Editorial: The Bronies Documentary Part 1: The Importance of Objectivity

My Little Pony 35 comments

Art by Kefkafloyd

“Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony” is a $322 thousand documentary funded primarily by pony fans. DHN was issued a copy (big thanks to the distributor at scrnland.com for doing so), and after seeing the doc, I’ve written a two-part editorial on my feelings on the documentary and the events surrounding it. This article will discuss the documentary itself, and you can find my opinions on it after the break!


Documentaries, as with all news and journalistic entities, have two ways they can present their information and content to the world: either objectively, by staying as neutral as possible and presenting hard facts and statistics; or subjectively, trying to argue for a particular viewpoint using facts, figures, and witnesses to back up their claims. Both viewpoints have positive and negative aspects attached to them. Pure objectivity is preferred in our industry, being the goal of many journalists. However, sticking only to facts and figures can make an article or story feel robotic and inhuman, and trying to remove all bias and emotion from the reporter can be difficult to do. Subjective content, on the other hand, removes the need to be unbiased in an effort to make an informative argument for whatever side the journalist has chosen. This approach is even more difficult to pull off effectively, as the truth can be lost if arguments for the other side of the story are whitewashed or not addressed. Journalists can also blind themselves from these arguments by becoming so involved with the subject matter that they can no longer see any argument other than their own as viable or correct. As such, most journalists strive to stay neutral on their stories, and let their readers decide for themselves what opinions or discussions they’d like to have.

“Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony” falls into the category of subjective journalism, with the argument being “bronies are good people”. And therein lies the problem with the entire documentary, in that arguing that someone is “good” or “bad” is not something you can put facts and figures to. Bronies are also too large of a group to be making such base attributions in the first place. The documentarians choose a subjective route, but the question remains as to why they choose to do things like they did, and not an objectively fact driven piece like it could have been.

As it stands, “Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony” is pure propaganda, with little to no intellectual value to be found within. Nearly all of the documentary is storytelling, following handpicked individuals around and letting them tell whatever personal story that brought them into the fandom, or to one of the conventions. Only two experts are ever brought in to speak on the documentary, both clinical psychologists, and even then they only give their professional opinions without backing them up with any kind of evidence. Individual personal stories can become the centerpieces for longform news stories, a tactic that NPR likes to use. However, personal stories are subjective in nature, being unable to be verified by anyone but the person telling the story. This becomes a serious issue when trying to use these individual pieces to try to represent a whole that is much larger then the individuals themselves. Without any factual basis, without statistics and studies, with almost no rational or justification for their arguments, the piece becomes a mess of emotional pandering and a disgusting display of yellow journalism at it’s worst.

Not addressing the issues within the history of the fandom doesn’t help the legitimacy of the piece either. And yes, there are issues, and not just clop. The documentary doesn’t address things like the harassment of Yamino after the removal of Derpy or the explicit death threats in the lyrics of pony artist Yelling at Cats. Purple Tinker, the creator of the original Bronycon, is shown lauding the fandom, yet recently has spent much of her time across many social networks blasting bronies for transphobic language. Not facing these issues means that bronies cannot learn from these mistakes, or at least begin to discuss them and try to figure out why people think the way they do. It’s also misleading to the general public. It promotes an image of the fanbase that isn’t the entire truth. And if people aren’t getting the whole truth, then why should they believe the good things that are crammed hamfistedly into the doc?

The terrible thing about this is there is some very interesting things that can be learned from the brony community that aren’t in the documentary or are played down in favor of trying to play emotions for sympathy. The history of bronies contains incredibly relevant and interesting ideas that could be used for studies pertaining to marketing, sociology, and social media. Letting experts in these fields discuss and break down the history of the fandom could have added much to the intellectual value of the piece. But instead, the history of the fandom is condensed down to a four minute song, and the experts and show cast are tossed to the sidelines in order to shove more high-emotion content in the viewer’s face. Not to mention that this history intentionally dismisses previous generations of the show and the fans who enjoy them, not only inaccurately portraying the fanbase yet again, but furthering the rift between these fans and the fans of G4. Fans of the toy line are ignored entirely.

