Fluttercry / Characters Watching Tv

Confirmed 232,444

Part of a series on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. [View Related Entries]

The image gallery for this entry contains major spoilers for various media (video games, movies, etc.). View at your own risk!

About

Fluttercry is a nickname given to a teary-eyed Fluttershy, one of the lead pegasus characters in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, first seen in an episode where she tries to save a dying Phoenix's life, but it bursts into flame before she could do anything to help. Since its on-air debut, Fluttershy's crying scene has been turned into a two-panel exploitable template: the first pane depicts Fluttershy's reaction to something shown on the mini TV screen and the second pane reveals the actual content of media.

Origin

This exploitable series comes from a stillshot of Fluttershy taken from Episode 22 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic – "A Bird in the Hoof". In this episode, one of the main characters, Fluttershy, attempts to care for Princess Celestia's sick bird. However, the bird is actually a phoenix at the end of its life cycle, which Fluttershy is not aware of. At one point, the phoenix finally bursts into flame and turns to a pile of ash, leading Fluttershy to believe she has killed the bird. The original image from the episode:

Spread

This image of Fluttershy crying has quickly became exploited on Ponychan and other MLP hubsites in several ways, the most popular being a two-panel image, the first panel being Fluttershy holding a small television set with tears in her eyes, the second being what is supposedly on the screen, usually a depressing scene from a movie, TV show, or video game.

In addition to Ponychan^[3] , Fluttercry exploitables have been seen elsewhere on Ponybooru^[2], 4chan's /b/^[1] and DeviantART^[4], as well as featured through social aggregator sites like Tumblr^[5] and Reddit^[6]. There are several variations of the template in circulation:

Derivatives

The Fluttershy version of the image has spawned a number of derivatives that feature other characters, mostly from MLP:FiM. Some of the initially most popular include:

Twilight Sparkle watching nerdy/geeky things
Rainbow Dash watching perverted things
Pinkie Pie watching insane things
Steven Magnet (a.k.a. the sea serpent from the pilot) watching stereotypically homosexual things
Various minor characters watching something to make a pun, i.e. a pile of rocks watching clips from Rocky