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

External References

^[1] 4chan – /b/

^[2] PonyBooru – Search Results for Fluttercry

^[3] PonyChan – /pony/

^[4] DeviantART – Search Results for Fluttercry

^[5] Reddit – Fluttercry

^[6] Tumblr – Search Results for Fluttercry