There are good things in this doc, but they’re too few and far between for me to recommend. The editing is well done, and the parts where they do bring show staff on to talk about the conception of the show is interesting (albeit, longtime fans have already heard these stories before, as they’ve been the subjects of interviews from pony media for years now). The animation done by Jananimations (also know for Ask The Crusaders) is well done, as to be expected from them. You can find much of this for free online though, legally, by reading news articles or by going to Jananimation’s youtube page. I would not recommend paying the $12.99 the documentarians are asking for this, but I would also not recommend pirating it either.

This leads me to the elephant in the room that has yet to be addressed: the price. In the second part of my editorial, I’ll go over what price the fanbase will pay for this doc, both monetarily and figuratively. I’ll also discuss the ethics of crowd source funding in relation to subjective documentaries, and who is responsible for things turning out the way they did, and question the motives of those involved. Stay tuned, pony fans! And as always, remain calm, post ponies.

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  • Rickadai

    I remember your post about this review saying that you expect DHN to get a lot of flack for this, but as it stands most people seem to agree with you.

  • Cazum

    Second.

  • Autism Incarnate

    Wow, pretty good article.

    Only been here a few times, think I might come back. This isn’t the circlejerking news I expected, this is actually well written and not nearly as subjective.

  • Anonymous

    The documentary was created with the goal to show that most general fans are not demented freaks that major news outlets like Fox News, or aging shock jocks like Stern or Springer like to think. From what I understand, it does a pretty good job meeting that goal.

    Of course it wasn’t going to cover inter-fandumb bullshit like Yamino (who dug her own grave with her reactions afterwards) or PT (who just doesn’t know when to quit), especially since those were going on during production, and most of it involved 4chon. 4chon pretty much got skipped in the documentary AFAIK, so it’s probably for the best that the site or it’s dark spots never got brought up.

    This is the part where someone accuses me of being a donator, while in reality I didn’t give a single cent to the thing, as I feel it is wholly unnecessary. But I can at least understand the reason why some wanted it to happen, and I get to laugh at the fact that a lot of people are over-blowing this whole thing, thinking that it’s supposed to be some end-all historic walkabout of the entire fandom, when in reality it was never supposed to be.

    • Anonymous

      “4chon”
      Yeah…
      Seeing as this whole fandom arose from 4chan, causing a huge disturbance there, even causing moot to go and finally create a board for them because “we fucked up and turned our back to probably one of the largest subcultures in history:” that should have been accounted for in their little history check to show HOW this got so big, because that really is a big part to understanding this. Even Lauren herself acknowledged the initial bronies of the /co/ board on 4chan and valued their approval of the show, which was probably one of the most valued moments by those initial fans to keep on liking the show, despite all of the hate they received for it.

      I agree though with not including Purple Tinker and other such “incidents” in the fandom that just were overly dramatic. That wouldn’t be important information to the purpose of the documentary: to show bronies in real life and their stories and how (even if only briefly), as a whole, the fandom started and grew.

      But the problem is, it didn’t do such a great job at that. I felt it was rather poorly organized. It starts off okay, with a few random people telling about their like of the show and then the “street interviews,” but after that once it gets to the personal testimonies it keeps on going back and forth between the creation of the show, with Lauren and Tara, and individual stories, which didn’t really make any sense to me. It felt as though they were attempting to multitask it to keep the audience remembering both sets of information, which miserably failed.

      If for an informative one, they should have just gone and watched Saberspark’s “Ballad of the Brony” which is fantastic for the history of the fandom, as well as not completely undermining the past generations of MLP, which this documentary so obviously did, alienating the past-generation fans of the show. They could have even included them and show THEIR opinions of this new fanbase around the new generation of my little pony.

      They could have damn well afforded to make it longer, not needing to stay under 90 minutes. They had so much footage, as well as a huge plethora of information that they could have easily acquired through simple google searching, but apparently that wasn’t easy enough. If they wanted to keep us from falling asleep during the thing by keeping it shorter, well it still didn’t work, since I was tired of seeing so much spaghetti-spewing that they inclined to keep in the final cut.

      If you want an assembled collection of testimonies of bronies and some of the people that worked on the show without any apparent reason to why they have to explain themselves in the first place and how it all happened, fine, then this is a great documentary.

      • Jon the Red

        “They could have damn well afforded to make it longer, not needing to stay under 90 minutes. They had so much footage, as well as a huge plethora of information that they could have easily acquired through simple google searching, but apparently that wasn’t easy enough.”

