Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - Flappy Bois

One of the strangest things about rewatching the series is the pivotal moment when Twilight got flappy bois. It came at the end of a rushed finale to a truncated season, and totally divided the fandom. At the time, it seemed a really important issue - largely because we had no clue what lay ahead - but when looked at in the context of the whole series, Twilight's alicornification didn't even happen 1/3 of the way in.

The show went in directions that none of us - not even the writers - could have imagined.

While speculation about Twilight eventually replacing Celestia as Supreme Alicorn Monarch surfaced in fanfics as early as 2011's "Circle of Friends," the first two seasons feel like a strange, insular bubble where such things might be speculated, but didn't actually seem possible.

The show got more and more ambitious as it continued to reimagine itself - trying all sorts of new things - sometimes succeeding; sometimes failing - but it's still kind of crazy looking back at this moment.

Love them or hate them, these wings meant so very much to us. Looking back, everything that came before feels like an Age of Innocence, where such bold new directions were relegated to the realm of fanfiction.

The point of the show was to be massively, unapologetically - even aggressively - quaint.

While these early seasons are generally not as beloved by the bronies who joined the fandom late, and had missed out on its golden age (for lack of a better term), once upon a time, that quaintness and that wholesome simplicity of the early seasons was the entirety of the point.

Looking back, it all seems so crazy. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Discuss.
-Sprocket

Comments

[Frith]

What gets my heart beating faster is triumph over adversity. I find that the journey and the story telling was usually better in the first few seasons. I'm fine with winged Twilight, but what rubs me the wrong way is that she got them in some sort of afterlife after getting fried by the Elements of Harmony. There was no triumph over adversity in that event and no reason it should result in her becoming an immortal.