This is where is I chat about rubbish and also sometimes post fiction.
I'm Marianne
I'm twenty-four
I'm Irish
I live in Chicago
I read
I write
I fall over a lot
I have a very loud voice
But I am very small
Things I like
Fictional maps
Photography
staircase-spirit asked: Love love LOVE your post about Laura. Very well-spoken. Thanks for being supportive of her, and of trans-identified people in general. :)
Thank you! I generally read more than I talk about trans issues because it’s all new territory to me, but I’ve been a fan of Against Me! for a long time and this news really struck a chord with me.
lauren-is-a-redhead asked: You posted about the lead singer of Against Me! and said how people should start using Laura to ID her. She however, stated she will begin using the name soon. She still goes by Tom.
The point still stands, people should call her what she wants to be called. I assumed the article meant that she will eventually legally change her name on her passport etc., but if she has explicitly stated that she still wants to go by Tom, then fair enough.
The lead singer of Against Me!, who many of us have known as a man named Tom Gabel, has come out as transgender. Gabel has officially announced her plans to start living as a woman and to begin the process of transition. She plans to take the name Laura Jane Grace.
And if I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman
My mother once told me she would have named me Laura
I’d grow up to be strong and beautiful like her
- from “The Ocean” by Against Me!
On an unrelated sidenote, her leg work is incredible.
Anyway, so obviously, this news was met with the usual barrage of transphobic bullshit that shoves its way to the surface like a nasty pimple whenever a high-profile person reveals that they do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. We’ll ignore those people, because they’re not going to listen and they’re not going to change.
But, there’s another subset of commenters who are a bit more insidious. They probably don’t actively hate trans people and consider themselves liberal and open-minded, but nonetheless seem very unwilling to let go of the name Tom or use the female pronoun when referring to her.
Don’t get me wrong, talking about transgender issues is difficult. I’ve started to do a lot of reading around trans issues and I don’t feel like I have a proper grasp on the correct terminology. I’ve probably fucked up at least twice in this post already. Some people genuinely don’t understand that it’s offensive to use male pronouns to refer someone who has publicly identified herself as a woman. Also, famous people give us the illusion that we know them well, and it can be difficult to change the way you think about someone you know well in a split second. If one of my friends changed their name, I’d probably slip up a few times before I got used to it.
However, a lot of these commenters have successfully proven that they not merely ignorant or careless, because they have been corrected and they’ve decided to start an argument about it anyway. For some reason, it’s important to them that they get to refer to Laura using male pronouns because she still has a dick (they assume.) Charming comments such as “Tom is a man…” and “He’s not a women YET” imply that “Tom” is a man until they have deemed it otherwise, and so she should be referred to as “he” until… until what, I’m not really sure, until she has sex reassignment surgery? Even though she may not be planning on it? The article linked above only mentions plans for hormone treatment and electrolysis.
I could write a long paragraph here about how gender is a fluid entity that does not always align with biological sex assigned at birth. Now, thanks to science, biological sex can also be a fluid entity and so people are free to change their bodies to better reflect their gender identity and this is a good and positive thing. I could write about how calling people by their chosen pronoun and/or new name is important because it acknowledges their existence based on their true identity, not whether look like a man or a woman. I could write about how many trans people do not opt to have surgery to change their genitalia, or indeed do not opt to make any permanent physical changes to their body and how they have just as much right to be respected and referred to as their chosen gender as anyone else.
But you know the best and most compelling reason you should call trans people by their preferred pronoun and/or name, even if you are secretly a bit transphobic and would rather not deal with the concept on any level? Do you know why you should do it anyway? Because it’s the right thing to do. I mean, seriously. Do you really want to make the often emotionally and socially harrowing process of altering the outward expression of one’s gender even harder for the sake of your inalienable “right” to call someone by the pronoun that matches your preconceived notion of what may or may not be in their pants?
Because if you do, you’re a massive tool.
Li’l Marmar out.
I just watched the first two episodes of the new HBO series, Girls.
First off, I acknowledge that any show with a main character who is a 24 year old publishing intern with a degree in English who is currently writing her memoirs in essay format and has a casual sex thing with an actor is … already hitting scarily close to home.
