"Outsider" reactions in the past?

[Taffeta]

Hmph! I hoped you threw that hypocrisy right back in their face Zapper.

I sadly didn't. In my early collecting days I would shut up, deactivate my account on a specific forum and re-introduce myself as a new user. I got my "no fs given" attitude a couple of years later when I realized the TF fans are mostly stereotypical nerds who can't get laid and are resentful of women because of that (they used to haaate female Transformers, too, and would only accept Arcee as a token sexy chick who has to shut up and look after Danny all the time).

It's a wonderful irony that that b-word are a byword now in our community for something unpleasant and not really worthy of our respect.

So some of those TF people who adopted the brony culture are now looked down on by the sad fans of older gen ponies they once mocked.

Karma is a beautiful thing.

[Leave a Whisper]

I love hearing that your toy stand outsold the TMNT one, Elfpony.     

[dragglereeka]

When I originally posted on the Arena, it was around 2005-2008 and everyone was lovely. Despite a few scammers as others have mentioned.
Earlier than that I was just a kid with no internet access, so enjoying ponies in peace

HOWEVER. Adults and children alike (In IRL.) would criticise my hobby. I brought some G3 ponies to school once and bullies took them off me and kicked them around the playground. For some reason, there was this general consensus that MLP was "too young" a toy for me to play with at ages 7-12??? I could talk more about this but I don't wish to be too negative.

I'd like to think that "outsiders" are generally more accepting now. Most people my age now think it's cool to collect vintage toys. And the whole negative Brony stereotype is becoming a thing of the past.

[SpacePinto]

Not technically "pre mid-2000s", but between 2006 and 2009 I used to browse tons of pony videos on YouTube and tons of pony fanart on Deviantart and Furaffinity, and whenever there was a comment by someone not into MLP, it was usually friendly and non-judgemental. I even had pony avatars on several non-pony-related message boards during that time and nobody had any problem with that. The first time I started seeing signficant negativity towards pony fans from general public was during the G4 era.

[Taffeta]

Funny what you say about 'too young', dragglereeka.

I went to a small village school and I played with ponies, as did my friend, up till year 6 (age 11 for those outside the UK). But in the final year another nearby village school closed and the kids came to ours. And some of THOSE kids acted like that. I ignored them, however one went to my secondary school and would constantly talk about how babyish we were in primary school.

Hence why I never disclosed playing with ponies or collecting them in secondary school and probably why I put my ponies in the attic for a year during year 7. I did play with sister after that, because Naynie is 6 years younger than me, almost, so she was 5 or 6 when I was 11, and I could be a good sister doing that. But my ponies were shut away whenever I had friends over, even when they were brought down from the loft, and any ponies around the house were associated with my sister.

Sad really.

[dragglereeka]

Yeah, it is sad really Taffeta. I'm glad now we're adults we can just enjoy things without fear of judgement 

[banditpony]

This is a bit about toy collecting in general.

It's hard for me to imagine non-collectors being "accepting" because I just didn't see that. There is certainly a strong "you are too old for that" attitude that starts when kids are still *kids* from their peers and adults. Kids will absolutely bully other kids for liking toys, even if they are in the appropriate age range.

I heard negative comments said to my uncle by family members for the BOY toys he collected in the 80s/90s as a teen and young adult. Most of it was "too old" comments, but I was a kid absorbing it. I want to say that I think the "too old" comments can be damaging. I felt like everything I liked and enjoyed had to be hidden, and it was really destructive to my mental health. My own family was always supportive, but I was scared of what other people thought of me. Maybe some people can let that roll off their back, but for me it was a different story and led to isolation, poor self image, and other damaging things.

Ironically collecting in general is more "main stream" these days (based on what is out of shelves, and how things are marketed)... but a lot of people still aren't accepting and never will be, and internet trolls can be loud and hurtful.. and kids are still expected to (or forced to)"grow up", maybe even faster these days.

[LadyAmalthea]

It is sad how fast kids are expected to grow up. I was about to add the phrase 'these days' to the end of that sentence, but it was also going on over 30 years ago, too...one of my most heartbreaking childhood memories was when my childhood bully (Lauren W.), out of jealousy or what have you, decided to steal my best friend.

That bitter cold February morning on the playground is etched into my psyche, when Lauren staged her coup. I can still hear the snow crunch and see her approaching in the shadow of the bright winter sun as she trudged past the monkey bars to deliver her manifesto. She read a list from her palm about how not only my best friend, but also my 2 other friends, didn't want to be my friend anymore because I still played with My Little Ponies and that made me a baby. Her list of grievances was long, but that was the one that stung the worst. I'm not sure how much say my friends actually had in what she said/did, but they were skulking up against the brick school building with the popular girls and, well, they weren't coming to my defense.

I held it together until I got home that day, but as I chucked all my ponies into the back of my closet with tears streaming down my cheeks I didn't know that that day (on which I marked out so hard on my wall calendar that the marker tore through) would mark the beginning of the end of my childhood. It was the Valentine's day before I turned 11. It was a long, friendless 6 months (which is forever in kid-years) before I made my pathetic appeal to my old friends to be friends again...'I don't play with ponies anymore...' on the first day of 6th grade; a plea no child should have to make. Guess I didn't have the strength of character enough to realize that those friends probably weren't worth having, but we all lived happily ever after, at least until I had to change school districts and we gradually went our separate ways. It still makes me mad as an adult that something that even could have been overlooked as a quirky interest in high school, could be so scorned for a 10-year-old.

