The whole shebang

I've got a lot here in this piece. From cartoons (none of which you've probably seen), about four fanfict reivews, review of the final episode, and thoughts on season three.
==================

The Moth and Flames – 1937- Disney – Gilert

By this point in time, the Silly Symphonies have pretty much become musical bits that featured little dialogue and not much in the way of either plot or gags. This is one of those cartoons (although, there are gags, such as one involving fire insurance, that I enjoyed), it's a dance of seduction between of a belle moth and a vilianous flame. It actually harkens back to the older Silly Symphonies which featured small weak characters and a large menace (and usually the bad guy was after a female). The difference is that it's in color, and the designs of the leading moths are updated. Plus the animation of the flame is pretty cool.

Booby Traps – 1944 – Warners – Clampett – NSFW

A little history on this cartoon. Late in 1942, the government created a film department for propaganda and education purposes, one unit led by Frank Capara. Originally, Disney was going to be the one making the films for that unit, but because Schlesinger offered to do the job for less, his company got the contract. Amongst the films made were a series of cartoons made to teach soldiers how to not screw up at their jobs in a rather entertaining ways (looking at some of them, I have trouble believing anyone could learn anything) by featuring one of the most arrogant boobs every to hit the screen , private Snafu (named after the military codeword for “Situation Normal: All Fucked UP”).

A number of these cartoons were written by Theodore Giesel (aka Dr. Sesuss), and this one is one of the best. Here the lesson is how to detect Booby Traps, I guess, because Snafu is such a bullheaded idiot, and the traps so obvious (hence the booby part I suppose), you wonder if anyone learned anything expect to avoid playing “Those Young Endearing Charms” (the first use of this particular gag). But still, because he’s such a moron, it’s hilarious, seeing the traps fail to work.

Now these cartoons were made just for soldiers in the army, that meant that censorship boards who would scream about, such as swearing (they still couldn’t use “fuck” in the series, had to use foul to explain Snafu’s name) and scantily dressed women (very sexual- and perhaps sexist-these cartoons). So when I say this isn’t safe for work, believe me, it's not sa. So, to be safe, I’m linking to a sign in video on YouTube, and if you don’t have an account, you can search the same website.

As a side note, I believe the military would be about 50 % more effective if they start reproduction of cartoons like SNAFU to teach their troops.

Jitterbug Follies – 1938 – MGM – Gross

Back in the thirties, few major studios outright own cartoon studios, instead they had smaller studios make them (by paying an advance) and they would then distribute them and collect then. Well, MGM broke away from the Harman-Ising studio, and created its own studio to make cartoons. However, a big problem they had early on was getting their directors to work well and produced quality cartoons, due to the chaos caused by coastal factions (people from New York and people from California often went at each other, this was true at any studio, but MGM supposedly had it the worst), and producer Fred Quimby, who ran the short department, and considered probably the most disagreeable producer given his stubbornness (Avery said that part of the reason they didn’t make many anti-Nazi cartoons because Quimby said “they had to be careful. We don’t know who will win the war”). So the studio went through a few people as directors in the early years, and one these people brought in was Milt Gross, a newspaper cartoonists. He eventually left because of his disagreements with Quimby, but he did manage to create two cartoons (cartoons, I should add Quimby did not want to release saying it would bring shame to MGM’s name because they were dirty or something (I don’t remember the reason given)). Luckily, both were released, and this is one considered the better of the two.

Count Screwloose and his dog J. R., are holding a contest as a quick way to make money (leave with the prize money gathering from the tickets sold). However, they are stopped by the thugs of the Citizens’ committee on Fair Play and have to hold it. Let me just say that this is a strange cartoon, we have animals acting like humans (including two penguins who become a running gag; don’t hate these guys, they save eardrums of the world), no real sense of plot, so animation that’s cartoony in a non-Looney Tune like way, not still unique. It’s hard for me to explain why I like it. It’s just fun for me to watch.

