Clop (erotic fan art)

Clop (also referred to as pony porn^[1][2]) is erotic and pornographic fan art, fan fiction, fan films, fan games, and other fan labor based on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, and subsequent generations of the My Little Pony franchise. The term clop derives from the onomatopoeia for a hoofbeat and is a pun on fap, an Internet slang term for masturbation. Related terms include clopfic—a portmanteau of clop and fanfic, for erotic My Little Pony fan fiction—and clopping for the act of masturbating to clop.

The brony fandom (the adult fandom of Friendship Is Magic that emerged on the Internet in the early 2010s) gave rise to clop alongside its other forms of fan labor. Variously described as a subset of the brony and furry fandoms, clop has grown into one of the largest bodies of erotic fan content associated with any single media franchise. It spans visual art distributed on imageboards, fan fiction published on Fimfiction, fan games, and content generated with artificial intelligence tools. Characters from Friendship Is Magic are among the most frequently tagged on the furry imageboard e621, and the My Little Pony imageboard Derpibooru hosts hundreds of thousands of explicit images.

A source of controversy both within and outside the My Little Pony fandom, clop has been criticized by bronies and journalists alike for sexualizing children's media. Fans of clop have argued that their interest is directed at fictional characters perceived as sapient beings with human-like qualities, rather than at real animals. In 2013, internal fandom surveys suggested that only a minority of bronies have engaged in clopping; however, surveys in recent years have found that consumption of clop has become more widespread and accepted, with a majority of respondents in recent polls reporting that they consider explicit pony content to be a valid form of self-expression.

Clop has received substantial scholarly attention across sociology, folklore, gender studies, queer studies, and fan studies. Researchers have examined how the production and consumption of erotic fan content intersects with the gender politics and hegemonic masculinity of a largely male fandom engaging with media originally created for young girls. Academics have variously interpreted clop as a form of queer transgression, a reinforcement of traditional gender hierarchies, or an eroticization of cuteness in a manner comparable to moe in otaku culture.

Clop is both an onomatopoeia and a pun or wordplay on fap, itself an onomatopoeic Internet slang term for masturbation.^[3] The word is part of bronyspeak, the distinctive vernacular language of the brony fandom, which built upon the show's own practice of recasting human phrases in equine terms (such as everypony for everybody).^[4][5] Due to the fandom's origins on the anonymous imageboard 4chan, bronyspeak expanded into increasingly transgressive territory, incorporating vulgar and sexual terminology alongside the show's family-friendly vocabulary. Folklorist Bill Ellis, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, observed that the anonymous nature of Internet communication encouraged aggressive linguistic play, which facilitated the creation of terms like clopping.^[5]

The term has produced several derivatives within the brony fandom. Clopfic, a portmanteau of clop and fanfic, refers to erotic My Little Pony fan fiction. Clopper denotes a person who consumes or produces clop, and clopping is used as a gerund to describe the act of masturbating to clop.^[6][7] Furthermore, clop has been compared to yiff, the furry fandom's analogous term for erotic fan content, which similarly originated as an onomatopoeia for an animal sound.^[8]

Erotic slash fiction involving characters from Star Trek circulated among fans as early as the 1970s, and erotic mini-comics known as Tijuana bibles depicted famous media icons in sexual contexts as far back as the 1920s. The advent of the Internet made the distribution of erotic fan works far easier and more anonymous, increasing both the quantity of material produced and the likelihood that non-fans would encounter it accidentally.^[2] By the 2000s, Rule 34, an adage which states that pornographic content will inevitably be created for any popular media, had become a well-established Internet meme.^[9]

Following the premiere of Friendship Is Magic in October 2010, erotic fan works based on the show began appearing on the Internet as an application of Rule 34.^[10] The show's adult fanbase originally began on 4chan's /co/ board, and by early 2011, the prevalence of pony content had generated considerable conflict within the 4chan community, with many users expressing frustration over the high volume of Friendship Is Magic content appearing across the site.^[11] On February 26, 2011, 4chan implemented a total ban on pony-related content, which resulted in immediate bans for users who posted such material,^[12] leading bronies to create dedicated websites to host brony-related content.^[13][14]

