Bronies

            The bulk of this post actually comes from a cultural criticism paper I wrote for my creative nonfiction class this past semester. In case you just skipped the title, I’ll give you fair warning now that this post is about the incredibly strange Brony fandom and how I became a part of it. A friend of mine made me promise to put it on here and I figured if I’m going to alienate over half of my potential readership then why not get it over with.

            I can think of few moments when I feel more secure in my masculinity than when I am sitting with my computer and a voice sings from the speakers, “My little pony, my little pony…” After that admittedly girly opening theme is done, I’m immersed in twenty minutes of quality cartoon centered on the friendship of six ponies and their adventures in the land of Equestria.

Young men like me who watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic get more than a little grief. Let’s rewind a bit. In October of 2010, Hasbro launched a new take on their My Little Pony show based on the accompanying line of toys. The show last aired in the early 90’s and was remembered as a terrible cartoon that shamelessly marketed the toy franchise with cheap animation and poor plots. When the new My Little Pony aired in 2010, it quickly got the attention of those who remembered the awful predecessor and garnered some critical reviews. One such review caught the eye of some young adults on forums like 4chan, and they decided to check it out. Some of them fell in love with the show, took on the name brony (a combination of bro and pony or /b/rony depending on who you ask), and a cult following was born.

            By late 2011 the number of these followers, mostly men aged 15-30, had swelled tremendously, and my eighteen-year-old brother had stumbled across them and been snared by the cartoon ponies as well. When I came home for winter break, he was all too happy to try and share it with me, even if I was less than enthusiastic. I’m not certain what my exact response was the first time he asked me to watch MLP with him, but it was something along the lines of “No thanks, I like women.”

What I didn’t know was that after a couple weeks at home, one becomes a bit desperate for things with which to kill time. Having been worn down by my brother and seeing fairly funny MLP related content online, I looked up the first episode.

Honestly I wasn't hooked by the first few episodes, but nobody really is. The first episode was half of a two-part special, and when I found myself decently entertained I watched the next episode too. I continued clicking the “next episode” button for a little while until I realized I had watched ten episodes. Still I resisted, not telling anyone I’d watched it and trying to convince myself that just watching some of the show didn’t make me a brony; at this point I was what is referred to as a “closet-brony.” It wasn’t until a few weeks later when I found myself humming a song from the show as I walked to work that I was forced to accept that I was thoroughly hooked.

Since “joining the herd,” I haven’t exactly kept my love for the show a secret, but I don’t usually broadcast it either. My own introduction to the phenomenon displayed a pretty typical reaction. People tend to assume bronies are either homosexuals, pedophiles, or people with some other mental defect. While I obviously think there is nothing wrong with grown men enjoying a show targeting little girls, I will be the first to admit that it’s really weird.

To their unending credit, the makers of the show responded very positively to the unforeseen demographic the show had captured—once they managed to pick their jaws up off the floor. At one point they even released a promotional music video for the show that contained a direct shout-out to bronies. They’ve also taken to paying attention to trends in the fandom and playing to our interests. The most notable example is of a background pony who was first shown as cross-eyed, prompting bronies to nickname her Derpy Hooves. When the creators noticed the apparent animation prank and the fans’ reaction, they began placing her in the background more often and eventually gave her a short speaking role and officially named her Derpy—to the bronies’ unending delight.

Lauren Faust, the creator of MLP: FiM who has also worked on cartoons such as Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, has totally embraced the unexpected fan base. She has stated that the thing she has always disliked about cartoons designed for girls is that they only target little girls and can’t be enjoyed by anyone else. Unfortunately not everyone shares this philosophy on cartoons. The general response to bronies has, predictably, been a mix of confusion and disgust. Most people think there must be something wrong with a grown man who watches a show for little girls; it’s just not natural.

Well why not? Once I accepted that I thoroughly enjoyed the show and was in fact a brony, my next goal was to figure out why exactly I liked it so much. With all the negativity directed toward bronies, I needed to justify my interest in the show and be able to refute any arguments that say it’s wrong. People assume that bronies must be perverted, or that watching the show makes a male gay or somehow less of a man.

The popular argument is that it’s just unnatural for grown men to watch such a “girly” show without something being wrong with them. Having watched the entire series thus far and clearly investing a lot of thought into the subject, I’m willing to go out on a limb and consider myself something of an expert on My Little Pony. Despite the supposed girly nature of the show, I can’t find much that is objectively girly about it. What makes ponies- whether normal, pegasi, or unicorns- girly? Is the theme of friendship girly? Perhaps from a certain socially constructed viewpoint it is, but not objectively. Well, maybe the themes and issues presented in the content pertain to girls only? Not exactly.

