Saturday, February 18, 2017

#mylittlepony - #Twilight's Ultimate Guide to the MLP Fandom (version 2.0)


Twilight's Ultimate Guide to the MLP Fandom (version 2.0)

Hello everypony, Twilight here. The My Little Pony fandom has created a lot of amazing things over the years. I've noticed though that sometimes, especially for new bronies, they can be pretty hard to find. What we need is organization! That's why some time ago I compiled a list of all the best, most popular fan works this community has created. It's been almost a year and a half now though since I created that list, and I think it's due for an update. That's why Spike and I have been working nonstop for the last 48 hours to update the list to cover a whole bunch of new fanworks that I discovered over the last year and a half! Can I please go to bed now? Anyway, just between you and me, it's possible I might have missed a few things while making this list. Obviously I can't include everything, but if you see something super-popular that I might have forgotten to include, please let me know. Now, without further ado, I give you...

Twilight's Ultimate Guide to the MLP Fandom (version 2.0)

Hello there! For whatever reason, it seems you've stumbled upon this humble guide to the My Little Pony fandom. Perhaps you're a new brony looking to see what the fandom has to offer, or maybe you're an outsider coming to see what all the fuss is about. Or perhaps you're already an experienced member of the fandom, just looking to see if there's anything important you might have missed. Whatever your reason for reading this might be, I hope you'll find this guide enlightening.

A good chunk of this guide is basically just a list of what I consider to be the best original animations, songs, comics, artwork, and stories created by the fandom. It will almost certainly be missing some things, as I definitely can't claim to have seen everything the fandom has to offer, but I'm confident I've covered a good chunk of the more popular works.

Keep in mind that unless otherwise stated, the links posted here make no attempt to avoid spoilers for new members of the fandom. The list itself should be reasonably spoiler-free, but click on one of these links without having seen every season of MLP and all the movies and all bets are off (again, unless otherwise stated). That means if you're viewing this list on Reddit using RES and you're concerned about spoilers, make sure none of the below links are expanded before proceeding. Feel free to check with another member of the brony community if you want to be sure that a particular fan work is spoiler-free before you view it. Anyway, read on for a massive list of some of the greatest works in the MLP fandom!

Animations

The MLP fandom has a number of very high quality (sometimes even as good or better than that of the original show) animations depicting all sorts of things, including original stories, crossovers with video games, interpretations of events from the show, and more.

PMVs

Often animators will set their animations to music. Sometimes music from outside the fandom, and sometimes original music from brony musicians inside the fandom. These animated music videos are referred to by those within the fandom as PMVs, Pony Music Videos.

Fully-Animated PMVs

These PMVs are composed primarily of original animation from the MLP fandom. There is some overlap here with the "animated" category above, but I tried to put all the videos where the music is a large part of the focus of the animation in this category.

Mashups & Typography

These are PMVs composed using simple motion graphics and/or carefully selected clips and screenshots from the show or other fan-works. These PMVs are much more common, as they're easier to produce than fully-animated PMVs. Here are a few select stand-outs.

Music

As I mentioned in the previous section, there are a number of artists in the MLP fandom who create original songs inspired by the show. Some of these are remixes of songs from the show, while others are entirely original.

There's lots of pretty amazing stuff here; definitely more than I can cover in this post, so here's a sample of some of my favorites. (I tried my best to cram these into just a few major categories, so sorry if the genres don't fit perfectly in all cases here. I'm open to suggestions if you've got any ideas on how to categorize these better.)

Pop (sort of)

Metal

Mashups & Remixes

Classical

Instrumentals

Musical artists

Here are a few of my favorite musical artists in the fandom, some of whom are responsible for the songs mentioned in the section above.

Analysts & Theorycrafters

Some members of the fandom find it fun to critique episodes of the show, or to spend time coming up with theories and headcanons explaining details about the world of Equestria which are not fully explored in the show itself. Here are a few of the more popular ones (including a small sample of some of their best works).

Blind Commentators

Want to relive the joy of seeing the show for the first time? Want to hear what others thought of an episode? A number of people have recorded themselves watching MLP (and related fan works) for the first time (i.e. "blind"), and sharing their thoughts with you as they watch.

Art

There's really so much great content in this category that I can't even begin to compile a comprehensive list of "the best". Below is a small sample of artwork the fandom has created. Beyond that, I suggest you check out what's on DeviantArt and branch out from there. I also have my own collections of my favorite artwork of canon and non-canon characters on DeviantArt which you're free to check out.

Comics

Some of the artists in the community have used their skills to create comics about the show. Some of these are random silliness and gags, while others feature original stories.

Character Blogs

These are basically blogs where the featured characters respond to questions from the readers. Try a few, you'll get the idea.

Longform Story Comics

Shorts

Fanfictions

And of course, like just about every other fandom in existence, MLP has a number of fanfictions written about it. I personally haven't explored this area of the fandom too much, but here are a few works others have frequently recommended to me. For discovering more stories, FIMFiction.net is a good resource, along with some of the reviewer sites and groups out there like Seattle's Angels and the Royal Canterlot Library.

Games

A number of creators have teamed up to create full fledged video games based on the show. For discovering more games and mods, right now Equestria Daily is probably your best bet.

Mods

Fansites

Trying to find more awesome pony content? Looking to talk with other bronies? There are all sorts of places on the web for that!

Parodies

Some animators have created parodies of the original show. Lots of random humor and crazy shenanigans here. If you've ever seen any fan-created "abridged series" of other shows, you should a pretty good idea of what these are.

Memes

There are a are number of popular memes in the fandom. I don't necessarily consider these to be "top quality" animations or photos (though some of them are pretty funny), but nonetheless they're important to understand in that they give you context for understanding cultural references and inside jokes in the fandom.

Background Ponies

Throughout many episodes in the show you'll often see random ponies placed in the background for the purposes of filling out a crowd or livening up the town. They're basically nameless "extras". Except, thanks to the fandom, they're actually not nameless. In fact, most of these random ponies have names and backstories given to them by the MLP fandom. Here are a few of the more well-known background Ponies:

Official content you might not have seen

Aside from the show itself, Hasbro has released a few original comics, animated shorts, and songs which tie in to the actual show. While these aren't technically fan-created, I figured I'd mention them here anyway just to make sure you didn't miss them.

Equestria Girls Animated Shorts

Rainbow Rocks Prequel Shorts

Rainbow Rocks Encore Shorts

Friendship Games Prequel Shorts

Frindship Games Deleted Scenes & Bloopers

Legend of Everfree Bloopers

No shorts this time, just bloopers.

Comics

Music

International Opening/Closing Themes

Several versions of the MLP theme song from other countries feature lyrics and tunes completely different from their English counterparts.

The Hub Promos

These are a series of commercials The Hub did to advertise the show.

The above is a small selection of some of the best commercials. See here for a full list.

Books

There are also a number of storybooks licensed or published by Hasbro. Some contain fully original stories, while others are adaptations of existing MLP movies.

The list below only includes books authored by writers for the actual show. If you include other officially licensed books there's actually a lot more, but most of those are targeted towards younger children and aren't particularly interesting...

Game

There's actually an official free-to-play (with microtransactions) MLP mobile game created by Gameloft.

Downloads: Android | iOS

Oops, looks like I ran out of space on Reddit for this post. You can view the rest in the comments below, or view the entire post at once here. (Yes, seriously; there's more.)



Submitted February 18, 2017 at 09:01AM by Ajedi32
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