Morgan's Story · 6:38am Jul 30th, 2012
The story of how my friend Morgan feels about My Little Pony and the concept of being a brony is quite the odd one.
To start out, I've known him since the first day of Middle School. He's been like a brother ever since. We have virtually identical tastes in video games, movies, and TV shows(except for MLP, obviously). We also have similar personalities, although he's much easier to anger. Simply making him the first to lose all of his lives in a game of Super Smash Bros Brawl can cause him to erupt in rage. It takes him mere seconds to calm down, but it's still some impressive anger when it happens. Anyway, with all our similar interests, I was naturally eager to see if he could become a brony like I did when I started to get into the show early last year.
Many of my friends were already bronies when I had discovered the show, and most that weren't already quickly joined the herd after I recommended it to them. Among survivors and the real life Brycen are two examples of friends who became bronies after I talked highly of the show. It seemed like almost all of my closest friends were becoming bronies besides Morgan. Since he liked the same kind of cartoons as me, I figured all I'd have to do was tell him about the show and he'd probably like it too. I was wrong. When I first mentioned the show around him and asked if he was a fan, his initial reaction was giving me a look of annoyance. He had heard about the show, but he didn't enjoy anything about it.
When I asked him why, he told me about an online friend of his that he met on Xbox Live. Almost all of his Xbox friends were bronies. It didn't matter about most of them because they didn't annoy him by being a brony. For this particular friend of his, however, that was not the case. This friend of his was a hardcore brony. A bit too hardcore. Instead of occasionally talking about the show with fellow bronies and neutral friends, he ALWAYS talked about the show. Every time he was on Xbox with Morgan he would talk non stop about the show despite it not being relevant to the conversation at all, quote pony memes, and tell Morgan about the Rule 34 pony pictures he had witnessed and enjoyed. Needless to say, it didn't take long for short tempered Morgan to become fed up with hearing anything pony related.
All of this was going on when I was still oblivious to the show and when I first started getting curious about it. Meanwhile, Morgan finally agreed to give the show a try to shut his Xbox friend up. He started watching the first episode. He didn't make it past the intro. He saw the storybook opening and listened to the intro and was convinced that the show was way too happy and bright for him to become a fan of it.
So I, now being a brony, was a bit disappointed to hear all of this. Morgan and I could both agree that his friend was pushing his opinions way too much, and I agreed that listening to him probably would've turned me off from the show if I was just finding out about it as well. But after seeing how good the show was, I decided Morgan should at least give it one full chance, but I assured him that it shouldn't be with the first episode. I remembered when I first gave the show a try and watched the first episode first. Much like Morgan, the storybook opening and theme song drove me away. But seeing the continued support of it, I sat down with my girlfriend and watched Dragonshy, and became hooked. I told Morgan that I'd find an episode for him to watch, and that if he didn't like it, then I wouldn't mention watching the show to him again. He agreed and I caught up on more episodes to see which would be the best for him to watch. As luck would have it, a new episode came out the next day, a Saturday. It was Lesson Zero. Watching the episode, I was convinced that if all the craziness of this episode didn't hook Morgan to the show, nothing would, and that would be the end of that.
So I told Morgan that day to give Lesson Zero a watch. He sounded reluctant at first, but agreed to. He said that he'd watch it before he went to his Nanna's house, as he was having some friends over for the night, including me. I told him to promise to not quit before the episode got really good, and to just skip the opening theme. He assured me that he would. When I got there that night, I asked him if he had liked the show. He simply said no. I asked him if he watched it all the way through, knowing that he had to at least like the bear getting his neck snapped by Fluttershy. And did he watch it all the way through? Hell no, he didn't even make it to the scene with Rainbow destroying the barn.
He told me that he was getting bored watching the episode on his computer and that Gabriel Iglesias came on the TV at the same time. He shut his computer off and instead watched his stand up. Then he went on and on about Gabriel Iglesias and wouldn't shut up about his jokes. I personally didn't give a shit, I was ticked that he lied and didn't give the episode a full try. I told him he should have went through with his promise and he started to get mad in response. Not wanting to set off a temper tantrum, I dropped the subject for the night. I waited about another week before I asked him about giving the episode a full try like he promised. He refused and said that he'd just end up watching more stand up due to the boredom, and that the concept of becoming a brony to the degree of his Xbox friend frightened him. He was fine with me, Brycen, and everyone else being one, but that one friend of his convinced him that he wanted to avoid that show like the plague. He ended the subject matter by saying there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. It was at that moment when the idea for This Can't Be Happening popped into my head.
I joked with Brycen for a couple of days about the concept. We sarcastically talked about how making a story about Morgan being inserted into the universe of MLP might be the thing that would inspire him to be a brony. Of course we weren't serious. I was pretty convinced that Morgan would never become a brony, and I was fine with that. He's one of my best friends, and him not liking a cartoon that I like wasn't going to change that. However, I was still kind of irked that he broke his promise about giving Lesson Zero a full watch. Brycen told me I should go ahead and write This Can't Be Happening for real as his punishment. So I did.
So that's what This Can't Be Happening essentially started out as. My way of getting back at my friend for breaking a promise: by inserting him into the universe of MLP. To this day, he still gets a bit annoyed knowing the story exists, but he also knows he shouldn't have broken his promise, so he pretty much accepts it as a fitting punishment in exchange for not being asked to watch the show anymore.
And that's how things are now. Conner accepts that Brycen, I, and many of our other friends are bronies, and we accept that he is somewhat of an anti-brony. We don't try to push the show down his throat, and he doesn't trash talk about it around us, even if we're sporting pony merch. It's kind of funny though. He absolutely loves the PONY.MOV series, even to the point of CRUSH KILL DESTORY SWAG being his favorite thing to listen to currently. He's impressed with most brony fan art(as long as it isn't R34) and pretty much all of his friends are bronies. None the less, he hates the show itself with a passion, and it's mostly due to one Xbox friend of his.
He brought the topic up recently while we were hanging out. He stated that he thought the show itself was honestly decent, and had some great talent working on it, but it was just too happy and colorful for him to get into it. It was a genuine answer and I have no problem with him not being a brony.
That being said, I also have no problem continuing the story, because it's a lot of fun to write.
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I'll leave you guys with a part from a Let's Play featuring Morgan, Brycen, myself, and two other brony friends in a typical time of playing video games. I chose this part because I gave this one decent subtitles. Morgan prefers to be called Conner in most instances, hence why he is called so here.
Hurrah for being mentioned!!