About me!

I'm not quite sure! Unlike some non-brony MLP fans and collectors, I've never been much into horses or ponies. People who don't know me assume those two things correlate, but I have no interest in actual equines at all. I also had some G3s as a child and didn't feel any particular way about them (now kicking myself for getting rid of them). However, I can hazard a guess on how I ended up here.

When I was in my tweens, I started watching MLP:FiM. I was an awkward, anxious kid, and seriously bent towards escapism. It didn't help that I was going through some personal and familial problems at the same time (weren't we all lol). MLP:FiM was the latest iteration of my habit of latching onto a piece of media to distract, and it had a lot of distracting things about it! Characters, lore, background ponies to catalogue...

At some point during this phase, I stumbled upon ponylandpress.com and it was like a floodgate opened. There was a whole world to understand, file away, and devour, and I found G1 designs immensely endearing. Something about their colors and symbol styles hooked me. I learned as much as I could about the minutae of toy timelines, peripheral media, rare releases, and the like. I became armed with some of the most useless information on the planet, and I loved it. I still do; I love cataloguing my collection, taking care of it, chatting about the toys and media on forums, and making art!

It's a bit difficult to find information on why, psychologically, people collect things. There are negative correlations tangled up with hoarding for those who don't understand the difference, and some people find a collection of children's toys creepy, as a sign of immaturity or toxic nostalgia. However, when I looked into the topic during a writing course in college, others' research suggested that collecting supports the collector in a few ways. It makes you an expert in a subject, giving you an area in which you are confident; it allows you a corner of your life to organize and over which to exercise full control; and it provides access to another avenue of social connection through a "collector community" of shared interests and knowledge.

Given all that, why My Little Pony? Could my collection have really been anything I latched onto during a formative and troubled time in my life? Do I collect because I have some insecurities to bolster, or do I collect because I think vintage toys are cute?

Let's be honest - it's probably both. :P

This website previously existed in a different form on Weebly. However, I came back to my site after an absence and found that Weebly had merged in some sense or other with a company called Square. I didn't even know what Square was, and now I needed to make an account with them to continue editing my site.

This was a free process, and Weebly remains free to use, but this gave me pause - I didn't know the future of Weebly, so the future of my site wasn't really in my hands. That, combined with growing general dissatisfaction with the increasingly profit-centric web, led me to actually make the move to Neocities. The catalyst had been a post on Tumblr encouraging others to use Neocities to create their own website as independence from said capitalistic algorithmic sites. I saw that post, thought about my own fatigue, and now here I am!