My little... Satan

About a year ago, I got into a fairly surreal conversation with a friend of mine over the phenomenon of "Bronies."

A "Brony," for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is an adult, usually male, fan of the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  At first my friend didn't believe that there was such a thing, and she accused me of trying to convince her of something ridiculous so that I would have ammunition for teasing her later when she found out that it wasn't true.

This forced me to dig up an article in Wired from all the way back in 2011 that proved to her that, unlikely as it may seem, the Brony phenomenon is real.

The Bronies are pretty serious about their obsession, too.  They have conventions, and dress up as characters like Fluttershy and Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, complete with wigs and costumes that are colors not found in nature.

BronyCon. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Keith Survell from USA, Bronycon summer 2012 cosplay session, CC BY-SA 2.0]

They collect action figures.  They have online discussion groups wherein they discuss the events in recent episodes with the same gravitas you would expect if the scripts had been penned by Shakespeare, or at the very least, George R. R. Martin.  They make fan art (as of the writing of the Wired article, the site DeviantArt had over 90,000 pieces of My Little Pony-inspired art; heaven alone knows how many there are now).  They went so apeshit when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ended its run in 2019 that EntertainmentOne and Boulder Media teamed up with Paramount Pictures to produce a full-length movie called, I kid you not, My Little Pony: A New Generation, which is scheduled to be released this September.

There is also a subgroup which apparently like to dress up as My Little Ponies and then have sex with each other.  Which I guess is harmless enough if everyone involved is a consenting adult, but open-minded as I am, I really didn't want to investigate further.

Being an author, my internet search history is already fucked up enough as it is.

Anyhow, after discussing the whole phenomenon with my friend, I got to thinking about it, and I decided that I had to see if I could figure out why this show had gained so much popularity amongst adults.  And fortunately, the article linked above has a short clip from one of the shows.  "Who knows?" I thought.  "I'm an open-minded guy, and confident in my own masculinity.  Maybe I'll be charmed.  Maybe I'll understand how some dude could get taken in by the innocent delight of entering a pastel-colored world where stories always end well."

So I watched the clip.  And "delight" is not what I experienced.  All I can say is, the voices of the My Little Pony characters reach a level of Annoying Whine previously achieved only by the actors who voiced the little dinosaurs in The Land Before Time.  After watching ten seconds of the clip, I wanted to remove my ears, with a cheese grater if need be.  I not only cannot understand how anyone could become a Brony, I felt like I needed to chug a six-pack of Bud Light after watching the clip just to restore order to the universe.

But all of this is backstory.  Because just yesterday I found out, through a different YouTube clip that you all must watch, that there is a reason that otherwise normal guys become Bronies.  And after watching the clip, I realized what a narrow escape I had.

Because My Little Pony is rife with symbolism of Satan and the Illuminati.

From Princess Celestia, who watches the world with the Eye of Horus and is actually a pagan sun goddess; to Applejack, whose apple symbol represents the Apple of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; to Twilight Sparkle's six-pointed star.  All symbols of evil magic and the occult.

And don't even get me started about "Pinkie Pie."

All through the video, which is eight minutes long, there is eerie, atmospheric music playing, sort of like the soundtrack to The Exorcist only less cheerful.  I watched the whole thing through twice, because it's just that wonderful.  There are all sorts of references to the Masons and the Satanists and the Illuminati and the Pagans.  An especially great part is where the subtitles tell us that there are six Pony characters, and each one has her own "magic element" and her own color, and 6+6+6 = 666.

I always thought that 6+6+6 = 18.  Maybe it's special Illuminati math or something.

Be that as it may, I guess that this explains the whole "Brony" phenomenon.  Adult guys are getting sucked in by the evil magic of My Little Pony, and through the wicked influence of characters like "Rainbow Dash" they are being induced to dedicate their lives to worshiping Satan.

So it's a truly awesome video, and very educational, although I would caution you against drinking anything while watching it unless you really want to buy a new computer monitor.

