What the Bronies Know

Bronies—adult men who are sincerely, deeply into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a show made for small girls—were the internet’s preferred punchline for several years running. Bob’s Burgers made an episode about them that got it right: be baffled, don’t be cruel. The internet tried the other approach and it didn’t take. The Bronies persisted, ran conventions, produced fan art at a scale that defied rational prediction, and proved that mockery cannot outlast genuine devotion to a thing.

A Brony Tale premiered at Tribeca and follows Ashleigh Ball—the voice actress behind both Applejack and Rainbow Dash—through this world as a guide and subject simultaneously. She’s the interesting hinge: a woman voicing characters beloved by grown men in horse costumes, someone whose professional performance became the center of a fandom she never anticipated. The film treats this with curiosity rather than contempt, which is a deliberate choice worth noting.

The whole phenomenon still interests me. These are people who found something that makes them feel genuinely good and refused to apologize for it. I monitor my own enthusiasms for ironic distance constantly, qualifying every love before someone can question it. The Bronies never bothered with that. Whether their specific object of devotion is a cartoon about pastel ponies or something more conventionally respectable doesn’t change what the devotion itself looks like from the outside: total, undefended, indifferent to judgment. I find that harder to mock than to admire.