2023-01-01 – Taking a step back: 1 year later

This article is a follow-up to an article we wrote exactly one year ago, about moving away from the furry fandom onto the brony fandom.

We are first going to read back at what we've said at the time, and then compare it with how it is now.

Reading back

Browsing r/furry (and — in general — other furry-related places) led me to quite a lot of NSFW stuff, more than expected, or almost-NSFW content (an amount of content I didn't find in other communities).

This still globally holds true. Unless we specifically look for such content, we have never been confronted with NSFW content on brony communities, including r/mylittlepony.

Aside from that, the general "everyone is gay" vibe has been annoying me. It was fun at first but it ended up being really annoying, maybe to the point of being toxic.

This is something we haven't found in the brony fandom. Sexual orientation (or even gender identity) is more than often not a topic of conversation, and conversations are more focused on meaningful things, such as My Little Pony itself.

I also have personal reasons for leaving the fandom, mainly due to mental health during this year [2021].

Our mental health has actually improved in 2022, which is good. My Little Pony has helped a lot in that, especially with calming down and dealing with the stressful life we are living. However, personal events have also contributed to making our mental health better.

I will still continue communicating with people I consider friends, even if they are furries

It is extremely hard to keep up with social interactions online. That said, we have reduced communication with furry friends, which is counterbalanced by the fact we have also made a lot of new friends last year.

I may still continue listening to furry music, to a more limited extent

This has also been reduced, primarily because we just find My Little Pony-themed music better.

I will remove any mentions of furry content in my projects (Foxperson is exempt from this change)

At the time of writing, Foxperson is still not done and will most likely never be official released. Needless to say, leaving the furry fandom removed a lot of motivation to work on this project.

I recently got started to the My Little Pony fandom (especially Friendship is Magic) fandom, and I like it; I really like it.

This still holds true today, and is probably not going to change any time soon. Even though we have evolved and My Little Pony has evolved a lot last year, we still really like the franchise and the community. We feel proud of looking back at last year, when we joined the brony fandom, and we surely don't regret that at all.

With all that said, I just hope you are not disappointed by this change, and I hope I move forward to try out new things and be happier!

"Move forward". A lot has changed for us in the past year (for instance the fact we are now identifying as plural), and while every year is a major step towards a happy and healthy life, we think last year was the biggest step; but the hardest is yet to come.

Summary of last year

We have learned a lot about My Little Pony this year, whether it is how the franchise works, things about Equestria, and so on. We started last year confused about G5, and now we enjoy it almost as much as G4 (although, let's be honest, we are never going to forget how G4 made us feel).

We definitely expect to learn a lot more in the next year. From what I can see, the first year of a brony is generally the one with confusion and discovering, next year is probably going to be the year we shine (we plan to get a lot of merch).

My Little Pony is what keeps us alive. If the franchise was to end tomorrow, we would probably be profoundly hurt. This may sound terribly stupid, but this is just how we are. All of us (Raindrops System) are ponies, and My Little Pony (as a whole) ending would make our identity meaningless.

We feel ashamed of once being part of the furry fandom due to the reasons we've mentioned last year, but we shouldn't focus on our past.

What's next?

2023 is going to be the year of hope. Hope that our mental health once again improves for good, that we get more deeply integrated into the brony community, and that we get happy in our personal life.

Thanks for reading, and happy new year everypony and everycreature /)