Each of the six main characters could have her gender flipped and keep her main traits without it seeming off. The first is a bookworm, the second is all about having fun and partying, the third is an introvert who cares for animals, the fourth is obsessed with fashion and style, the fifth is a hardworking farmhand, and the sixth is a cocky athlete. Nothing in those descriptions is necessarily girly, or even feminine, and in fact some seem to fit male stereotypes better. The issues addressed in the show are the same; each episode wraps up with a moral about friendship that easily applies to either gender.

What confuses me most about the argument is that I’ve never seen a similar fuss raised about girls of any age watching cartoons targeting boys. In fact whenever a girl takes an interest in something that’s supposed to be for boys, such as video games or guns, it’s seen as desirable. The message sent by this seems clear: the feminine is undesirable and lower while the masculine is better and to be strived for.

Why has My Little Pony gained such a devoted following? I can think of many reasons: the animation is very well done, the music is fun and catchy, the plots are surprisingly well written, and the characters are relatable and entertaining. Once you add in the wonderful fan community and the creators who pay so much attention to them it’s no wonder so many get hooked. The community is possibly as big of a draw as the show itself. Bronies create everything from memes to fan-fiction to fan art to original music inspired by the show. A brony who looks into the community as well as the show will get all kinds of new art along with the show to enjoy.

One thing that keeps many of us in the fan base is the attitude of bronies. We revel in the fact that we managed to look past the first impression of a show like this and enjoy it anyway, and we rally under the motto “Love and Tolerate” as the main takeaway from the show. The more I think about it, the more trouble I have finding anything not to like in this wonderfully “girly” cartoon about a bunch of colorful ponies.

An Education in Doubt

            This weekend I’ve been reading the book Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose. In a nutshell, Roose was a student at Brown who had an encounter with some far-right Christians that got him thinking about the God-divide. He enrolled in Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University for a semester and pretended to be an evangelical Christian in an attempt to see the other side of the divide and then wrote about it. As a Christian, even a politically moderate Christian, I disagree with a lot of his views, but many of his observations of conservative evangelical culture hit uncomfortably close to home.

            Particularly, his observations on the sheltered nature of the education system at Liberty have gotten me thinking. Throughout the book he notes a distinct lack of professors encouraging students to really question what they believe in order to learn more about it. Rather, the usual stance is that you should actually ignore evidence against your beliefs and just stick to your guns. Roose and many of his peers at Liberty see this as contradictory to a good liberal arts education, and I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing.

            In my own Christian college experience at George Fox University, I’ve been presented with a pretty wide range of beliefs from my professors, and an even wider range in the material we study (I’m taking a class on the Beat generation for crying out loud, it’s hard to get much further from traditional Christianity). I’ve heard some fairly negative responses from my family and people at my church about this, one or two even wondering aloud if the university should be considered Christian if so many liberal views are held. As an advocate of engaging my faith on an intellectual level, I have to disagree with them.

            Perhaps the biggest concern my friends and family have voiced when I tell them about the less traditional aspects of GFU is that it may drive students to leave the faith; like teaching us about the various stances on evolutionary theory besides young-earth creationism versus atheistic evolutionism might turn us from worshipping from Christ to praising Richard Dawkins. I don’t feel like I should have to point out how ridiculous that sounds, but apparently it’s necessary. Many of these young adults, myself included, have been raised in a pretty sheltered environment where our exposure to alternative philosophies has been severely limited. That isn’t going to last forever. Sooner or later, most of us are going to find ourselves in environments where our ideology won’t be the majority, and if we haven’t been prepped at all it’s going to come as a bit of a shock.

            College seems like the ideal place to get that exposure, especially if it’s a Christian college. We’re young adults, which means it’s time for us to grow out of the faith of our elders if we haven’t yet and figure out what we believe for ourselves. College is the time when we’re figuring the rest of our lives out anyway, so it seems fitting that we should hash out what we believe in regard to religion as well.

            In fact, I think it’s healthy to question what we believe and weigh it against other beliefs. Is a faith mature if a person is unwavering on what they believe but has no actual idea why they believe it beyond it being what they grew up with? Why should we apply more rigorous study to science or other studies than we do to our faith? If I go through the first 22 years of my life without looking at other beliefs without dismissing them offhandedly and then enter the real world where people around me believe those things, how am I going to function alongside them? Better yet, how am I supposed to witness to them, as I believe I am called to do?

            I want my faith to be intellectual as well as spiritual and emotional. I enjoy questioning what God says and growing to understand it better through that. And if my views should change, as they have quite a bit, I think that’s a good thing.