There’s also been a lot of backlash against this show (which I, obviously, have to work hard not to take as backlash against my life personally.) A lot of it, despite being wrapped up in palatable words like “shallow” and “unnecessary,” still reeks of my favourite flavour: misogyny! Honestly, I’m not going to even address the RARRR-GIRLS-DOING-THINGS-NO-ONE-WANTS-TO-SEE-THAT bullshit, except to say that it is getting tiresome wading through the same old thinly-veiled “arguments” any time a woman makes something about and/or for women. That said, some of the backlash is totally legitimate, such as the almost total absence of characters of colour except in incidental, stereotyped background roles. I hope this is something Lena Dunham et al take into account when introducing new characters.
Apart from that, I enjoyed my viewing experience immensely.
Apart from the aforementioned creepy parallels, here are some things I really relate to:
1. A lead actress who looks like she wears an average dress size and isn’t afraid to appear on camera looking scruffy, mostly naked or without excessive make-up. More crucially, the fact that the main character’s appearance is a deviation from TV-normal is not the main point of the show, as in Ugly Betty. I would like to see more bodies like Lena Dunham’s on my television, please and thank you.
2. A lead character who is actually weird and awkward. Not weird as in Manic Pixie Dream Girl who giggles too much and not weird as in quirky tomboy who makes all the boys uncomfortable with penis jokes. Not awkward as in the shy-wallflower-bookworm-cutie or as in the driven nerdy girl who is just so driven and smart that her social skills are adorably underdeveloped. A genuinely weird girl, who is kind of a motormouth and puts her foot in it and has inappropriate responses to situations, but is also smart and semi-capable and distinctly NOT floating around in an ethereal stupor blinking innocently at everyone because she doesn’t understand why she isn’t allowed dance in a fountain dressed only in cherry blossoms and whimsy.
3. Sex is a lot of fun, but usually involves some measure of awkwardness, either before, after or during. Girls enjoy sex, but not because they hit giant screaming orgasms like clockwork every single time. Most girls don’t orgasm every time and many find it quite difficult to actually climax, but would still enjoy doing sex more than most other things at any given moment during the day. The myth of girls wildly climaxing after a few minutes of being bucked around on a giant dick doesn’t seem like it’s going to be perpetuated by this show, and I appreciate that.
4. Lady friendships exist, and more often than not do not exist in the context of cocktails and shoe shopping. According to Girls, they most frequently exist in the bathroom, which is not wholly in line with my experience, but I’ll let it slide for now. The point is that lady friendships are an important and solid thing. All too often, women are portrayed as too bitchy and insecure to form proper friendships with each other. All too often, female friendships are as flimsy as the tiny paper umbrella in the cocktail they rest upon and they are easily brushed aside in favour of A Man. This is absolutely not my experience. For most of us, lady friends are our most important support network outside of family and we couldn’t get by without each other. I mean, without lady friends, who would we talk to about…
5. Periods. Period exist. They are things that happen once a month. They are frequently inconvenient and sometimes painful, but they are not gross or mysterious. I ALSO NEVER QUITE KNOW WHEN MY PERIOD IS COMING, LENA. I ALSO HAVE THE UNDERWEAR WITH THE WEIRD STAINS.
…
And now that I’ve got that out of my system.
A lot of the people who are angry about Girls seem to be angry about the entire premise of the show. The main character is an intern living a comfortable hipster life in New York on her parents’ dime. Some people seem genuinely enraged at the idea that a fictional middle-class girl with vague aspirations for an arty career could have problems or conflicts that are worthy of a TV show. Unless you literally only watch Very Serious and Educational Documentaries, you’re already dipping your toe into hypocritical waters if this is the basis of your criticism. Most TV is unabashedly fluffy, shallow, mindless entertainment about and for people who have nothing even resembling real problems and I can’t see why Girls should be singled out as particularly indulgent or unrealistic.
Especially since I would also argue that Girls isn’t entirely mindless-lady-fluff. Girls is painfully self-conscious. Dunham definitely does not think it’s quirky and adorable when her character, Hannah, turns up at her parents’ hotel room, high as a kite, proclaims that she the voice of her generation and asks them to give her $1100 a month for the next two years so she can finish her book. This scene is not supposed to endear us to her character. That scene is a wry and hard-hitting comment on a privileged generation. We were raised to shoot for the stars and to believe that we are entitled to an unprecedented level of job satisfaction, while also paying our rent and drinking craft beers on the weekend. So we pissed around in college, studiously avoided assimilating any actual skills and now we can’t understand why no one want to pay us to tweet and read scripts all day.
