 |
| Favorite poni banner with art provided by EmpressTwilight |
So... retiring from EQD! Not yet, but eventually this year!
I promised a followup and figured I'd get it up sooner rather than later since there is a lot of speculation and freaking out going on. I've had multiple people come to me wanting to take over, along with several offers to keep hosting everything and an army of people saying this site is a pillar of their daily internet routine. I admit, part of me feels really bad about disrupting that, but 15 years is a long time to do one thing, especially a thing that is daily no matter what! I have a very... unique personality that can handle this sort of thing, but even I have limits. The bed calls, and I will go to it finally.
So lets get this going! Head below for a bit of word salad about what this all means, along with more personality out of me than you've all seen in the last decade.
When I turned 20 I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to start some kind of website. It took me 3 whole years to finally find a niche I actually fit into. I did everything from a weird "self improvement" site with a friend of mine (before it was that cringy scam thing we see these days), to an art archive that died immediately, to a movie review blog. The pony site of all things eventually stuck.
Lucky for me, I really loved these ponies. For whatever reason, their overall art style really drew me in. If you knew me before pony, you'd know that I tend to latch on to specific character designs, and these were basically the pinnacle of that.
This also leads to my very specific personality quark of needing to BOMBARD the internet with stuff I like. It's completely out of my control. You will either embrace my favorite thing or finally just block me. Imagine my surprise when I could turn that nonsense into an actual job!
 |
| Source |
Unfortunately, I can be picky too. Just because it is pony doesn't mean I'll love it. It's one thing that drove most people nuts in the creative side of the fandom. I've got my biases, as most people do, and I've tried my absolute best to avoid showing the dislike side. It's going to happen though even subconsciously with such a massive scale of time. Luckily we had lots of people behind the scenes over the years for various sections of the site to help temper that.
This made stuff like Equestria Girls and G5... particularly challenging. Up front here in the spotlight I needed to accept and embrace humanizing the ponies. I didn't want to ruin it for people that loved it. Behind the scenes though, it was the most "job" this job ever was.
Equestria Girls was a tough pill for me to swallow. Before its announcement, there was a time when I was working closely with a Hasbro licensee who was actively pitching a new series starring some of our fan favorites like Lyra, Derpy, and Luna, complete with piles of concept art from actual artists I loved in the fandom. EG ended up winning though. There was no budget for another, and it, frankly, just made business sense. Hasbro needed dolls to compete with Monster High, and what better IP than their biggest, viral hit of G4 MLP? Needless to say, humanized ponies didn't do it for me at all. I honestly only watched up to Rainbow Rocks for the Trixie villain song. Outside of that I slapped up what came in and buried myself in regular pony when I could.
G5 was a similar experience. After a decade of surrounding myself in all of these amazing 2D art styles, Tell Your Tale just... wasn't it for me. I enjoyed the A New Generation movie despite not being completely on board with the smaller eyes and pillowy snouts they have, but that bean mouth style really isn't something I wsa thrilled about at all. Which is funny since it worked for Gravity falls (another show you should watch that was really good), but NOT my ponies! Not with so many insanely good style variants we have in the fandom. Follow that up with OpenPony hitting every possible "I love this!" point on the 3D front, and G5 in my brain was effectively backburnered.
In the end, I had no problem with Alicorn Twilight, loved me some Glimmy, and generally really enjoyed G4 pony all the way to the end, but goddamn was it a chore for me to act excited about Equestria Girls and eventually G5. I was still super fired up back in the EG days, but it was the start of the cracks forming for sure. G4's ending broke the shell, and G5 was just me trying to collect the pieces.
Truth be told, OpenPony kept me going over the past few years. I was all ready to call it quits around 2023-2024. There was a month or two in there where I felt like I had truly "beaten" this internet game. I did what I could, helped spark a fandom, helped keep it fueled for over a decade, and was allowed to finally rest. But OpenPony dragged me back in with love for those adorable models via one final hurrah.
 |
| This ain't it... |
 |
| There we go~ |
It's funny how everyone's tastes are different though. A lot of people prefer G5 models to OpenPony models, but they hit whatever part of my lizard brain triggers dopamine just as well as G4 did.
