Subway Porn

About

Subway Porn referes to edited images and original fanart in which questionable and explicit content has been censored by using the restaurant franchise Subway, making it appear as if the characters are engaging into sexual activities with a Subway sandwich. These type of censors were initially used by the Brony fandom to fight explicit art in a jesting way, but were quickly adapted to be used as a non-serious censor in general.

Origin

Lauren Faust is an American animator and the creator of the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Due to this she has become an iconic figure within the brony fandom and even received a ponified version of herself, nicknamed Fausticorn (shown below, left). Late 2011, certain fans began including Fausticorn into explicit fanworks, which were mostly met by negative replies due to Faust’s iconic status within the fandom. In reply to this other bronies began editing Subway sandwiches into the fanart in an attempt to stop the creation of it (shown below, right). Due to the deactivation of the largest brony image board, Ponibooru, in August 2012, the original instances of both the fanworks and the edits have most likely been lost. The earliest unedited piece that is still accessible can be found on the brony image board Twentypercentcooler on October 31st, 2011.^[7]

Spread

As the amount of censors on explicit art of Fausticorn grew, the use of Subway sandwiches slowly turned into a toungue-in-cheek joke within the brony fandom. The result of this was that Fausticorn was more often combined with the Subway brand in general in fanworks (shown below, left). Subways also began to gain a more notable presence in fanworks, often intentionally added from the start or even drawn in.

On December 26th, 2011, a forum thread was started by Facepunch user Jackald, asking users to photoshop Subways onto pages of hentai manga and doujin pages.^[1] As of March 2013, the thread contains over 200 pages and had its most recent activity late January of the same year. A Facebook page called Hatsune Miku Troll was also launced early 2012, and has created various edits of hentai manga with Subways up until its deactivation later that year.

Subway’s Facebook Flooding

On August 15th, 2012, members of the Hatsune Miku Troll Facebook^[2] page began tagging their creations with the Facebook profile of the restaurant franchise by the suggestion of an admin of the profile. This resulted in the Facebook profile of Subway being flooded by censored hentai containing subways, most of the images originating from Facebook page and the Facepunch thread.^[1] This event was also covered by The Daily Dot,^[3] Gawker^[4] and Hypervocal.^[5] A post on the r/funny sub-Reddit^[6] managed to gain more than 11,000 upvotes as of March 25th, 2013. Subway replied later that day that they were aware of the content and began removing it.

External References