The MLP Arena
Pony Talk => Pony Corral => Topic started by: Cottononi on December 09, 2020, 10:10:58 AM
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(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 : )
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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
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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! :lol: 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! :P
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.
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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.
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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 :P
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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. :pout:
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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).
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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).
:hug:
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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.
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I love hearing that your toy stand outsold the TMNT one, Elfpony. :satisfied:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Yeah, it is sad really Taffeta. I'm glad now we're adults we can just enjoy things without fear of judgement :heart:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'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.)
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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...
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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...
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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 :lol:
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:grouphug:
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We gathered the unicorns with the sharpest horns and invented a new game called pony chase.
Which unicorns had the sharpest horns?
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Fizzy was the best. Tuneful and Bouquet were decent, too. Those were the ones my friends and I had between us. Milky Way was poor. My friend actually split the base of her pony's horn from this.
I suspect the jousting pose ponies are all pretty good at this, but Fizzy was our champion.
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Fizzy was the best. Tuneful and Bouquet were decent, too. Those were the ones my friends and I had between us. Milky Way was poor. My friend actually split the base of her pony's horn from this.
I suspect the jousting pose ponies are all pretty good at this, but Fizzy was our champion.
Yeeeeah but if you figured out a way to attatch mimic posed ponies heads together, you could create a pony throwing star. Just sayin! :silly:
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Fizzy was the best. Tuneful and Bouquet were decent, too. Those were the ones my friends and I had between us. Milky Way was poor. My friend actually split the base of her pony's horn from this.
I suspect the jousting pose ponies are all pretty good at this, but Fizzy was our champion.
Yeeeeah but if you figured out a way to attatch mimic posed ponies heads together, you could create a pony throwing star. Just sayin! :silly:
I think that would have been a bit concerning for the school dinner ladies if we'd managed that at age nine or ten xD.
"Miss, they're throwing severed toy heads at us!"
...Subtle is better. No boy is going to go tell tales on pony chase if it means telling the grown ups that the girls are chasing them with pastel ponies and they're scared of them...
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Fizzy was the best. Tuneful and Bouquet were decent, too. Those were the ones my friends and I had between us. Milky Way was poor. My friend actually split the base of her pony's horn from this.
I suspect the jousting pose ponies are all pretty good at this, but Fizzy was our champion.
Yeeeeah but if you figured out a way to attatch mimic posed ponies heads together, you could create a pony throwing star. Just sayin! :silly:
I think that would have been a bit concerning for the school dinner ladies if we'd managed that at age nine or ten xD.
"Miss, they're throwing severed toy heads at us!"
...Subtle is better. No boy is going to go tell tales on pony chase if it means telling the grown ups that the girls are chasing them with pastel ponies and they're scared of them...
:biggrin:
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LOL imagining the unicorns sharpening their horns in the corner, like-
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LOL imagining the unicorns sharpening their horns in the corner, like-
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Like shivs?