As the fandom rapidly expanded beyond 4chan, dedicated platforms developed different approaches to managing erotic content. Derpibooru, the largest and most popular My Little Pony imageboard, adopted a four-tier classification system (safe, suggestive, questionable, and explicit) and became the most permissive of the major fan sites; erotic content consistently ranked among the most popular material on the site by user ratings. Fimfiction, the largest repository of My Little Pony fan fiction, permitted written erotica of virtually any kind but banned erotic visual art entirely. DeviantArt officially prohibited pornographic images but enforced this inconsistently, and artists developed various workarounds to share erotic content on the site.^[15][16] Clop also has a significant presence on the furry pornography imageboard e621, where Twilight Sparkle has been the most frequently tagged character on the entire site since 2012.^[17]

The volume of clop on the Internet grew rapidly throughout the 2010s and 2020s. On rule34.paheal.net, the number of sexually explicit images tagged My Little Pony rose from approximately 53,000 in 2013 to 65,000 in 2015 and over 95,000 by 2017. On e621, images tagged My Little Pony nearly doubled in two years, from approximately 82,000 in 2015 to over 147,000 in 2017.^[6][18] As of March 2026^[update], Derpibooru hosts over 530,000 images tagged as explicit,^{[‡ 2]} and Twilight Sparkle has over 40,000 tagged images on e621 as the most tagged character on the site, followed by Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash as the third and sixth most tagged characters.^{[‡ 1]}

As a result of the massive prevalence of clop on the Internet, critics (both bronies and non-bronies) raised concerns that children searching for My Little Pony characters on mainstream search engines could inadvertently encounter explicit material.^[19][9][2] According to surveys of the brony fandom, very few bronies favored either leaving explicit content entirely unregulated or censoring it outright; approximately 40 percent agreed that some measures should be taken to protect children, and the most popular proposals involved tagging systems, content warnings, and safe-search options on fan sites. In 2014, the Tumblr blog "Bronies Against Bullshit" launched the #SafeSearchWrapUp campaign, which organized bronies to systematically flag explicit My Little Pony content on Google and other search engines to prevent children searching for the show's characters from encountering pornographic material. The campaign subsequently expanded to cover other fandoms with young audiences, including Avatar: The Last Airbender and Steven Universe.^[9]

The Adobe Flash point-and-click adventure game Banned from Equestria (Daily) by Pokehidden became one of the most widely cited examples of erotic My Little Pony fan games. On Fimfiction, the Clopfics group became the largest community on the site, and specialized subgroups emerged for specific genres of clopfics.^[15] Since the AI boom of the 2020s, generative artificial intelligence tools have been adopted for the production of clop, most notably the use of 15.ai for AI voice acting in explicit fan videos.^[20][21]

An internal survey conducted by the brony community in 2013 found that 19.05% of respondents reported having engaged in clopping, though the actual figure was believed to be higher given the social stigma attached to the practice at the time. Thomas Raethel of Critic Te Ārohi wrote that early supporters of clop in the brony fandom's inception included converts from the furry fandom, who brought with them existing traditions of erotic anthropomorphic fan art and channelled them into My Little Pony content.^[22] In 2015, Mikko Hautakangas wrote in the Journal of Popular Television that most Finnish bronies adopted an "accepting but marginalizing" stance toward clop, in that they acknowledged its existence while regarding it as not representative of the fandom as a whole.^[1]

In 2019, large-scale surveys of the brony fandom found that roughly one-third of bronies almost never consumed clop, one-third did so occasionally, and one-third did so frequently. About 5% of bronies also created explicit content. Most first exposure to clop was incidental rather than deliberate. Fifty-six percent of bronies said they preferred non-pornographic over pornographic fan art, and 32% had no strong preference. Female fans were significantly more likely to prefer non-explicit content and were nearly four times more likely to report not consuming pornography at all. About 13% of bronies held strongly negative views about clop, less than 20% wished to see clop limited or banned, and the majority regarded it as a valid form of self-expression even among those who did not personally consume it. The overwhelming majority of bronies reported that pornography had not been a factor in drawing them to the fandom. When surveyed about what the community should do, few bronies favored either a complete free-for-all or outright censorship; the most popular responses involved tagging systems and safe-search options to protect younger fans from inadvertent exposure.^[9] In 2022, MEL reported that male bronies who enjoyed clop represented "not a tiny minority," referencing a Twitter poll in which nearly half of brony respondents reported interest in clop.^[23] In a 2024 online poll on Equestria Daily, approximately 59% of surveyed bronies answered that they enjoy explicit pony content.^[24]

