1 Year of Fimfiction, and my intro to Ponies

As a pure reader...
But still, that time has flown.

This post is really just a little journal thing for myself than anyone else, a way to write out my thoughts at the time, as my awful memory forgets the dates and times of anything specific. I have no idea how people remember the exact date they first watched or finished things otherwise.

I don't even remember how exactly I got into ponies, it was either one of two ways...
Crazed ramblings ahead~

One would be through the Hearts of Iron 4 mod, Equestria at War. Pretty simple one really, being a big fan of other Paradox games I wanted to learn how to play HOI4 but found myself struggling to both learn how to play, and who to play, I had heard about the mod beforehand and played around with it and found myself enjoying the ponies funnily and wanted to know more, which would lead into the next part...

The other way round would have been through a YouTube reaction series first, then the mod. About halfway through 2022 I found myself with little content to watch and was bored out of my mind, one thing I somehow enjoy is seeing reactions to content I've already watched, but a few series have been different. There is one specific YouTube reactor that I enjoy the most, and I had watched most everything on his channel that interested me, except one, the first show he ever reacted to... that being MLP.

Backtrack a little over a year ago before then, that same reactor had successfully gotten me into RWBY, another show that I had known about for years, and put off watching it, and even disliking it because it was popular to do so. But using a content creator whose videos I enjoyed helped me get into something I wouldn't have given a chance otherwise with RWBY, maybe the same could be said for MLP? The only problem was the reaction series started from season 4, in terrible quality, so I ended up skipping seasons 1, 2, 3 and 4, straight to 5 and started watching. It must have been some crazy stoke of luck that the season 5 premiere is pretty heavy in tone, it must have gone a great length in endearing me to the show early on, I kept watching these reactions through to slice of life, where said reactor was going crazy over every little thing happening, and at that point I bit the bullet and decided to start the show by myself from the start, and what a journey it has been.

Recently, to pinpoint the date that I finished the show originally, I had to delve through my YouTube likes to find that same reaction to the finale of the show, which I was following on with after watching episodes myself. Then check the adjacent liked videos either side in the playlist to check the date that they were uploaded, those being a unrelated daily upload series I watch, giving me the exact date of September 14th 2022 being when I finished the show, using the same method I found that I started watching the reactions on July 14th, so now I know, not that it really matters.

In the year and a bit since, Im still just as enamoured with the show as I was then, having having watched the show a dozen times through, and having read close to 6,000,000 words according to my stats, so thats pretty cool, I genuinely have read more MLP than actual literature now, and it's only going to get worse. My longest read so far is the 'Ballad of Nasty Jack' at 619,211 words, which took 19 days to read through, which is pretty good time for me.

Again, this was really for me, but I do want to start not being so reclusive and get involved with the community, even commenting is difficult for me, so i'm hoping writing things out might convince me to break out of my shell more.

Not sure how you found me if you're reading this, but hello and thanks for maybe putting up with my rambling! How did you get into the show?