        You do know they plan to release a Blu-Ray version with all those extras, right? They filmed a huge interview that they didn’t put into the digital download version, for example. Of course, I can clearly see that they’re only doing that to make bronies pay for the same hugbox film twice, but rest assured, they do have more than they put into the version you’ve seen.

        • If you go to http://www.scrnland.com/p/bd/ after purchasing the film, it says “Gifting Coming Soon!” and “Digital download card/promo card redemption coming soon!” So they have other things planned.

  • SBF1

    While I agree with the anon up there, I think that ultimately neither side really is right. While I do understand that the Documentary was supposed to show that not all bronies are braindead chucklnuts, the Documentary essentially goes in the other direction. There’s no balance to it; it’s the other end of the scale.

    If the Doc had show off both sides of the fandom, talking about the good bronies have done, but also touching on some of the less-savory areas, it would have felt a lot more informative and a lot less biased. The way it is, it’s essentially the situation of two young children stubbornly arguing with each other, neither side willing to consider the other. Fox News portrays bronies as freaks, the documentary portrays bronies as normal people, and I don’t trust either of them because they’re both obviously leaning to one side.

    The fandom itself fell into the same sort of trap some time earlier: during the time when bronies were first starting to become known, there was a mad scramble to show that bronies weren’t freaky freerfs. The problem is that bronies are freaky freerfs… not all of them, but some of them. But oh no, we can’t talk about the problems we have! The brony fandom is all cool stuff and never any real elephants in the rooms, right?… right?… guys?

    Ultimately, the Brony Documentary is the same as the kind of reports that Fox or Springer do/did. The Documentary might have set out to challenge a stereotype (bronies are freaks), but all it did was enforce the opposite stereotype (bronies are not freaks). This sort of thing isn’t a clear-cut issue, it’s not black and white. There’s good bronies and bad bronies, and denying the existence of either good or bad is a bad thing to do.

  • Tsumomo

    Honestly, I think maybe they shouldn’t have called it a documentary if anything.
    The point was never to subject the public to the negative aspects of the fandom, and as pointed out in a Q & A session, the film was meant to show on the whole what bronies are really about (namely to everyone else who doesn’t really know the fandom at all.)

    Pretty much agreeing with the anon up above somewhere in the comments where I think the reason people are getting upset is because they don’t know what it is supposed to be about (and to be fair it was never clearly defined) and assuming it is and was supposed to be something it was never going to be to begin with.

    For this, the documentary did an excellent job, and I actually rather enjoyed it on the whole.

  • Ragnus

    I think making a point about objective journalism, but wanting fanwank to be covered is the wrong route to take. Objective journalism is extremely important and much too rare these days, so I definitely appreciate your point here. However, what way could one go about adressing internet drama without stirring up even more problems? I think there are no objective sources on things like that and I have no idea how you would even report about it.

    The documentary sadly failed to make this clear, but yes, it was never supposed to be a big, thoughtprovoking piece on sociology or anything. It’s a film that says “These people are kinda cool, and we want to explain why”. It could have been much more, and I agree, that would have been interesting. However, that wasn’t the goal. It wanted to show us some examples of who these pony fans are, and that’s what it did.
    Obviously, some cherrypicked people can never represent the fandom as a whole, but neither would the ones that stir drama.

  • Anonymous

    Fantastic article. Props for the honesty.

    I think a lot of us knew that the documentary was going to be congratulatory and pandering, since the target audience and the financiers were the same people. Bronies love hearing how great they are.

  • Seraphem

    I’m with the anon above. It was never meant to be a hard hitting, in depth expose on Bronies. It was an attempt to counter the negative stereotype given to us by other media outlets.

    You berate them for using the stories of only a few individuals as being representative of the fandom. And then also say they should have talked about two other individuals? one of which I’d barely ever heard of and seems to only really be big on /mlp/

    Oh no they didn’t mention that there are some drama issues at times!!! Becuase they are over all rare, mostly the work of the minority, and not the reason why so many people love this show and this fandom. The issue, to me, seems to be you expected this to be something other then what it was, and are basing your impressions on it on your expectations, not what it was meant as.

    • Anon

      I think you need to read deeper. The anon above you was saying how uninformative and circlejerky it was, and you said you agreed with his negative review, then gave the documentary praise. And I’m sorry for wanting a doc that actually went into the history of bronies through thick and thin, rather than skim the surface on ‘how great we all are’.
      And I believe the author of this article wasn’t saying they should include more individuals to be focused on, but rather the events they caused that shook the whole fandom (i.e., Derpy’s removal).

