"Outsider" reactions in the past?

[Cottononi]

(Sorry for unclear wording in the topic name, couldn't come up with better one.)

So this has been on my mind for a while; How was the MLP community treated in the early (pre  mid 2000s) days? And I mean by those outside of the com. Since I'm fairly young and been here for only around ten years I really don't have any idea of what people thought of MLP pre FiM era. I'm not gonna get into detail since I assume everyone knows how ugly it got at times, but my earliest memories in the community are of people bashing both ponies and especially people who enjoyed them back when FiM and brony phenomenon were mentioned in mainstream news.

That makes me wonder was it always like that? For sure the com was much, much smaller and it's online presence not so public, but there must've been occasions when non-ponyfans came across fans and I assume they had some kind of opinion on it. For example when booking a location for a meetup they would hear what the hotel venue would be used for or someone selling their child's old ponies for an adult who told they were not going to be played with but added to a collection. Did they say rude thing or give weird looks to collectors?

Also something little different but how did other kids react to pre-/teen collectors? I think that children used to continue playing a lot longer back then so it might not have been at all strange to have a 12 year old collecting pony toys but I for sure got teased for it at that age, as ridiculous as it sounds.

Also, apologies if this is a kind of taboo topic and there have been times when this community has been seriously bashed and abused. My intention is not to bring back any bad memories, just curious about history : )

[lovesbabysquirmy]

we were little known but well received and delightfully surprised by the general public (well, haters gonna hate) but NO absolutely there was very little drama and toxic negativity or incorrect assumptions about G1-G3 collectors.  if there was drama, it was mostly because of scammers.  or interpersonal drama of a bunch of tweens and teens growing up together on the internet LOL

[Taffeta]

I think the worst that happened were people thought it was a bit weird, or whatever. I came online in 1997 and properly online at home in 1998 (before that it was a library) and even the internet was a new thing then tbh. I collected ponies in secondary school but hid it - my sister was younger and she was a good foil for any found around the house, since she collected too. In school I would not have talked about it. I think it was probably seen as childish to still have toys when in secondary school.

After that...I dunno? I graduated university with G3 Rainbow Dash. The community was small and policed itself. There were occasional spats within it and some unpleasant factions that mostly have gone away now.

I think mostly people outside didn't comment all that much. People at carboot sales sold them cheaply or gave them away as junk. Toy fair people rarely had them and didn't consider them collectable. I remember a show called I Love Toys and another one which is I Love 1983 that aired here. One of them has an interview with a long term community member in who I've known as long as I've been online, so I guess they showed some interest? My Dad wrote an article for a collectable magazine about them in somewhere early 2000s, and I was interviewed by BBC Radio about it I think sometime around the same period...

The other documentary just included a G1 commercial and then showed a pony being hoiked off set as though they were saying, "enough of that". But that's as far as it went. Not that different to 'my little pony, skinny and bony' which is what got sung in the playground. Sometimes you'd get patronising people going "yeah, those things, I hated them!" in shows, but that was all.

But this was still in a kind of a bubble. I had a pony on my desk at work. My colleagues liked to decorate her but totally accepted her. I got some ponies from ponycon for free for the daughter of one of my colleagues who was mad about G3 and got all excited when she saw my desk pony.

The outside attitude to pony was pretty much a "not really sure why people still have these when they're adults" but I didn't have any problems with it in real life. I didn't have to hide it from my colleagues, which was a big deal for me as an adult.

Also, I should add - I think everyone knows G2 was not greeted with happy thoughts, but G3 was. And G4 was also. The existing pony community were excited by G4 and welcomed it and its new fandom with open arms. It was only when those fans got hostile that rifts began. There was never any sense from this side of the community at the start of G4 that G4 and FIM were not welcome or part of the franchise.

Sad how it ended up really. I suspect the public opinion of pony fans has probably been eternally tainted by the extreme behaviour of a very few who shouldn't really call themselves 'fans' of anything at all.

[brightberry]

My experience of outsiders growing up was that MLP was "girly and juvenile".  I never felt attacked but learned pretty quickly that it wasn't really a topic many wanted to talk about.  I think the older generations really didn't get our genx obsession with toys.  And most boys were pretty dismissive of ponies.  There were even some ideas floated that ponies perpetuated girl stereotypes and were bad for our development.

After I grew up, most people who knew I liked ponies just filed the information as quirky thing about me.  I never discussed them in detail but I wasn't worried they would think something awful about me. 

[gemini_pony]

I honestly don't know because I didn't have any interest in ponies until G4 came out.  And I'm good at avoiding drama so I never had issues in any of my groups.

[Ponybookworm]

When I was growing up I was bullied anyway, & the "skinny & bony" rhyme was among the nicer things I heard.

When I was a student, I was supposed to be quirky anyway, so nobody minded if I grabbed MLP at jumble sales & stuff then either.

Then, like I said, a BAD THING happened & I lost almost everything, Ponies included.
After that I was busy replacing everything else I'd lost.

Then another BAD THING happened around the same time I started looking for "pegasus poster" on eBay, & you know what eBay's like, right??? posters with no pegasi & pegasi which weren't posters showed up. G3 was on sale in shops at the time, & I was, why not? Nobody cares anyway...

And it's the old saying: those who matter don't mind, those who mind don't matter. And it stayed that way until certain Bronies started going sour... (note, not all of them, but those who did tarnished everything)

[LightingElectricDream]

I don't recall negativity toward us in the early 2000s
No one really knew about us unless there where looking. And even no one really stoped to pay any mind.

This Comunity for the most part is all about the toy collecting. G1 G2 and G3 are all about the toys for the most part.

