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Art of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom
Artwork subculture of My Little Pony fans From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The adult fandom of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (commonly known as bronies) has generated an extensive collection of fan art since the animated series debuted in 2010. This artistic production encompasses various styles and media, with digital art being most dominant, though traditional media works remain popular. The show's colorful aesthetic and distinct character designs have made it particularly adaptable to various artistic interpretations.[1] According to a 2018 study on the brony fandom, 12% of respondents reported that they frequently created fan artwork of My Little Pony.[2]
Fan art creation began shortly after the show's premiere in October 2010, initially appearing on platforms like 4chan's /co/ (comics and cartoons) board before rapidly spreading to other online communities. As the brony community grew in prominence by early 2011, fan art production increased dramatically across multiple platforms. Several distinct art styles and themes emerged within the fandom, including "humanized" versions of pony characters,[3] crossovers with other franchises,[4] and original character (OC) creations known as ponysonas.[5] Ponification is a popular artistic practice within the brony fandom, where artists transform non-pony characters, people, or objects into pony form.[6][2] The show itself is not the only source of inspiration for fan art; some fan works of My Little Pony, like the acclaimed fan fiction Fallout: Equestria, have inspired fan art drawn by other artists.[5][7][8][9] Artists frequently sell physical prints, custom plushies, and pony-themed merchandise at My Little Pony fan conventions like Everfree Northwest and Ponyville Ciderfest at their vendor halls.[10][11]
The primary platforms hosting My Little Pony fan art include Derpibooru, the largest dedicated imageboard founded in 2012; DeviantArt, which attracts a large community organized around themed groups; and /mlp/, the My Little Pony board of 4chan. Owing to its 4chan roots, the brony fandom has experienced controversies, including the presence of extremist imagery and conflicts over racist content during the George Floyd protests in 2020.[12]
The fandom continues to produce new content even after the conclusion of the television series in 2019. As of April 2025[update], Derpibooru has over 500,000 users and over 3.1 million non-deleted images in its database (excluding duplicates).[13] The abundance of My Little Pony fan artwork has led to its use in training artificial intelligence models. Beginning with the AI boom in the early 2020s, the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom has emerged as a leading community in art created by artificial intelligence. Projects such as "Pony Diffusion," a specialized diffusion model trained on pony art, is one of the most popular base models for generating cartoon-style images using AI,[14] and has been cited in multiple publications and preprints.[15][16][17]
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Fan works
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Videos and animations
Fan-made videos incorporating footage from the show are regularly posted on YouTube, including music videos, parodies, and remakes of movie and video game trailers.[18][19] One notable early video that attracted media attention was created by high school student Stephen Thomas, who used scientific principles to analyze physical impossibilities in the show as part of a class presentation in 2011.[20][21] This video was later featured on the Comedy Central show Tosh.0.[18][22]
Remixed versions of professional works using Friendship Is Magic clips have been noticed by their original creators. Filmmaker Edgar Wright acknowledged My Little Pony versions of trailers for his films Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Hot Fuzz.[19] The UK blog team and magazine of Top Gear also recognized a video using clips of their show featuring pony characters.[23] A fan-created pony version of South Korean rapper Psy's "Gangnam Style" was highlighted by media outlets as one of the best adaptations of the viral video.[24][25]
In 2013, fan Zachary Rich created a full-length Flash-based fan film titled "Double Rainboom" as part of his coursework at the Savannah College of Art and Design.[26] Pony-based parodies of "Weird Al" Yankovic's songs that Yankovic highlighted on Twitter eventually led to discussions between the musician and the show's directors, resulting in guest appearances by Yankovic in the fourth season episode "Pinkie Pride" and the ninth season episode "The Last Laugh".[27]
Fans have developed various video games based on Friendship Is Magic, including the fighting game My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic[28] which eventually became Them's Fightin' Herds. Other fan works include modifications of existing games such as Team Fortress 2 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.[29][30] Fans have also created crossover content between My Little Pony and other franchises, including video game settings.[31] A notable example is "Turnabout Storm," a crossover with the Ace Attorney series.[32][33]
Flash-based applications have been developed that allow fans to create their own pony original characters in the artistic style of the show, contributing to the popularity of fan-created original characters.[34] These pony character creators have helped standardize the visual style of fan-created content and facilitate the creation of ponysonas within the community.
Ponification
Ponification is a distinctive artistic practice within the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom where artists transform non-pony characters, people, objects, or events into pony form.[3] The term was officially recognized in the open-source Webster dictionary in 2017, defined as "bestowing the harmonious qualities relating to the magic of friendship upon a person, creature, fictional figure, or inanimate object by converting into the likeness of an animated My Little Pony character."[6][35] Ponifications often appear in fan videos, crossover content, and physical merchandise at conventions.[10][11] A ponysona is a ponification of one's self.
