing for the toys. Still, Hasbro didn’t expect to be met with legions of adult fans, and initially didn’t seem to know what to do with them. As a result, many bronies buy their merchandise not from Hasbro, but from fan artists who create higher-quality products.

Rob Harrison shows off his My Little Pony collection at his North Vancouver, B.C., home. Mark Yuen/Postmedia

Hasbro eventually came around to the bronies, and has begun selling higher-end collectibles to its adult fans. The company has embraced the bronies in other ways, too. The show’s voice actors and series creator Lauren Faust often appear at brony conventions. Several episodes feature inside jokes that only bronies will catch.

But it can be a testy relationship. The bronies get upset when Hasbro is too transparent about using the show to sell toys. The Season 3 finale caused outrage when Twilight Sparkle, the central character, suddenly grew wings — a lazy attempt to boost sales, fans decided. They still talk about it today.

Some argue that the money is one reason for the fandom’s decline, as the bronies face new financial responsibilities. “I think, ultimately, the fandom was created for teens and tweens, and eventually mom and dad’s money ran out,” said Trapa.

***

To some extent, the decline of the brony fandom was inevitable. The show is eight seasons old and the sheen is wearing off. Some bronies grumble about how the writing isn’t as good anymore, or about how the focus has shifted away from the six main characters to a growing cast of lesser ponies.

Added to that, a slew of unintended email leaks from Hasbro in December 2017 signalled that the show may be coming to an end after Season 9, to make way for the next generation of My Little Pony toys. The revelation sent shockwaves through the community, now facing an existential threat. “A lot of it is a sense that Generation 4… was kind of lightning in a bottle,” said Gardiner. “Everything went exactly perfect, and that won’t ever happen again.”

But many also believe the frenzied heights of the brony fandom in 2014 and 2015, which Hughes compared to a Silicon Valley start-up, were never sustainable. “We saw a lot of people who maybe were just interested in the one convention to see what it was. Maybe a little bit of curiosity,” she said. “And I don’t think we had as many dedicated fans as we thought we did.”

BronyCAN opened in 2013 to 850 guests, and peaked at more than 1,000. But attendance soon started to drop off, and by the end, they struggled to break even, Trapa said. He believes part of the issue is that bronies are so narrowly focused on a single TV show with an expiry date. “This is the first time I’ve been involved in a fandom that I know is going to die,” he said.

***

Rob Harrison is a brony who is surrounded by his My Little Pony collection at his North Vancouver, B.C. home. Mark Yuen/Postmedia

Many bronies don’t like to talk about the fandom dying. They don’t see it that way — to them, it’s just levelling off. “I’m definitely as into the show as I was from the start,” said Rob Harrison. “I would say probably even more so at this point.”

At 38, Harrison is fighting perhaps harder than any other Vancouver brony to keep the fandom alive. After BronyCAN closed in 2017, he decided to start up a new convention, on a smaller scale, that he hopes will be sustainable. The Vanhoover Pony Expo launched on Jan. 11 and will run through the weekend, in defiance of those who say “the pony ride is over.”

Gregarious and confident, more outgoing than many bronies, Harrison makes a good spokesperson for his cause. His tiny basement apartment in North Vancouver is cluttered with plushies, figurines and a pirate airship from last year’s My Little Pony feature film.

I’m definitely as into the show as I was from the start

Harrison recognizes that without the conventions, some friendships won’t survive. A lot of bronies worry about that. When BronyCAN ended, Trapa said, “people realized they might have friends that they’ll never see again. And that’s pretty tough.”

Many of the bronies that organized BronyCAN are on board to help with Harrison’s new convention, even those that aren’t quite as attached to the fandom anymore. Gardiner, Hughes and Trapa are all involved. They want it to work.

If Harrison worries that his mission is a little quixotic, that he’s trying to resurrect a moment that’s already passed, he doesn’t show it. He says he’s just doing it for the community. “Are they growing up? I don’t know,” he said. “I think the whole point of this is that none of us will ever grow up who are interested in something like this.”

Gardiner, too, hopes the new convention will last. He doesn’t like change, even though he recognizes that an important chapter is drawing to a close. He’s planning to go to Baltimore this year, to send off the mother of all brony conventions with a bang. There’s no way to escape what that represents.

“It’s kind of a symbolic end to the fandom,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a moment in time that’s never going to happen again.”

• Email: mforrest@postmedia.com | Twitter: MauraForrest

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Bronies, Trans, and How to Change Society

Alexandra, a 30-something friend of mine, recently introduced me to a subculture known as “Bronies.” A Brony is a guy who is into the world of “My Little Pony.”

Bronies at a Brony Convention

I confess that my memory of My Little Pony was limited to the girl toys from the 1980’s that a cartoon was made to sell. Seems like it did well, but I don’t recall much other than it existed.