No mistake, Hannah Horvath is spoiled, entitled and a little bit delusional and so are her friends, to a greater or lesser extent. Girls acknowledges this, upfront and unflinchingly, and it’s not always easy to watch. I am an intern living in a big city with substantial financial aid from my parents while I try to figure out which career would make me the happiest. Granted, if my parents cut me off tomorrow, I’d say, “Thanks for facilitating me up to this point, it’s been a great ride, I’ll start looking for a real job right away.” I know exactly how lucky I am and I do not expect it to hold forever. But the point still stands. I have fuck all to complain about in my life. Ever.
I’m going to hazard a guess that if you have the time and means to watch a show like Girls and the energy to expend forming angry opinions about it, which you then plaster all over the Internet, then you, my friend, also have nothing to complain about. If you have ever bought a coffee while out and about, if you have a Netflix account, fancy cheese in the fridge, a few nice pairs of shoes, a smartphone, a tattoo or a record collection, you also have a level of privilege that the majority of people in this world will never experience. What’s more, you probably bitch just as much as the next person, about your job, your sex life, your bank account.
But you know what? That’s fine. I even believe there is room for a timely, observant and well-written TV show about this.
The first two episodes have definitely made me more self-aware. They have made me go, “Holy crap, I hope I’m not that selfish/flaky/crazy/obnoxious!” They have also made me go, “Wow, this is a really apt and witty portrayal of my many feelings and interactions with other humans.” Sometimes it made me cringe right out of my skin, other times it made me clap my hands and yell “THAT!” (See point 5 above.) Dunham has a blunt, self-effacing honesty and a real handle on the ridiculous bundle of contradictions that is being a recent college grad trying to figure out what the hell happens next. There is a baseline of sensitivity and affection for these girls, but I feel like our patience with them is going to be tested quite thoroughly. So I’m going to keep my eye on it and hopefully find out what happens to me after my internship ends.
At the end of the day, at least Girls isn’t trying to pretend that it’s possible to live in New York with a designer shoe fetish and expensive cocktail addiction on the income from a single weekly column.
A few months ago, I had a giantly sentimental New Year’s post queued up and ready to go. Then I deleted it. I am learning to hold back.
Now, it is April 24th. I will leave Chicago in exactly a month. The sadness this causes me is a niggling, persistent sadness. It feels like the flap of gum that is straining against the slow but inevitable eruption of my lower right wisdom tooth.
This city has challenged me and pushed me. I have only just begun to feel comfortable here, to find my own rhythm. I have my little red bike and my bros and the weather is starting to get nice again. I have beer and a narrow little room full of comics. I have new underwear and blue bed sheets. I have only just discovered Panda Puffs, and I will eat them with yogurt and fruit.
Last year, when I started this blog, my life was a dramatic conflation of the extremely good and the extremely bad. It didn’t feel like that at the time, it never does when you’re in the middle of these things, but in retrospect. My year was broken up by long stints by hospital beds, polite conversations on trans-Atlantic flights, dreary, elated, dream-like journeys through the grey-and-green inkwashed Irish midlands, my thumb massaging the back of my phone, like a talisman.
Last year, my dad could have died, but he didn’t. I don’t even understand how lucky I feel. Blessed is not a word I use often, because I instinctively shy away from the residue of all things religious, but when my father calls me up to ask me to track down out-of-print science fiction books for him in Chicago’s numerous used bookstores - but only if I happen to be there, I’m not to go out of my way, and only if there’s enough room in my suitcase, and do I always wear my helmet and make sure the windows are locked at night - I guess these things feel like a blessing.
I got to come back to Chicago.
When I started this blog, I had managed to boil down my personal ambitions into to two simple, achievable, task-based goals.
1) I want to be a writer.
2) I want to be physically fit.
And now.
1) I write everyday or close to it. I can tell people that I am a writer and I would like to make a living out of writing without a gong-pang of shame. I have a habit. I get cranky if I leave it out.
2) I ran and I ran and then I stopped. I took up Bikram yoga and sweated out of every pore in my body and then I stopped. I bought a bike and my thighs are like pistons. I enjoy my body. I feel like it lets me do things. I trust my strength. I appear to be incapable of doing two things at once, but I’m fine with rotating habits.
