h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Male (Role) Models: Macaronis, Flaneurs, Crooners, Bronies - A87845458
Author: Dmitri Gheorgheni - U1590784

After writing about the flappers' shocking behaviour, I thought I should give the guys a turn. And since we just took a bit of the holiday downtime to watch the 'Brony' documentary, I threw them in.

A caveat: this author has never actually WATCHED an episode of 'My Little Pony', due to personal allergies. However, I am sure that it is a fine programme, and applaud the candour and bravery of these fans.

for tomorrow, sorry am just on my way to bed

GB

Bless you, sleep well, and don't dream of pink and purple pony dolls.

What a useful Entry

I had heard of Bronies, but didn't know exactly who they were, so I learned a lot. I'm an '80s child, so I have never watched the new TV show because the 2010 ponies are a mere caricature of the original and best, but I am a big fan of Q, so I could be tempted to watch an episode...

If you do, give us your expert opinion on them.

I watched an episode last night No Q in it, though, so I'll just have to watch another episode as well...

It reminded me of the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons - about 20 minutes long: a problem happens, it gets fixed, and then there's a summary at the end to highlight the moral message.

The colours are all pale pastels, but there's not overmuch pink in it - plenty of other colours too. The pinkest pony had the squeakiest voice, but some of the ponies had particularly smooth mellow voices...

(The original My Little Pony movie was something I enjoyed in my youth, but it seems I missed the beginning of it, as when I tried to watch the movie again some years later, the "nails on a blackboard" voice of one of the ponies singing at the beginning was enough to make me turn off the TV so I never did see if the rest of the film was as good as I had remembered).

I considered the episode in terms of gender aspects while I watched, and found it to be interesting. From my knowledge of the original toys, I know there were specific boy ponies who were shire horses, and we did see a glimpse of a couple of them in this episode, but the main characters generally didn't appear to behave in a particularly gendered* way - even the pinkest one, who was also the one who saved the day, had the most stereotypically manly appetite in contrast to her delicate figure.

*to the extent that I know what "gendered" means - I used to think Florence in the Magic Roundabout was a boy because his name was fLaurence, even though his pink skirt was supposed to be a clue...

Fascinating

Wow. Thanks for the analysis. It's interesting - and it shows that the animal fable, which has very long roots, going back to the earliest human storytelling, can still move people.

Great entry, Dmitri.

A few things...

I thought Beau Brummell was mad about cravats. I didn't think he wore a necktie.

In British English it's not right to call a tortoise a turtle. The word turtle is used only for the marine species.

I think it would be better if you moved the line about the turtles/tortoises enjoying the walk to a separate one-sentence paragraph at the end of that section.

A few typos:

winp --> wimp

I's a cartoon for little girls -->
It's a cartoon for little girls

Thanks, Gnomon. I, too, only call a marine animal a turtle. I'll change that - I found the word 'turtle' in my researches a lot, so I thought somebody did that.

Quite right about the cravats - but it's the evil stepfather of the necktie. I'll fiddle with that.

Updated, and thanks for the proofread and tips.

This is very interesting and thought provoking. And funny

I wasn't sure that the word 'macaroni'as applied to these fops came from the pasta, because it also means a type of poetry that mixes words of foreign origin into the poem. Couldn't the fops be mixing clothes of foreign origin into their appearance?

Do people think men from other cultures are'girly'? Couldn't they be seen as brutes and barbarians? I don't want to suggest that the girls like the brutes but if you shave him and show that he's actually rather dashing... I suppose what they like was something rather different from the men they've known all their life.

Thanks, MVP.

No, macaronis had nothing to do with macaronic verse, although it's possible the verse form got its label from pasta, too - macaroni was peasant food. Of course, the habit of mixing languages in poetry went back a lot further than those silly wigs. And it's possible that some of the macaronis could spout poetry.


The OED backs me up on the pasta question, and also refers to the macaronis' favourite London restaurant, The Macaroni Club.

I'm not suggesting that popular prejudice *today* regards all foreign men as 'girly'. But in the early 20th Century, this attitude was very much in evidence. Hence the 'pink powder puff' article. What rude stereotypes people come up with nowadays is another question...

You want to see how Westerners stereotyped Asians in 1915? Watch 'The Cheat', if you can stand it. It's, well, creepy in the extreme.

http://archive.org/details/The_Cheat

Poor Sessue Hayakawa. Disturbing film, but technically an achievement - watch the shadows, etc. He was a great actor - and a hero in the French Resistance.

Bronies also write thousands of words of fan fiction http://www.fimfiction.net Some of the stories on that site are better than actual published books I've read (And one of my favorite authors actually reminds me a lot of you, Dmitri). Quite a few of the stories get put on hiatus when the author gets deployed...

Wow. I didn't know that, Amy - thanks! Fanfic can be incredibly creative. The fact that you get paid for something doesn't mean it's better than something you don't get paid for - as we all know.

I'd put up a link, but I'm reluctant to include .net links - we'll have to ask for guidance on that.

Let me see if .com redirects... Ah, no.

"Would it surprise anyone to find that critics accuse Bronies – without a scrap of concrete evidence – of being overwhelmingly gay and/or sexually deviant?"

Oh, poor Dmitri. There's a wealth of evidence about these sexual deviants.

I can't bring myself to link to the horror on a family site, but I do advise listening to Lou Reads the Internet:

http://loureads.com/2014/09/03/lou-reads-from-the-pages-of-my-little-waifu/

If your whole opinion of the Bronies is formed by the documentary they financed themselves, you might be influenced a little bit by the bias. A fair proportion of them are a wee bit tapped in the noggin.

Here's a bizarre bit of Brony logic too. Straight from the horse's (sorry!) mouth...

http://i.imgur.com/3eEtS.jpg

Dmitri, the policy in the old days (BBC) about links was that they should be:

1. informative
2. stable (not going to disappear in a year or two, or be different everytime you look at them)
3. not overly trying to sell you something

I think those should still be the rules, and the issue of whether it is .com or .net is irrelevant.

That's my Researcher and Former Guide Editor opinion, but is not necessarily the opinion of etc. etc.

Thanks, Gnomon - I take your point about .net, and I'll check with the GEs about what they think. I was only worried about .net because - perhaps wrongly - I'd thought the sites might be less secure than other suffixes.

Mr603: As linked to in the entry, there are actually sociological studies that have been done of this fandom. With statistics. And they haven't turned up any evidence of what you suggest.

The occasional weirdness on the internet - photoshopped images, bizarre opinions - occurs with every fandom. Have you ever seen the fanfic attached to the 'Sharpe' series?

Apparently, Bronies even have conservative defenders:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rise-of-the-bronies/comment-page-1/

I might go back and include this interview with the Library of Congress on Brony research:

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/08/research-is-magic-an-interview-with-ethnographers-jason-nguyen-kurt-baer/

The LC is studying Bronies as a 'born-digital folklife primary source'.

All right, you people. I have added some links. GEs said it was okay. So now I know.

I think I should stop there, though. Yes, there's stuff on the web called 'The Macaroni Club' that has 18th-Century fanfic in, etc, etc. I even found flaneur fanfic. But enough's enough.