Toot, Whistle, Pluck, and Boom – 1953- Disney – Kimball - Warning

I talked some time back about a cartoon called "Melody: Adventures in Music." This is a sequel to that cartoon. This time, Professor Owl teaches the class about musical instruments from the caveman days to modern times. There at times that does get dry (and despite being an educational cartoon, I first saw this cartoon during music class, I don't know if one could really learn from this), but at other parts it's funny. The animation is limited in a number of spots, which I do think helps Kimball's deadpan comedy style. The only real warning besides the dry bits and limited animation comes from the design of some humans representing specific ethnic groups that are rather outdated (one representing Asians is particularly cringe worthy).

==================
Home is where the Harp is by Blueshift

While I’m a fan of most of Blueshift’s comedies, his dark work isn’t something I grab onto as much. Sure there’s “A Star in Yellow”, one of my favorite fanficts, but there’s also “Twilight’s Best Friend”, which failed to work for me, mainly because the big moment required me to accept an action that simply could not see Twilight committing under her circumstances.

Sadly, I think my reaction to Home is where the Harp is, isn’t much better than to a 50’s B-horror movie. Rather than being terrifying or serious, I found it to be silly. Part of my reason might have to do with the medium. In a more visual format, I might have found the only thing somewhat scary. Here, I had to hold myself back from chuckling at number of instances. If the writing (which overall was good) went into more detail on the horror of the Smooze as it wraps around its victims, it might have been more powerful.

And that really leads to by next problem, use of Smooze itself, which is probably the most used thing that is strictly G1 after “Monsterman” and Midnight Castle and Surprise and Firefly (why Seaponies aren’t in first place is beyond me). Like much of G1 (when it’s not being horrendously bad), I personally find Smooze to be silly rather than creepy, and when Blueshfit including the sound it makes during the song, it reduced how seriously I could take. At the same time, he changed aspects of it such as instead making others grouchy when splattered over them, it consumes things (including the concept of pony-created objects, so that if it devours a quill, so will every other quill, which I get on a metaphorical level, but it makes the Smooze so overly powerful that I asked myself how the heck was this defeated the first time, assuming the movie isn’t canon; if it is I don’t why the Smooze is so different from the movie). G1 is dangerous to work with because it’s so bad, that’s there’s little of value worth salvaging without changes. But if you change stuff from it, those who are familiar with it’s original form are probably going to be confused. That was a large part of my problem with Semper Fidelias by Bobcat, he changed how things about “Monsterman” and “Hank the Sasquatch” that their relationship didn’t make sense. And it’s part of my problem here.

I have more to talk about but I’m going to put it in spoilers

If the Smooze had engulfed all of Equestria, I wouldn’t have minded such an ending and might have appreciated the grimness of the act. Instead, Lyra basically gives a speech in how both of them are alone and afraid consumers (of what others create) who produce nothing and do nothing. But there’s still hope for both of them if they change their ways and actually do something with their lives. Couple of things, first, that speech was corny. Two, I dislike them in general anyway, let the reader figure out what to take away from the story, don’t (directly) tell them what they should take away. Put down the rubber mallet. Finally, it really doesn’t work for me. You have this all-powerful, all-consuming sludge of hate with a limited thought process and it’s defeated by talking to it about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Really, that’s so anti-climatic, it’s not even funny. On the plus, the ending is really open, you don’t know if Lyra’s life is going to get better.

The writing is good, and Lyra is a pretty well conceived, but this thing got the wrong reaction out of me.
============================

Certain Advantages by The Descendent

When I went into to this, I expected a character-based comedy that concept aside, would pretty much be in tone with the show itself. I didn’t get that, but instead got something more… random and wacky. This passage will suffice (Celestia is now covered with grape juice, which has dyed her coat):

“Hello, Spike,” she said, catching his eye. “Do tell me, who do I remind you of?”
Spike blinked. Apart from the barrel-half and the jewelry (and her immense size, supposed immortality, and suggested divinity) Celestia almost looked like…
“Oh, how I do love books!” Celestia said, raising her tone. “I should make a list of all the things that I enjoy about books… and then list the things that I love about making lists!”