The word “mantra” makes me think of rusty bronze warrior men on beaches, who wear only hemp loincloths and drink only goats and do sun salutes as the tide breaks over their impossibly calloused feet.
But I do have a mantra, even though my feet are not as calloused as I would like them to be. It lives on my scratchpad on my desktop. It reminds me that I’m doing well. It reminds me that this is actually pretty simple. It reminds me that I could be doing more.
1) My writing still has no direction, it’s still painfully self-reflexive, this blog is still brain vomit. I know not everything has to be a masterpiece, not everything has to be a memoir. This blog, like my notebooks, is not a precious place. This is for everything and anything. But I want to write for a living, which means I have to figure out what kind of writer I would like to be. At the moment, I am rolling around in a mish-mash of fiction and opinion and intensely autobiographical essays which I can never show anyone. I did a solo performance a while back, and it felt great, but I cannot go home and tell my parents I want to be an autobiographical solo performance artist. My mother would bite a piece out of the cat and my father would ask me about the novel I was writing when I was thirteen.
2) The thing I have learned about me and exercise is that exercise became roughly a billion times easier the minute I stopped thinking about it as a means to an end. The minute I stopped hoping it would magically transform my body into something my body is not. I will never be a tiny yoga goddess. I will never be long and lean. So instead, I do it because there are immediate tangible benefits and it makes me feel functional and tight and capable. I no longer prescribe myself impossible goals (every day or not at all, seven miles or all bets are off, two camels, two triangles, no water break). It is on-going and no longer a chore. It also makes sex better.
In exactly a month, I will be leaving Chicago. This city was a catalyst for a lot of unprecedented and frankly alarming personal growth. I am the mental equivalent of three inches taller. I guess leaving everything you know and almost everyone you love will do that to a girl. I dread going home, but I want to carry all these things with me.
I do not want to be a dramaturg or a literary manager.
In many ways, I am back to square one, but I will carry these things with me and the friends I have made, and when I get home, I will sit on the couch and cry just a little bit and tell the cat all about it.
I will definitely be back.
Poor neglected blog. My 60+ hour work week has not been kind to you. Here is a solo performance piece that I wrote. I also performed it a couple of weeks ago, at a show with a bunch of very talented writer/performers. I was totally out of my comfort zone. There were over fifty people there (I was expecting maybe twenty, including my friends) and I was bricking it right up until the point where I got up on the stage, and then it seemed to go fine.
Our theme was the Research Topic. We each put a specialist subject in a hat and picked one at random. The result was that everyone had to go away and research something they knew nothing about and then incorporate that research into an autobiographical piece. My topic was the meaning of handwriting:
__________
Literally, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. It’s exactly what you would say if you had to make it up. It always just might be magic, but I am consistently disappointed. A broad-spaced hand with nice wide loops means you’re open-minded and personable. Heavy pressure on the pen means emotional intensity and a strong libido. A neat tight hand means you’re a neat tight kind of a person. A long life line means long life. A broken love line means broken love. The upper mound of Mars means some bullshit. Death never quite means Death, even when it’s upside down, but the Lightning-Struck Tower means HOLY FUCK DISASTER APPROACHING and I am disappointed nonetheless.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fucking genius. I’m a well-versed sceptic. I can read tarot, palms, runes, Elvish, Pokémon cards, probably minds, with varying degrees of proficiency. In yoga, I kind of believe them when they tell me my energy centres are opening and closing and lighting up in different colours, like elemental gems wedged somewhere between my pancreas and my upper-digestive tract. I can read the wry grin under my doctor-father’s moustache. Even when he’s not here, I see him raising his eyebrows at his sister as she sits on the edge of his hospital bed and tells him all about homeopathy. I hear him telling my doctor-mother that all these toxins people are constantly trying to flush out of their bodies with saunas and blueberries DO NOT EXIST, they are magic toxins, science does not support their existence!
Sometimes I flick through the Richard Dawkins books that live in a pile on the windowsill in the bathroom of my family home. Sometimes I see things that aren’t there.
There were a couple of months, a while back, when they were dead serious about adding a thirteenth sign to the zodiac. His name is Ophiucus, the Serpent Bearer. I realised this meant I was going to be shifted from Aries to Pisces. If you asked me for my sign in a bar, I would laugh at you out of it, but I’m still pretty resistant to the idea of being anything other than a bad-ass ram.
