Trigger warning: Rape, molestation
Earlier this month, a fan-made website parodying a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic character stopped working. Some thought Hasbro shut the site down. Some thought its domain site did.
According to EverFree, an online news outlet, the creator of the parody site claims he took it down on his own agency. Though, looking at the news outlet and its source, it’s easy to question to reliability of this claim.
At any rate, fans of the show were upset. These fans are not the target audience. These fans are grown men who call themselves “bronies.”
The bronies did not take kindly to the site being taken down.
Some began harassing a girl known by her blog’s name, Pinkiepony, who allegedly led the charge against the fan-made site. They made comics and wrote rants criticizing her for being overly sensitive. They messaged her on her blog and Twitter, often calling her a whore or other offensive words.
But what sort of site could this have been to have these grown men so outraged to see it taken down?
That sounds like a question for Molestia, the site’s parody character of the show’s character, Celestia. The site, Ask Princess Molestia, operated in blog format, often dealt in pornographic fan art—of cartoon ponies—and even more often in rape and molestation jokes.
Rape jokes, simply put, are never appropriate. Anyone who would make a blog dedicated to this sort of joke is detestable. The fact that this person pairs these jokes with content related to a show aimed at little girls is utterly sickening.
Perhaps this doesn’t seem like such a problem. Someone could ask why parents don’t just monitor what their children see online? Put on safe search and call it a day.
The content from Ask Princess Molestia is rarely tagged “NSFW.” A simple Google search of “Princess Celestia” turns up a few pornographic images fairly quickly.
According to a blog entry from PinkiePony, little girls are definitely seeing this content.
“I recently babysat a child who…upon seeing my massive My Little Pony collection, ran to my Friendship is Magic shelf and started naming them,” PinkiePony said. “Once she got to Celestia, she told me she rapes people.”
That is unacceptable.
Still, bronies defended the site. One comment on the Tumblrpony wiki site said the rape jokes were not intended in a misogynistic way. How can they be taken any other way?
They argue that people who oppose them are sexist for criticizing their feminine choice in television. Let’s get this straight right now: Bronies are not under attack for liking a feminine show. They are under attack for forcing themselves into the show’s culture and tainting it with pornography children can access easily and accidentally.
There is no reason or excuse for this content to be so prominent on the Internet. Sure, there are weirdly pornographic drawings out there of just about every kid’s show from Caillou to Little Bear, but none are so obnoxious as the work of the bronies.
Ask Princess Molestia is not the only source of pornographic images, but was, by all accounts, the most popular. It is certainly a step in the right direction to have it taken down.
Netflix recently added a documentary to its collection of streaming content. Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of ‘My Little Pony’ basically follows a few male fans of the show and explores their culture (because girls have never liked something meant for guys, right?).
Unfortunately, the documentary is extremely biased, shedding no light on any of the pornographic material from the brony community, which has existed long enough that it should have been included.
