How and when did you become a Pony Fan/ Brony?

A rule34 Flash by TiaraWhy. I was not impressed and moved along. Then I saw a few pony youtube poop videos and I have decided to watch some episodes and here I am.

I actually watched the show the day it premiered. I’d always gotten some kind of weird excitement from watching “girly” shows, regardless of whether or not I actually liked them. I thought it was alright, but didn’t really pay it much mind after.
 
I used to browse Fchan a lot, and noticed a lot of pony pictures on there. I was like “wtf”, and started browsing.
 
And that’s when I saw Vinyl Scratch. I was all, “HOLY SHIT HOUSE DJ IN A KIDS CARTOON?!”
 
I watched it every day from then on for about a year.

@GargantuanBass  
Same. I blame She-Ra being way more competantly written than He-Man on my conversion. He-man was just goofy and campy as hell, it was written like it was made for the 60s with 80s animation techniques. She-Ra meanwhile, at times felt like a story ripped from Heavy Metal and then ‘kiddified’ traditional SatAM style. Specially that one horrendously out of place bounty hunter with the raspy voice. She seems like she prolly garroted a few Glimmers in her day. _{^{Note how she always seems to glare at Glimmer whenever she speaks, heheh.}}

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
I can’t believe there hasn’t been a ponified Heavy Metal yet.

@GargantuanBass
 
Dang yo. I found tons of ponified metal musicians, but not actually Heavy Metal! Crazy! Also I found Fluttershy’s Dirty Secret while rooting around too.

@GargantuanBass  
same. I had inexplicable fascination.
 
Then again, I was a mischievous child who often teased the fairer sex (and the courser one as well), not to mention being stubborn as fuck

Happened to see a Kaa pic while ßrowsing deficientTart ßack in July/August 2011.  
Reaction:meh. Fast forward to Octohßur 2011:  
While checking out some YouTube poop, I noticed something curious in the related vids.  
So I checked them out. Avast Octavia’s Ass had me intrigued;  
not because I liked the sound that much, but rather because I was somewhat enthralled with those curvy feminine contours of her body as well as her aesthetically pleasing color scheme.  
Cue google search for her and happening across her mlp wikia artickoh.  
( I also remember loving the header image for Twi’s R-tickle )
 
Followed by watching the S1 finale and then the rest of S1 in no particular order, although I had to somewhat force myself to watch Party of One, Over a ßarrel and particularly Owl’s well that ends well.  
Also, it was getting harder to find playlists that weren’t already being taken down ßy “Haßsro” thus I moseyed over by EqD, where I’d become a regular visitor around the time Sweet and Elite aired.
 
Came out of the staßle around Chris-mess of ’12 (my sißlings, particularly my teen sister already knew though :3)
 
Was a ßackground pwnee on pwnee-ßewrew and migrated over to durrpeeßewrew when it happened.

I got it from YouTube  
Then porn  
Then YouTube again  
I love and miss YouTube….

I watched the Starscream VS Rainbow Dash video. When Dash won, I got interested in MLP. Then I learned about the other ponies like Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, etc. and I joined the herd.
 
I wonder what would happen if Starscream won.

@Artcast Nyans You’d have gotten interested in watching Transformers Prime instead?

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
Possibly. I’m just glad that Dash won because I have a lot of brony and pegasister friends over the internet :3.

I had insomnia and a migraine. So I started listening to this song on youtube…somehow, ended up here and then decided watch the show. Since all of Season 1 was online I watched it non-stop that Saturday. I caught up to where season 2 was on Sunday. I then started looking at fanart and discovered Ponibooru.

Mid-2011, I believe I’d seen a few stray images and references to “bronies” here and there but paid no attention. A few weeks later, a YTPMVer I’m subscribed to uploaded some filler that sourced Bridle Gossip, so then I basically go and start with S01E01 and ran through all 26 episodes in two days.
 
I then discover Equestria Daily and My Little Brony and then also manage to convert a bunch of guys on IRC. Then, Season Two started. I was doing some weekend projects with schoolmates during then, so after lunch me and the one other convert in the school group went to YouTube to watch the episode that just finished airing much to the displeasure of all my other schoolmates that were around.

