My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic cult following

The My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic cult following describes the cultural phenomenon surrounding the large fan base of enthusiastic participants of the animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The show has garnered a following mainly on surprising locations like 4chan's /co/ board.
History and Background
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic began airing on Discovery's The Hub station on October 2010. About nine days later, an article was started by Cartoon Brew on the television series, titled "The End of the Creator-Driven Era in TV Animation" which stirred a response from 4chan's /co/ board. Eventually, members of the 4chan community started to poke fun at Cartoon Brew's article, which eventually spread into 4chan's more well known boards such as /b/. This grew to the point that in February 2011, the 4chan staff, becoming increasingly tired of the growing fad, decided to ban all users posting in pony-related threads, as well as any user posting in a pro-Pony fashion. This has since calmed down to a maintainable level and most banning has ended.
Creation of Pony themed sites
Followers of this cult (known as bronies) have created numerous websites and communities to continue the cult without a risk of being banned. The cult inspired the creation of Ponychan, a board based on the same engine as 4chan. It has also inspired the creation of a social networking site called Rainbowdash Network, a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter based on the Free Software StatusNet tool.
Derpy Hooves
One of the more notable things to come out of the cult following was the discovery of a background pony. People throughout the cult following has given this background pony the name Derpy Hooves, because of her "derp eyes". Derpy and several other background ponies were named by the animation crew before 4chan's /co/ board identified and named them. Derpy was unofficially nicknamed Stoneface, Bubbles, Bubblehead, and Ditzy by the Philippine animation crew. Because of her popularity between fans and the animation for the television show, Derpy will included in the story boarding process and not simply thrown in at the last second in the second season according to a staff member on the animation crew, although the fate of her name is not yet known.
Reaction
The cult following behind the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series has gained much reaction since it begun in October 2010 from sites such as The Escapist, Whiskey Media's Screened, and Know Your Meme. During the 2011 South by Southwest festival, Christopher Poole (founder of 4chan), revealed the first instance of acknowledging the growing My Little Pony following on his community. On March 20, 2011, it became more obvious when moot changed every board's header to show the words, "Once Upon a Pony" and "Everypony welcome.", which stirred a massive outrage from those in the community who became annoyed with the fledgeling MLP cult. Lauren Faust, the creator of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, has also acknowledged the cult following on her DeviantArt page. As a thanks and as an effort to help Japan recover from the , she released sketches of the characters, as well as a 2011 sketch of Derpy Hooves that sold for $2,151 on eBay.
Todd VanDerWerff of The Onion's A.V. Club favorably notes the show's "sheer and utter joyfulness" and lack of cynicism, which are unlike other shows that garnered a cult following of parents and twenty-somethings. He compliments the characters' stylized appearance, the stories' relative complexity for kids TV, and the solid jokes which make the show enjoyable to parents as well as their kids, and gives the series a B+.

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