Entry 02 (EqG Series 01): Equestria Girls - A Land of Contrasts

I love Equestria Girls. It's some of the best that G4 has to offer.
Equestria Girls drives me up the wall. It's dumb as hell and I hate it.

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I am not aware of the particulars, but I don't think it's controversial to say that Equestria Girls started as a shallow attempt by the infernal toymaker-demon Hasrro to push the MLP brand into the humanoid dolls market.
It's also, I'm afraid, dumb as hell, in service of this profit motive. Do I understand the marketing impulses that set these girls in a highschool instead of the college their pony counterparts are aged for? Sure. Understanding doesn't make me want to bite out the throat of whoever decided to inject "yeah the portal just turns young adult ponies into teenagers on the other side" into EqG without even explaining why any less.

Not to say that FiM isn't guilty of this too, but there are also a great many things it neglected to establish regardless of monetary pressures, to the eternal infuriation of me and thousands of other scholars.
Like. It never actually clarifies whether this place full of humans is Earth or not. It's jarring as hay to go from a fic that makes up faux brand names for the nation of Pedestria... to another fic that just puts a by-name iPhone in Applejack's hands. For a while, my headcanon was that it was just also called Equestria because the humans there were famed horse riders, but as demonstrated by Now It's Our Problem, I changed my mind. If it's funny to imagine Sugarcoat getting annoyed that all of the months in ponyside are horse puns, it's even funnier to imagine Sugarcoat getting annoyed at the puns deliberately refusing to acknowledge that the Pedestrian language calls what we know as January 'Manuary' and she has no idea what base word it's actually a pun of.
Or, hey, what year of high school are these girls actually in? The only thing we know from the show is that they're not in freshman year, but, like, if everything goes in chronological order of release, you'd need a whole four years from debut Movie to Backstage Pass, IGNORING the three years Sunset apparently spent winning the Fall Formal already. Putting all of EqG on a timeline sent me into a pit of madness. But I did it, and concluded that Sunset had to have gone to CHS for seven years, that all of her friends except Sci-Twi got held back a year to make them Freshman for the Fall Formal, and that Backstage Pass happens AFTER graduation, which is only something I can comfortably commit to because they had to stop making them before they could explore everything they wanted to explore. Like, say, who the hay human Sunset was.

...But on the other hand, when EqG is good, it's good. All subjective of course, but--
Most of the best songs are in Equestria Girls. The sirens just show up, play good music for a full movie, leave, and then show up again at the end with another solid track.
Most of the best characters are frustratingly exclusive to Equestria Girls. Most EqG villains get dimensionality that FiM does not feel like spending on pawns they're going to clear from the board anyways.
Emotionally, the main show never made an act of villainy as terrifying and disturbing as when Wallflower erased Sunset's entire human life. That shit was gut-wrenching and I loved it.
And in terms of thematic coherence and messaging, I genuinely think that Equestria Girls put more thought into what redemption means than Friendship "send the evil baby to pony hell" is Magic.

I can't imagine anything I have said thus far is particularly novel. I am, as with many things, late to the party. I still wanted to say it and establish my feelings on Equestria Girls as a whole before I commit any future blog posts to analyzing individual episodes. Of course, Now It's Our Problem is already kind of a vehicle for analyzing them, but it can't exactly speak about them in Doylian terms like I can here, and it's more of a creative exercise in coming up with Watsonian explanations for their nonsense, anyways.

In conclusion, Equestria Girls is a land of contrasts.