Chapter 7: Everypony

Soundtrack: MLP Intro Remix, Alex S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmjbLs1Fxs

In 2010 I emerged from my furry shell into the larger world of kink. I began interacting with littles and ABDLs and kinksters on Fetlife, and met a whole lot of people who were not furries, but had many of the same interests as me, and others that I had always wanted to learn more about, like bondage. I had avoided BDSM and kink for years, since the very start I had preferred to stay in my little furry niche. This was because human ABDL stuff freaked me out a little, and I didn’t have any interest in BDSM play or pain. The non-furry websites and groups that dealt with diapers (like DPF) did not appeal to me, and I felt like I had very little in common with most human ABDLs. However there were individual exceptions.

One of these exceptions was a friend named Mako, who loved sharks as much as I loved weasels, but he wasn’t a fur and didn’t want to BE a shark, he just liked them. He had designed a pride symbol for ABDLs that I quite liked. We had interacted on and off over the years on various forums, and it turned out he lived down near Washington DC, where he was a member of a BDSM club called The Crucible. And every year, The Crucible held a week long kink event called Camp Crucible.

Camp appealed to me because it wasn’t a “BDSM dungeon” but summer camp for kinksters, and you slept in cabins, and there was an entire track for littles, and there’s so much more I could post about camp. But long story short, Camp Crucible changed my life. After that first Camp, I understood what kink was, why it was important, and why BDSM is held in an almost sacred reverence by its participants. You can read my much longer, detailed writeup about my first camp here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/3975029/

I ended up going to Camp Crucible six times over the course of the 2010s, the last one in 2019, until COVID put the kibosh on it for awhile.

Also in 2010 was the premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a show that came out of nowhere to spawn a massive fandom in the space of a few months. We watched a few episodes and both Axiom and I became instant bronies. On Twitter I had been roleplaying Mad Men characters with in-character tweets, and garnering thousands of likes for what was essentially text-based fanfic. I decided to do the same for this new pony show that was only a few episodes into its first season.

In early 2011, right around the time the episode “Sonic Rainboom” aired, I set up mlp_twilight and mlp_celestia and mlp_spike accounts on Twitter and started posting IC as those characters. Others started to join in, like Rainbow Dash and Rarity and Pinkie Pie. I didn’t do any sort of control over who played what, it was freewheeling and responsive. I just roleplayed as Twilight Sparkle with anyone who seemed like fun. Axiom ran Spike and Celestia and I ran Twilight and other ancillary characters like guardponies and stewards that kept the plot running. We kept it strictly G-rated and as close to the show as possible in its tone.

In that same year, brony conventions started cropping up, and they were immediately massive. I remember being jammed in overloaded con hotel corridors swarming with three times the number of attendees than were expected. It was a genuine phenomenon those first few years.

Bronydom looked for a time like it was becoming Furry 2.0. Artists, musicians, animators, the sheer amount of creativity that exploded around ponies in 2011-2013 was something to behold. Bronydom was less queer (not totally straight, but less), there was less porn (not zero porn, but less), there weren’t as many full fursuits but lots of accessories like rainbow tails and unicorn headpieces, and most of all I noticed a LOT of old school furries coming out of the woodwork to participate. I saw names and faces of furs who had left furry fandom years ago for various reasons pop back up again in the early days of brony, like Purple Tinker and Tim Kangaroo. Many of the artists had just been biding their time while furry culture evolved and changed in the 2000s, and were ready to go to jump onto pony fandom when it came out of nowhere in 2011.

Bronydom got its start on 4chan, and that was a big part of its success but also contained the seeds of its own destruction. For a time it really looked like the show’s messages and its femininity was having an effect on the more toxic parts of chan culture. It was nice to see something that was genuinely warm-hearted and with a message of friendship and tolerance be taken up by such a place as the chans. But as time went on the 4chan-ness seeped through, and bronies began to acquire somewhat of a stigma and a reputation. The brony fandom quickly got a worse reputation than furry had, and the cons peaked in popularity and then began to decline in the mid 2010s. Some brony cons are still around, but they are not remotely as huge as they were back in the day.

Also, when a fandom is based around a single show, it seldom survives the decline of that show, and honestly after Twilight Sparkle became an alicorn princess in Season 3 it was downhill from there. The early seasons of MLP were fun, original and exciting, but as the show lost its original creative spark and slipped in quality and shoveled in character after character to shore up toy sales, the fandom started to dissipate. It’s still around, but its not even close to what it was in the first few seasons.

On Twitterponies we didn’t care about any of that. Apart from one panel at a brony con in 2012, we were just kind of doing our own thing on Twitter. We didn’t even use the word ‘brony’ much at all. At one point there were thousands of mlp_ prefixed characters all playing out scenes. mlp_Twilight had over 35,000 followers at one point. We played out elaborate, multi-day arcs and musical numbers and events like Winter Wrap-Up where everypony participated. It remains to this day the best and biggest RP I’ve ever done, with scenes that moved me to literal tears sometimes with their emotional impact. It was all improvised, with nothing more than occasional backchannel conversation and setups, not outcomes, being agreed on in advance. We didn’t know how scenes would turn out, but they frequently turned out amazingly.

I continued to play mlp_twilight until I kind of ran out of steam with it in 2014. Axiom continued with Spike and Celestia, all the way up to today, on Mastodon. Just go to ponies.social if you want to see what twitterponies still is all about.

Meanwhile, furry fandom was running in parallel to bronydom, with many members in both camps. Many furries became bronies. Many bronies, especially artists, filtered back into furry, parlaying their profile in bronydom into major popularity as furry artists - like Braeburned and Bubblepuppers. There was a little bit of rivalry I suppose, and some bronies had vestigial anti-furry bias from years on 4chan, but honestly I don’t remember much friction. Other bronies filtered into fandoms like anime. The long term effect is that furry absorbed much of bronydom into itself and just became even bigger.

Similarly to this cross pollination, I was bringing what I had learned from my sojourn into kink back into furry. At several cons I brought a set of doctor scrubs and a lab coat and conducted medical play scenes for furries - doing physical examinations for “patients” in my hotel room set up as a clinic. They even had to fill out a form with the kind of treatment they wanted and their limits - an idea I had swiped from Camp Crucible’s ‘kidnapping’ crew. I liked the detached feel of medical play and the ability to time-block the scene to 30 minutes of activity before the next patient. I had tongue depressors and reflex hammers and blood pressure cuffs, and could get really up into someone’s business but in a casual, professional manner. I did medical play scenes at a bunch of cons, including the best con of all time: Rainfurrest.

Yes, THAT Rainfurrest. It was fuckin awesome. Although stupid idiots had to blow the whole thing apart making it the most infamous furry con of all time, I maintain that I had the most fun at that con out of the 25 or so furry cons I have attended in my life. The room parties, the scenes, the vibe, all of it was so amazing - and friends like Abbey and Jeffy and others made it that way. It was one of the few cons where the feel of the room parties was close to the stories and pics I had imagined over the years. And a photo got posted of some guy in a diaper and the whole thing fell apart at the seams. Goddammit. We had a great thing going.

I know that it was a number of multi-variant reasons Rainfurrest collapsed, but everyone knows the photo of the guy in the diaper, and thats what they think of when they think of Rainfurrest. Thanks, obama.


More later.