This is one of my favourite articles I’ve written. A holy bifecta: my first academic foray into fan fiction and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I wrote it for a conference that a couple of my friends organised. Sadly we couldn’t all go to the University of Exeter due to COVID, but the online conference was loads of fun.
The book based on the conference has now been published. It’s really cool and has loads of great chapters in it, the cover is not bad either.
My chapter looks at adult fans of My Little Pony and their fan fiction. Some of these ‘bronies‘ write long stories about the ponies that include Christianity or Jesus. There is a clash between their identity as fan of a tv show made for small girls and as a generally conservative Christian. And in their fan fiction you can see how they deal with this.
I’m not the first to write about this specific topic, Andrew Crome over in Manchester wrote about it first. I build on what he’s done, but also disagree with him. He seems to think that as these Christians christianise the ponies, that this is innocent play. I argue that this is a politically subversive act that resonates with a lot more going on in the evangelical right of the US.
Thanks to Dutch copyright law, you can read this chapter for free via my university’s repository.
Here is the first section of the article to give you a taste:
The Bible and My Little Pony
I sat alone on the couch next to my Rainbow Dash plushie doll. The doll was sitting on a small table next to my couch while I watching My Little Pony Friendship is Magic on the television. […] I loved Applejack and Rainbow Dash so much. […] I couldn’t take it anymore. I reached over and picked up my Rainbow Dash plushie doll and squeezed it so tightly against my chest. […] I looked at the table and removed [sic] some papers around. There on the table was my old Bible that I hadn’t picked up in years.
In this introduction to their ten-thousand word piece of semi-autobiographical fiction, a fan author highlights how their fandom of the TV show My Little Pony is replacing their Christian faith. In this section the author creates a dichotomy between the Christian Bible and My Little Pony. Their once-beloved Bible lies disused under old papers, whereas the dolls from the show sit next to the author on the couch. The author recounts the final replacement of the Bible with the ponies: ‘I picked up my Rainbow Dash doll and placed her on top of the Bible’. This introduction to their story highlights a common struggle between loyalty to one’s faith and one’s fandom(s). In this article I will examine some ways in which fans engage with both faith and fandom, I will look at how popular entertainment is used to engage with the Bible. I will argue that though there appears to be a clash between faith and fandom, the faith of a Christian fan often supersedes their fandom. Furthermore, when Christian fans create fannish products they are creating a discourse in which they claim both My Little Pony and its fandom for Christ. At the same time, the interaction of faith and fandom fundamentally changes their view of the Bible.