Turns out it not only did well, but it morphed over the years through a few iterations until Lauren Faust developed her friendship-centric version of the show that has now exploded into a huge following. The fans of My Little Pony are still mostly female, but a large number of young men have entered their fandom with as much enthusiasm as any Trekker, Potterhead, Whovian, or Star Wars fan.

Alexandra helps with Brony Conventions and commented that there are a lot of transgender people who attend them. She handed me a DVD documentary titled Bronies — The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. I watched it and was quite moved by the similarity of the struggle for acceptance that is shared by Bronies and transgender people.

The documentary followed the paths of several Bronies to their first attendance of a BronyCon. Among them were one British fellow with an autistic condition formerly known as “Asperger's,” a chubby American boy that reminded me a lot of Bobby from King of the Hill, and another young man who drove a tan sedan with My Little Pony stickers on it.

So what struck me in the DVD?

The young man in the sedan told a story about pulling up to a gas pump, and then being boxed in front and back by pickup trucks. Assholes (and this is a time when name-calling is warranted) got out, started calling him names, smashed in his windows with a baseball bat, and began waving a rifle around. The Brony got into his car, damaged the side as he pulled out and sped away to home.

Bad enough … except that he had to lie to his parents about how the car was damaged to not incur even greater anger about his passion.

Does that sound like anything a transgender person has encountered?

The chubby American boy, who was about 13, started watching My Little Pony and got hooked, but didn’t dare tell his parents. When he heard of a My Little Pony convention of guys who were like him, he knew he had to go. With a lot of false starts on trying to “come out” to his mom, she eventually figured it out. Both were very concerned about his dad, whom both of them described in this hesitating way: “He is …(pause)….conservative.”

Does that sound like any story a transgender teen might have experienced?

The British Brony was a bit more interesting. Because of his condition, he avoided crowds and was very insular. He very seldom left his home. When he saw My Little Pony, he also got hooked on the themes of friendship and knew he had to make an odyssey to the BronyCon in America. Overcoming many social fears and the obstacles they present, he made it, and by the end of the convention, felt empowered and thrilled to finally feel “accepted” by a community just as he is.

Does that sound familiar to any transgender person who has found a group of transgender and/or openly accepting and affirming people?

The documentary went on to describe one other thing, and it’s something that has been niggling at my mind about all of us who live on the social fringe.

One other Brony featured in the story was a boy with serious health problems that prevents him from being able to do most of what any healthy person can. He would have loved to go to a BronyCon, and his loving mother would have gladly done so, but it wasn’t physically possible. When his Brony kin heard of this, they began fundraising money to help. They were able to raise quite a lot of money and even had one of the vocal stars of the show present the check and toys to the boy in-person. They brought the essence of the convention and community to him.

Still makes me teary-eyed to think of it.

Why?

The reason is this: The Bronies united to help someone less well off than themselves. They demonstrated the essence of My Little Pony friendship.

Those of us on the fringe are so used to being harassed and ostracized that we try and try and try to make other people understand that while we are different, we are not a threat. We have non-profits who support us and lobbyists who try to help change laws for us. We have churches and businesses we try to support because they welcome us.

Us.

Sometimes we get so overwhelmed in trying to sort out our own problems, that we forget just how powerful we can be when we unite to “do good” for someone else. I don’t think we should ever stop trying to advocate for our social rights, but I think we would do well to not simply tell people that we aren’t a threat to society. We should show them that we are the opposite.

Perhaps there are ways we can join together to make collective, positive differences for others and “show” people that trans people may be different — but we care about others, too.

If you’re aware of any such efforts, add a link to your comments. I’d love to hear of them.

Pony Nationalism and the Furred Reich: Inside the Alt-Furry's Online Zoo

Does it come as a surprise that the alt-right would identify themselves with beasts?

By now Pepe the frog, grotesque comic muse and focal point of widespread "meme magic," has become something of a household name. But a closer look at the alt-right reveals conservative animals of all stripes, a veritable zoo of foxes and wolves, mythical creatures and pastel-colored ponies led by a furry Trump, cast as an extremely smug-looking anthropomorphized lion.

I'm talking, of course, about alt-furries and alt-bronies, the mere mention of which is enough to provoke eye rolling and wholehearted despair in members of both the political left and right.

Personally I was baffled by the contradictions within a movement which preaches tolerance for fursuits and "yiffing" (furry sex), but which rails against Islam and Black Lives Matter. I also worried that I'd be offering the furry alt-right a free pass, by inviting them to explain themselves. Still, this unlikely faction goes some way to explaining absurdities of the broader movement, which—for all its gross-out humor and ragged edges—appears to be gaining mainstream credibility.

Within furry fandom it's difficult to separate hyperbole from reality, even more so when applied to those furries with alt-right politics.