Advocates of clopping consistently distinguish it from zoophilia or bestiality, as the ponies in Friendship Is Magic are depicted as sapient beings with human-like personalities, emotions, and social lives.^[5] The Harkness Test, a set of criteria determining whether it is ethical to have sexual relations with a non-human character, gained popularity in the early 2010s due to its application by the brony fandom.^[25] Some advocates of clop claim that their attraction is directed at the characters' humanized traits and that the pony form is something they look past rather than seek out.^[18] Many bronies have confirmed that they have no interest in real horses, with some expressing active dislike of actual equines while maintaining strong attachment to the show's ponies.^[5]

A 2015 survey by Pornhub reported that most viewers of My Little Pony-themed pornographic content on Pornhub were millennials between 18 and 24 years old, and that men were 37 percent more likely to search for such material than women. Rainbow Dash was the most popular character, followed by Rarity and Pinkie Pie. Geographically, consumption was highest in Eastern Europe, with Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and Puerto Rico as the top five markets.^[26]

Gianna DeCarlo of The Baltimore Sun condemned clop as an "unstoppable force of sexual deviancy" from which "not even a simple Google search is safe."^[19] E.J. Dickson of The Daily Dot wrote that clop enthusiasts were "black sheep in the community" of bronies, most of whom feared that cloppers would give the fandom a bad name.^[27] Katie Notopoulos of BuzzFeed News wrote that clop "begat a myriad of horrifying subgenres".^[3]

According to Claire Burdfield in Journal of Popular Television, the reason that the brony fandom attracted a disproportionate amount of public and media scrutiny (despite erotic fan content being present in earlier fandoms) was because of the public nature of the Internet—including the visibility and popularity of clop—to the general public.^[2]

The brony fandom has been described as an American manifestation of Japanese moe (a phenomenon in otaku culture involving the romanticization or eroticization of cute fictional characters). Fans have noted that the ponies in Friendship Is Magic possess pastel colors, large reflective eyes, and juvenile proportions—visual traits commonly associated with moe and the kawaii aesthetic. Clop art tends to preserve and eroticize the ponies' cuteness regardless of its style, ranging from faithful reproductions of the show's style to fully humanized anime-style depictions. Works commonly feature expressions of sexual naivety, flushed faces, and coy dialogue juxtaposed with explicit content. The degree of anthropomorphism in clop varies greatly; in some fan art, ponies are given human genitalia, more human-like proportions, or fully humanized forms, while only retaining distinguishing features like mane style and cutie marks.^[6]

According to Ellis, bronies "poach" elements from the show and repurpose them in consciously transgressive ways that challenge prevailing attitudes toward gender and sexual orientation, framing clop as a form of queer gender expression.^[5] An ethnographic study of /mlp/ (the My Little Pony board of 4chan) published in Sexualities found that users of /mlp/ tended to construct a collective identity around clop and their sexual desires they themselves recognized as deviant, embracing their otherness as a basis for solidarity rather than contesting the stigma attached to it.^[28]

In 2012, Autostraddle reported that the fandom's tolerance of erotic My Little Pony slash fiction was unevenly distributed: lesbian shipping and erotica (yuri) were widely embraced by the predominantly male fanbase, while male homosexual fan fiction was routinely downvoted.^[29] According to Sexualities, the routine sexualization of the Mane Six in clop (where their individual Elements of Harmony are often subordinated to their role as objects of sexual desire) allows male fans to assert a masculine presence in a space perceived as feminine and serves as an opportunity for homosocial bonding among men.^[28]

• Cartoon pornography – Cartoon characters in sexual situations
• Rule 34 – Internet slang regarding pornography
• Yiff – Slang term used in the furry fandom

In the text, these references are preceded by a double dagger (‡):