Bronies learning English in the digital wild

Abstract

This article reports on fan practices, in English, among an international community of bronies—adult fans of the animated cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP). Originally directed at a target audience of young girls, MLP has become popular among men. These older male fans have been extremely active in producing multimodal and plurilingual fan practices. We explore how two different groups of bronies—one in Russia and the other in Spain—carry out fan practices in English. Applying digital ethnography, we describe six different cases of adult MLP fans. They both consume and create products such as fanfiction, translations, and fandubbing in different contexts with the use of sophisticated technologies. Not only do fandom practices allow these fans to develop digital identities and reach new audiences, they also help them to improve their English language skills—a task at which they reveal themselves to be both autonomous and self-critical. Regarding translation practices, we note several instances of bronies receiving mentoring from fellow fans who have a higher level of English. Finally, this article points out how, in the process of adapting their written output for global readerships, bronies can acquire some important transcultural skills.

We want to especially thank all the participants of the study, for their time and willingness to help. This research was partly funded by the doctoral scholarship (2017FI_B_00181, Government of Catalonia) and by the research projects ICUDEL (EDU2014-57677-C2-1-R, Ministry of Economy, Spain) and Fandom in Spain (third call, Queen Sophia Center for Youth and Adolescence, Spain).