That’s funny, but could anyone imagine Celestia saying that? The same could be said of the other characters from Twilight bailing her eyes out throughout the story after Spike says she’s a slave driver and popping up at random (she’s a running gag) to Dash’s attempt at getting Spike to make a bet with each other to determine who will be the others slave (Spike is in-character, though) to how everyone reacts to when some nameless characters that don’t appear in the show decide (for free it seems) to splatter oils all over Granny Smith’s back (which I didn’t find creepy like they did because . All of it depends some very exaggerated emotions that don’t while somewhat understandable, . An explanation at the end gives why the princesses act as they did, but it falls flat for me given how everyone else is acting theatrical and it actually turned what was probably my favorite part of the story into something rather disgusting (not even a princess of Equestria should be allowed to get away with that).

A number of these jokes are rather on the crude and lowbrow side, which I guess surprised me, given what I thought of the author (if my catholic grandmother used the C-word, I’m not sure anything would surprise me). This includes a couple of puns as well (I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word bunghole used as well here), and some

I’m going to nitpick here (because it happens only once), so skip this paragraph if you want to, but this fanfict did touch one of my pet peeves for puns and I have to rant about it. During the race, the princesses are nearing the pie table, and Dash says “they’re gonna have their just deserts.” The next line has Spike thinking of telling Dash that she meant desserts. First of all, deserts as in “just deserts” and desserts are pronounced the exact same way (desert as in abandoning someone, is slightly different), so there’s no way Spike would be able to tell Dash was using the wrong word. Second, she really wasn’t using the wrong word, again that’s the right deserts for “just deserts.” Maybe the joke is that , but if that’s the case, why have the line about Spike thinking of correct her. For me it is a poorly conceived pun. Ugh.

Sorry, I had to get that out of myself. It annoyed me quite a bit while I was reading and it made look up if I was pronouncing the word wrong.

Any way, the jokes again vary. Some of them such as how the audience reacts to the princesses at various points, amused me. A running gag involving the diamond dog as Vikings, and parts of the race messing with their landing (when the Princesses get involved, things rather chaotic), meanwhile, didn’t get me to laugh. Neither did any number of fanon references or pop culture jokes (okay, “The Princess Bride” quote did make snort).

The overall prose is thankfully very good. I can’t talk much about errors (I think I saw a few), but clarity was never an issue. To put it another way, if a joke falls flat, it's due to the concept of the joke, not how it's written (and in all fairness even

In short, it’s dumb. Funny at times, yes, not bad, yes, but dumb.
======================
Twilight gets Kidnapped by Munngojerrie

I’m not sure what possessed me to read this. Kidnapping of young children is probably one of the least fertile areas for comedy. That doesn’t mean it can’t be funny (black comedy’s very nature is turning that which is horrifying humorous), but it’s an uphill battle.

The main action of the story is basically a variant of the scene from The Incredibles at the end where Buddy kidnaps Jack-Jack (even borrowing a line from it). Let me just say that there is a number of good reasons why it worked as well as it did Incredibles that already story doesn’t have. One, we knew who the captor was ahead of time. Because we knew Syndrome’s character, watching a baby beat up on an egomaniac in a cape is a lot funnier than watching a baby beat up on than a burglar turned kidnapper. Two, the use of the different mediums, slapstick of this kind almost always works better than in the visual one.

But what really brings this story down for me isn’t that it takes from a well-known movie. It’s the fact that so many bits don’t make any sense. The pegasus who breaks into their house and is chased out (making out with one piece of jewelry, then returns to their home (just a few seconds later), by breaking into Twilight’s room. Let me explain why this is awful story telling. First, most (if not all) burglars do not return to the houses they are stealing from after they are discovered. Their instinct is to take what they have and get away as far as possible. Second, he says that he’s taking Twilight as compensation for a botched job and the event plays out as if he returned precisely to take her. How would he know where the baby was or even that there was an infant in the first place? Did he spy on their house beforehand? Third, why would he even think about kidnapping her? Stealing is one thing, that gives you a few years in jail. Kidnapping brings out the lynch mob (small children like puppies, are the measuring sticks of cuteness and evil). He’s already quite a ways away from the house before he starts think of what he’s going to do with her (the whole doing it for compensation line strikes me as unbelievably petty). Maybe this guy is suppose to be that dumb, but I can’t buy that.

