Happy... whatever ponies have instead of Easter!

All right, this isn't the most thrilling post you'll ever see on Louder Yay. (Okay, none of my posts are thrilling, but bear with me.) But I really do hope that everyone reading this has a nice Easter, whether you celebrate it or not! My next post should be slightly (note that word) more interesting.

Review: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic issue 5

Does Pinkie really need magic to do that sort of thing?

Easter approaches, and we find ourselves on the precipice threshold brink of a new story arc in IDW's massively successful My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic. The creative team is of the "something old, something new" variety: Heather Nuhfer takes over writing duties and Amy Mebberson is now handling the artwork, but the colourist (Heather Breckel), letterererer (Neil Uyetake) and editor (Bobby Curnow) remain the same as they were in the last issue. Another £3.15 spent; follow me past the jump to see whether issue #5 is a winner!

BUCK it and see

This post is outdated. Please see this newer post for details of how BUCK ticket sales are now being processed.

Yes, you are going to have to put up with lots more puns like that one

Yes, that's right. I thought, "Oh, to Tartarus with it" and took the plunge. We've been told by one of the PR people that a schedule will hopefully be available in a few days' time, but with Easter coming up I felt it was time to make a decision. Of course, I could have waited for the second wave of tickets to appear... but let's face it: I really want to do this. I may end up hating it, but at least I'll be able to say that I gave it a go. Now all I have to do is to save up another £1 million to be able to afford actually to buy anything!

BUCKing the trend?

This is why dragons hoard all that gold

The road to BUCK 2013 has taken another step, with tickets now on sale from the official site. This is obviously a very welcome development, although reaction from bronies has been rather mixed. Part of the problem has been the way in which the start of ticket sales came very suddenly, in the middle of the night UK time, rather than anyone having said, "Right; tickets are going on sale at X o'clock on Y March", which would perhaps have been a rather better idea. After all, it was late April before they appeared last year.

The other big concern from a lot of people has been the cost of tickets. No-one needs to be told that economic times are hard right now, and it's fair to say that prices for the premium-level packages in particular have been much higher than many people had expected. Standard admission this year is £55, which compares reasonably well to the €69 you'd pay for a basic weekend pass at GalaCon. That said, because of the lack of an "Early-Pegasus" discount this year, it's effectively £20 — or 57% — more than in 2012 if you're on board from the start.

The really startling prices appear when you look at the premium packages. The "20% Cooler" ticket, for example, was £75 last year but is £135 this time around; that's not far off a doubling of the 2012 figure. For this, you get a priority queue to get in, an exclusive T-shirt and a buffet lunch with community guests. There are some big names there, such as The Living Tombstone and LaserPon3, but it's worth noting that "community guests" does not include any show staff BUCK may or may not have managed to attract to the con.

Is that worth an £80 premium over Standard admission? Frankly, I'm having trouble seeing how it can be, especially as you still have to pay another £35 if you want entry to both the "Summer Sun Celebration" on the Friday and the after-party at FAB. Even more eye-watering is the Celestia-tier ticket, which does include those things, as well as a mysterious "VIP dinner" on Friday. I'd guess that one might include some official show guests... but at £250 a pop, very few of us are going to be finding out!

It's not really fair to compare BUCK to BronyCon, which benefits from lower American costs and from an attendance figure in the thousands. Instead, look at ConFuzzled, the UK's most important furry convention. A standard non-residential ticket to go there is £80, though the con lasts for more days than BUCK. However, the top "Sponsor" level of ticket is only another £50, and for your £130 you get considerably more freebies than "20% Cooler" customers will — and you don't have another layer on top of you.

"So, what are you going to do, Logan?" I hear my three readers ask plaintively. The answer is that I don't really know. I like the idea of going to BUCK, since I'd like to meet some new bronies but the only nearby meetup group (Birmingham's) is really not my cup of tea. And although there's the smaller, simpler and cheaper UK PonyCon this autumn, its venue has not been announced yet. So I may well still go. All I can really say at this point is that I wish more than ever that I'd been to BUCK last year!

Review: Snowdrop fan-made episode (Silly Filly Studios)

We've all been waiting eagerly for Double Rainboom for a very long time now, but delays to that project mean that the title of "first fan-made episode" of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (well, apart from Dusk's Dawn) should probably now go to something else. That something is Snowdrop, a 14-minute film by Silly Filly Studios — directed by Meredith Sims and Marshal "Zedrin" Watson — that you can watch by clicking the preview above. Follow me past the jump to see (with spoilers!) what I thought about it.

Review: MLP:FiM Micro-Series issue #2: Rainbow Dash

It's a sonic rainboom! How not cool could it possibly not be?!

After the launch issue of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Micro-Series left me a little underwhelmed, I was hoping that issue #2 (written by Ryan Lindsay and drawn by Tony Fleecs) could provide something a bit meatier. The fact that it stars Rainbow Dash gave cause for both optimism and anxiety: she's a very strong character, but also one who can easily be mishandled. I bought via Comixology again, though I have a paper copy (with Amy Mebberson's cover, as above) on order. I should mention that their customer service in sorting out a hiccup with my order was exemplary. But was my £2.73 worth it? You'll find out after the jump...

State of the Herd 2013 — how many British bronies are there?

The 2013 State of the Herd Report is now available to download, and as usual the "herd census" throws up some interesting results. (AJ fans, look away now.) However, I do have to take issue with the report on one thing: what might be called the brony count. The conclusion drawn is that between 7 million and 12.4 million USians "strongly identify" as bronies, using the criteria set out in that link. That figure does seem remarkable, but I'm not American so can't really say from experience whether it feels right.

However, here's why I find that figure somewhat hard to accept. Elsewhere in the report, there's a "country of residence" section, which states that 64.3% of respondents said they lived in the US and 6.1% in the UK. In other words, there are nearly a tenth as many bronies here as there are there. Applying that to the figures I mentioned in the previous paragraph, that would suggest that the British brony count is somewhere between 664,000 and 1,174,000 bronies over here.

I don't know anyone over here who thinks that there are anything close to a million "strongly identifying" bronies in Britain. While it's true that I haven't conducted a survey of my own, one thing is certainly true: many people here have never come across another brony in public, other than at arranged meets. Ever. I know I haven't. If there really were a million of us here, I really would have expected to have met someone (for example) wearing some MLP:FiM clothing from time to time.

So, although I can't prove it for certain, I tend to feel that State of the Herd's figures regarding the total brony population are a big overestimate, at least in their implications for the British fandom. If I had to bet on it. I'd say that the relevant UK figure was in five figures rather than seven (or even high sixes). Tens of thousands I can easily believe. Hundreds of thousands, much less so, and a million certainly not. We British bronies are a dedicated and quite active group, but I just don't think we're a huge one.