Anyway, there you have it.  Why guys become Bronies.  Me, I'm still not likely to watch, even now that I know that the show has a darker side.  Those voices are just beyond anything I could tolerate.  Not that this will convince my friend, who still thinks I'm covering up a secret obsession, to the point that she got me a "Pinkie Pie" mug for my last birthday.

But it could be worse.  She could have gotten me a plush toy with a voice box.  And then I might have made a deal with Satan just to get even with her.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

Cat-and-mouse game

What is it with people and cartoons?

We've had people claiming that the Cat in the Hat is a coded symbol for the takeover of the world by the Illuminati.  A Saudi imam issued a fatwa against Mickey Mouse because "the mouse is one of Satan's soldiers."  The Vatican looked gave a serious look into whether or not the Simpsons are Catholic.  A French academic published a paper making the claim that The Smurfs is communist propaganda.  There was an outcry by the seal-the-borders cadre here in the United States when it was revealed that Dora the Explorer might be an illegal immigrant.

And because all of that wasn't ridiculous enough, Salah Abdel Sadek, head of Egypt's State Information Service, has made the claim that violent extremism in the Middle East is due to...

... Tom & Jerry.

Yes, Tom & Jerry, the iconic cat-and-mouse duo whose goofy hijinks have delighted Saturday morning cartoon watchers for decades.  But their shenanigans may not be so innocent, Sadek claims:

[Tom & Jerry] portrays the violence in a funny manner and sends the message that, yes, I can hit him … and I can blow him up with explosives.  It becomes set in [the viewer’s] mind that this is natural...   The cartoon conveys negative habits like smoking and drinking alcohol, teaches children that stealing is normal, distorts the concept of justice, and helps children invent sinister plans using sharp instruments such as chainsaws.

Okay, can we just get one thing straight right from the outset?

Cartoon characters are not real.  Because of this, I do not expect the world to be like an episode of Scooby Doo.  Although I have to admit that it would be easier in a lot of ways if it did.  Then all we'd have to do is to pull the masks off of the Koch brothers, and it'd turn out that they were actually the carnival owners, and they'd have gotten away with taking over the government if it hadn't been for You Crazy Kids and Your Flea-Bitten Mutt.

Also, most children are perfectly capable of telling cartoons from real life.  I grew up watching Looney Tunes, and I never once thought it'd be a clever idea to drop an actual anvil on anyone.  I was aware right from the outset that if you shoot a gun in someone's face, it doesn't simply blow their nose around to the other side of their head.  I knew that I couldn't paint a picture of a tunnel onto a wall, and then run down it like it was real.

Further, I understood that if you step off a cliff, you will fall right away, not wait until you notice that you're in mid-air.

In other words, I got that there's a difference between cartoons and real life, a distinction that seems to have escaped Salah Abdel Sadek.

Of course, there's another reason that he's making the claim.  Blaming the problems in the Middle East on a pair of (Western) cartoon characters makes it easy to ignore the more troubling reality -- that extremism isn't going to be as easy to fix as telling your children to turn off the television.  In order to do anything substantive about extremism, you have to acknowledge the role of poverty, sectarianism, and the preaching of religious intolerance, all three of which the Egyptian government is reluctant to address.  That would require doing something difficult, such as addressing wealth inequity, legislating equal treatment under the law for all races and religions, and squelching the Muslim clerics who shriek about jihad against those who are "insulting Islam" by virtue of holding other beliefs.

Easier to blame a fictional cat and mouse, isn't it?

So there you have it.  All this time and money and effort, and to end the violence all we had to do was cut subscriptions to The Cartoon Network.  It'd be nice, wouldn't it?  Just shutting something off makes it go away.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way.  I know.  I've been trying that with Ann Coulter for years, to no avail.

