My first experience with MLP was when I saw a member with an avatar, signature, and username inclusive of Pinkie Pie. My first instinct was "lolwat. Okay then..." and I went searching around elsewhere. Later that month, I began seeing loads of Youtube videos containing ponies and such, and I attempted to ignore them profusely. It was becoming annoying to see it popping up everywhere, and I soon found out it was a meme, and had it's own community. I wasn't resentful, but I wasn't apprehensive. Some of my closest friends online began displaying their likes for ponies via avatar and signatures, so I began to question it, and even played along by posting whatever pony content I found funny on their walls.
Then, one day, I was at my friend's house, and we were watching TV. It was about 9:00PM EST, and we'd just finished eating after a few games of SSF4. I was scrolling through On Demand, and in the preview box above, a commercial displaying My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came overhead. At first, I wanted to ignore it, then it began to look interesting by what the announcer was saying. I decided to give at least one episode a chance (I knew that one chance would not be with the pilot episode, this I learned from the pilots of many series I'd watched prior), and I followed the instructions to the My Little Pony section of The Hub. I chose the episode titled Griffon Brush-Off, and within the first thirty seconds, Twilight's response to Pinkie Pie didn't make me feel like it was all that girly. When it got to the intro, I almost utterly lost it, as the show dropped straight down into girlyville and rented a home for 600$ a month. Like, seriously. I was about to press stop and call it quits. But I thought about it for a second, and realized "This is only the intro, and the target audience is very young girls. I can't let that be the basis by which I choose the judge the show." I went onward, left hanging by a thread after the intro and theme song, and the show began to pick back up with Pinkie Pie continuing to chase Rainbow Dash. To sum up without going through how I felt throughout the entire episode, it was a cool start for me. The show was definitely not as girly as I originally thought. It wasn't like they we're doing nails and **** while talking about how they're going to hit up that boy at the mall while constantly singing.
I gave the show another chance and watched another episode, Green isn't your Color. The episode was amazing. Photo Finish became my most favored pony, and I finally felt like the show would hold something dear to me. I didn't really feel like talking about it, so at first, I just kept quiet and threw on an avatar/signature. Sooner on, around my birthday, I decided to get in touch with the rest of the community, which began in the thread, right here on these forums. Everyone was so cool and having something in common with everypony was pretty awesome. I could go beyond brony and say I could see many of them being an actual bro for me. A couple months later, I still enjoy the show, the fanbase product, and many other objects related, and I'm hooked.
:foxbrawl: 
