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As trending subcultures go, bronies have been gaining steam for the past few years. Male and ranging in age from tweens to middle-agers, bronies are the male diehard fans of the rebooted cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, an unlikely audience that's become one of the most-examined pop culture phenomenons in the world today.
A variety of documentary films have been produced about the bronies already, and one’s coming to St. Louis for an extremely limited engagement this week. As in exactly one showing.
A Brony Tale screens at the Tivoli (6350 Delmar, 314-727-7271) Tuesday, July 8, at 7 p.m. St. Louis will be one of 17 cities across the US and Canada where the film is being screened tonight, with other major markets also offering a single screening over the course of July.
The film’s website is a remarkably lean affair, offering only a list of screenings, the film’s trailer (which we link to above), and the straightforward tagline “A film about men… who like My Little Pony.” That’s sparse info, but a look at the trailer and some passing familiarity with the movement suggests that the film will tackle a few guiding themes:
Men can (and do) love the most-recent launch of the My Little Pony franchise. They can be of any age, ethnicity and sexuality. They can come from big cities or small towns. Most—if not all—will face a certain scrutiny from friends, family members, and those who simply can’t wrap their heads around the fixation.
Being true a true adherent to the My Little Pony cause is usually not a casual thing. Bronies tend to go full-steam into their fandom, whether that be collecting every toy affiliated with the show, attending conventions around the country, or creating fan fiction, video mashups or even original music. The scope of the fandom is pretty much all-encompassing, taking fans out of the realm of simple consumers and into the world of content creation.
As past documentaries have colorfully shown, the hardest-core bronies are prone to writing fictional stories, creating their own short films, and writing entire albums’ worth of music dedicated to the equine cast members of My Little Pony. Impressive, in some respects, is that the culture’s a relatively recent phenomenon, with the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic launching only in 2010, and the fifth season of half-hour programs currently in production.
We could go on about this topic, but words from someone outside the brony community can’t possibly offer much more than some bare-bones hints at what the brony scene’s about (or seems to be about; as the truest believers seem to insist, unless you’re in it, you can’t possibly know). Much better advice is this: sit at a computer and simply type the show’s name into YouTube, where you’ll be funneled into what seems like an endless chute of new viewing options.
We’ll start you out with the trailer to A Brony Tale. Where you go from there and for how long is entirely up to you, but know that the descent into curious, “one-more-video”-style streaming may very well eat up and hour, or two, of your time.