The main action also suffers from this such as a scene where Twilight takes control of the pegasus’s forelegs, and pulls them away from his body, which if he did so, he would drop the child and end the whole thing, right then and there. Plus, there’s a contradiction of canon, Cutie Mark Chronicles pretty much shows that Twilight could barely control her magic (she struggles to even turn the page of a book), but here she’s taking over the body parts of an adult pegasus. And wouldn’t a screaming baby, I don’t know, wake up half of Canterlot.

Plus, it takes too long to get the main action. There’s no need to have this early scene about Twilight not liking her new crib and her mother switching it out (the only relevant bit before the family is awoken by a noise is maybe the fact that her parents fear about her not showing any signs of magic, given the connection with the movie and the end). There are some gags, but everything above pretty much got in the way me enjoying them.

=====================
My Time Among the Clothes Hangers by Kegisak

I’m not a huge fan of romance fiction. When it’s a subplot, it’s usually not a problem, but as the main draw, it can be a slog watching all the clichés and mawkish plot points play out can really bring out the satirist in me. That was my greatest fear going into this story. Thankfully, that didn’t come true, because “Clothes Hangers” isn’t really about romance (well, it’s an important part), it’s about Pokey accepting who he is and that there’s ultimately nothing wrong with that. That makes it far more tolerable to me at its base. Luckily, it does more things right.

All the characters are pretty well-conceived for their role involved and a little more. Brolly’s role maybe that of the best friend, but not once did I think of him as just that. Part of that is the conversations the characters had. From the small talk and jokes to the larger personal ones, there’s nothing inside of them that seems out of place (for example, Brolly throwing his keys at Pokey after coming hum from working telling him to get a job, struck me as the natural thing a roommate would say when he has to carry the rent) And these conversations are what drive the story.

The real strength for me is Pokey. The he’s constant in denial, and suppresses his true-self, yet the angst never gets annoying. And when he reaches his final outburst, the emotions burst into one very touching scene that made my eyes water.

One of the bigger complaints I have is something that probably won’t bother a lot of other people: it just didn’t feel like a pony story. The use of light swearing and other things, made me feel that this would have worked as well (maybe even better) if the story took place in the real world. In addition, this fanfict did hit my pet peeve of using non-speaking verb for as substitutes for words like said. Maybe I would have also preferred a bit more conflict in Porky’s friends being a little less accepting on his sexuality (at best we get Rose looking away (indicating reluctance or maybe jealousy)and some innocent jabs from Brolly). But these are rather minor.

This was a very good fanfict (definitely didn't deserve the star-bombing it received) and probably the best one I’ve read since came from my hiatus. I’m glad to have spent time with this piece.

By the way, can I say that despite having a deep loathing of Scooby-doo, an avatar of Shaggy kicking the Penguin is frickin' awesome.

===================
I’m going to spilt my thoughts of the episode into two areas. One on the whole cutie mark stuff and then on the princess thing.

The whole thing had terrible pacing. Because a good deal of time had to be allotted for the ending, Larson basically put the whole thing into rush mode. Larson is pretty much the gag expert of the group, but when I look at his episodes, I can’t help but feel that he has trouble wrapping them up (Return of Harmony does an incredible job at Discord messing with the cast, but once it comes time to defeat him, he has to rush through the recovery stage just to properly finish the episode or Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000, he makes the Film Flam bros. lose by introducing a cheap ‘honorary’ family bit). It seems that he has too much fun with the problem of the week that he doesn’t always remember that he should be working towards the ending and just speeds to the end. Here, he doesn’t even have the former, due to lack of time (I noticed very few gags). He has to keep the plot moving in order to finish. In pretty much no time whatsoever, Twilight figures out what caused the whole problem and how to solve it. What’s more is that very little happens in the acts. Basically, it goes Twilight discovers problem (with a song), temporarily gives up (with a song) and then with Spike’s encouragement goes out to solve the crisis, fixes Fluttershy, and then the rest of them (with a song). I was flat out bored because there was almost nothing for me to grasp on to.