      This doc would seem nothing more than ‘mlp propaganda’ to someone who has never seen the show before.

      • Seraphem

        Was referring to the anon up higher, didn’t notice there was another one right above me.

  • Tiepilot789

    What a miracle, a review that isn’t mindless praise

    I agree, the film was decently produced, but that’s it, the content itself has ZERO value.

    • Anonymous

      Are there other reviews out there?

  • I… actually wasn’t expecting to see an article like this appear, but then I pretty much forgot about the whole project.

    As always a nice article, as to be expected from DHN, you guys are definitely the best.

  • Zaehlas

    I can understand why this review is the way it is, and the only reason I don’t agree with it, is the reason the documentary existed in the first place is as a specific counter to the negative press.

    The problem that exists with any internet fandom in the last decade or two is that ALL of them (Bronies included) have their good and bad sides. The huge point being is that the furry fandom exists, and is viewed as bad, even though there’s alot of great work out there. There has been pornographic Disney and Simpsons stuff for decades. Before the movies, when Harry Potter was gaining popularity, the amount of mature fanfiction for that genre totalled more than ALL other fanfiction COMBINED.

    But none of that ever hits the news.

    Those that knew about it either knew it, or ignored it and went on with their lives. The ones that didn’t know stayed blissfully ignorant, and the public never had an opinion because to them, it didn’t exist.

    However, specifically to the Bronies, due to the fandom’s size, the controversy, activity on the internet, or all of the above, the negative of the fandom was specifically focused on and made public. The Bronies, in their defense tried multiple times to get a positive story out there, but with the exception of some news articles that appeared after the documentary was filming, only got belittled more, and turned into internet flame wars.

    To a certain extent, the Documentary is an opinion piece, and needed to be a positive piece that can show the good side of the fandom. Plenty of avenues exist for the bad side of the fandom (and the internet in general)

    I have not had the opportunity to see it yet. I ordered my copy because I believe in it’s message, but it’s taken me a few days to get my account fixed. I am now downloading it, however it will take me approximately another day, as stuck out here in Afghanistan, I have about the equivalent of a 56k modem connection, when I am lucky.

    I am not saying this is a bad review. Everything said here is absolutely understandable, and the documentary probably could be much better.

    What matters in the final run is if the documentary makes a difference in the common person’s view of what a Brony is. Some people’s opinions will never change (but then again I talked with a guy in a bar a few months back that still truly believes that women’s suffrage should be overturned and segregation reinstated).

    Things change. Three years ago no one could predict something like the Bronies could exist. Three years from now I’d like to know for a fact that I could walk in public in any place in the world with a brony shirt on, and only a select few would judge me, and even when doing so, THEY would know they are the minority.

    I hope the documentary is a step in that direction.

  • Gendid

    These are some good discussions, with some very good points. One thing I’d like to address for now though:

    The belief that there’s a “bad media image” has been circling around here. I don’t want to spoil things, but in the second half of this editorial, I will be addressing the media scapegoating that went on during the kickstarter funding period, along with why I don’t think the media has an overwhelming negative view on bronies.

    Not gonna get into it here though. Stay tuned, I should have the other half out soon, depending on if I can get ahold of the people I need to!

  • Starlight Ironhoof

    Could you please stop throwing the word “objective” around? Accuracy is what journalists strive for. The idea of objectivity has been proven impossible and wrong for quite a few decades now, and as such we journalists don’t strive for objectivity as our number one goal anymore. The three As of journalism are: accuracy, accuracy and accuracy. Objectivity isn’t a part of that. Just by picking which stories to write, which ones to feature, what makes the front pages and what sources to cite, objectivity is thrown out the window. In fact, the Society of Professional Journalists dropped objectivity from its code of ethics in 1996. The core ethics of journalism are “seek truth and report it,” “minimize harm,” “act independently” and “be accountable.” If you’re going to attack the documentary, it should be under the actual ethics and practices of journalism and not things that you are making up on the spot just to make an interesting headline for the ill-informed masses. I can already see that you really don’t care about proper journalism as you are citing negative incidents within the fandom that occured during production of the documentary. This also calls into question your ability to be accountable. As it stands, this article is a great example of the decay of journalistic integrity that has been perpetuated by the Internet.

