20% Cool Aid, or why ISIS will defeat Amerika

“A Brony Tale” is a documentary about the weird subculture or fandom known as bronies. It features Ashleigh Ball, a voice-over actor from “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” as she attends a BronyCon, a fan convention of said bronies. “A Brony Tale” is less interesting than “Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony”, another documentary about the fandom featuring Lauren Faust and John de Lancie.

As you might have guessed, bronies are obsessed with the animated cartoon “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”. What makes the fandom weird and widely derided is that most bronies aren't little girls – the show's intended demographic – but teenagers or adults, and mostly male! “A Brony Tale” presents a survey of the subculture, showing that 85% are male, 35% are in high school while a whooping 62% are in or have completed college. The average age is 21. Most women in the fandom have brony boyfriends, making the researchers question whether the “pegasisters” are real bronies at all. More surprisingly, perhaps, was the finding that only 1.5% of the bronies described themselves as homosexual, while 84% claimed to be straight. 10% defined themselves as bisexual, while circa 3% were asexual. The survey was conducted by two psychologists, one of whom has a teenage son who is a brony...

The statistics clearly disprove the usual brony stereotype of a 40+ male pervert living in a basement with his plush sex toys, or the parallel prejudice according to which all bronies simply must be gay. That being said, it's pretty obvious from “A Brony Tale” (note the pun on “a pony tail”) that many of these high school or college kids are confused and socially awkward. It's also clear that they have an effeminate ideal, which helps explains why bronies have become part of the “culture wars” around everything from same-sex marriage to Gamergate. They are, of course, “liberal”. So am I, but I wonder if these bros can fight a real war against, say, ISIS or North Korea?

I admit that I don't really like the heavy promotion this kind of phenomena have received lately. To be blunt, we need more “alphas” and less “gammas”, more “viragos” and less…well, bronies.