Anyway, that's sort of a testament to the creative side of the fandom always kept me rolling. G5 included. You all took a style I didn't love and made them adorable. Our regular drawfriend post here on the site has always been a joy to do. This bled over into Twitter where my compulsive need to BOMBARD EVERYONE WITH MY FAVORITE THINGS was completely unleashed. I love spamming my favorite pieces there.
In fact, one of my daily rituals is revisiting old places in the fandom, from old Drawfriends to Deviant Art and Derpibooru, slowly making my way through pages of ancient pony art. I've been building an archive of my absolute favs that was originally created so I'd stop posting duplicates on Twitter (which I've found impossible now at this size). Now it's just my ultimate collection. I'm currently digging into comics and animations, and sharing them too of course. Maybe I'll release it all some day!
All in all though, this side of the fandom has been my absolute favorite part of it. I've spent way too much on canvas prints from some of my favorite artists. Hell, my living room is currently a showcase of EmpressTwilight and Magnaluna. That's probably not going anywhere anytime soon. When it comes to the ponies themselves, I'm not burnt out AT ALL. In fact it seems to be getting worse. Mare is... perfection. All mares. Not just official mares! Rescuing forgotten pony OC's on deviant art is something I'm weirdly passionate about. I remember when OC's weren't even posted here. We REALLY didn't want to be the sonic fandom back then! (Are we worse now?)
 |
| Source from ultimate Lunaposter |
15 years later and some say pony is dying, but I don't think that is true at all. In my perspective, blogs and news sites are just... dinosaurs. Social media has completely taken over the world for better or worse. I've spent a lot of time on my furry side with Instagram over the last few years, and pony over there makes even peak brony fandom look minor. Some of the most basic posts on the planet with a dude in a grainy camera talking about his favorite pony end up with millions of views. And this happens all day, every day, nonstop. These people have no idea EQD even exists. They never interact with any of our fandom staples. Occasionally they discover us and send some weird website for a fanfic submit, and we have to direct them over to Fimfiction. It's wild.
I don't think this is a bad thing. I mean, bad for me maybe from an "EQD can't compete with this shit" standpoint, but pony being spread everywhere with pocket communities celebrating it for completely different reasons isn't a terrible place for the fandom to be in 2026. They discover some of our old content and spread it around like wildfire over there. One of my old Youtube Popen videos was resposted and went viral a few months ago and suddenly we had a bunch of people making ponies. It's just different. Exciting in its own way.
One thing I've written warnings about extensively here is the rise of AI. I probably should have slapped this in the burnout section, but I've largely given up on it when it comes to certain categories here. Writing in particular seems impossible to stop. Delete the ChatGPT em-dashes and you can fool most casual viewers. Minorly tweak a few AI buzzwords and you fool almost everyone else. Having played text adventure AI since GPT-2, it blows my mind me how far this has come.
Then there's art, which is in this weird place where I know artists are absolutely using tools like generative fill for things. I can't tell them not to. It's just a basic tool in Photoshop now. Meanwhile, some submitters send sketch versions of their finalized work as "proof", and it ends up in this weird situation where we'd happily post their sketch... but they don't want that. They want the obviously AI colored final version submitted instead. In their pocket fandom, that workflow for creating art is fine. It turns into a debate and I delete the email and move on. Honestly guys? I don't have the fight in me for that anymore. It's like debating with a brick wall. Then I check their pages and they are growing faster than all of my new favorite real artists. It's kinda depressing. (in other news, go follow those real ones! Sallycars is using MSPaint which is just wild to me in 2026 and Nnaly's daily Luna gets me out of bed in the morning.)