A small dangling lower loop means “you have a tendency or a trait by where you meticulously distinguish or separate a friend or close companion to the extent that you will exclude and reject others from the relationship. You may also be suggestible to object attachment or fetish.” I’ve known a few small dangling lower loops in my time. My long inflated lower loops indicate a double-dose of restlessness, a desire for change, for diversified company and activities, and even perhaps, at the core of it all, a rejection of reality. I say that seems about accurate. I get thrown back. I am a genius.
I mean, that’s not exactly what she said. It’s the sleepy week before we break for summer. She says I’m highly creative. No shit. Is it the scuffed hiking boots paired with mandatory navy-blue knee socks? Is it the crust of plaster and paint on the cuffs of the mandatory blue gingham shirt? Is it the fringe, streaked with oily blonde, hanging heavy over the mandatory acne-scarred forehead.
It seems kind of obvious, but I am the most obvious thing in the world. You are highly creative, she says, but ha ha, it’s very erratic, the way your upward strokes slant to the left, there’s no pattern, ha ha, that’s a sign of an unstable mind, you could a homicidal maniac, ha ha ha, that’s a joke, girls.
This is exactly what I want to hear. I am sixteen. I am special, but also a little bit dangerous. It’s not like my mother never washes my shirt. It’s not like I am precise or patient enough to use paint.
Graphology, apparently, pertains not just to handwriting, but to any kind of inscription we make with our hands on a surface.
I am susceptible to hypnotism. When I clap my hands, she tells me, when I clap my hands, you will wake up and you will know the whole future of this world and you will write it on the wall with your index finger. I jump at the clap and everyone is laughing, but I can barely hear them because waves of blister-bright clarity are crashing down around my ears. It’s all there in front of me, all I have to do is write it down. My index finger is not magic obviously and makes no mark on the wall. I grow distressed as I start to forget bits of the story, I mean, it’s relentless, it’s searing, this story, time is folding in on itself but I can only go forward, and I am biting my lip and sweating and searing and I have almost finished my third wall, from as high as I can reach down to the peeling skirting board before they realise that I am crying and shaking and no one is laughing and she grabs me firmly by the shoulder and says, “Sleep.”
I am twenty-three. At some point, I made a conscious decision, I corrected that erratic leftward slant and now my ‘bs’ and ‘ds’ stand bold and upright, herding lesser letters in front of them. I had to learn to print all over again when I got to college, because my joint-writing was a mad scrawl, but not in a mad-Picasso-moleskine-chic kind of way, not like a genius, more like a child who never learned how to hold the pen properly, cramped and cramping and slowing me down. It wasn’t practical for taking notes in lectures. I’ve weeded out most of the deformities, but I still drop my loops a full line, sometimes two and I have to contend with them later on, hoping the spacing will fall just right to dodge the engorged tails of my ‘gs’ and my vicious spiking ‘qs’. A friend once told me that this aspect of my handwriting makes her panic. I said that seems about accurate. I said it keeps me on my toes. Her writing is impeccably straight Victorian cursive. If you met her, this would be the most obvious thing in the world
Now, my handwriting is unapologetic and I am not afraid of ruining notebooks anymore, because I am a genius and one day they will find it and they’ll say, “Look at these powerful uppercase ‘Ms’ and these distinguished fully-formed vowels and the intrepid cross of every last ‘t’. Publish these scribbles and sketches immediately! A posthumous Pulitzer for these fragments of stories and the places where she shaded in the margins!”
I am eleven years old. I make my father climb a dubious stepladder to the ceiling of my narrow room, while I yell instructions based on the lush illustrations in my hardback copy of The Zoo in the Sky. I want the Ram and I want the Dragon, picked out in plastic glow-in-the-darks stars, to guard me while I sleep. We have three left over, so we make Orion’s belt over above my door. They will never find the lime-green diary tucked underneath my mattress, with its deformed loops and stunted clumps of vowels. They will never find it because I will burn it in a fit of dramatics when I am sixteen.
Once they hypnotised me and made me believe I was a tiny dragon. This is the most obvious thing in the world.
My sister told me I should update. I haven’t been here because I got a haircut, and my hair is the source of my power. Like Samson, except with pseudo-intellectual semi-autobiographical inconsistent blogging. You can’t see my haircut because the Molehole is still the darkest place in the world, but here is my face nonetheless.
