>>8584
>Why were ponies so palatable for it?
I think the straight-forward characters, not cutouts, not caricatures, and the fact that all the background ponies got names. So much of the lore of the land was laid out lovingly at first light.
Err, the opening double-header gave us all a running start on writing in this shared world.

I mean I've read some pretty bad attempts at writing that had ponies it in, and the FiMfiction folks had to set some rules about when they would boot your story because people were writing identifiably in some other setting but using humanized pony names for completely the wrong characters.
But on another hoof, there's the pony-words. Hoof, everypony, things that immediately remind the writers to "think like a pony" which meant slightly different things to different writers but all of them knew something about it, and that helped bring everypony together to write in the same world.

>was there something with pony itself?
I recall seeing a byline, set late first season or early second, asking someone who was in a position to see the answer, what proportion of fanmade tales that featured Rainbow Dash, featured her losing her wings somehow.
<"uhh, about 100%, I think."
Is how I remember the response.