Often placed at the lowest tier of the "geek hierarchy," furry fandom—people who identify with anthropomorphized animal characters they play-act as online and in "fursuit" costumes—has long attracted ridicule. The subculture, based largely online but branching into annual conventions, took root in 1970s comics like Fritz the Cat and fanzines like FurNography and Yarf!. Later, bulletin board systems such as FurNet and Usenet's alt.fan.furry hosted the furries, along with IRC networks including FurNet and Anthrochat.

Mainstream media has rarely shown furries in a good light, dating back to Vanity Fair's 2001 exposé of the Midwest FurFest, the wonderfully titled Pleasures of the Fur, which dwelled on the sexual side of furry fandom, its rampant plushophilia and deviancy. Within furry fandom it's difficult to separate hyperbole from reality, even more so when applied to those furries with alt-right politics.

I spoke to several members of alt-furry and the brony right in Twitter DMs to get a clearer picture of the movement. In offline life, BroniesForTrump/@GWSSDelta is an accountant living in the state of Delaware. Online, he's a right wing brony and a member of a chat group called the Horse Reich. Inspired by Trump, he joined Twitter in February 2016 and quickly found his niche: "I loved the idea of embracing my identity, and not being afraid to express myself in fear of SJWs," he said.

@GWSSDelta sees the alt-right as accepting of groups neglected by traditional conservatism, including LGBT people, women and, of course, bronies. When questioned about the contradictions in some of his ideas—it seems quite a leap to find inspiration for a "furred reich" in My Little Pony, a children's cartoon which preaches that "friendship is magic,"—@GWSSDelta wrote that the more sinister jokes made by alt-bronies about gas chambers are "all in good jest," in the vein of outrage-heavy 4chan humor.

While claiming that Nazi furry culture isn't serious, however, @GWSSDelta proudly noted that even alt-right leader Richard Spencer "disavowed" the alt-furries in a Reddit AMA, apparently due to them being too extreme. He also wrote that, while Spencer is "a bit further to the right than me," he's not actually advocating for white supremacy: "To be honest, I really feel like people overreact to him, and try to paint their opponents as boogiemen. You need to step back and view the Trump phenomenon as our culture under attack. Like howHillary criticized WWE when she went to Saudi Arabia." (Clinton did in fact criticize pro wrestling as "counter purposes to what we truly are as Americans," though it was in conversation with an Afghan general, rather than on a trip to the Middle East.)

This exchange left me with more questions than answers. @GWSSDelta was framing the election as a culture war; did Hillary's attack on WWE wrestling cost her the election? Could My Little Pony, in turn, have helped Trump win? And returning to my subject, it's true that it's hard out there for a brony, but how can that justify calling for a "National Socialist Party" under Trump? And how much of this is meaningless trolling? I found myself hoping that @GWSSDelta was not serious, when he wrote, on voting for Trump, "I just wanted to make sure bronies have a place in Richard Spencer's ethnostate."

Delve into the history of furry fandom and you'll find it's never far from the sinister side of right wing politics.

ThatSleepyPooka/@TheQuQu is an acting spokesman for the alt-furry movement (a pooka, in case you don't know, is a type of shape-shifting hobgoblin or sprite). As with all of the alt-furries/alt-bronies I spoke to, he is male, American ("but of European descent"), and disarmingly well spoken. "Alt-furry is not anything new at all—it's a phenomenon which predates the name," he told me, listing other wings of the alt-right the furries get along with including "the PaulTown wing of the alt-right, the alt-bronies, right-libertarians, nationalists, and even ancaps (anarcho-capitalists) and Randian objectivists."

However alt-furries have clashed with parts of the alt-right, including religious members who "view the rejection of the form of man as idolatry or subversion of god's will," and label furry fandom as a form of degeneracy.

@TheQuQu maintains that fandoms in general tend to lean left: "I often say that the reaction to alt-furry justifies the need for alt-furry... Even the very idea of alt-furry existing is enough to send entire cliques into a virtue-signalling purity spiral." Does this mean alt-furry exists purely to shock? @TheQuQu sees a cycle in action, one in which right wing groups marginalized within fandoms they helped to build break away, form their own groups, and begin the cycle anew. "The only way to break the cycle is to create a subculture that is explicitly right wing. And that's what Alt-Furry did."

"It's not a joke, it's a real thing," said Robin, or @xReklawx, another alt-furry I spoke to who is based in Nashville, Tennessee. "Most furries identify as left-leaning, and alt-furry is something of an answer to that for right wing furs." I asked Robin if "fursonas" make voicing politics easier online. "Oh definitely, but it's not the same kind of freedom you might have as being totally anonymous. Like the difference between reddit and 4chan, I guess."