Open season on Snorky

I know that there are many important things in the world I could be blogging about today. I could be devoting my writing to analyzing the candidates for the presidential election.   I could be posting about a prototype fusion reactor about to be turned on in Germany, which (if it works) could revolutionize clean energy production.  I could be discussing the ongoing problems in the Middle East.

But no.  My topic for the day is: why the hell do I have the theme song from The Banana Splits stuck in my head?

For those of you who are too young to remember the 60s, or who were, shall we say, otherwise occupied at the time, The Banana Splits was a short-lived and rather ill-conceived Saturday morning cartoon.  It ran, insofar as I can remember, on the variety-show model, with a number of short clips (both animated and live-action), music, and so forth.  It was hosted by a foursome of actors in animal suits (the eponymous "Banana Splits") -- Fleegle the dog, Snorky the elephant, Bingo the gorilla, and Drooper the lion.

It was, in a word, weird.  It is second only to H. R. Pufnstuf as being the trippiest Saturday morning cartoon ever aired.  And for those of you who haven't heard of this amazingly freaky cartoon, the only way I can give you a flavor for it is to imagine what would happen if J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a script for an episode of Barney and Friends while on LSD. 

You think I'm kidding? Ask anyone over 50. Or check out the Wikipedia entry, which gives an interesting take on the series, as well as many links to related sites.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the theme song of The Banana Splits -- whose lyrics I kindly won't share, partly out of consideration for my readers and partly because the bit of it that is currently whirling around in my brain consists mostly of "la la la" -- is one of the worst earworms in the world.  An earworm, as defined by psychologist James Kellaris, is a song, jingle, or fragment thereof, which gets lodged inside your skull and will never ever ever leave, even if you try to remove it using an electric drill and a shop-vac, until finally you go completely and totally MAD AND BEGIN TO FROTH AT THE MOUTH AND START CALLING ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS WHO ARE HUNTERS AND ASKING THEM IF THEY WOULD HAVE AN ETHICAL PROBLEM WITH KILLING AN ELEPHANT NAMED "SNORKY" EVEN THOUGH ELEPHANTS ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES.

Whoa, sorry, got a little carried away, there.  And perhaps I exaggerate a tad.  Even the most annoying earworm will eventually leave, but often only because it's been supplanted by an even worse one.  So once I have the theme song from The Banana Splits out of my head, who knows what musical adventures I have to look forward to?  Maybe "Copacabana."  Or "Benny and the Jets."  Or the "Kit-Kat" jingle ("Gimme a break, gimme a break, break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar.")  There are so many my brain can choose from!  I can hardly wait!

The worst of it is considering what a waste of mental energy this must be.  When I think of the amount of brain space I'm currently devoting to keeping "la la la, la-la la la, la la la, la-la la la" ricocheting off the inside of my skull, it just makes me depressed.  I could be writing a symphony, coming up with a Grand Unified Field Theory, solving world hunger, or figuring out why Carly Fiorina appears to be physiologically incapable of uttering a true statement.   But no. I'm sitting here, going "la la la."  And worse yet, writing about it.

Good lord, I just realized something.  Now I've infected all of you.  I'm really sorry about that, truly I am.  And if all of you go out and infect others, it'll be... it'll be.. a pandemic!  Bananasplitsitis!  US productivity will grind to a halt!  (The Russians and Chinese are immune, because during the 60s they were too busy having Cultural Revolutions and Great Leaps Forward and Sputniks and Missile Crises to come up with pointless, psychedelic cartoons.)  World markets will collapse.  Pandemonium will ensue.  And it will all be my fault.

Wow.  I feel just awful about this.  I think I need to lay low this morning, just to recover from the guilt feelings.  Find something to take my mind off all the trouble I've caused.  Maybe relax, daydream a little.  Daydream about... about a magic land... where everything is alive!  Filled with whimsy and weirdness!  Where the mayor is a brightly-colored dinosaur!

Ahem...  "H. R. Pufnstuf, where'd'ya go when things get rough, H. R. Pufnstuf, you can't do a little 'cause you can't do enough..."