Physical merchandise
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Merchandise of My Little Pony fan art (colloquially called brony swag) is sold at vendor halls at brony conventions like Everfree Northwest or Ponyville Ciderfest.[11][10] Types of commonly purchased merchandise include clothing items like T-shirts, socks, and backpacks, as well as commissioned artwork, physical prints, and posters. Other common merchandise forms include figurines, plushies, accessories like mousepads and glassware, lunchboxes, stickers, DVDs, and games.[2]
Ownership of pony-themed merchandise is an important and visibly recognizable aspect of the brony fandom.[2] Patrick Edwards, the author of the book Meet the Bronies and the founder of the brony study project, stated this is not surprising given that the My Little Pony franchise was originally designed to sell toys to children. According to Edwards, this pattern is not unique to bronies: Star Wars fans are often depicted wearing stormtrooper costumes and carrying plastic lightsabers, while Doctor Who fans commonly show off items featuring the TARDIS.[2]
According to Edwards, the ownership and display of pony merchandise functions as a form of ritual practice; the visibly recognizable nature of merchandise allows bronies to identify fellow community members in public spaces, creating opportunities for social connection and solidarity.[2]
Artificial intelligence art
With the emergence of AI art generation in the early 2020s, the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom has become a major contributor to and adopter of this technology. The fandom's extensive collection of existing artwork has provided valuable training data for specialized AI models. A notable example is "Pony Diffusion," a specialized diffusion model created by PurpleSmart.ai.[36] Originally designed to generate pony-style artwork, the model has gained widespread popularity beyond its intended use case.[36][14] Based on Stable Diffusion XL, Pony Diffusion has become one of the most popular models for generating cartoon-style images using AI, with applications extending to realistic imagery as well.[15][36]
Pony Diffusion has been cited in academic publications and preprints related to AI image generation.[16][17] The relationship between Pony Diffusion's developers and larger AI companies has occasionally been contentious; for example, there were disagreements between PurpleSmart.ai and Stability AI regarding licensing terms for newer models like Stable Diffusion 3.[36][14]
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Platforms
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Derpibooru
Founded in 2012, Derpibooru (a portmanteau of Derpy Hooves and the suffix -booru, a reborrowing from Japanese bōru, meaning "board"[37]) is an imageboard dedicated to hosting and archiving visual fan art from the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom. It is the largest and most popular My Little Pony imageboard on the Internet.[38][12] Derpibooru offers a minimalist interface with relatively limited social features, drawing inspiration from established imageboards like 4chan. The site allows anonymous posting and commenting, and serves as a repository for fan artwork, including pieces previously published on other platforms.[39]
The site employs a user-driven tagging system characteristic of folksonomies, allowing for categorization and content searching.[12][39] Derpibooru maintains a content rating system with four primary categories: safe, suggestive, questionable, and explicit. The safe designation indicates content entirely free of sexual themes, while the other three categories contain varying degrees of mature content, including so-called Clop (erotic fan art). The enforcement of this rating system is largely community-driven rather than strictly administered. Statistical data from the site suggests that while non-mature artwork constitutes the numerical majority of submissions, content with mature themes often receives higher engagement rates based on the site's rating systems.[39]
DeviantArt
Since 2011, DeviantArt has served as one of the platforms for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan artists, attracting a large community of bronies.[18] By June 2012, DeviantArt hosted more than 500,000 pieces of Friendship Is Magic artwork.[40]
The website allows users to publish various media including visual art (drawings, animations, photographs) and literature. Its strong social features enable users to rate and comment on others' work, follow activity, exchange gifts, and join user-created groups.[39]
The brony fandom on DeviantArt organizes around themed groups, with the largest containing 30,000 members. These groups perform content curation and categorization, which helps users navigate through over 1.7 million results for My Little Pony-related searches. By joining specific groups, fans can filter content based on format, theme, quality, and maturity level. DeviantArt maintains restrictive policies regarding mature content, prohibiting explicitly pornographic imagery and literature with detailed definitions of prohibited material in its terms of service. The platform employs a "mature content" tagging system for milder suggestive content.[39]
/mlp/
As an imageboard, /mlp/—the My Little Pony board of 4chan—also hosts fan art.
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Popularity and statistics
According to a 2018 study of 221 bronies, fans possessed an average of approximately $1,050 worth of merchandise, ranging from clothing and commissioned artwork to figures and media—an investment of a few hundred dollars annually for long-term fans. The study also documented frequency of engagement with fan-created content: 73% of participants reported watching brony-made videos almost daily, 70% listened to brony-themed music almost daily, 39% read brony fanfiction almost daily, and 42% frequently watched reruns between seasons. In addition, 12% of bronies reported that they frequently created fan art of Friendship Is Magic, and 5% reported that they frequently created fan collectibles. Notably, bronies consume fan-created content and fandom news with greater frequency than they watch the show itself.[2]
As of the study's publication, Derpibooru contained more than 1.6 million unique images.[2] By April 2025, this number had grown to over 3.1 million non-deleted images (excluding duplicates).[13]
Controversies
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Nazi imagery and racist content
Some segments of the brony fandom have produced fan art featuring Nazi imagery, including a fan-created character named Aryanne, (a pun on Aryan) a pony with a pink swastika on her hip.[12][41] This character emerged from the more edgy elements of the fandom that originated on anonymous imageboards.[42] While most bronies are not associated with extremist views, the presence of such content has created tension within the community.[41]
In June 2020, during the George Floyd protests, The Atlantic reported that the My Little Pony fandom was experiencing an "all-out civil war" regarding racist content. The article noted that some /mlp/ users mocked the protests with racist art, many of which was posted to Derpibooru—the fandom's primary fan art repository. On Derpibooru, artwork mocking the protests received substantial upvotes while pro-Black Lives Matter artwork was heavily downvoted. This conflict led to the site's first significant moderation policy change, with administrators banning images "created for no reason other than to incite controversy" and temporarily removing content mocking the protests.[12][38]
One controversial image described in The Atlantic article was a modified version of a white nationalist meme that juxtaposed SpaceX astronauts with Black Lives Matter protesters. In this adaptation posted on /mlp/, the artist replaced the Black protesters with cartoon zebras—characters that have African-coded representation in the Friendship Is Magic universe. The article noted that these zebra characters are commonly referred to on /mlp/ using the word zigger—a portmanteau of zebra and nigger.[12]
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See also
References
External links
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