Brony fandom is pretty much gone · 5:57pm Apr 4th, 2020
With everyone being stuck inside, I was curious to see if there would be an uptick in site activity. There isn't. The fandom has just continued to fall precipitously after the dismal finale. This is different that any other major fandom. Hell, even "Bleach" maintained its fandom, and the anime is unexpectedly coming back.
Sure, you'll have the small cluster of adherents, but the show went out on a very sour note with a story that fully half the dwindling fanbase hated with a passion. That's not exactly the best way to maintain interest in your franchise... as "Star Wars", "Doctor Who", and "Star Trek" are also learning the hard way.
FiM killed itself with a finale that followed the idiotic trend of 'subverted expectations' in a ludicrous and implausible manner, and had awful writing and characterization. These TV show writers never learn. They killed "Star vs Forces of Evil", "Steven Universe", "Adventure Time" and several other animated shows which initially had compelling and immersive worlds with the laziest and dumbest final seasons I've encountered in any cartoons that attempted long-term storylines.
Keep in mind, "Gravity Falls" had a mere two seasons and held its fandom intact for nearly 5 years after it ended... BECAUSE THE WRITING WAS GOOD AND THE FINALE DIDN'T CRAP ALL OVER EVERYTHING!!
So why did Fim die so badly? Well, I think the biggest issue is that there was never a clear idea where it was going. That's suicide for any show trying to have long-term continuity. You need to have an endgame in mind from the start and STICK TO IT. Then you can make sure all developments fit. Drifting along without a plan only works... to an extent... for purely episodic shows and satire. And hell, even "South Park" pays attention to its continuity (which is why it's lasted with high ratings for 22 years!).
This should be a lesson to show runners... but I doubt many of them will take the advice. Arrogance and narcissism are #2 and #3 of the top major qualifications required these days, apparently (adherence to leftist ideology is #1)... talent is somewhere around #10, and they never get that far in the interviews.
Did you seriously just describe the show as "trying to have long-term continuity"? No, that was never a thing they could be remotely described as having tried to do.
You deserve a follow.
5235704 Uhm, Seasons 1-3 had a story bible. That's hard fact as Larson often talked about it! They adapted it for season 4, then tried to set up new continuity for seasons 5 and 6.
But, the constant shifts of staff finally doomed it, and the continuity collapsed as almost no one coming after Season 6 in paid close attention to what had come before.
Look at the ratings. Season 4 had the highest ratings of all, nearly 800K for several episodes... and that's when it was still on a additional pay channel! Season 5 stumbled, then 6 dropped the ball. It was all downhill from there, steeply so!
Meh, imma stick around anyway. Even after everyone else goes home. I'll still be here. like a festering malignant cancer that can never be cured. I couldn't care less if the fandom dies and the show is over, I'm a builder and a story teller, I'll pick up there discarded brushes and paint my own world! At this point I'm a monkey with a gun, there's no telling what is going to happen but I guarantee it'll be fun! (For me anyway!)
Uh, I liked the final.
Yeah, I'm not the only one who noticed how all activity on this site is nearly gone.
Perhaps if Knighty pulls off the miracle and turns it into a general fiction site to compliment the MLP current one?
I like this site User-friendly interface and the tweaks to allow for a nice and comfy reading without straining the eyes with the classic black lettering over white background that burns the eyeballs.
Speaking of Svtfoe, what do you think even happened there? The first two seasons were good, those who worked on the show clearly knew what they were doing but by season four everything went to absolute shit and beyond.
I can't help but think of this video everytime I think of that show.
Maybe people just decided to learn chess. I mean, Lichess recently had more players than ever before, and the servers would regularly crash (also, I became an expert on playing Italian Game with black pieces).
5235719
Because of all that, I don't think that it's fair to say that the finale killed the fandom. By the time of the finale, the fandom was half of what it once was, and most of them were just sticking around to see it through. It wouldn't have mattered how good the finale was, they'd have left; the finale would only have changed how they felt when they left.
Lord knows, by the time season 7 rolled around, I was waiting for the episode follow-ups on Equestria Daily to see if individual episodes were worth watching. The finale was a non-event.
Still checking this site multiple times a day, though. If nothing else, it has the best set-up I've found of all the fiction sites to which I've been.
5235760
Yeah I mean, they couldn't bother to change the intro in Season 4 given that Star doesn't use her wand anymore. :/
5235719
5235775
The so-called "story bible" was nothing of the sort, and repeatedly contradicted by even the first season. By even the first episode. (Source)
5235736
Why?
5235997
It was good and fun.
I lost real interest in the show itself after the season 5 finale (Starlight's shit backstory was where everything went to crap, in my personal opinion). I kept up merely for ideas and to see if my personal prediction that the show would last long enough to add kirins in an official capacity and screw up my idea for them, which they did, though Autumn Blaze is my third fav cannon character regardless.
When I saw the finale, I didn't feel the same kind of sadness I feel for other shows, even ones I've rewatched time and time again. The end of The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea gets me more choked up since I know that's the end of the story and we'll never see these characters again. Maybe it's because I'm still working on The Witching Hour or because of the fandom, but I didn't feel the same way about the end of FiM, more like "oh, this is how it ends? Interesting. I'm going back to the fandom now."
Even if the fandom is dying off, it won't ever be completely gone, and if Gen 5 comes out soon and is at least decent, I think the fandom will come back.
Eh, well. We're still here, aye?
5236043 No, it was objectively bad from any number of writing, characterization, lesson, series and even episode continuity standards. Just one of the many obvious problems: internal pacing clock was a disaster. The Student 6 could not possibly have visited all those places and gotten all those species together so quickly.
5235760 I don't know. It just felt so thrown together. I can't tell if they just had no plan, or Disney corporate began meddling with their own ideas, as they tend to do.
5235731 Some men just like to watch the world burn.
Other men start the fire... (Alondro stands there with the smoking torch and points at you, "Uhm.... HE did it!")
5235797
Star without her wand is like MLP without the treebrary.
Oh yeah... I should really watch the show at some point
The brony fandom was obviously propelled in the beginning by extreme amounts of irony. People would make brony stuff because it's funny for guys in their twenties to like ponies, and because doing a crossover between Fallout and MLP was inherently entertaining. Then it had some staying power, because unlike every other show aimed at 5 year old girls MLP was a good(not even *that* great) show. The fandom's fallen off because the irony of guys liking ponies has gotten stale after ten years.
5237318 Well, that and the show not only failed to develop, it severely declined.
It's a textbook example of why you need a consistent writing team that knows the material.
5236043
Say that again in five years.
5235775
Half is a very generous estimate.
5242893
Okay.
5242893
You have clearly never read a Super Trampoline story. 5236701's reasons for bashing it are exactly what he likes. (See also: critical reception of the last Godzilla movie, where the only criticism they leveled amounted to "it's a Kaiju flick" and they tried to pass that off as a reason not to see it)
5237318
I have too disagree somewhat, the mlp fandom is one of the prime examples of "post-irony" and "psudo new-sincerity" (aka "post-post-modernist") movement that started in the early 2010s.
In Postmodernist-irony, something is meant to be cynically mocked and not taken seriously, and in New Sincerity something is meant to be taken seriously or "unironically" - post-irony combines these two elements by either having something absurd taken seriously or be unclear as to whether something is meant to be ironic.
It's irony folded back on itself so often that it has arrived at a form of blurry sincerity.
5291602
I don't think we really disagree. The brony movement has a lot of irony involved in it. It's twisted with sincerity, but the irony is a really integral component. But as the irony evaporates and there's just sincerity left, the movement doesn't completely die, but it slows down a lot.