TL;DR Thank God I have baby cousins. They let me watch MLP.

This is the story of how I became a brony. I decided I would put it on here because, when I first retraced my steps as to how it happened, I found it interesting. I didn't exactly pay attention when I became a brony, so I may be a bit fuzzy on the details. Here goes nothing:

It all started in late fall of 2011, at the height of my competitive Pokemon battling career. I had become a member of Smogon University, and, as I was on the RMT (Rate my Team) Forum, I saw one team with each member named after one of the Mane 6. In his intro, he said 'see how many MLP references you can spot' or something like that. Now, at this point my brain was like OH GOD WHY. The reason is because 1: the people on Smogon are around 12-21 ish, mostly guys. 2: when I heard MLP, I was thinking of G3 because those were the MLP commercials I saw as a little kid. So I thought 'HOW THE F**K can teenage guys like MLP?'

A bit later I had become part of a Xat(a chat site) community based around Pokemon battling, because I was super into it and quite good if I say so myself. A lot of random stuff came up, including MLP. One person put up a link to a video that was a parody of sorts of Friendship is Magic in which the ponies were cursing, etc. So then I thought 'Oh, ok, that's the MLP that older guys like.' And so I became oblivious to the existence of bronies.

Fast forward to summer 2012. I was going on a cross country road trip from my home in Texas to New England to do a wide variety of things, but mostly visit family friends. On the way was my grandparents' house, at which were my own family as well as my uncle's family. My uncle had two young girls, and I ended up watching a few episodes of Friendship is Magic with them. It was cool because the one I watched was Hearth's Warming Eve, so I got to learn about the origins of Equestria in my first episode. Neat! A month later, after I got home to have glorious Internet access again, I hopped onto Netflix to, you guessed it, watch MLP. I craved more. It was awesome, fascinating. I felt like a total freak, however, because previously mentioned, I had no idea there existed bronies.

About a week later, a visit to my one of my best friends, who I had no idea was a brony, lifted that burden off of me. He showed me PARTY.MOV, SHED.MOV, etc, and sent me to Memebase for me to learn that there are MILLIONS that like MLP because it was legit good. And indeed it was.