Polygon’s guide to Horse Girls

To celebrate the launch of The Horse Girl Canon, we’ve commemorated Polygon’s own horse mascot with its own T-shirt. Behold, The Official Hayseed Tee, a wearable ode to the biggest, dumbest, hulk-sized horse this side of the Mississippi.

Cass Marshall introduced Hayseed to the world in February 2019 in their groundbreaking essay, “Everyone hates my big stupid horse in Red Dead Online.” I can’t summarize Hayseed any better than Cass’ perfect encapsulation:

Space, dinosaurs, trains, wolves, trucks, dolphins, construction machines, dragons — there are as many different childhood obsessions as there are children.

And then there are horses, and their fans: the Horse Girls.

There is a big difference between the Horse Girl fantasy of popular fiction and the experience of actually riding a horse. I found this out the hard way.

In elementary school, I wasn’t into horses or the Horse Girl Canon. I was into historical fiction, especially stories about young women, and very especially the ones that bucked gender stereotypes. So I read all of the American Girl doll books, because pretty much all of them fit that mold.

The phrase “Horse Girl” invokes a lot of different imagery. Typically, she’s an upper-class white girl who eats, breathes, and lives horses. She can’t have a conversation about anything but the last time she was at the stables, and you know she’s going to make you watch Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron at every sleepover. While the horse world has had many different faces, and many of them aren’t white, most media would lead you to believe differently.

Characters of color are often the sidekick in horse movies, and their storylines are driven by their ethnicities. Where white characters have the freedom to be the “weird horse girl” or the daring cowboy, characters of color are stuck supporting their leads, or are forced to act as a representation of their entire race in an even more stereotypical manner than in other genres.

Black Beauty is a book that quite literally changed history. Anna Sewell’s fictional biography of a gentle, beautiful horse in 19th century England was a blunt parable on animal welfare, and its depictions of animal abuse — described from a horse’s perspective — led to reforms and an increased awareness of horses’ intelligence.

The novel was adapted several times in the last 100 years, most notably by Edward Scissorhands and Secret Garden screenwriter Caroline Thompson in 1994 as a period piece. Now 33-year-old Ashley Avis (Adolescence) has taken up the challenge of telling the classic story in a modern setting. Her adaptation of Black Beauty — which she wrote, directed, and edited — comes out on Disney Plus on Nov. 27.

In 2019, Lisa Hanawalt created the universally lauded, award-winning animated series Tuca & Bertie. Then she bought her own horse, Juniper, checking off two lifelong bucket list items in quick succession.

“I was afraid that if I actually got a horse, I’d have nothing left to strive for,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. A speech bubble hovered over an image of Hanawalt’s bird-headed stand-in as she cradled the nose of a recently purchased horse and chirped, “I’m ready for death now!”

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings built the foundation of the modern fantasy genre. Dwarves, elves, orcs, wizards, kings, warriors, quests, dungeons, and yes, even dragons. I love The Lord of the Rings. But you know what it doesn’t have?

Even one single goddamn unicorn.

Let’s talk about My Little Pony. Let’s talk about epic dynasties and perilous quests, about evil witches and terrible beasts, about dragons and dangers, about the sort of stakes that aren’t usually included in toy lines geared at little girls*. When the original My Little Pony toy line — preceded by her larger sister, My Pretty Pony — galloped onto the scene, it was something like we’d never seen before.

My Little Pony filled a niche no one had realized existed, except for maybe its creator, Bonnie Zacherle, and her team at Hasbro. Zacherle and company provided children with opportunities for non-specific pretend play set against a complex fantasy world. The design and marketing choices also rendered that world functionally optional, and eventually bolstered the theme with complex playsets that could fit into any desired mold. The brightly colored, chunky equines were for fantasy-loving little girls who didn’t want to learn to be better mommies as much as they wanted to learn how to fight monsters and go on epic quests.

One day when I was a kid, my mom drove out of town to a farm with white fences and large grassy fields. She had a surprise for me, and I couldn’t believe it: I was getting horseback-riding lessons. It was a wonderful day, and the first of many, as I spent the next few happy years riding horses like Button, Jake, and Goldie. (Thanks a million, mom!)

This was not my first brush with horses. As far back as first grade I was identified as “a Horse Girl,” one of those weird kids who gallops around the playground whinnying. I have always been deeply embarrassing to know. Long before those riding lessons, horse culture was drilled into me through books and movies: the Horse Girl Canon.

You know how we sometimes discover niche game genres and just go “Huh, of course that’s a thing”? You might very well feel this way about the concept of horse games: video games where the primary mechanics are focused on riding, breeding, or taking care of horses.

The horse game genre has been around since the early 2000s, when the unexpected success of titles like The Legacy of Rosemond Hill, Mary King’s Riding Star, and My Horse Farm proved to kids’ games publishers that there was money to be made off of young girls who wanted to spend more time with horses than their real-life circumstances allowed them to.