G4 has many sides..so with that being said it is just asking for different results and in the wrong hands you get negative results.

I know it made the news talking about g4 with a g1 pony picture. I know it made the Bronies loose their stuff. I dont think that Bronies like being osocated with G1 for the most part.

People on the outside dont know the difference and it makes much judgment for everyone involved.

The Brony community has alot of negative attached to it whether they deserve it or not.

I think Jerry Springer wanted a Brony to screem at on his show. They couldn't get one.

But I can't say that G1 had anything that bad.

[dragonfly]

Reactions were generally positive. Remember G1 was not ancient history and G2 was recent. There was excitement at being able to find nostalgic items on eBay and people thought it was cool. There were, of course, some oddball collectors whose behavior caused outsiders to question the whole community. There was always a lot of drama in the community, remember, most of the earliest collectors were girls in their late teens or early 20s. There were occasional trouble makers who sought to mock and tease.

We always had male collectors but some were closeted and posing as women and the men collectors were not large in numbers until the FiM era. There came to be some confusion between MLP collectors and furries but mostly we were a pretty quiet corner of the internet of people with a shared interest in the early days, happy to find others with something in common.

[Elfpony]

You have to realize too that toy collecting, although not as main stream as it is now, wasn’t unheard of. People were certainly aware of adults collecting toy train sets or Barbie, for example. It wasn’t a huge stretch for people to then realize that something like Transformers or G I Joe was collectible. Funnily, a lot of people didn’t make the jump to realizing that “girls” toys of the same era were as collectible as “boys” toys. So there was some sneering at buying ponies but then again I could walk away from a show with a bag full of ponies for little money.

When FIM took off the existing collectors had a bit of a “what just happened?” moment. It was odd to suddenly have an influx of interest, both from bronies and the media. The media really annoyed the collectors more. There was a lot of mocking of bronies (and collectors by association), and a lot of “look at this new weird thing!  MLP is suddenly popular!  Oops, now they’ve all moved on to something else, wasn’t that a weird little thing!”  And through all that you have collectors rolling their eyes and thinking “ we’ve been around for years and we’re still here but you don’t find us interesting because we’re largely 30-40 year old women with stable jobs and mortgages and a fun interest on the side but ok”.

On a side note, last year I had a booth at a local toy show selling MLP and other “girl” lines from the 80s. The dealers beside us who were focused mainly on TMNT and some other action figures were ribbing us a bit while we were setting up. “Oh, my little pony!  Hahahaha”. ...We out sold them by about $500.

Elf

[Minty_Magic]

On a side note, last year I had a booth at a local toy show selling MLP and other “girl” lines from the 80s. The dealers beside us who were focused mainly on TMNT and some other action figures were ribbing us a bit while we were setting up. “Oh, my little pony!  Hahahaha”. ...We out sold them by about $500.

Elf

HA! This makes me happy!

I wasn’t around pre 2000s, G3 was my childhood generation, but I was around pre FIM for a few years, so I knew some peace before everything kinda blew up.

I generally never had much of a problem with people thinking my ponies were weird or deviant. Which actually is shocking! I brought my ponies with me to middle school every day and somehow never got made fun of for it! Sure the other kids that it was a little weird and they’d tease me about it a little, but generally it was never mean spirited. In high school I stopped bringing them, but I wasn’t shy about being a collector. I doodled ponies all over my papers and had keychains on my backpack. I still never had much of a problem. I got the occasional “furry” jab, but that didn’t bother me because I generally think furries are pretty cool too, even if they have some bad members of their fandom. I think my family thought it was a last fling to childhood I’d outgrow them eventually, but here we are over 10 years later and still going strong!

Post FiM it became a little more negative, but not too bad for me thankfully. It was fun at first because I was still in high school when FiM very first came out and I had a lot of people asking me to draw them ponies. I was able to strike up conversations with new people and make some new friends. Things didn’t really get “weird” until after I had graduated, so I think I avoided some bullying because of that! At work I had some mlp stuff, like a water bottle, so my close co workers knew I liked My Little Pony. They would sometimes ask me if I knew about the sexual stuff,  it it was usually in a joking manner. They knew me better than that, but it was still uncomfortable. I stopped telling people I was a collector for a while because I was just sick of having to denounce such a huge part of the fandom.

Now that FiM has ended, I feel like things have quieted down a bit and don’t feel as hostile. At least now I feel like if I don’t visit brony specific websites I can mostly avoid the content I don’t want to see.

[Leave a Whisper]

I've never really heard anything positive or negative about it from other people, aside from the occasional "Oh I remember My Little Pony." Or "Aren't you too old for those?"  Which is more to do with older attitudes towards toy collecting in general.

[Zapper]

I wasn't collecting in the early 2000s but I had my childhood ponies and sometimes one or two would be on display on my desk or a shelf. Aside from "isn't this childish/girlish?" or "aren't you too old for this?" I never got any flak. Even when I started buying G1s at fleamarkets and restoring them, most people would either give me props or look at it as one of my eccentric hobbies.

Online MLP collectors have mostly kept to ourselves. There was overlap with doll and 80s toy collectors but that was it. Other toy collectors would look down on me for liking a girl toy. I used to be in the Transformers collectors community and before G4 came out I received the most mockery there. It was always about "huh? How come you collect this old crap? This is for little girls, TF is for manly sophisticated gents such as myself, hoho! Stupid girl".
Now a lot of TF fans are also B-words... life is strange

[Leave a Whisper]

Hmph! I hope you threw that hypocrisy right back in their face Zapper. They've no room to talk when they're collecting toys too. Jerks.   

[Zapper]

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).

[Leave a Whisper]

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).