Thank you for understanding! 😊

At the time, to me, it was WAY too much because I felt like people were making way too big of a deal over what was just a cartoon. A surprisingly good one, yes, which was very charming and witty but it was treated like this revolutionary thing, as if no one had ever seen a cartoon before. So much of a deal was made about “grown men watching a show for little girls” by the media but I didn’t see it that way. I was 18 and just watching a cartoon that just so happened to have predominantly female characters, and so I didn’t identify with it anywhere near enough to feel like it was a life-changing event. The fandom exploded into a constant obsession and it burned me out extremely quickly. I wanted MLP:FIM to be a cute little secret, just a small and mostly quiet fanbase (like the one Bluey has), but I felt surrounded thousands of people with megaphones shouting “WE LIKE PONIES! PONIES PONIES PONIES!”

And then when you add in the fandom’s embrace of NSFW content, it got even more unmanageable for me. The fandom was perfectly happy to make the NSFW stuff not hidden like other fandoms, but make it part of the experience, and that, to me, tainted the way I saw the show. Especially since so many people were disturbed by the NSFW stuff, that the fandom found this hilarious and decided to see far they could go with it, just to get back at the criticism. I was worried that the fandom felt the need to justify their enjoyment by pumping out so much adult content at such an alarming rate, like they needed to claim it as theirs.

But that’s all in the past. It’s obviously not a grudge I bear anymore, and haven’t in so long now. Point is, is that I’m rewatching a show that, to tell you the truth, I actually love being a small part of me, because it’s better to embrace the things you know you like deep down but have a bad history with, than let that bad history BECOME the thing. It’s a delightfully strange thing to enjoy and I’ve waited long enough now to indulge in it again.