Robin told me he has little concern for racial discrimination or the upholding of traditional gender roles, and maintains that "most of alt-right and alt-furry are just in it for memes, equality and freedom." How does he make sense of its far-right factions? "There's a section of the alt-right and alt-furry I think you're referring to, basically neo-Nazis who preach that Hitler did nothing wrong? I have nothing to do with those people. They're part of the alt-right and entitled to their opinions, but I personally don't like them."

I wouldn't assume that a majority of the alt-furries and alt-bronies hold far-right beliefs—they're simply a flamboyantly weird, intensely "internet" subculture, one which would struggle to find a home in traditional conservatism. But Trump's ascent has validated them, and victory has (for now) validated Trump, and now the alt-furry and alt-brony communities are drunk on their newfound power to outrage.

Delve into the history of furry fandom and you'll find it's never far from the sinister side of right wing politics. A LiveJournal account called 'Nazi-furs' exists, dating back to 2005, although from reading through posts it's clear it was a fetish community rather than a political one. In a 2007 edition of 2Life magazine, a Jewish publication for the virtual world of Second Life (which at the time had around two million registered accounts, and was at the peak of its popularity), players told of encounters with the "Furzi," a group of furry griefers dressed in SS uniforms who attacked and menaced Jewish players. Eventually the Furzi were reported to Linden Labs, the developer of Second Life, and their leader was banned from the game. Today Nazi furry culture lives on in memes and Twitter accounts, curiously untroubled by censorship, and fan art hosted on furry site FurAffinity or Deviant Art, where occasionally swastikas are swapped out for a black pawprint on a red and white background.

While not every alt-furry or alt-brony identifies with these views, let alone enacts them offline, common themes on the Twitter feeds I browsed through included the belief that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist cell, the claim that the white race is under threat and that the "cultural Marxism" concealed within Disney's Zootopia must be exposed. One alt-brony linked me to an extremely long interview on the white supremacist blog Counter-Currents.com detailing one fan's journey to "pony nationalism." In it, among other things, he states: "I do not feel comfortable around non-whites, mainly because they mostly harbor a desire to kill me for being whitey, on a macro scale if not a personal one."

The things I saw while writing my article left me wanting to erase my browser history and rinse out my eyeballs. Racism is racism, even when it's coming from a pony called "Buttercup Dew."

*

We remain uneasy, as a culture, with how "real" the internet actually is. Do promises, claims or threats made on Twitter carry through to real life? Is it overreacting, for me to take the alt-furries seriously?

And yet this ambiguity between online and offline life is ideal terrain for the fledgling fascist, the "edgy" provocateur who conceals their racism behind layers of disingenuousness and protestations to "free speech." Of course free speech, as a cause, would be important to furries and bronies—without it they could not identify as such at all. But the very importance they invest in words and images proves how seriously they take their online lives. Surely they take their online politics seriously too?

The International Anthropomorphic Research Project is a team of interdisciplinary scientists dedicated to studying the furry subculture. Their 2016 publication FurScience!: A Summary of Five Years of Research from the International Anthropomorphic Research Project surveys over 10,000 furries (credits are given in the opening notes to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, as well as someone who goes by "Malicious Beaver"). The study found that the majority of furries are aged below 25, up to 85 percent identify as male and up to 90 percent are white. 54 percent are atheist or agnostic, and 23 percent are Christian. Within the furry fandom, there's a 21 percent overlap with bronies.

Given these statistics, it's unsurprising that within the fandom many would favour Trump, who was elected by a majority of white, male voters. Perhaps, as with many Trump voters, the fear of a changing world–coupled with the social rejection they have always risked as furries–has led this group to their extremist beliefs.

Researching this piece opened my eyes to the contradictions and discrepancies within the alt-right, a movement borne—to my mind at least—out of a unifying rage rather than any attempt to reinvent Republican politics. This is confirmed by the apparently infinite subdivisions within the movement; outdoing the left's fondness for obscure self-labeling, subdivisions such as the Anime Right, the Trash Right and Beach Boys Twitter coexist on Twitter, spinning out their bizarre conflicts, tweeting about how Hitler was a friend to animals, creating Deviant Art tributes to "Pony Nationalism," and offending the unwitting normies who occasionally stumble into their world.

The internet can do unusual things to the soul. What do the alt-right furries want–mainstream validation? The ethnic cleansing of their online furry worlds? The supremacy of animals over humans? (Do furries dream of their own extinction?)

To me alt-furry betrays a misguided frustration, a longing for an imaginary solution to an imaginary threat. Hiding behind their avatars, these men can cast themselves as underdogs. A "fursona" can become an unlikely—but easy—vessel for intolerance, bizarre as that might sound. We risk allowing hate speech to become palatable, when it is placed in the mouths of ponies.

Editor's note: We've changed the photo on this story to avoid suggesting certain furry costumes.