When the season is away, the OC ponies will play. That has stayed true for the past 5 years, and especially as the fandom gets older. You can only draw Twilight Sparkle so many times before you need to branch off and find something new. Luckily cartoon horses make it incredibly easy with how standardized their design is. Hooves are simple to draw, and their body shape can be molded into quite a few different styles to differentiate from fellow artists.
From that simple pony body, accessories and extreme modifications become a big focus for a lot of artists. Some do crossovers from other major things, ponifying everything from Iron Man to Donald Trump. Others go down their own path. A path so wild, it will have you wondering if people have completely lost their minds.
Below the break, we dive into pony tails, and the growing side fandom of the Tailmouth!
Modifying Pony Tails in General
Lets start this off with just tail modification as a whole. It's something we have done a lot of over the year. This in particular is a lot less surprising than what we have come up with over the course of the fandom.
Usually a pony tail is covered in hair right from the dock at the base. Ancient texts and imagery of unicorns in some regions of the world showed a different story though. Popularized by The Last Unicorn, the tail is greatly extended, with the tuft of hair at the end.
We've seen this design picked up quite a bit over the years in MLP, probably because it turns out that the FiM model looks really cool with one, as Vinyl Scratch up above demonstrates. I've posted a lot of these over the years, and most people seem fine with the idea.
I figured I'd go over a few more before we hit that main course in the last category. I wouldn't even consider these first two to be weird at all. Above, we have the concept of an aquatic pony. They tend to replace the hairy tail with a shark or dolphin style fin. This has always been a relatively common topic thanks to the Sea Pony idea from the 80's. I wonder if we will ever see them in generation 4?
Now we are breaking into the weird, with the food ponies. We've seen donut tails, chocolate tails, spaghetti tails, and even... a bread tail? When it comes to ponifying things, this is pretty much the pinnacle of crazy. Pizza Pony up there was one of the first, and also one of the weirdest. It doesn't hold a candle to what this entire post was made for to begin with though!
Ponies With Mouths for Tails?!
Introducing the Tailmouth. Before you freak out thinking this is some weird fetish fuel thing, It's really not. Apparently the origins of this idea actually date back to the Furry Fandom, from someone with the actual name Tailmouth. The concept was pretty simple, with anthropomorphic animal characters sporting giant mouths for tails.
Very few pony artists ever mention the history though. For all we know, it could be it's own, self-contained pony evolution. Considering how creative we tend to be, that wouldn't be surprising.
Pony fandom tailmouth is, like all things cartoon horse, incredibly varied. The pony up above for example, is apparently based on Japanese beliefs with the prayer rope and spell tags according to her description. Her tail is it's own entity.
A good amount of the Tailmouths tend to have a personality completely separate from the actual pony, with some being evil, others simply mischievous. They do all trend toward looking slightly monstrous though, with giant fangs or odd colored tongues.
Where these ponies really seem to shine is the adoptables community. If you have no idea what that is, it's essentially a system on Deviant Art where people sell extravagantly decorated OC ponies for people to use as their own characters via auction. These guys can go for some pretty big prices. The pony above for example, sold for a whopping 5000 Deviant Art points (over $50).
While many may consider their designs to be a bit overboard compared to our much more muted canon characters, there is no denying that a massive community over on Deviant Art is more than happy to accept a speckled black and white pony with skull paint, pink bat wings, and a giant dragon head for a tail as perfectly fine.
And why stop the fun? Four years ago I would have been laughing in IRC/skype chat rooms about how ridiculous all of this is, but after deluging myself in every kind of pony imaginable for so long, I am starting to see the appeal. The Tailmouth, or any other wild original horse idea can be a bit strange at first, but if you dig into it and open your mind, the concept is kinda neat. I don't know if I'd ever want to see them in the show, but the art is definitely fun to look at after years of the very vanilla mane 6.
Though it is kinda scary that googling "[your name] the pony" will come back with even more results than "[your name] the hedgehog" used to do. Thanks pony creator. TRY IT AND BE AMAZED
Regardless of odd googlings, embrace the weirdness I say! My Little Pony wouldn't be anywhere near the cultural phenomenon it is without an armada of geeks that threw social norms out the window to give cute cartoon horses with squeaky voices and vibrant colors a shot.
If you have any other recommendations for weird pony trends, send an email to Sethisto@gmail.com, or tweet me. I'd love to keep this going as a series.
