I Had a Small Revelation... · 11:02pm February 20th
Over the last couple days, there was an intrusive thought that kept hounding at me for the longest time. It was in regards to my current interests and fandoms. Not about my hobby as a gamer, practice as an artist and writer, or love for the music genre of metal. It was more in regards to being a (relatively) long standing brony and how it started.
Ok, sure, when the show was first popular (end of season 1, beginning of season 2), I saw the memes and some excellent artwork, and thought to myself "maybe I'll give the show a chance", and the rest was history. It's a typical, dime a dozen backstory for most fans of Friendship is Magic that is repeated over and over among us a good 70% of the time, give or take. Thinking about it, however, I kinda remembered a few things that began to stick out to me now in regards to when I was growing up. One is that I was never really adverse to the idea of slice-of-life, cutesy female characters going on adventures every now and then, as I had been more of a fan of Powerpuff Girls and My Life as a Teenage Robot, even when my love of cartoons was slowly sunsetting for the time being. Second, whenever I saw toy commercials for MLP merchendise (back when gen 3 and 3.5 were being pushed), I had heavy criticism towards the My Little Pony brand at the time, somewhat asking (rhetorically, mind you) why they'd use electric guitar/bass metal riffs (on the softer end, to be fair) in the music, but I had always suggested (again, rhetorically) that if they were doing it to appeal to a tomboy/boyish crowd, they should go all the way rather than just some halfhearted music shift. I was also a cynical teenager at the time, so I might have just been pulling opinions out of my ass, but the memory is genuine regardless. The point was, I didn't actively despise the idea of MLP appealing to a wider demographic aside from just super young girls.
But, the third thing I remembered was something that was rather prevalent WAAAAAAAY back in my childhood. Said childhood memory was triggered when I was doing a little shopping for my wife on her behalf, and came across something that instantly caught my eye. A complete season 1 Blu-Ray of Sailor Moon. I'm not much of an anime guy, and my cartoon watching has become a bit scarce once again, but despite my normal reaction being just walking on by without a second thought, I instead couldn't help but gaze at it with intrigue. It was kind of weird, just seeing Sailor Moon out in the wild like that for about 60$, and I left it there thinking it would just be an amusing thing I saw while shopping.
However, little did I know, the longer the thought of that 46 episode collection would stick with me, the more I actually started getting hit with memories of the show itself, back when the translation and localization was handled by DiC. I remembered watching the show both with my sister and of my own accord along side episodes of Dragonball Z when I was super young. I remember my sister renting an old VHS of the final episodes of the show, compiled into a movie, where some incredibly messed up stuff happened to the scouts as they fought the big bad of Season 1 once and for all. I also ended up remembering a conversation with Joey a few years back where we talked about how brutal the show could be at times, completely contrasting against it's glitzy, glittery, pretty magic girl motif (to be fair, the scouts were fighting against literal demons from space, so...).
Then, it hit me, like a tonne of bricks of glitz and glam. After reallocating some funds and doing some light budgeting, I marched back to the store, bought the damn Season 1 Blu-Ray (not before checking online to see if I could get a better deal. Spoiler, I couldn't), and came to the stark realization that now makes sense to me all these years later. I probably wouldn't have been as into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic as I am now if it weren't for Sailor Moon. I probably would have just enjoyed the show for what it was for the most part, and dipped out after a while, not really engaging in the fun fandom stuff I do now (such as writing stories for FiMFic). Sailor Moon is probably the reason why I love Friendship is Magic, or at least the long lasting seed that eventually lead up to it. Does this mean I am/was predispositioned to enjoy ALL magical girl shows out there because of the silly "magic girls fighting demons" show? If that were true, I would have likely watched a LOT more anime, lol. No, however I DO think it more influenced my liking toward cute, feminine characters taking on the roles as heroes with just a little extra bite to keep it from being too saccharine.
Anyway, I just wanted to talk about this, as I thought it was a bit of some interesting introspection in regards to who I am and what I like. Though, to my few followers that actually read my garbage, I pose the question to you: What REALLY got you into Friendship is Magic? What do you think was the root reason, or the most likely one, that ended up resulting in you loving a show about silly magic horse girls?
For me it was just straight up memes I saw back in the day when frequenting Forums on websites like The Escapist.
Eventually curiosity took over and I decided to give the show a watch.