God Doesn't Understand

            People, especially young people it seems, are fond of claiming that God doesn’t understand what they’re going through. Struggling Christians seem convinced that their situation is somehow unique and He can’t get it. Atheists and agnostics have trouble believing in a higher power that is that intimately connected to everything. If we start with the assumption that God is the creator of everything though, it’s a pretty ridiculous thing to say.

            Why? Well the easy and commonly quoted answer is that He is God and all knowing and whatnot. The problem with that answer is that much like a father telling his kids that he makes the rules simply because he’s dad, it’s true but unsatisfying to people who are seeking an emotional and intellectual relationship with God. You could reduce a lot of reasoning for the rules in the Bible to “God says so,” but that answer gets annoying pretty fast. I accept that some things come down to that because they are beyond my understanding, but this is not one of them.

            Another reason one could give for how God can understand the human experience while not being human is that He actually did live a human life as Jesus. There’s a joke that points out the fallacy of saying God can’t understand because He never had to endure hunger, thirst, poverty, death of friends and family, rejection, persecution, pain, and death himself, because Jesus experienced all those things. Still, this answer has weak points in my eyes. Jesus didn’t go through genocide on the scale of the Holocaust, nor did He witness the terror of an atomic bomb, nor many varied and specific kinds of pain. If this is our only answer for God’s understanding our struggles then some people can claim it’s not enough and He truly doesn’t understand.

            The thing is, by His nature as creator, He has to be able to understand everything, and far better than any of us can. Think of it in terms of art. How ridiculous would it be for a painting to say its artist doesn’t understand it, or a pot to say its maker doesn’t get how it works, or for a character I create in a story to claim I don’t understand her? For us to say God doesn’t get what we’re going through is even more ridiculous a claim than that.

Artists are still dependent on materials and ideas that they did not create to form their art, but God created everything from nothing by the sheer power of his will. For that to be true, he has to understand every aspect of every piece of creation. Think about the implications of that. He gets everything. All those systems of nature with all of their intricacies? He came up with those. While we’re still struggling to really understand everything from gravity to the atom to black holes to the act of creation itself, he came up with all that. On a much more personal level, God created us too. That means He created our minds, which means He came up with how they work. We’re still fumbling with and debating psychological theories, but He knows exactly how we tick. Not only did He make the system, He made the emotions themselves. Those same emotions that so many people claim He can’t possibly understand, He understands better than we could possibly hope to. And if He understands things like hurt and grief and the like so well, I can’t help but think He feels them in the most profound empathy possible as well.

The Bad Guys

            I love books. Specifically, I tend to love fantasy novels (in all their 600+ page glory), but I’ve noticed a somewhat annoying theme in them. The “bad guys.” If that phrase on its own doesn’t make you wince like it does me, then allow me to explain. In a story there is the protagonist and the antagonist, and I have come to appreciate those terms as an alternative to “the good guys and the bad guys.” However, in all too many stories the antagonist is a cop-out: a purely evil character who does bad things because… well because evil.

            You see the problem with this idea; it’s not realistic. If art imitates life, and a good story has life-like characters, are you really going to find an evil character that actually thinks he is evil?

            This type of antagonist has his place, particularly in more lighthearted stories such as comedies (particularly satire) and children’s stories, but he often steps outside his proper domain and into more complex writing. Some of my favorite authors are guilty of this, but I suppose a popular example would be best: Voldemort.

            In Harry Potter, Voldemort is just straight up evil. It’s been about a year since I last read some of the books, but I can’t recall any motive given for Voldemort’s actions other than he came to the conclusion that wizards were better than muggles. There was no series of reasoning in which he explained why he truly believed this to be for the greater good, it was always pretty clear that he was just in it for ruling the world.

            But very few real bad guys actually do that, and very few interesting ones do. How much better could those seven books have been if we the readers had been forced to explore the Dark Lord’s thoughts a little bit? If we had been forced to see his side of things and understand that he really did think that he was doing good and that Harry was standing in the way of the righteous path?

            My favorite example of an author who does this, and who has rapidly become one of my favorite authors, is Brandon Sanderson. In each of his stories so far he really plays around with the idea of the bad guy. This ranges from starting a book with one character as an antagonist and having their entire worldview shift to keeping a character ambiguous but possibly evil and not revealing their true motives until the end to spending an entire book painting a character as pure evil and then forcing another point of view on you to show that they were actually helping the whole time.

This is how I think antagonists should be done. Nobody is evil in his or her own eyes, every bad guy has a reason for what they do that they probably completely believe. This can be as simple as greed and a “looking out for number one” attitude or as complex and involved as a worldview that says murder, oppression, and war is the only way to bring about piece. The point is that they believe in their cause as much as the noble heroes believe in theirs.