Then there are the songs used. Now, I know a lot people are going to disagree with me (more than usual), but I find the songs in the show to be overrated. It’s true for pretty much any piece of fiction, but I don’t like when a character (who was talking before) starts singing out and then some Broadway song and dance routine begins or when a character sings their heart out for little reason. It becomes really surreal, and tough to take things seriously. So, I while I believe that Daniel Ingram is a pretty good lyricists (what can I say Winter Wrap-up is pretty darn catchy), I find his songs work better when I’m not watching them in the episodes. But it’s a large problem here because seventy-five percent of the episode is song. I don’t know what stage the writing is at when Daniel Ingram starts working on a song (it probably varies between episodes), but I suspect for the parts with a longer song (think Winter Wrap-up, the Smile song, the Gala song) the story aspect takes a secondary role. So, Ingram is the one who controls not just the content, but also the pacing. The whole part of Twilight discovering what was wrong could have taken fifteen to thirty seconds with just really brief glimpses of what was wrong, rather than the two minute song it did. Plus, the next song basically reiterates what we already knew, there was no need for it. As for the big number, yeah, the instrumental part was pleasing to the ears with a nice rhythm to it , but it was also incredibly sappy and goofy.

The worst part was the whole connection with cutie marks and destiny and the elements of plot device. So let me state what I can tell from all this. For this episode, a cutie mark doesn’t determine what task a pony is good at (that doesn’t explain the “Cutie Pox” episode where Applebloom shows skill at whatever she has on her body; and they say season three has been the season of continuity). And as the pilot tells us, the elements are more or less inside of the bearers. And the elements and the cutie marks of the bearers are connected with each other, so if you change the elements, you also change the cutie mark. And if you have a different cutie mark (or more or less the wrong one), you basically have an uncontrollable desire to do what it tells you to do, until you give up (how exactly does work). And if you try the task that your old cutie mark says you were good at, you will get your old one, essentially rediscover it by enjoying yourself (and if I remember “Cutie Mark Chronicles” correctly, I guess this is how it works when you get it originally). And if you lose your old cutie mark, it basically eliminates your memory and replaces it… with a new made-up one I guess, and once your true cutie mark comes back, so does your memory. And (I’m starting a lot of sentences with this word) the reason for this doing as your cutie mark says is because it’s your destiny. I’m saying all this because, that’s ludicrous. What were they thinking? They way they presented it was that it’s the element and the mark that makes the pony, not the other way around. The whole destiny side of things annoys me as it does in pretty much every part of work. And because of all this, personality was thrown in the toilet with Twilight’s friends basically being treated like props. Never do that; there’s a difference between making shit happen to your characters and treating your characters as shit.

And how exactly would a memory spell not work; they just forgot who they are? I mean, the experience in your life and how you remember them the events in them (i.e. what you take away from it all) more or less determines who you are. It also determines what you’re good at; most skills are not innate, it’s something you build up and develop. Twilight’s cutie mark may be magic, but it took her years to get where she were, she used to be unable to turn the page of a book, and she gets better by practicing. Rarity was probably the same; I don’t think Dash and Applejack were born being as great as they are now, they had to work on their physical abilities. I’m not a psychologist, and my knowledge of amnesia is the mere basics and what you forget varies between person, but from what I can tell, if you lose your memory of how to do something, you have to relearn it (things are not like riding a bike) . So if Rarity wouldn’t have just been able to make a dress as she did if she had forgotten how to do so. She’d probably mess up, and I don’t think she’d be enjoying herself.

Plus, certain issues don’t make sense. Is Dash really the only weather pony in Ponyville? Shouldn’t another pegasus be able to take care of Rarity’s mess? How bad of a shape was Sweet Apple Acres in that Pinkie working on it would lead it to ruin, (and apparently, Big Mac is useless at working on the farm without AJ)? Wouldn’t that usually take days to happen? And the whole reason why the townsponies aren’t tetchy is because she’s there to make them laugh and smile? Do they chose to revolve their happiness around Pinkie, (which is ridiculous because there should plenty of things in their lives that can make them happy (it’s not like they were always unhappy and miserable before they met her)), or is Pinkie so charismatic that her own happiness can slay the grumpiness in other ponies, who are naturally rotten (great more emotional manipulation by magic)? Actually looking at all that and the previous episodes, I can safely say that not only does it suck to be a background pony on this show, but they are also incredibly incompetent and incapable of solving any problem whatsoever. If Twilight and her friends left, the every building would collapse in less than a week and the whole town would become a diseased ridden cesspool. I never knew the show had such Menckenian contempt for the common man.

