Unprompted Commentary: Memes (With a Plot Arc)

It's sort of come together for me at this point that the meme about a Deviant Art originated shipping/crossover fanwork has completed perhaps one of the most asymmetrical and disorientingly concise plot-arcs in meme history. This rambling essay will compile some recollections about ponys, pornography, and the poetry of emergent fandom.

This is very loosely structured, the TLDR of the text is that Memes can take us on a trip back through history, and there's nothing quite as Queer as being Cringe on the internet during the 2010's. Like seriously, we meme about the Gamergate to Transgirl pipeline, it's a thing.

Introduction and Historical Asides:

For those unaware, MordeTwi (takes you to KnowYourMeme) is one of the cuter early 2010's memes that traces its roots to the aftershocks of now a full Decade-Removed fandom experience. The explosion of fandom and creative works caused by the release of both My Little Pony and Regular Show deserves documenting in texts left behind when our civilization goes extinct. While Regular Show sort of sat as a cute cartoon that some Furries got excited about, MLP: Friendship is Magic is the titanic shitpost magnet which saw Hasbro panic as a bunch of depressed Millennial men (many of which in the queer closet) flocked to it for comfort, community, and fandom. Bronycon, the /mlp/ board on 4chan, and a whole host of other fandoms (Fallout Equestria being one of the most popular crossover fan community works) exploded onto the internet, occupying the front pages of Deviant Art, Furaffinity, Rule34.paheal, and E621. It was horny on mane, as much as you kind of expect when going on the internet, and in the Furry Fandom a schism existed briefly over the influx of Pony Pornography. My exposure to MLP:FIM as a passive observer (I was openly queer at the time and really didn't care for it, so its impact on me at the time was minimal) was in hindsight the experience of a lifetime.

I was young, studying abnormal psychology and demographic patterns for the first time. Things were so much simpler in 2012. Some of the earliest studies about fandom psychology and the internet as a magnet for neurodivergent and queer folks trace their first findings to this period. Works like Furries from A to Z (2007) had established firmly that queer (particularly gay and white men from the U.S.) people were attracted to fandom spaces online. As time progressed, we began to see how socially stunted and namely Autistic, ADHD, and otherwise neurodivergent people had remarkable concentration in Queer Spaces online. You'll see articles in the news, various online blogs, and yes Academic oriented persons all are investigating or discussing the links between Fandom and Autism. There is a natural concentration gradient of interest, social stunting/isolation, and accessibility through text-based interactions which enable neurodivergent folks much more opportunity to enrich themselves than a lot of the regular social world.

But, reminiscing aside, many clearly Autistic or neurodivergent friends I made through memeing IRL would go on to find their queer sides and discover themselves, some would even live healthy lives, though at least one would disappear into substance use disorders (no one knows if he's still alive) and another would disappear down the Alt Right Pipeline in 2015 (I assume if he didn't deconvert, he's doing Nazi shit with the proud boys). MLP:FIM was and remains to a degree absolutely massive, though the closure of the series in 2019 has continued to leave a hole in the internet to this day. It's quite the glory hole- erm, massive missed opportunity to spin off something meaningful, but from my passive observation, reception of later series has not been kind to the Brony fandom. Many have taken their cartoon horses and scraped the serial numbers off, from my observation, choosing to become other projects not stapled to Hasbro (such as the wildly stylized Them's Fightin' Herds), or to debrand from MLP to avoid DMCA or other possible character limitations inherent to the setting.

The Birds and the Mares:

Fitting then is the approximate Arc I have pieced together for MordeTwi, and seeing as Cohost spiritually is like Tumblr if full frontal nudity wasn't banned, I think the commentary can live here without risk of removal for at least a few years. What started as an unremarkable post in 2011 escalated steadily as it marinated in its own malaise, when suddenly in 2020 it hit youtube as a combo of a Tiktok originated emo cover of "Airplanes" by B.O.B., and the original Deviant Art image. It was meme gold, I knew about it, Covid was happening, everyone was caught in the reality vortex and shortly after more and more memes were pumped out. Afterall, this comes fresh off the heels of MLP:FIM ending its tenure the previous year! The utter audacity of the work and sudden fandom around its concept just took off, and three years removed, it is still flourishing in this ironic and post-ironic sort of way. I think it's hilarious, I love it, it makes me happy, and it's pretty much entirely because of how far removed from rationality the whole thing is. There's even porn, which I sort of can't believe butknow better than to even begin questioning. By my reckoning, it is at the minimum enough of a genre to have a few dozen genuine attempts if E621's results are to be considered.

Imagine explaining this little cultural nugget of internet history to your parents in under three paragraphs, in such a manner that they can comprehend it. I couldn't. Instead, please enjoy my extremely competently composed and highly original collection of memes ordered with some slight commentary added for narrative context and effect. The purpose is to illustrate that somehow there has been enough material here from people's memes that you can sort of rearrange the pieces to create a little story out of it. Three years of fandom generated image content, some of it made for jokes and some out of genuine enthusiasm. A lot of passion, skill, and time goes into making works like these, and I want to highlight just a few examples for an amusing use of my time. Everything here is linked either through Youtube (video interludes) or via the archive at KnowYourMeme, so you should be able to locate the original sources without too much work, in theory. I find stuff like this absolutely fascinating, and it's a healthy reminder that Fandom comes in many shapes and sizes, and ironically what starts out as sort-of bullying can become in its own way a celebration of our collective creative cringe. I hope you enjoy this elaborate shitpost highlighting what may indeed be one of the newest, most incredible, dankest memes since Loss.

The Plot Arc I Propose:

Thusly, as this is incredibly popular but has gotten entries over time, I have assembled from the finest of examples I can dredge up from my files, memories, and of course the archive KnowYourMeme provides.