>Ponies do seem to work well. Was it just us and a explosion of autism or was there something with pony itself? I think the answer is yes.The show wasn't the greatest on earth at first but special in ways a lot weren't. There was a lot of smaller, subtler details where it was trying. Like, background details and throwaway lines. Sure, one could say that was just are obsessiveness and autism defining stuff that wasn't there, but, there was something there. Look at any old flash cartoon from around that era and compare it to how alive and active the backgrounds were/are of FiM even in season 1. It's art and animation were even trying perspective shots and create a sense of depth in areas and the world had sometimes quirky internal logic that while might have not been to the level of what a hardcore theorist scraping the show for hidden complex plots and deep philosophical analysis, had more fuel and substance to do stuff and run with than most of its peers. I know other deep lore and high budget cartoons came around this time but that was far from expectation at the time.
Now, the second part is that, yeah, our autism came into play for sure. Pony exploded off of 4chan and into the wider web. It had the ultimate fanbase of sheltered awkward kids and misfits of whatever group you can think of (mentality impaired, early tumblr type people, furries etc) on end and various rebels and terminally online "internet elite" on the other (STEM and /g/ fedora types, otakus and weebs who might have already been obsessively contributing to some fandom, you could put some furries here as well). A combination of that and the social reject of the sheer, how do I say? Spaghetti that would foster caused the fandom to have to form its own institutions and lo and behold, you had, to some extent, still have, a whole lot of people under one house falling down into a rabbit hole of their own making and having a richer cultural exchange and not being bond by cultural trends of other groups at the time (I have heard for example that some saying outside the pony fandom had much less a stigma of grammatical critique but I don't know how true that was, just something I have heard repeated before). We still have a lot of bad fics and stupidity but I think that is why there was such a outpouring of higher quality stuff.
>>8586 These are also some 10/10 points:
>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.
>I suppose it just sort of hit a nerve - a desire to look at life through a positive lens. I think this is another driver, it gave the internet, peek ironic and jaded with no breathing room in some corners, a brake and permission to enjoy stuff unironically amidst all that. Early academic papers and a few articles throughing words like "neosincerity" around as a description of the fandom One I would partly dispute (not as a description, but as a zeitgeist) , but that would be a long tangent.
