Finding Bronies – The accidental audience of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Abstract

The practice of audience segregation, demographic profiling and manufactured viewerships has become common practice in the television industry since the turn towards niche programming and narrowcasting in an increasingly multichannel environment. While much critical scholarship has been devoted to the way that media companies undertake extensive market research to target their products to specific demographic segments, this article concentrates on the way that untargeted and unexpected viewers have coalesced around certain television programmes, and become the ‘accidental audience’. ‘Bronies’ have become the most well-known accidental audience in recent years, and are a perfect case study by which this phenomenon can be examined. The article therefore explores the way that accidental audiences develop, and how they offer both opportunity and threat to the managed selling of media brands. This article will also engage with the issues surrounding identifying and responding to these accidental audiences. Using the ‘Brony’ fandom of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, this article asks how accidental audiences develop and how, in particular, the Internet serves to shape and cultivate them.

Pretty Cure and the Magical Girl Media Mix

“…The show appeals primarily to a target audience of young female viewers and a barely acknowledged audience of older (mostly male) otaku fans. The latter are slyly catered to in various ways and are far from an “accidental audience,” the term used to describe unplanned male fans of the children's show My Little Pony (Burdfield 129). For example, the director for the first Pretty Cure series, Nishio Daisuke, was the director for Toei's long‐running adventure and battle anime Dragon Ball (as well as its feature‐length animated films); he brought his trademark flair for action sequences and hand‐to‐hand combat scenes to bear on the Pretty Cure battles.…”

Contextualizing the bronies: Cult, quality, subculture and the contradictions of contemporary fandom

“…Andrew Crome (2014) analyses another subgroup, religious bronies, and their use of the show's characters and relationships to engage with the teachings of scripture; while Bell (2013) details the controversy surrounding a pony known as Derpy Hooves, a co-creation of the show's producers and the television series' fandom. Each study reveals specific cultural struggles entailed in the enjoyment of Hasbro's show by what Claire Burdfield (2015) labels the 'unexpected audience' of the series.…”