Ponify — Ponified green character with prosthetic legs and brown ponytail

Ponify

2010fan art transformation formatclassic

Published August 1, 2026

Ponify (past tense: ponified) is a brony fan art format where people, fictional characters, or objects are redrawn as cartoon ponies in the style of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The practice took off in late 2010 on the image board Ponibooru and became a recognized subgenre of MLP crossover art through 2011 and 2012.

mlp memes fan art memes redraw challenge memes deviantart memes fandom discourse memes

Overview

Ponify is the brony fandom term for turning any subject, a person, fictional character, or object, into a My Little Pony style character, typically matching the visual language of the 2010 Hasbro series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic3. The verb covers everything from dropping a canonical show pony into a meme template to designing an entirely new pony based on a real person, a video game character, or an existing meme.

The technique sits alongside older species swap traditions like gijinka, which turns non-humans into humans, and Furry style anthropomorphization, but ponify is tied specifically to the FiM art style. Finished pieces often keep signature details from the original subject like hairstyles, glasses, or prosthetic limbs while grafting them onto the show's four-legged silhouette, and they surface on DeviantArt under tags like 'ponified'4.

Origin & Background

Platform
Ponibooru (source) / DeviantArt (viral spread)
Date
2010

One of the earliest documented ponify posts landed on the image board Ponibooru on December 27, 2010, featuring Emi from the visual novel Katawa Shoujo redrawn as a pony with prosthetic hind legs3. Fan art then spilled onto DeviantArt in February 2011, when a piece based on three competitors from the 2009 Original Character Tournament '1 Dollar Fighter' bracket was posted on February 25, 20116.

How It Spread

By May 2012, DeviantArt was hosting more than 4,450 results for 'ponified' and over 7,600 for 'my little pony crossover', while the MLP:FiM image board Ponibooru's 'ponified' tag ran past 275 pages3. Tumblr users tagged the same style of work under 'ponified' and 'ponification', and dedicated crossover folders appeared inside DeviantArt groups like MLP:FiM and E-qual-estria4.

By October 2011, ponifying was listed as a sub-rule of Rule 34 on rulesoftheinternet.com, and the fandom drafted its own version of the internet rules with the pony variant in place2. Urban Dictionary's entries for 'ponify' and 'ponifying' redirect to broader Rules of the Internet definitions5. The show itself fed the loop with fan-named characters like Doctor Whooves, a light brown background pony first seen in Season 1's 'Winter Wrap Up', who was reframed as a ponified take on David Tennant's Doctor Who and covered by BuzzFeed1.

Ponified fan fiction grew into its own genre on Equestria Daily, FimFiction, and fanfiction.net, with novel length crossover works like Fallout Equestria, World of Ponycraft, and Death Note Equestria.

How to Use This Meme

A typical ponify keeps the subject's most recognizable traits like hair, skin tone, accessories, or props and grafts them onto the FiM pony template with a matching cutie mark, mane style, and coat color. Artists often post finished pieces on DeviantArt, Tumblr, or dedicated pony boards under tags like 'ponified' or 'ponification' for discovery4.

Frequently Asked Questions