4chan Chronicle/The Bronies

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the seventh revival of the My Little Pony franchise, wasn’t received with many expectations by the population of /co/. With a fandom borne out of a small general (one of the first to call itself as such) with a handful of tripfags, to everyone’s surprise, the series became a hit on the TV and the board, and quickly assembled a sizeable amount of fans. /co/mrades began to flock on the general of the now called bronies, who were starting to show all the signs of becoming a problematic sub-community – an excess of tripcode users and a tendency to rile people up. Bronies were mostly left alone and ignored, as nobody wanted to associate with a series for kids. However the general would keep growing in size and its content and culture would begging to pop on unrelated threads on /co/, sparking an outrage every time. The situation became clearly uncontainable and /co/ exploded in drama as everyone was trying to get rid of them. Realizing how easily entire threads could be derailed with a single pony image, the MLP general and its newly named bronies attained a massive troll mentality, which further attracted new users with a penchant for trolling. The situation finally exploded and bronies got their general banned, which prompted them to spread to other boards. Wherever they went they were received with complete and utter confusion. /b/tards where proven completely unable to handle the situation and essentially collapsed in civil war when the bronies made a general on the board. Besides the core fandom, who simply wanted to discuss the series and enjoy their culture, various users and tripfags were in only for the sake of trolling – and where exceedingly successful at it. Donning tripcodes, practicing avatarfagging, resetting their routers, organizing from off-site, planning raids and even designing an automated proxy-switcher program named BanBuster and several spam programs, bronies raided the entirety of the site, including the then moderator heartland /q/ - Questions. Given that it’s in fact impossible to truly ban someone with a dynamic IP, and despite monstrous efforts in part of the moderation, moot was forced to concede defeat and give the bronies their own board. This ended the civil war in the first “defeat” 4chan ever suffered. Making a global announcement, moot presented the creation of a new board: /mlp/ – My Little Pony. Many cried betrayal at the sight of this, however those who saw the endless trolling of the bronies realized there was no other way.

Where Did They Come From?

It’s also worthy of note that besides /co/, bronies came directly from the furry fandom. This resulted in the furry fandom being “purged” of its most socially inadequate elements as they flocked to greener, less mature pasture. This also leads to the ironic revelation that 4chan’s first true defeat against a force not their own was in the hand of furries.

Worthy of mention was the /b/ MLP General (Shitpost Illuminati): Even through /b/ was set as forced anonymous after the creation of /mlp/, the brony trolling group kept making threads. On top of the proxy switcher (BanBuster) and hanging out off-site, they designed a script they called NameSync that enabled them to don names and see each other’s names on anonymous boards. This allowed them to continue using the general as if nothing ever changed. This group was nicknamed Pony /b/read by its users. /MLP/ was getting tired of having people demanding they take their soldiers off /b/ and suffered occasional trolling from members of the /b/read general, so they disassociated them from the board. Pony /b/read became a community inside /b/ that eventually migrated to 8chans /b/ board during the GamerGate fiasco, despite being thousands of bans, constantly being spammed by /b/tards, and thread deletion. In order to hide themselves from the mods, they began to use vaguely pony related imagery and reduce avatarfaggotry. When questioned why they chose to stay on /b/, a few very dedicated members would say that /b/ was the board they originally used before MLP and its fandom was a thing. To this day you can see, from time to time, several /b/tards talking as if they knew each other personally, that is usually because they are still using NameSync and can identify each other. Today their threads still continue on the /trash/ board on 4chan after being banned from 8chan's /b/ board in early 2017.