This has brought me to the conclusion that I can count my writing as successful if I can just for one moment get a reader so invested in an antagonist’s story that they find themselves rooting for the “bad guy” before they can stop themselves. Who knows what other false assumptions about people they might start questioning then.

My Body is a Tent?

            If there is one thing American Christians are really good at, it’s coming up with catchy, pithy metaphors to sum up complex theological ideas. It’s quite a handy little talent, if sometimes problematic. One such metaphor that became very popular a couple years ago in my church was the idea that our physical bodies are just tents; temporary and imperfect dwellings that we have to live with for now but will eventually be replaced with something better.

            You can probably see why this is such an attractive idea. Our bodies are broken in thousands of ways, many of them irreparable, and we don’t want to think that we’ll be stuck in them forever. So we look forward to the next life where we’ll live forever and have new bodies that don’t have all the same problems our current ones do (either new or renewed, I’m not solid on the theology there but the point is the same). We’ll be trading in these crappy tents for a mansion. It really does seem like a sweet trade, and at first I totally bought into the idea, but there is a very big problem with this metaphor.

            Word choice is important, especially when fitting a lot of thought into a short statement. The less words you use the more precise you have to be. The body as a tent metaphor is an example of bad word choice.

            What is a tent? It is a temporary dwelling unfit for long-term use. Many people I know would say, “Well yeah, like our bodies. They aren’t meant to last, they are broken and corrupted and need to be replaced.” Well, that’s half right. Our bodies are broken and corrupted, but to say they were not meant to last is a massive fallacy.

            In Genesis 1:31, after God had created humans and everything else it says, “Then God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.” Everything God had made, including these bodies, was good. God didn’t half-ass our bodies with the intent of making them temporary, his creation was complete and good.

            This attitude of the flesh being evil and sinful is everywhere. Another popular saying is, “You don’t have soul; you are a soul. You have a body.” Always this separation from the physical form. We’ve romanticized the mental and spiritual form and degraded the physical form, but this is wrong. We are a soul, yes, and a body and a mind. We cannot separate our flesh from what we are any more than we can our mind or soul. The flesh is corrupt and broken, yes, and so is the mind, as was the soul before the sacrifice of Christ.

            This is the problem with calling the body a tent: it implies that God made a mistake. He didn’t finish us because he knew we were going to screw up, but that’s not right. God didn’t give us a tent because he knew we’d screw up. He knew we’d screw up, but gave us a perfect mansion anyway. The broken body isn’t a crappy tent, it is a beautiful masterpiece of a mansion that God gave us and we wrecked. Calling it a tent takes the blame for our brokenness and places it on God.

            These bodies are broken now, but that is because we messed them up. We’re going to get new ones, but it’s not an upgrade from tent to mansion, it’s so much better. God gave us beautiful homes to live in for free and do as we pleased. We chose to party it up and let the homes fall into disrepair, and instead of looking at us in anger and leaving us with our mess he gives us another chance and is going to completely rebuild our homes for free again. Isn’t that a much more moving illustration of grace than God throwing us in a crappy tent to screw it up before trusting us with a mansion?

An Introduction

I've been thinking a lot lately. I've been told this is dangerous, but hard to stop, so I needed to find a solution for the torrents of ideas in my head. I've never kept a journal, and some of these things just don't make for an easy transition into poetry to get them out of my head. I could always assault my friends, family, and acquaintances with my thoughts, but in my experience I'm less likely to get a good response when I try that approach.

So I'm compromising. Whenever I have a burning thought that I just need to get out of my system, I'll come write it here. Ideally it will go like this: I write my thoughts down and like-minded people read it and comment, tweaking my ideas with their own point of view and insights. Better yet, people who blatantly disagree with me will find this place and get a real discussion going.

Worst case scenario: I end up writing an open journal that nobody reads but I still get the satisfaction of writing my thoughts down. As long as it doesn't devolve into some emo LiveJournal I'll be happy; I'd really rather not have to grow my bangs back out and start alluding to suicidal thoughts and eating disorders that I probably don't honestly have.

Now, about the title: "Thoughts You Probably Don't Care About." This is pretty simple. I know it sounds self deprecating and like I'm starting on the aforementioned emo path, I titled it that because I actually hope nothing I post here is of particular note. God-willing, I'll be nowhere near the first to think these things; because if I'm the only one and end up as some kind of prophetic voice for my generation, then my generation is screwed. Rather, I want to post thoughts that I haven't seen discussed much, or satisfactorily, that I see as important and get people talking about them and finding them important too.

In short, if everything goes according to my diabolical plan, I'll get some people thinking about things. Religion, art, whatever tickles my fancy really. If not, then I just get to indulge my writing addiction, which works just as well.