The term clop, derived from a hoofbeat, also means masturbation in this context. An internal study within the fandom suggests that about 19% of bronies (My Little Pony fans) have engaged in "clopping." Critics who view it as a problematic aspect of the fandom fear that it might taint the reputation of the My Little Pony fan community as a whole.
Clop is both an onomatopoeia and a pun or wordplay on the slang word fap, itself an onomatopoeia as well.[1][2]Clop is also used as a verb, meaning to masturbate. Related terms include clop-fic for erotic and slash fiction centered around My Little Pony characters, and clopper for a person who enjoys this type of material.[3][4]
History
Clop is considered to be either a subset of brony fandom, furry fandom, or both.[5][6] Compared to other types of fan art, clop features homosexual ships more prominently.[7] The topic has received scholarly attention.[8][9][10][11][12] Clopping (masturbating to clop) is frowned upon by some My Little Pony fans.[5] However, in 2015, The Guardian reported that the /mlp/ brony community (the My Little Pony board of 4chan) saw not clopping as a form of heresy, and viewed having sex with a real person negatively.[13] In July 2015, the most popular character in clop on Pornhub was Rainbow Dash, followed by Rarity and Pinkie Pie.[14] Justin Mullis wrote that "the amount of [clop] continues to grow at an astounding rate".[15]
Popularity
By 2013, the imageboard rule34.paheal.net hosted 53,731 sexually explicit images tagged My Little Pony; 49,419 of them featured characters from Friendship Is Magic.[3] By 2015, the website hosted 64,889 sexually explicit images tagged My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic,[15] and by 2017, it hosted over 95,401.[3]
On the furry imageboard e621, over 82,469 images were tagged My Little Pony by 2015;[15] by 2017, the number of such images had nearly doubled to 147,037.[3] The Mane Six have been among the most frequently tagged characters on e621.[15][16] Since 2011, Twilight Sparkle has been the most frequently tagged character, reaching 33,792 tagged images by March 2023.[17][bettersourceneeded]As of September 2025[update], Twilight Sparkle is the most frequently tagged character on e621 with over 38,000 images; Judy Hopps from Zootopia has the second most tags with over 37,500 images.[16]Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash are the third and fourth most tagged characters, respectively.[16]
As of September 2025[update], the My Little Pony imageboard Derpibooru hosts over 500,000 images tagged as "explicit".[18]
An example of clop is the Adobe Flashpoint-and-click adventure game Banned from Equestria (Daily) by Pokehidden.[19] In recent years, the use of technology and artificial intelligence in clop has become popular within the brony fandom, such as using 15.ai for AI voice acting (e.g. in the explicit music video series Pony Zone).[20][21]
Demographics and geography
According to internal studies undertaken by the brony fandom, 19.05% of bronies have engaged in clopping, but it is assumed that the percentage is larger.[5] A 2015 survey by Pornhub revealed that most cloppers were millennials between 18 and 24 years old, and men were 37% more likely to search for clop than women.[14][22] In 2022, MEL magazine 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]
A clopfic is clop fan fiction.[24][25] On FimFiction.net, the central fandom repository for My Little Pony fan fiction, erotic stories are managed through a comprehensive content rating system: explicit sexual content is labeled with the "sex" tag.[26] The Clopfics group on FimFiction.net is the largest community on the site. The site also hosts several specialized erotic subgenres, such as Futaquestria, which features stories of futanari characters—female characters that possess male genitalia (often through magical means).[25]
The range of erotic content in these stories varies widely, from mild romantic encounters to explicit material featuring BDSM, non-consensual scenarios, and various fetishes.[25]
Reception
Gianna Decarlo, a journalist for The Baltimore Sun, condemned clop as one of the problems of the My Little Pony fandom, calling the erotic art an "unstoppable force of sexual deviancy" from which "not even a simple Google search is safe."[27] EJ Dickson of The Daily Dot wrote that clop enthusiasts were "black sheep in the community" of bronies, most of whom fear that cloppers will give the entire fandom a bad name.[28]
On a discussion on clop in Equestria Forums, an online brony forum, users argued that cloppers are not attracted to real-life horses but rather to "humanized ponies", emphasizing that the characters are perceived as sapient beings with human-like qualities rather than as animals.[29] One user noted:
"Being attracted to Rainbow Dash is a lot different than being attracted to a fucking horse. I’m sure very few people are looking at mlp porn thinking 'oh my god oh my god oh my god i want to put my dick inside a horsssee' it’s more like 'oh my god Dashie you're so fucking sexy I am willing to look past the fact that you’re a horse.'"[29]
Another user from the same discussion supported this perspective, noting that characters like Rainbow Dash "are perceived as people at a mental level" and possess humanized features that differentiate them from actual animals.[29]
In 2024, Helina Hartman of Rutgers University examined how the Mane Six are transformed and reinterpreted within the clop community. Hartman found that the original character designs of Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and Fluttershy—which were created to embody positive feminine values and friendship—were systematically altered through processes of sexualization and masculinization. Hartman observed that the Mane Six's individual personalities and character traits, originally designed to represent elements of friendship, become secondary to their transformation into objects of sexual desire or symbols of masculine conquest. Hartman wrote that this reinterpretation strips away the characters' original feminist messaging and educational value and replaces their roles as positive role models for young girls with versions that reinforce traditional masculine dominance and heterosexual validation, which inverts the show's core themes of friendship and empowerment.[30]
↑ Dark, Stephen (June 15, 2016). "State of Brony". Salt Lake City Weekly. Archived from the original on August 9, 2021. Retrieved January 6, 2022. A Booming Fringe Community of Utah Youth Finds acceptance through My Little Pony
↑ Jones, Bethan (1 April 2015). "My Little Pony, tolerance is magic: Gender policing and Brony anti-fandom". The Journal of Popular Television. 3 (1): 119–125. doi:10.1386/jptv.3.1.119_1.
↑ Burdfield, Claire (1 April 2015). "Finding Bronies – The accidental audience of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic". The Journal of Popular Television. 3 (1): 127–134. doi:10.1386/jptv.3.1.127_1.
1 2 3 4 Mullis, Justin P (2015). Playing Ponies: A Critical Evaluation of Religious Elements and Gender Politics at Work in "Brony" Fandom. Religious Studies (MA thesis). Charlotte: University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
1 2 3 Bajor, Jan (June 2015). Między bajką a perwersją – pornografia i erotyka fanowska w środowisku internetowym na przykładzie fandomu My Little Pony: Przyjaźń to Magia[Between fairy tale and perversion - fan pornography and erotica in the internet environment using the example of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom]. Institute of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology (Master's thesis) (in Polish). University of Warsaw.
↑ Aragon, Cecilia Rodriguez; Davis, Katie (2019). Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring. The MIT Press.
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