In b4


vs


Oh, wait, too late. Very well, then.

randomjsa: I don't know where the brony thing came from but I know where it's going.

Can you say "regarded with less respect than furries in a few years" boys and girls?

Yes, and?

NFA: I only saw the first 30 seconds because I lost consciousness from beating my head against the desk.

Yes, and?

danielscissorhands: I propose some sort of solution that has finality to solve the bronie/hipster problem.

Yes (LIKE A BOSS), and?



And I'm we're still a little bit drunkhaving fun and nopony can stop that, so Party Hard.

John DeLancie doing something like this, I sort of expected, although I didn't think he'd take it quite as far as 2:20. When voice actor Tara Strong joined in 30 seconds later, and when I saw the final credits, my jaw dropped so hard it probably woke the neigh-bors. They actually managed to encapsulate the past two years of insanity (along with the Brony Subculture Analysis in terms of moderates/hipsters/creatives/etc) in the space of four and a quarter minutes.

Every time I think this fandom's exceeded its grasp, it gets 20% cooler.

FirstNationalBastard: encyclopediaplushuman: js34603: Not that it matters, I'm sure there will be some really clever picture of a cartoon pony to respond and people will just keeping being weird, I guess I can just wait a few months until Brony becomes another forgotten stupid thing that happened on the Internet.

Also, this fandom has gained a ton of stream, it's more likely we'll be around more like Trekkies, who are still here, than disappear. That is, just assimilate into the group of accepted culture.

I don't know... after the show is finally off the air in a season or two, I'm not sure if the Bronies will continue on.

Now that I've woken up and can type again, I can be half-serious.

First off, to those I poked fun at upthread, guilty as charged. My principal use for a mirror is to point at the silly dude in it and laugh, and you're a great mirror. I went through the five stages too: Denial - Just a meme, gone in a month / Anger - Why the hell am I watching this? / Bargaining - Maybe just one more episode / Depression - OK, I'll watch the whole series. And when I'm done that, I'll find more... / Acceptance - Eeyup, I'm one with the Herd.

Second, where does it go from here?

Star Trek and Dr. Who had/have the advantage of extremely long-running shows, both in syndication and original production. I can't see Hasbro going that route with MLP. It doesn't make business sense when the objective is ultimately to sell toys to kids, and they'll only be buying toys for 2-3 years. So you only need to produce 2-3 years' worth of episodes before moving on to another property.

I think the fandom ends up somewhere in between the two extremes. Not forgotten the day the show's over, but not self-perpetuating like the Trekkers and Whovians. Maybe like Browncoats or fans of BSG and Babylon 5. There are still active communities around these shows, they still show up at cons, everyone recognizes the shows' contributions to the genre, but other than that, their presence has faded into the background. Eventually everyone moves on, remembering the shows as pleasant times in their lives.

FirstNationalBastard: this is the first fandom to have all these options open to them for creating original content because of the relative ease of flash animation, plentiful voice actors, and a copyright holder that hasn't yet went off the deep end with DMCA notices...

though Hasbro is starting to get all big corporation-y with things, so we'll have to see how long the hands off golden era can last.

The traditional business model:

1) Make content.
2) ???
3) PROFIT! (sell ad space, sell toys)

Step 2 is the hard part. The sensible move is to lock down the IP, keep it in the vault, and let it out only on special occasions, or when the price is right. Disney is the traditional example of this approach. But then, what fun is there in making sense?

Hasbro took the opposite tack. They've been incredibly generous with permitting the use of their IP. In part, because they never expected this to happen in the first place, and it takes a while for a large corporation to react to anything. When they realized that something was happening, even if they didn't understand what or why, they made the brilliant (but highly unorthodox) move of just going with it.

Letting the internet remix your IP turned out to be a low-risk, high-reward bet. If it's just a fad, it dies out in a few months and doesn't affect sales. If it actually goes viral, the experiment succeeds. In this case, it succeeded beyond any expectation. There are now hundreds of thousands of young adults who will be watching reruns of the show with their kids in 5-10 years, and Hasbro doesn't have to spend a dime to reach them.

Step 2 - the magical step that comes before profit - is that you maintain ownership of the IP, but otherwise let the fans run wild with it. It's profitable to let your fans remix and mash your property up, than it is to lock it down.

If the Brony phenomenon teaches content producers that lesson, and nothing else, the world will be a better place for it.