 |
| Gemini creating freakishly real plushies from a screencap... |
Meanwhile, we are on the verge of music and video being completely indistinguishable now. Twitter released a new video generator and just... gave it to everyone. Suddenly we got a bunch of AI video submissions. 99% of them were awful and obvious, but a few edited after the fact by the submitter could have easily fooled me if I wasn't actively looking out for them at the time. I actually subscribed to X premium to test it and write another one of my AI warning PSA editorials about it, but I'm just... tired. It feels like a losing battle. After a day of playing with it, what am I supposed to say that everyone doesn't already know? We feel kinda doomed here. I mentioned pony videos going viral on Instagram. Guess what a fraction of those are now? And Grok is the cheap garbage model. The others are even more terrifying if you drop the money. Grok cost me a whopping 8 bucks and outside of an annoying blue checkmark doesn't require much pain at all to make pony videos if you edit out the awful audio it generates.
On the music front, you have Suno V5 fooling pretty much everyone. When people used to submit pony tracks with the older versions of Suno it was pretty obvious if the song was more than 30 seconds. They always had similar song structures and singers. V5 released and suddenly everything went out the window. Glitchy weird stuff that only the most indie of musicians make is coming into the box making me run around checking what all was uploaded there recently for similar examples. When I was writing up that Grok/X PSA I grabbed Suno too. It's just sad really how convincing it is becoming. The big problem is, AI voice artifacts, muffling, and other quirks are all less noticeable due to the fact that we've been listening to musicians warp their voices with autotune and other programs for decades. Music is already heavily computerized and edited, to the point where entire genres appear from fusing and breaking sound in ways that is supposed to be glitchy and weird. AI errors just sound like more of that if you are listening casually and not looking out for it.
 |
| Source - MRW another AI submission pretending to be real... |
Where will this all go? Will the internet end up broken with AI spam 24/7? I have no idea. Maybe content curation like here on EQD will be more valuable than ever. The powers that control the internet aren't going to funnel traffic to places like this though. They are all banking on AI. Google will happily summarize anything on here so you don't have click and can stay in their ecosystem. Sometimes it's fun being AI detective, and I actually enjoyed writing PSA articles warning everyone about new models and things coming out, but keeping the AI radar on is time consuming with how much content comes in. And as I've mentioned previously, I have a lot of other "jobs" going on at the moment to make up for where EQD lacks incomewise.
Personally though, I think creatives will always be valued. I'll be first in line when EmpressTwilight drops another YCH pose page, and most artists I know personally are still seeing just as much, if not more love since all of this began, even if their AI counterparts are growing freaklishly fast. Keep supporting the people that have brought you all of this joy over the years and we will get through this regardless of how many data centers jack up my power bill.
 |
| Source |
So... where do we go from here? I have no plans to just shut the site down. I don't even really have a timeline in place for when I will officially retire from it. I just know "some time this year when outside work becomes too much to keep doing this too". Right now I'm currently juggling a million things in both the real world and in my other fandoms, and since we are in a hiatus with very little coming in anyway, I'm not ready to set a deadline or anything. I've had a few people bring up interesting proposals, and that is super helpful right now since it's a very unique situation that really doesn't have a googlable solution. Keep 'em coming!
One thing is for sure. When I think about covering G6, I really just kinda dread it. Even if it's good! The greatest thing in pony history! A Luna series with kirin, bat ponies, Sweet Velvet, and all of my other favorite OC's in a Frieren style story with the greatest show writer on the planet, I still really just... need a break.
 |
| Source - draikjack |
I sometimes wonder if Lauren Faust regret leaving pony right before it took over the internet in 2011-2014. To see something you worked so hard on suddenly explode right as you moved on from it. In the end, she didn't need to be directly involved in it. She still got to enjoy these ravenous fans celebrating her cartoon horses anyway, and we all loved her for it. We will never forget the amazing group of ponies her genius mind conjured up for us, and that insanely appealing style she hooked us all with.