I don’t know why I ruthlessly document my haircuts on a grainy webcam.
Chicago, you are cold as balls but you are beautiful when it snows. Every morning I sit on the Brown Line and watch the grey skyline until I can’t crane my neck up any further and every day I can’t believe I live in this city, under this sky that could conceivably be full of superheroes. The reality that I only have three months left here has been sneaking up on me and making me sadder than I can explain. I will definitely be back, but there are so many whens and wherefores around that eventual goal. Today my mother suggested that I start thinking about booking my flight so I get a good deal, and I got a little lump in my throat. But if I do not go to “Oxford” in September, my parents will come for me, wherever I am, and bodily force me to go. They will not stand for further delays to my education. I am not terrified of “Oxford” - I think “Oxford” be very comfortable.
I impulse bought a bike yesterday. He is a little red Schwinn and he is small enough for me to ride without dying. I rode home slightly drunk up Ashland last night, and I didn’t die, even once. Biking in the city is one of the things that terrifies me, because it seems like everyone I know has been run over or doored at some and they are all much more urban and savvy and better-at-left-and-right than I am. But I will commit and I will watch as the weather gets warmer around me and hope that my terror evaporates.
Work has been keeping me insanely busy, in mainly a good way but sometimes in a frustrating way. Being an intern is tricky business. I want to be helpful and efficient and polite and compliant, but being all these things plus good at photocopying is not the impression I want to leave behind. I want to be involved in discussions and have opinions and be ballsier that I actually am. I have a lot of opinions in my day-to-day life and this is experience remains useful, but brain is usually too mushy after a long week to think about any of the things I like writing about in a critical and structured manner.
I am doing a solo-performance-writing-workshop thing which is low-pressure and low-commitment, but still terrifies the absolute shit out of me because I will have to do something other than bury my face in the page and barrel through in the final performance. I have to do an action. This is one of the things that terrifies me.
My sister got an internship in Japan for the summer, which is incredible, she’s going to be looking at the evolution of particular type of fish or something. (“THEY’RE VERY IMPORTANT FISH” - Lara Cassidy.) I don’t pretend to understand, but I feel like there will never be a better excuse to visit Japan. Or go home together via the Trans-Siberian Expressway. My sister is a fearless traveler. Her goal is to set foot on every country on the planet. She’s good at lists. She can list the capital city of every country in the world. I’m a slower traveler. I like to go places, but then I like to put down some roots and make friends and know about little bars and well-kept secret noodle shops and take a photo of the same skyline every couple of months, from different angles, depending on the weather and my wanderings.
I have never barreled through a continent with the fierce, chaotic determination of my little sister, but I’d like to do it with her. We are going to get tattoos, some day. Lara’s will say “It’s not far to go” in my handwriting, and mine will say “The road goes ever on and on” in hers. It may be years before we live in the same country again.
I will be terrified to get on that train and go, but if my little sister will do it with me, I will get over my terror.
Because nothing is more terrifying to me than days like this, when I stop and check out and can’t deal with people and walk along the street with my haircut and my reusable bag full of groceries and my sensible coat and my snow boots. I am so comfortable. This terrifies me.
I don’t know what these moments are, but I guess I’m never beyond blogging about my feelings. HERE ARE ALL MY FEELINGS.
When you ask someone how they got into this show, the most common response is, “I don’t know how it happened! I thought I’d watch for a few minutes to see what all the Internet hype was about and now I’ve seen every episode and my favourite character is Fluttershy!”
That’s exactly how it went for me. Except my favourite is Applejack.
In all honesty though, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is one of my favourite shows. And I have literally no idea how it happened.
If you spend even a fraction of the time I spend on tumblr (or reddit or any other site whose lifeblood is composed almost entirely of memes), you will already be at least vaguely aware of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I immediately recognised the images cropping up over and over again on my dashboard as the latest incarnation of Hasbro’s enduring franchise. However, I couldn’t quite figured out why they were on my dashboard, specifically. To my knowledge, I don’t follow many pre-teen girls. Closer inspection made me realise that these pony memes were all permutations of Arrow To The Knee and the ubiquitous rage guy comics, as well as the “ponification” of movie trailers and a truly bizarre amount of My Little Wu-Tang Clan.These are not the offerings of eleven year-old girls. These are the offerings of nerds, clearly. At this point, I discovered that the withered husk of apathy that was once my natural curiosity was not yet completely inert, and at its feeble behest, I decided to spend five seconds googling this new wave of little ponies.
