The new design of My Little Pony starting with G4 has made the concept of crossovers beyond easy. Their semi-anthro stances and giant facial expressions has caused a massive surge in ponification over the years.
The brony fandom is, at it's core, a bunch of pop culture geeks. I doubt pony is the only thing you take part in out there in the wide world of entertainment. Thanks to this proliferation of people from all walks of the nerd spectrum, cartoon equines have been just about everywhere.
Below the break, lets dig into 10 of the best over the last 5 years! Expect ponies being awesome, cause that how we roll.
Skyrim
Since it's very beginning, Skyrim has been absolutely bombarded with ponification. Back during the early days of EQD, we actually ran a series of banners for it's release. As soon as mods became common, My Little Pony became an absolute flood. There were incredibly popular videos of people reacting to dragons replaced with Fluttershy, awkward weapons made from pony heads, and companion cartoon horses starring everyone from Trixie to Derpy. If you are bored, you can even polymorph yourself into a pony. Why not?
Launching right as the FiM fandom was at it's pinnacle helped fuel this odd little crossover, and to this day, we still see random occurrences of Dhovashy fluttering around the art side of the fandom.
League of Legends and Dota 2
One thing is for sure here in the world of internet fandoms, we love our video games! What happens when you make one community based, and completely free? Tons of publicity! League of Legends was ponified constantly early on, with an entire drawfriend dedicated to it early in EQD's existence. Hell, even I drew one for the Artist Training Ground a few years ago.
The team over at Riot played host to a number of references over the years, including Hecarim's voice clips. There were even rumors of the two sisterly champions, Diana and Leona, being inspired by Celestia and Luna.
Later on down the line, Dota 2 released, and while it was much more unforgiving and less "brony" in a way, it still fostered a pretty large pony following thanks to things like "My Little Dota 2" and the animated character portraits downloadable for the game.
While MOBA crossovers seem to be on the decline, there is no doubt that we definitely ponified the hell out of it when it was new.
Pokemon
Pokemon played on a lot of the things that got people into ponies in the first place, via cute characters with appealing color combinations, giant anime eyes, and an interesting world. Add that to the fact that most of us were into Pokemon as kids, and it was pretty inevitable that it would gain a My Little Pony crossover following.
Whether you liked the concept of catching ponies, or being one and collecting pokemon, both had their own little subsets of popularity throughout the years. Unfortunately, we never did get a fully fledged ponified game. Countless projects started and eventually died. Maybe some day someone will go back and complete one? I'd play it.
Team Fortress 2
Yet another free-to-play, heavily moddable game sparked even more rampant ponfication. Team Fortress 2 has had boadloads of brony servers over the years, thousands of mods, entire cloned sections of Equestria in the form of maps, and more. I'm sure I'm not the only one that ran the pony interface. While we never got a proper equine sized character mod that didn't invoke potential nightmares, pretty much everything else was dominated by them in some way shape or form.
Will Blizzard enable modding for Overwatch and spawn the same thing? I doubt it. But if you ever find yourself bored and in the mood for some oldschool team based shooting, Team Fortress is still the ultimate ponified playground.
Zelda
The Legend of Zelda is something many of us cherish in our early gaming memories, and considering how huge the brony video game community is, it's no surprise that ponies would be well loved crossing over with Link and his buddies in Hyrule. Artists everywhere combo'd the two fandoms, with Twilight Sparkle being ridden into battle by link, or Epona getting the Friendship is Magic model treatment.
Probably one of the biggest occurrences was the Legend of Derpy; a complete model replacement for A Link to the Past. Quite a few lets plays happened to celebrate it, and many other games joined in on the sprite-replacement scene.
Now go hug your Epony body pillow. You deserve it.
Doctor Who
A simple background pony with an hourglass cutie mark and spiky hair spawned an absolute deluge of Doctor Who crossovers. There was a point in time where we had to stop taking them on the fanfiction side, just due to how many new ones came in every day. Quite a few bronies actually picked up on his time traveling shenanigans thanks to the pony fandom, including myself.