I'll feel the same way about EQD. The next person or people that take it over might get the ultimate pony cartoon to cover, but I can still enjoy it. I'll just be a fan instead. To watch and discuss it rather than have to report and compete with other people reporting on it. To compete with SOCIAL MEDIA reporting on it. Nope! I'm done. I hate competition. I always did. I do it when I have to, but I'm almost 40 and this is a silly horse cartoon on a website that made... $86 last month. Wow. Ain't no one got time for that. It's why when the G5 guys were wrecking us on G5 coverage, I just asked Overcast from over there to come report on it for us. The solution was friendship all along! Who would have thought? There was a time back in the mid 2010's where we were competing with an "actual business" as they put it, with them attempting to poach our writers and stop others from reporting on cons. It was around that time I realized how much I despised that stuff. The "Game of Pones" as we coined it. I wanted out back then, and I especially don't want to do it in 2026!
In the end, I just wanted to post poni, and I got to do that. And I'll keep doing that. Just not here, or maybe much less here. If anyone does take this over, I'll probably stick around for the occasional shilling of OpenPony or specific artists I love. Maybe a few articles a year on topics I'm interested in? I don't really know.
I have Twitter to ponypost on, but I'll probably cut that back a bit too once I really get going on whatever path I take next. I was going to slow way down or even stop at 50k followers there. Surely that was grandmaster level ponyposting already! But promoting artists like the ones I linked above, or OpenPony, or just shilling my favorite old comics and art is too much fun. I'm sure I'll be dragged away soon since I plan to do some very non-internet stuff in the future, but I can't deny it's a blast.
 |
| Artist - plunger |
Part of me just wants to take on a bunch of temp part-time jobs for fun. To meet people who aren't on the internet. My two non-computer hobbies in lifting and hiking are pretty anti-social after all. In both cases I always have my earbuds in listening to Dungeon Crawler Carl or whatever audiobook series I've stumbled on. Meanwhile all of my other "side gigs" are on the internet or facebook marketplace, which is just people sending pre-made "Is this still available?" and me hitting the "yes, are you interested?" button over and over. Or telling them where to shove it when they offer me 20 dollars for the thing I have listed for 150.
Luckily I've always put some of my income toward the S&P500 and a few safe dividend stocks since EQD doesn't have a 401k plan, and that gives me a good safety net. Assuming all of that doesn't crash. Did I ever mention that most of the S&P is being propped up by AI stocks right now? It's pretty freaky that if AI fails, the economy will probably crash. Meanwhile if AI succeeds, jobs will implode and the economy will... also probably crash? Can it do anything else if no one can buy anything because robots took their jobs? What a world we live in!
Anyway, back to positive. I want to say thanks to all of the awesome people that helped me out over the years! I'll probably do a longer version of that when I actually exit, but here is good too. To all of the prereaders, music reviewers, Discord moderators, submitters, editorial writers, and everyone else that kept this place chugging along and taking some of that crazy early fandom workload away from me, if you are still reading this site, thanks for all of that hard work! And to my various blogponies that went off to join the real world as they finished college in those early days, including Hypermark, Cereal Velocity, PK, Phoe, Algernon, ABagOVicodin, and User, hopefully you all found some badass careers! And the admins and writers that stuck it out all the way to the 2020's with Cobalt Comet, Calpain, WeAreBorg, Phoenixfire, Grimlock, Onyx Dash, Pascoite, Ferret, Confetti Cakez, Silver Quill, The Illustrious Q, Overcast, and everyone else, thanks for dealing with my very burnt out nonsense! And of course Gameleon for literally keeping this site alive whenever Blogger, Cloudflair, Google, or some other company decides to murder it. It hasn't always been easy but it was great having you all around!
Wow, this got long. If I didn't have such horrible typos I probably could have been a journalist, but I'm guessing that's not exactly a stable job these days is it? I think we will all survive this though. We are persistent, just like pony is. EQD hasn't been the primary pillar of the fandom for years, and you all are going to be just fine no matter where this site ends up. The pony will flow!
Now go consume some Drawfriend or check out a music post. It will be a while before I actually fully retire, and those creatives still need your eyeballs, comments, and commissions to keep on making stuff!