Five seconds was all I needed. The second or third result told me all about bronies. Bronies are a legion of young men who are proud and self-proclaimed MLP: FiM fanatics. They are the ones proliferating these memes and as far as I can tell, their adulation for the inhabitants of Ponyville is completely sincere.
Lauren Faust is the producer of this show. Her former credits include The Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. You know, those kids’ cartoons with a distinct adult edge that play on the tropes of popular culture that go right over their tiny heads of their proposed target audience? So this makes sense, Faust has obviously made Ponyville edgy and hip. Now, it’s all one giant reference to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air with distinct Tarantino undertones and voice cameos from cast of the original Dr. Who or something and everyone is happy!
So, because I’m me and the only real prompting I need to spend hours watching children’s TV is a hangover and an edible vessel for transporting hummus to my mouth, I decided to watch a few episodes. I have been known to re-watch entire series from my childhood for nostalgia purposes. (I still don’t understand a lot of X-Men, or pretty much any of Gargoyles.) I was a fan of the original My Little Pony cartoons from the 80s, despite its amorphous cast of near-indistinguishable ponies, questionable musical numbers, horrific animation and two human protagonists who wore frilly pastel dungarees as a matter of course. That said, it actually had some fairly dark story-lines. If I were the kind of person who could remember the name of specific episodes I would recommend “The Return of Tambelon” as a prime example of all these things, but moving swiftly on…
Seriously, Megan? This is a choice you made?
The first thing I will say about MLP: FiM is that it is beautifully animated; smooth chunky lines, vivid block colours, lush landscapes, detailed interiors. It follows the tried and tested colour scheme of most TV shows aimed at girls aged 8 -11, i.e. rainbow with an emphasis on pinks and purples. It also follows the tried and tested character formula of a lot of female-centric entertainment (which has carried over to everything from Sailor Moon to Sex and the City) in which an unlikely group of best friends (the nerd, the tomboy, the princess, etc.) share fun and adventures, which can and often do range from world-saving quests to sleepover shenanigans within one series. Or indeed, one episode
The first two episodes were not even remotely what I was expecting. Like their dedicated brony following, Twilight Sparkle and her new group of varied-but-surprisingly-compatible friends rise to prevent the impending destruction of Equestria by the evil Nightmare Moon with unflinching sincerity. I could not locate a single tongue even partially inserted into the adjacent cheek. There was none of the satirical sadism of Dexter’s Labratory, the slapstick gross-out factor of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy or even the latent stoner appeal of Adventure Time.
It is the sort of show I would have been absolutely engrossed by as a little girl. The voice acting is uniformly strong, the plot barrels along at an entertaining pace, the world is well-realised and, to reiterate, the animation is stunning. It’s also a really genuinely clever. It does not patronise its audience. It’s great to see a show focused on female friendship that isn’t simultaneously focused on boys and fashion. Still, I couldn’t fathom what set of pop culture planets could have been in such a perfect and precise alignment at the moment of first airing that this charming, thoughtful, witty show about female friendship had become an online phenomenon so poignant that a community of young men with girlfriends and careers stood up as one and said, “This show is so great that I want everyone to know I like it. I don’t care if it’s meant for little girls. It’s the best thing ever. Also, Pinkie Pie is way better than Rainbow Dash.”
And so, I kept watching.
And watching.
And now I’m up-to-date with Season Two, and I look forward to my regular pony fix every week. And I still don’t know what on earth it is about this show that has me and hoards of other quasi-cynical pseudo-intellectual 20-somethings so absolutely enchanted.
But I think it’s a good thing.
I will elaborate on why I think this in Marianne Raves About Children’s TV #2B, but for the moment, there’s only so many pony-related things I can credibly link to in one post.
For now, I remain, your faithful brony,
(Yes, this is what I think I would look like as a little pony.)
(Yes, it is awesome.)
(Yes, you should totally make your own on the Pony Creator.)
So I normally don’t share shit that isn’t my shit, but this had me in stitches and I want to keep it here forever. Also, it sums up pretty much all of the reasons why I love comics. Max Landis on The Death and Return of Superman, feat. Mandy Moore, Elijah Wood and Simon Pegg (briefly).
I found this through uppercut, which is where I find most great things.
