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y’know what, buck this.

The major part that fanart plays in all this is to attract new fans. This is actually something that fanfic can’t. You read fanfic when you’re already a fan and willing to invest your time in it. Fanart, on the other hoof, is often something you stumble upon by chance. The more you find, the clearer it becomes that there’s a fandom behind all this fanart that you may want to join. That, and the fanart mirrors what the fandom ticks like.

@Pulse Wave  

 
I agree. I’ve seen a lot of people say they lost interest in the show before it ended but stay in the fandom because of the content it produces.
 
However, I think that OCs and AUs might have enough potential to keep people invested just as much as works written in the same style as the original source material, and potentially more. There are entire fandoms-within-a-fandom built on alternate universes in this fandom that have been going strong for years. By reimagining the setting, they allow themselves to do things that the original can’t.
 
I also think that images can be just as important as fanfics in keeping a fandom alive. Images can appeal to people who don’t necessarily care for fanfics, they don’t take as long to make or to consume, and they’re easily accessible through sites like Deviantart, Tumblr, and Derpibooru. And I think the continued survival of many fandoms (including this one) relies very heavily on artists keeping the fandom alive by producing porn.

I’ve discovered an interesting phenomenon about fandoms: If they produce enough quality fan works, they can continue to live on these fan works. Even if what the fandom is about is not only cancelled but won’t even see any re-runs (or only behind technological and/or financial hurdles), the fandom will continue as long as it has enough good fan works. This works the best with fan fiction which gives the fans new stories to enjoy in the same setting. These fics can stand in for new episodes better than blatant AUs or fics mostly driven by OCs.
 
Fandoms with no, little and/or hard-to-find fanfics are far more likely to wither away than fandoms that produce lots of good fanfic and publish it where it can easily be found and read. Also, the closer the fanfics stay to the original material, the better this works.
 
Granted, lots of fanfic are no guarantee for a fandom’s survival if it’s easy to lure the fans away to greener pastures as may have happened to the once mighty Gargoyles fandom after just a few years.
 
That, and there needs to be enough fanfic for the fans to read. A huge fandom such as ours can easily produce so many good fanfics within a short time that one doesn’t run out of stories for many years. Smaller fandoms, in contrast, require a constant stream of new fanfics worth reading.
 
In another fandom I’m in, a few people have already stated that they’ve meanwhile become fans of the fanfic rather than of the show itself because these fics continue what the show started but without the show’s restraints. Unfortunately, that very fandom has barely seen any new fanfic in years, so it has fallen rather quiet. One could also argue that the revered fanfic classics from this fandom which came out in the late 1990s to mid-2000s actually didn’t age well because fanfic trends were different back then from what they are now.
 
The Bronydom’s situation is vastly better. For one, we do have lots and lots of fanfics for just about every taste. But our creativity doesn’t stop at fanfic including fan comics (and fan art which doesn’t contribute nearly as much to a fandom’s survival than fanfic IMO). One could say that if it’s imaginable for fans to craft it, it has been crafted. We’ve got lots of fan animation, we’ve got a number of fan games, and I think there isn’t a single fandom out there with more fan music in various genres, not to mention that all this is still growing in numbers.
 
I think and I sincerely hope that Brony creativity has reached a critical mass at which it becomes self-containing by continuing to inspire its own likes.

@office mare  

 
We certainly have.

the fandom will always exists due to sheer amount of porn there is out there. And different sketches and alternate universes (such as fallout eqoustria) proved that MLP fandom is something more then fans of a cartoon. It created a whole new dimension to art style, MLP cartoon simply laid the foundation and 2012 content such as videos and art placed another layer of foundation. and some may move on…. but there will be new generation that will lay new layers to the fandom nonstop building a universe and community brick by brick. of course there is no brony cons like good ol 2012 but we are still here, its just we became more self aware of how cringy we were. and personalty i find it so astonishing that such creation was made from what hasbro thought would be a cheap cartoon to largely sell toys to little girls. MLP fandom is truly a manifest of a miracle.

I respectfully disagree.
 
Even when the show was still going, this fandom created a lot more content than most other fandoms did, and the hiatuses between seasons didn’t diminish the content output one bit. I think what happened is that somehow it attracted a bunch of artists and retained enough fans to give the artists the business they need to stay invested. And in addition to having a very large body of work to draw inspiration from, there seems to be an almost limitless potential for new work in the form of alternate universes and crossovers.
 
I think in some ways the content our fandom creates now is actually better and more sophisticated than it was before because we’ve passed the stage where everything is new. Many older works that were popular before are being re-evaluated and and people realize they weren’t as good as they previously thought, while new work builds upon the ideas of those older works and actually makes them good.
 
I don’t think Hasbro’s content output is really affected much by the fandom. We were never Hasbro’s target audience and I don’t think they even understand why our fandom came to be in the first place. Hasbro’s sole concern is to sell as many toys to as many children as possible, and all of their decisions are based around that. I think ‘Pony Life’ would have been made whether bronies existed or not. I don’t think we’re going to get another FiM-type show in the forseeable future because it simply isn’t a pragmatic business decision.

The fact that this fandom is, for lack of a better term, so dense, that it no longer needs a show to survive. I mean, other fandoms can chug along without new content for a while, but MLP is the only fandom I can think of that, If they just stopped making MLP stuff altogether, would never die down at all.  
This sounds good, but it’s actually a problem. It’s good for a fandom to quiet down and get starved for more content every now and again. It encourages creators to make better things for those who wait for it.  
But MLP no longer needs good content to survive, so Hasbro won’t give good content anymore. They know that it doesn’t matter, so they won’t bother. The fandom’s basically killing the very thing it’s a fan of.