    • Anon

      The decay of journalism was due to ‘Yellow Journalism’, something brought about by extreme subjectivity.
      The repeated use of ‘objective’ was simply to hammer home the point that this documentary was anything but. And your core ethics all work nicely with the idea of being objective over subjective, aside from the ‘act independently’ part. And a journalist’s job is to report the bad and the good, ‘the whole truth’, right? How is the author not caring about proper journalism if they skim over the ugly parts to paint sunshine and lolipops over everything? As for your three A’s, this article hits each pretty nicely. And the ‘negative incidents within the fandom that [occurred] during production of the documentary’? Last I checked, Derpy’s removal isn’t exactly recent. All in all, I found this article to be an accurate wake-up to the parts missed by the documentary, and a fair judgement of it as a whole.

      • Starlight Ironhoof

        Objectivism was the response to yellow journalism, and it was perceived as a failure and began its decline in the 80s with a final nail in the coffin during the mid 90s. It’s not part of journalistic ethics today. What part are you not reading in my comment? Any mention of that in the above article can be tossed out of the window. The article above is just part of DHN’s seemingly need to be edgy and counter-culture to try and keep readership up while being overshadowed by EqD, which is a news source I wouldn’t call superior by any means as they clearly don’t even try to appeal to journalistic qualities. And how is the author’s article factual? He says that documentaries aren’t subjective. List some examples of recent documentaries to prove the point, and ones from the same genre, not historical documentaries. The way documentaries are handled has changed greatly during the past 20 years. It just seems to want an oversensationalized piece trying to show how bad bronies are. It wants the worse. It wants the crew to go back to muckraking. I don’t see how 100 people, less than 0.001% of the fandom, participating in death threats is representative of brony culture. Why even bother generalizing these things over everyone? Yes, lets just make our journalism revert nearly a century in ethical values and try to bring huge highlight to the worst cases that will never even come close to amounting to 1% of the fandom-at-large when you combine all incidents rolled up into one package assuming separate individuals participated in each one.

          • Another Anon

            I was scrolling down and was pleased to see a response from DerpySquad- I expected to see a well thought out reply, and I got a weird looking dude wearing an eyepatch.

            …

        • suomynonA

          objective journalism should have properly died in the 70s. This is what I mean:
          Gonzo gonzo gonzo gonzo. Subjectivity is the shit. Hypergonzo for the current times.
          The end.

          The man’s right though, postmodernism thoroughly obliterated the idea of “objective” journalism. The next movement is bringing it back though. It isn’t reverting. It’s a postmodernly informed objectivism (small “o”). Pomo was kind of a crock and I’m glad to see it go. Who knows whether or not this stuff here has the right idea… It has to be done right, and consciously in order to avoid the old pitfalls. Don’t believe that objectivity as been deconstructed out of existence. You’re thinking inside a postmodern box if you are. Gotta move past it!

  • EquestriaGuy

    Like the anon above said, the reason JDL signed on the documentary was a response to the bad press bronies got from Fox News. Curiously, they cited some random local affiliate, and what I’m guessing is an internet show, instead of citing Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld, where a lot of the disrespect came from. This was an effort to give the bronies a voice, to stand up to their main stream media bullies where they normally couldn’t hope to put out a positive message as quickly, or widely as the media could spread a negative message. It would be one thing if the documentary was meant to expose the full spectrum of the fandom, but that doesn’t seem to be the inspiration for its creation. Furthermore, I think expecting all of the interpersonal squabbles and forum drama to be part of this documentary is a sign that we have an inflated sense of importance or influence. The /mlp/, ponychan, and EQD crowd are small compared to the full breadth of the fandom, so our drama shouldn’t be front and center even if the documentary was meant as an expose, which it wasn’t.

    Rather than bemoan the documentary for what we want it to be, we should critique it for what it was meant to be; a rebuttal against the negative stereotypes, and an affirmation that there’s nothing wrong with watch a show original meant for little girls.

    • Anonymous

      “Curiously, they cited some random local affiliate, and what I’m guessing is an internet show, instead of citing Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld, where a lot of the disrespect came from.”

      Some of that is not their fault, but the fault of Fox News and dollar signs. See, In order to use Red Eye, they have to get permission from Fox News, which would then have to review the film and sign off on it stating that they had legal permission to use that particular clip from that particular show.