Now after that fiasco, the episode moves on to the whole princess thing. Basically, Twilight gets blasted by the elements after completing Starswirl’s spell (convenient isn’t it). She goes into… outer space, the Twilight Zone, whatever. Then Celestia explains the reason why Beardy couldn’t complete it is because he didn’t understand friendship like Twilight did. I can’t be the only one who found that line to be corny. Plus, it’s implied Celestia knew ahead of time what was wrong with the spell and what the heck it would do (she was there to congratulate Twilight, so the she planned ahead of time, that bitch). I mean all it took was Twilight to finish writing down the part that Starswirl didn’t get. Would he even have the elements any way (because that’s what the spell is for), I mean “Hearth’s Warming Eve”, which is a dramatized version of the founding of Canterlot, states that was when Star Swirl was alive, and the elements were found by Celestia and Luna (as stated in “Return of Harmony”), years later. I’d think he would be dead. Then we get a walk down memory lane, something that could have been meaningful (and if this was the actual series finale, more so), but really just turned into a clip show and a song that I could not enjoy. And where exactly did that magic that changed Twilight come from, it didn’t look like a spell was being cast?

So, Twilight then gains a pair of wings, gets referred to as the a-word while her friends give her a pat on the back (no jealousy, whatsoever). Celestia keeps talking about how Twilight learned so much , but I’m thinking to myself, “didn’t Twilight’s friends learn a lot about friendship themselves”, it’s not like we see them really hang out with anyone else (all them of were more or less stuck in their own world and seemed to have few, if any, real friends (or, in the case of Pinkie, so many friends that ultimately none of them) before Twilight). In that respect, what exactly makes Twilight more worthy of this “upgrade” instead of them? Wait, I know the answer: destiny, damn it. Preordination at it’s finest. Then she’s crowned because that’s what they do with all those like, to assert how much better they are than everyone else. Wow, this is really reminding me of Mencken. And no Twilight, you have no right to use Lou Gehrig's line . Even if I could get over all this, it doesn’t change the part that those last seven minutes are incredibly boring.

Yeah, I hated this episode. Tied with the Wedding as my least favorite.

And the thing about the whole princess piece. It feels like exposition to something else. So, no Twilight I do not think everything is going to be just fine.
===========================

Season three has been overall, at best, disappointing, at worst, awful. Episode by episode, it has been far weaker than the previous two.

That isn’t to say that everything to come out of season three was bad, I would say “Just for Sidekicks” was a rather good episode, overall. By the same token, not all of seasons one and two were good, I fact I can think a quite few episodes (the Wedding, “Feeling Pinkie Keen”, “Putting your Hoof Down”, “Dog and Pony Show”, “The Mysterious Mare-do Well” come to mind) that are just despicable. And in all fairness, I wouldn’t say that .

Yet, nothing in either of the first . The concepts for the episodes have almost always been questionable unlike in the previous two (only two episodes from season 2, the Wedding and “Read it and Weep” made me question what the writers were doing before their release),Now, I will admit that when I first decided to try the show out, I first checked an episode guide and selected the episodes that struck me as the most interesting. While concepts for the episodes, were not all equal, and from an outsider’s perspective, they don’t look like that great or the kind of thing that would attract a large number of male fans, none of them made me say, “God, why.” For this season that’s not been the case, seeing that a future episode was going to feature the return of Trixie or Discord or the finale, filled me with dread unlike any other episode. Other episodes, such as Infinite Pinkie Pies , they struck me as far weaker ideas than in the previous two seasons. That worries me, it makes me think they’re running out of ideas. Admittedly, Slice of Life especially for a kid’s cartoon is hard to do right. You can’t rely on plot or violence to gain draw them in because you’re focusing on a far more mundane. You have to rely on characters. And there again, the season falls flat given how poorly it’s used them.

There’s other things else well. I’ll be honest, the first thing that worried me about season three was seeing that McCarthy was going to be the head. Of the writers who has been in both season one and two (I’m looking also at Rogers, Larson, and Morrow), she is the only one who hadn’t written an episode I would call a fav. Perhaps more troublesome, I find a number of her episodes weak (the Wedding, Lesson Zero, Dragonshy, etc.), more than the rest. Worse the staff has bowed to the pressure of others. Not just Hasbro, but also the fandom. I’m a wrong to think that the show might be a victim of its own success?