@poiuj1  
You know, that was the same video where I first discovered G4 Ponies on YouTube.

I got into the show between Season 1 and 2. At the time I was a big user of the Minecraft forums and I saw a lot of pony avatars around. Also, the house-hold thread for MLP was one of the biggest threads there. At the time, some people I was following on dA were doing drawings of ponies and stuff.
 
I took it originally with humor, I didn’t intend to follow the show. I made a few jokes and categorized them in alongside furries and went along with my life. Though, I figured I should look into this show so I can at least claim I “gave it a chance”.
 
And watching the first three it just sort of went on its own, and now four seasons in…
 
Painfully though, at the time my internet was terrifyingly slow so I could only watch one or two episodes a night.

Poltergeist.

I always watched it as a kid, and no one stopped me as I got older. It was one of my favorite shows.

Summer 2011. Got it recommended by a friend and has been hooked ever since.

Wow this got necro’d, but so did I, realizing I haven’t contributed to anything here in like nine months
 
_{Time to start posting again I guess, got a lot of art to go through}
 
MAY 26TH 2011. The date of no return. 1am specifically. Previous requests to watch FiM while S1 was airing by friends had been kinda brushed aside as ‘I’ll do it later.’ However, amidst extreme boredom after waiting for a tornado outbreak that turned out to be rather mild and uneventful, and the only one awake in the pre-dawn hours, I figured I could try watching something new before calling it a night, having been hassled to watch it by a friend yet again a month prior. These numerous requests meant maybe there was something to it and having seen numerous /co/ threads get pony-hijacked, eh, I guess maybe people actually did like it. I watched the first half of the series pilot on YouTube, in like 144p, back before the copyright swarms struck.
 
I strongly disliked it! Haha!
 
But alas, it was just the pilot episode and I knew full well that was just a series intro, so it wouldn’t be fair to judge it on that. And, it was also a two-parter, so I had to finish the second part. Well, the turning point was Pinkie’s sarcastic “it was under e-e-e-e-e!” line shortly into it, which made my sleep-deprived self laugh uncontrollably. This was humor I could actually get behind, maybe this will be worth watching after all! I actually started paying attention to the plot and was actually interested in the episode after that, and was highly impressed by the tie-in with each element and how that was woven in per character. Not many cartoons for such a young audience bother with crap like that. So the second half of the pilot, I really liked, so I watched the next two and wound up on Applebuck Season, which I absolutely loved. I was hooked at that point but really had to go to bed for work.
 
Aaaaand I marathoned the 22 remaining episodes of S1 back-to-back in one sitting the following Saturday and became completely obsessed.
 
Been stuck on the ride ever since for almost a full decade and tbh there’s little sign we’re even to the mid-course brake run yet, looks like there’s a lot of track left ahead

I got curious as to why everyone on the internet kept posting pony pictures. Even people I knew were too old to be the target audience.
 
So I decided to check the what the fuss was about around the time for season 2 to premier.

@EquusStorm
 
Necro’ing good, because it allows me to see how I wrote (and if anything I predicted came to pass), and reminds me of people here who are no longer a part of our community.
 
It also shows me that me and Dustcan joined around the same time, though they lack the exodus badge to show that they came here from the venerable Ponibooru.

Sometime between late 2011 and early 2013. i used to hang around on FurAffinity, but had started losing interest on that. i found some MLP images around the place, but thought nothing of it. then, when i began using TvTropes, i ended up finding it again, and began to read about it. then, i found the fanfics. i pretty much only read the fanfics and saw some of the fanart for a good while, but, since i’m not the type to read silently (even though i don’t talk loudly), i tried to watch some clips of the episodes to see if i could get the characters’ voices right when i was reading the fanfics. then, around the time of the S3-S4 hiatus, i started watching the episodes themselves.

Reading these ancient threads makes me feel nostalgic. I was going to write my own response to OP’s question, but I noticed I already did that eight years ago.

@JP  
Crazy to think about yourself so long ago, but to see and almost hear yourself from that time, it hits you right where it matters.