      Which costs money. And everytime that documentary gets played on a TV show, or someone buys the DVD/digital download/Blu-Ray, a percentage of whatever money was paid goes to Fox News. Depending on how long the clip and/or the citation of Fox News was mentioned, the more percentage Fox News can charge those involved with making the film.

      And, on top of that, you also have to pay the OTHER actors involved with that particular Red Eye sketch. Or, it’s simply possible they tried to contact Fox News and/or one of the actors involved in that show, and one said no.

      If one said no, you can’t use them at all.

      In which case, you’re screwed and have to find another source material.

  • Meyers

    All this for cartoon ponies. I adore the show, but all this drama is insanity. We can’t even have a fun cartoon without people going OCD over trivialities and whining over how the cartoon they watch isn’t perfect. I actually hope we get Twilight as an alicorn because it will piss off the whole lot of you, and hopefully chase away the more broken personalities from the fandom so we don’t get their miserysh1t griping over how X episode should have been a seven parter with a backstory novel published two weeks before airing. They can go write their 900 page epic fan fiction about Equestria’s outbreak of hemorrhagic plagues where Twilight’s friend all die horribly before her eyes. Fun!

    • Anonymous

      “…but all this drama is insanity”

      You mean CHAOS? Or Disharmony? Like a certain creature on the show…?

    • I like you. Repent now to cleanse you of your sins before Alicorn Twilight’s arrival. She is the harbinger of pony death.

    • Anonymous

      I really do find it all rather hilarious when some users say they don’t make the show or fandom a big deal… and then things like this happen and they instantly lose their shit.

    • Anonymous

      Glad I’m only in it for the show, and not for this broken infighting joke of a fandom that you take so seriously.

  • Anonymous

    I’m sorry, but if we need several hundred thousand dollars for uninformative circle-jerking, when the only productive goal of such a project could have been done so with far less nonsense and budget, I think we, as a group, have failed to regulate our own product and public image to something actually worthy of pride, much less, praise.

  • There always points to be made about the quality of a piece like this, and there are many negative ones to be made about this particular piece. the work, research, and any other scholarly element behind this will most likely never see the light of day, but what of the Documentary itself? I’m just glad to see some one on the outside actually give the community chance. I would like to think that the positive bias is actually just a product of bronies being awesome. As far as the objections about very little brony history in the piece, I have to support the lack of it. The birth from 4chan wouldn’t have shown the average person how fast we grew, as they wouldn’t even comprehend 4chan in the first place.

    • SBF1

      “I would like to think that the positive bias is actually just a product of bronies being awesome.”

      I’m an idealist, but even I can say with certainty that this is one of the most naive statements I’ve ever read. Though, perhaps ironically, it’s also the logic used by the people who made the documentary in the first place.

      As someone who interacts very little with the fandom itself (I prefer watching and musing, myself), bronies are most certainly not awesome – whether or not you meant it in that way, or if you simply worded it wrong, I can’t say.

      Some bronies are awesome, maybe. I have a few friends in the fandom, and I like them. It’s cool when there’s charity donations and the like. But there are also some bronies that are just plain not likable in the least, and the drama that goes on in the fandom is proof of that. Look at YellingAtCats – he was a jerk who… like, he put a slur and a death threat into one of his songs, right? Yeah, that’s not awesome. But the bronies who sent him death threats in response? They’re no better. They did the same thing he did.

      People have been arguing that the point of the documentary was to “counter the negative press bronies had gotten”. But the problem is that very few feel like it accomplished that. I remember when Springer had some “bronies” on his show, and from what I remember most people agreed that the entire thing felt very staged and acted out; the people he talked to probably weren’t bronies, but people who were acting in a very unrealistic way to play up the point of the show. The documentary does the same thing, in the opposite way. It shows the fandom as something wholeheartedly positive, something that is a Big Good, and the people who show up seem like they’re exaggerating the “goodness” of the show and the fandom. They’re playing up the good aspects of the fandom and hiding the problems of the fandom, and that’s nice and everything, but it’s not realistic. Nothing is perfect, and people know that, most of all the bronies in the first place.

      The documentary’s fatal flaw, in my mind, is simply the fact that it’s tipped too far on one end of the scales. It’s just gushing, and while it’s nice to just gush and blab about something you really like and enjoy, it’s not something that can be taken wholeheartedly as fact. If you try to hide a problem, it just makes the problem more apparent when people inevitably see it.