Plus I really don’t know what I’m going to do with that Equestria Girl spinoff. On one hand, yes, I shouldn’t jump towards conclusion. But on the other hand, I have to break that because so much of it raises red flags: the cast as humans (part of the reason I like the show is because they’re non-humans), the setting (they’re going to be teens at a school it seems), the designs (not the worse I’ve seen from a Canadian show (I almost lost Thursdays’ breakfast just thinking about the ones from Total Drama Island), but they’re generic and why would they color their skin like that, that’s just creepy), fears over standing apart from FIM and other girl shows (besides the fact there is probably going to be no magic, how is this going to be different, and why do I get the feeling that shopping and clothes are going to play a large role; please don’t make an episode about boys), and the fear it’s going to drag people away from working on FIM. In short, why?

The fandom side of things aren’t exactly bright, either. I read a comment by Couchcrusader that some Pre-readers were leaving once they finished their projects. Considering the creative side of the fandom is one the things I do look forward to, that has me worried.

But then there’s this question: what am I looking for? What keeps me watching a show that for the most part I’m not enjoying as of now, let alone writing about it? To be honest, I don’t really have those answers. Not now, at least.

Well, actually there’s one they could do.

♫ Shoop-bee-doo shoop-shoop-bee-doo ♫

♫ Call upon the sea ponies when you’re in distress♫

(Don’t judge me)

♫ Helpful as can be ponies simply signal S.O.S. ♫

♫ If you find you're past the drift and haven't got an oar (oar) ♫
♫ Count upon the Sea Ponies - they'll see you to shore ♫
♫ Shoop-bee-doo-shoop-shoop-bee-doo ♫
♫Are you sinking fast? ♫
♫Had some nasty shocks? ♫
♫Feeling like all hope is gone and washed up on the rocks? ♫
♫ Washed up on the rocks ♫
♫ Shoop-bee-doo-shoop-shoop-bee-doo ♫
♫ Call upon the Sea Ponies when you're in distress ♫
♫ Helpful as can be ponies - simply signal SOS ♫
♫ If your rudder runs aground or seeweed holds a grip (kelp) ♫
♫ Count upon the Sea Ponies - they'll see you get help ♫
♫Sea Ponies, Sea Ponies♫
♫Simply signal SOS, simply signal SOS♫
♫Sea Ponies, Sea Ponies♫
♫Simply signal SOS, simply signal SOS♫
♫Oh, yes!♫

Comments

[Chris]

I think that I've seen maybe two of the cartoons you link to in your blog posts before you introduced me to them. Both times, my reaction was one of intense but inexplicable pride: "Heck yeah, I remember that one! Wait, why does that make me feel good?" Anyway, yeah, none in this post that I'd ever heard of, but I rather prefer to read about them before seeing them, so it all works out.

My Time Among Clothes Hangers is probably my favorite shipping fic (insofar as it can be called a "shipping fic") in this fandom. Kegisak writes great characters, but he seems to have a lot of trouble editing down. Sometimes (like here) it's not too bad, but in other fics of his that tendency leads to unfocused rambling. Either way, I do like his stuff.

The finale? Well, I've already written up my own thoughts on that, and it'll be posted on my blog tonight. So for now, I'll just say that there's a lot more that we agree than disagree on this time around. "I believe in M. A. Larson" my foot.

[Inquisitor M]

Destiny is a balls idea. Destiny done badly is catastrophic. It undermines any character progression, individual success, and any ability to establish functional character profiling. Congratulations MMC, you were worse that CCaFO; you had to be an utter clusterfuck to manage that.

As I said elsewhere, it makes the scriptwriters look like genuinely talentless hacks who don't give a rats ass that what they're putting out isn't just nonsensical, but actually insultingly perverse. I find it near impossible for a philosophically grounded individual such as myself to have any empathy for the characters, or have anything more than actual disdain for the episode and it's creators. These people shouldn't be allowed to pollute young minds with this crap.
Yes, it made me angry.

-M

P.S. Looking forward to your blog tonight, Chris :)