Trends

I've been noticing recently that bronies in Australia are rather underrated. I don't look at all of the nightly roundups on Equestria Daily, but I've never seen an Australian meetup in one in my past year and a half of being a brony.

I have interacted with other bronies, such as when I went to Supanova last year, a male brony wearing a Big Mac shirt overheard me talking with my friends about ponies, and told us that there would be some pony stuff there, as in the conversation we had mentioned how it would be our first convention and were wondering what sort of stuff would be there. And also, me and a friend met some other female bronies at a Target and between the four of us we were able to scan through the Wave 7 blind bags quickly and efficiently, taking the ones we wanted and leaving the others.

There was a PonyCon in Sydney this year, of course with my luck it wasn't in my state and I was also in the Japan at the time of its happening.

But never have I heard of an official meetup of Australian bronies. Not even in another state. And you may wonder why I decided to make this a topic of my discussion. Find out after the break!

The main reason I brought this subject up, about Australian bronies and how I believe we are rather underrated is because I feel it affects the different merch, official and unofficial, that appears in my country. I go to conventions, and see some pony stuff, and whole stalls of pony stuff, and that's all fine and well. And surprisingly, we get the comic books. Not only that, but at the same time. We seem to get many of the toys a far while later than the US (around 2-4 months, depending) in Australia. And I'm very unsure of when, and how much, if any of the new Pinkie Pie's Boutique line will hit the Australian shelves. This is mainly because we didn't get the Fan Favourites Collection Featuring Nightmare Moon pack, and many older lines, such as the Royal Wedding line's distribution was varied between the different retail chains. For example, I found the non-Mane 6 singles from that line at Coles, which is a supermarket, and Kmart. Only the Mane 6 were available at Target and Big W and Toys R Us. Also, the Pony Scooter pack, either with or without the bonus Skywishes was available at Kmart. Nowhere else. It may have just been my local stores. In fact, my local Big W still hasn't picked up on the singles from the Crystal Empire line and has absolutely nothing from the Crystal Princess Celebration line (the latter of which is only currently available at my local Kmart (and only just became available there anyway), once again), and is still selling Mane 6 singles from the Royal Wedding line.

The main reason I talked about the varied distribution of the figures is because we completely missed out on a pack. It's not that I didn't go to the closest Toys R Us (which is almost an hour's drive, by the way), or check the Australian website. I am led to believe that it is because Australian bronies and collectors of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic line are significantly underrated. I'm not entirely sure about countries other than the US and whether they got the Fan Favourites Collection Featuring Nightmare Moon pack or whether it was a US exclusive. But now, I'm waiting for Australia to miss the second set with Chrysalis so that I can pay extra money for the US Toys R Us to send them together internationally to me.

This post may seem like a post full of complaining, but it's a post full of opinions, and the stupidity of the stores I have to go to in order to build my collection of ponies. Unless a continuous and concious effort to promote the bronies and MLP collectors in Australia, by the bronies and MLP collectors of Australia, Hasbro won't notice us. And we won't get the special Collector's line if we aren't noticed. This isn't a job that can be done by one, two or three of us. It has to be done by all of us.

~WotaYagi