The concept of "companions" in the Who universe was one of the big contributing factors to it's cross-overy success. Whether you subscribed to Twilight sciencing it up in the Tardis, or Derpy accidentally crashing it, ponies found a wonderful place beside The Doctor in all of his space-time bending travels.
Final Fantasy
Pick a number between one and fourteen. That's how many major Final Fantasy titles there have been, and chances are the one you grabbed has been ponified. Final fantasy typically involves a cast of major characters traveling across the world stopping some evil baddie, and replacing said characters with cartoon horses is beyond easy. We've got the cast and villains. Might as well put 2 and 2 together.
We've seen countless images, fanfics, animations, and videos of this concept over the years, but one in particular kinda dominated everything. From the ground up, Final Fantasy 6 was completely ponified, with Discord replacing Kefka and Twilight starring in Terra's role. Not many of these major game mods actually see completion, but one brave pony fan actually managed to do it.
Other Modern Day Cartoons
There has been a recent rise in cartoon quality these last few years. We went through a relatively nasty dark patch in the mid to late 2000's, but companies are once again seeing the value in providing deep entertainment that both kids and adults can enjoy. Animation has always been big on crossing over, from the Simpsons invading Family Guy, to super heroes wandering into eachothers universes. The ease of ponification has made cartoon equines the norm.
Whether it's Rick and Morty stumbling on Equestria, or Mabel from Gravity Falls teaming up with Pinkie Pie, ponies have been in just about all of them thanks to our never-ending fan art side.
I'd seriously pay all the money for this.
Star Wars
Lightsabers make everything better. You can't deny this. If you do, you are wrong. Now add ponies to that! Some would scoff and say this concept is ridiculous. Others would brush it off as "brony nonsense". The brave few though, the ones willing dive into pony oblivion like the rest of us, will google it and find images like the one above.
Ponies were made for saber wielding, cloak wearing, force powering awesome. If you don't want to go as dark as our next topic, but still want a bit of manlyness and war in your equine loving brain*, look no further than ponified Star Wars.
And with the new movie dropping around the world this week, I for one expect even more!
(*though, dat season finale. I guess we've gone all the way in canon now haven't we?)
Fallout
How can we do a post about crossovers without addressing the elephant in the room? Fallout Equestria began way back when Friendship is Magic was brand new, providing a stark contrast to our otherwise happy-go-lucky hooved citizens. A humongous subset of the fandom wanted things dark, and there is nothing gloomier than a post apocalyptic wasteland.
I'd almost consider the Fallout fandom to be it's own entity at this point. The amount of fanfics created, animation projects drawn up, radio plays broadcasted, and SFM videos molded starring some of the big names in FoE is staggering.
If you managed to make it through all 620,295 words of the original fic, or if you are just a fan of Little Pip's many less-wordy ideas like me, fear not at any lack of content. She, and her wasteland buddies, continue to be celebrated to this day.
Honorable Mention: Undertale
We haven't really seen how far this one is going to go yet. Undertale is still relatively new, and exploding at the same rate Pony did a while back. How long that will last without the concept of "OC ponies" and extra episodes fueling it is a mystery, but the pony fandom seems to love it. Quite a bit of Undertale based crossing over has happened since it's release. Will we ever see the game completely ponfied? Fingers crossed!
Honorable Mention: Trixie
Trixie is her own entity. One does not cross Trixie over into things. Things cross over into Trixie.
Woops I forgot: Super Heroes
I had this on the original list, but for some reason completely forgot about it. For the sake of not getting completely clubbed to death in the comments, have it! Ponies have been costumed up in all of the major DC and Marvel properties, along with some of the more obscure offshoots. With Power Ponies making the concept canon, and the rise in theatrical releases, I can't imagine this ever slowing down in the near future.
Feel free to toss any we missed in the comments. I'm getting TACOS!
