Clop (also referred to as My Little Pony pornography, or pony porn for short) 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 works. 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, and other fan content, including those generated using 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 outsiders alike for sexualizing children's media; in response, bronies have taken measures to tag such works as explicit on search engines and fan sites. Fans of clop consistently distinguish it from zoophilia, as their interest is directed at fictional characters perceived as sapient beings with human-like qualities, rather than at real animals. Though internal fandom surveys in 2013 suggested that only a minority of bronies have engaged in clopping, 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 sexology, folklore, gender studies, queer studies, and fan studies. Academics have variously interpreted clop as a form of queer transgression, an indication of the rising popularity and legitimization of fictosexuality among Western audiences, a reinforcement of traditional gender hierarchies, and an eroticization of cuteness in a manner comparable to moe in otaku culture.

Etymology and terminology

Clop is both an onomatopoeia and a pun or wordplay on fap, itself an onomatopoeic Internet slang term for masturbation. 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). 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. 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.

The term has given rise to 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.

History

Background

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. 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.

Origins 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. 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. On February 26, 2011, 4chan implemented a total ban on pony-related content, which resulted in immediate bans for users who posted such material, leading bronies to create dedicated websites to host brony-related content.

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. 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.

Growth

The volume of clop on the Internet grew rapidly throughout the 2010s and 2020s. On the cartoon pornography website 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. On Fimfiction, the Clopfics group became the largest community on the site, and specialized subgroups emerged for specific genres of clopfics. , Derpibooru hosts over 540,000 images tagged as explicit, rule34.paheal.net hosts over 169,000 images tagged with My Little Pony, and Fimfiction hosts over 35,000 published works of fan fiction tagged as mature. 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, respectively.

On :/mlp/, the dedicated My Little Pony board on 4chan that was established after the initial ban on pony-related content was reversed, users embraced clop as a central element of their collective identity from early in the board's existence. Users of /mlp/ tended to distinguish themselves sharply from mainstream bronies, instead commonly self-identifying as the tongue-in-cheek labels horsefuckers and ponyfag and constructed a communal identity around their sexual attraction to the show's characters, treating participation in clop as a normative expectation of board membership. Users who discussed real-life romantic relationships were dismissed as "normalfags" and told to leave the board, while erotic and romantic fiction about ponies formed a regular fixture of the board's discussion threads.

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.

Community response 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. 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.

Other works 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. Since the AI boom of the 2020s, generative AI tools have been adopted for the production of clop, most notably the use of 15.ai for AI voice acting in explicit fan videos.

Reception

Prevalence within the brony fandom 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. 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. That same year, The Guardian reported that the :/mlp/ brony community generally saw not clopping as a form of heresy, and viewed having sex with a real person negatively.