- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
The thing is, real children are able to understand stories far more complex and nuanced than that pony crap. The Moomin Family, Pippi Longstockings, Winnie the Pooh (the books, not the fuckin cartoon) -- there are lots of stories for the youngest among us which are fun and great to read; no need for any retarded pony product placement garbage.That's because MLP was written with little girls in mind. The entire land is bright and colorful because that appeals to little girls. The characters are stock and two-dimensional with one defining feature. The stories are simple and easy to digest. And it's really there to sell a product.
In other words, it's a show for children in every sense of the word.
In enjoy the Moomin Family books by Tove Jansson to this day, they were a childhood favorite of mine and I re-read them a few years ago and enjoyed them (but I was surprised at how short they seemed now!).
The thing about Bronies is not so much that they consume material intended for children, it's rather that they consume exceedingly dumb and commercial material aimed at children. When they begin talking to pony plushies and pretend to have a romantic relationship with them, it's then that things really get strange...
But it's not even that per se: People believing and even pretending to have relationship with fictional characters is an old hat. E. g. catholic monks and mystics very often displayed an affection for the Virgin Mary or some female saint that was very clearly romantic and even sexual in nature. Not hard to understand why and how: These people were officially not expected to have intimate relationships with women, so being madly in love with Saint Ursula or so was quite an obvious "release of steam". Of course, the monks would never openly admit to feeling sexual attraction to the saint or Mary, but it was unmistakably so: They would pray fervently to her several times a day and write hymns about her of a clearly sensual nature: Oh Santa Ursula, thou art sweet as the dew of early morning, thou bringest joys into the darkest of nights, from thee I take the sweet balsam of salvation...
It is an interesting fact about humans that they can feel as intensely (or maybe even more intense?) about a fictional character (whom they may arguably imagine to be real) as about a real-life human they know. People burst into tears when they see a sad movie -- in spite of it being wholly fictional and none of the events shown having actually taken place. We make the hero of a novel our friend and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion with him or her.
So Jin isn't so far-out crazy as it may seem! What makes him stand out are two things: Firstly, "pony-worship" is not socially accepted in our culture (...yet...). Secondly, said pony is a character from a show aimed at children, which makes the clearly sexual nature of that relationship ultra creepy. If Jin had choosen the Virgin Mary over Twilight, we'd just think of him as an extremely devout catholic. But since he fell madly in love with a purple cartoon pony, we raise our eyebrows and see him as a lolcow.