The situation with MLP was more that when gen4 started airing the schism in western counter-culture that crystalized its chauvinist libertine elements out of solution into open fascists hadn't occurred yet, so 4chan was still counter-culture and had a sizeable number of queer artists/theater kids and depressed eggs. They latched onto it with varying layers of protective irony, which made it "safe" and part of the site culture in a way that meant a lot of the future-fascists hanging around felt secure in watching and enjoying it themselves.

Also it's monarchist propaganda that's run through with reactionary themes, with four of the six main characters consisting of a small business tyrant who eventually becomes a landlord and owns slaves, a planter who owns sapient language-using beings as livestock, a royal lackey from a military family who eventually becomes royalty herself, and someone whose only long-term goal is joining the military and becoming part of a special forces unit. It also did Manifest Destiny apologia in the first season, with an episode about how it was ok for the "productive" ponies to take the land the buffalo "weren't using for anything but stomping around in anyways" for their plantations as long as they gave a portion of their harvest to the buffalo they'd forced onto more marginal lands.