[dannahbanana]

It's so sad to hear the negative experiences some had as children who loved ponies. It was the "you're too old" "it's too girly" comments that convinced me to make my admiration for MLP a secret throughout my childhood and into adulthood. I didn't even own a single MLP as a child until I received one at age 10 from an elderly family member for Christmas, and my mother complained that I was too old for it (she was the only pony I owned until the age of 26). Based on that and what I would hear other adults and kids say about people who like MLP (this was pre-FiM) I decided to pretend I had no interest in them whatsoever. Once FiM became a big thing, I mentioned to my best friend how I kinda sorta maybe enjoyed the show a little. She shamed me for it. So I went back to loving MLP (of all gens) in secret for a little longer, until quite recently. I just told that same friend last week how I have begun collecting. She poked some fun at me at first, but she accepted it eventually, and that made me feel so much better. I've told my mother too, and to my surprise she has also become interested in the G1 ponies (she especially loves baby ponies) and has even purchased a few for me as gifts.

[Esbayne]

'my little pony, skinny and bony' which is what got sung in the playground.

My fave from when I was a kid (90's kid, G3 were my firsts) was "My Little Pony, phony bologna"
(or baloney I guess as some spell it, makes the rhyme a little better I guess lol)
When I was still living in Canada as a kid before my mother moved us, some kid ran up to me in PE class and yelled that at me, I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard.

Only negative comments/'bullying' I received about collecting as an adult, really, were from my mother & her family, lol, when I still lived with my mother. But ponies or not, they'd find a way to be condescending & rude. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe a bit in 5th grade, from kids who just wanted to feel cooler/more adult than my friends and I, but it was always so easy to shut down.
("You guys are playing with PONIES? pffff"
"Yeah."
"Oh... Well... >:/ "
lol stuff like that
Those same kids asked to play with us one day at recess lol, some imaginary dragon game, condescending & laughing like, "What're you guys DOING? Hahahah, can WE play?" and I was like (along the lines of) "Yeah sure- aight so we're being dragons, and-" and started giving them the 'run-down' of our game. They didn't know how to respond and just kind of left, lol. I don't think they thought they'd get that far, if you were just matter-of-fact with them about their weird teasing they'd end up stumped lmfao. Kids can be really dumb.)

[Taffeta]

This reminds me of the boys at school who used to throw the ponies on the roof because they thought it was funny. And I know I've mentioned this before, but the headmaster (who was a nasty man) decided to ban ponies rather than punish the boys because he got fed up with it.

So we got mad about this and when the ban expired, we got our own back. We gathered the unicorns with the sharpest horns and invented a new game called pony chase. Which instead of chasing boys to kiss them involved chasing them and prodding them with unicorns until they ran away screaming.

...No more ponies on the roof. If the head wasn't going to do something about it, we were.

I was never a girly girl and we never played girly games with ponies. One of my close male friends would play ponies with us on the understanding he got to be the Zombie Warlord. We loved this, and spent a lot of playtimes being ponies trying to escape the evil Warlord, save our kidnapped friends from him and also sometimes being zombified ponies trying to corrupt others to the evil Warlord's will.

...There were no "let's have a teaparty, bow tie!" moments when we played ponies.

I also remember in year...5 I think? We had this whole conspiracy that the tree (that looked like a man with a gun) in the far field was haunted, moved around, and cast spells. We had this whole story about the school and ghosts that haunted parts of it and also up at the local church (which was considerably older than the school, about 800 years old at the time I think). So we were all into ghosts and monster stories and things then. How did this connect to ponies? Well, it was at that point we decided Moonstone must be in league with the ghosts because she had red eyes and that was spooky...

I hasten to add this was probably not a normal pony childhood experienced by the average young girl in the 1980s and early 1990s, but whenever people talk about MLP being girly and stuff, it really annoys me because MLP is and was always what you make it, not what other people assume it is. It was one of a wide range of toys in that time period that required or encouraged kids to add their own imagination, rather than default to rules set down by a fixed story, as is more common now.

Another thing I remember is my first best friend at primary school tried to steal one of my ponies. At the time I ddin't realise it, but now I do. It was Snowflake. I had been to play at her house, but I didn't take Snowflake when I went. And then a few days later her mum said to mine, we found this, it has your daughter's name on it, it must've been left behind when she came over. And Mum said thank you, took Snowflake and gave her to me (sure enough, my name on the hooves). And I was confused. I still remember saying, "I didn't take her to my friend's house." So how did she get there? I guess because someone took her home without permission. :/ That friend didn't last long though. She didn't want me to be friends with anyone else and I wanted to be friends with other people so we ended up going ou separate ways. She hated me with a passion for the rest of primary school after that...xD

In hindsight, and knowing that I was at times a difficult child due to undiagnosed ASD and the fact I was perpetually being bullied by the headmaster...MLP was the thing that connected me to my peers. I never had any problems fitting in or making friends in primary school. My mother never had any complaints about me or my behaviour from any of my friends' families, and I often would spend the night or whole days at their homes. Funny how my behaviour was only a problem when I came up against the man who frequently banned ponies...

[Harmonie]

It's interesting to read everyone's posts here as I was pretty much an outsider myself (I played with MLPs in early childhood but it did not extent past that).

The only experience with someone who liked MLP in the mid-2000s was a moderator on a forum I frequented during that time. She had a username made after a G3 MLP and IIRC used one as her avatar as well.

As an "outsider" I was just neutral. I never even thought of disparaging her for it, but I had no interest myself. My how the tables have turned now that I'm interested in MLPs myself. I wonder if she still likes MLPs? I'll probably never know...

[LadyAmalthea]

We gathered the unicorns with the sharpest horns and invented a new game called pony chase. Which instead of chasing boys to kiss them involved chasing them and prodding them with unicorns until they ran away screaming.

This made me giggle a little 

[Leave a Whisper]

[SpacePinto]

We gathered the unicorns with the sharpest horns and invented a new game called pony chase.

Which unicorns had the sharpest horns?