MLP and Exposition Inefficiency · 7:48am Nov 24th, 2013
So, it's been an eventful past couple days. The interweb's been exploding with decontextualized Doctor Who images, and now we've just had our thing. This happens to coincide with the first weekend in ages when I've actually had some legitimate free time (that is, time that my schedule allows me to take off instead of me looking at my full schedule and taking time off anyway) so now that I've had time to absorb some media that isn't high literature for once, I thought I'd take a bit to give my thoughts on the latest, most up-to-date additions to our fandom.
That's right: I finally watched Equestria Girls.
I'm not going to do a review, since I can't see myself saying anything that hasn't already been said a hundred times; that is, that even though it was pretty obvious that the writers had been handed a dumb premise and were basically just trudging through a checklist that some marketing agent had handed them, they still managed to sneak enough fun and charm into it that it felt like an authentic MLP experience. At a couple points I had to stop and explain to my computer why something was dumb, but the songs were catchy and it left me with the warm fuzzies, which is all I really wanted in the first place. But what I really want to talk about has to do with the writing, and not the easy targets about the premise-based issues, which I've already forgiven and forgotten. This is something that I've seen sneak into the main show itself, as well as a number of things aimed at younger (and occasionally, not younger) audiences. One of my recurring gripes with MLP is that the dialogue is inefficient.
Maybe that's a little harsh. A big part of the show's appeal is that it's charming and true to characters, so I definitely don't want to advocate a change to substance over style. But one of the ways that FiM often struggles is in filling its twenty-minute time slot, often having to compress stories that are too big for it and occasionally not having enough and filling in time with Pinkie Pie flailing around, usually literally. That's one of the ways that EG worked well, since it finally felt like the show had enough room to stretch out and tell a complete story. (Hey, this is starting to turn into a review after all.) But even though these big stories have to fill a very small space, so often, especially around the presenting of the moral, characters start spouting vague lines about the subject instead of actually addressing it. They fail to say in several lines what could have been made clear in one. This is annoying.
Some examples, just so that I, too, am not waffling about a subject instead of dealing with it. Magical Mystery Cure is probably the most egregious example, with enough content for easily two episodes being montaged into one. But at the end, when Twilight is undergoing her ascension and a huge, series-changing and fandom-dividing event is taking place, Celestia talks about how proud she is of Twilight. Then she sings a song about it. A really good song, and the only one that really stuck with me after the episode, but my point stands. Then Twi transforms, and Celestia talks about how she's a princess, and how she has all of the good qualities that make her a princess. Then they all celebrate the fact that she's become a princess, which lasts (let me check) another four minutes. But in all this time, for all their singing and partying and talking about what just happened, they never actually answer the question of what the funk just happened? What was this spell? What does this say about princesses in Equestria? What does it say about friendship? What does it mean? Couldn't they have cut just one line about how great Twilight is and used it to offer up just one solid, satisfying chunk of exposition? (Season 4, don't fail me now.)
I don't need to tell you how a confused message can have disastrous consequences; A Dog and Pony Show had a well-meaning girl power message but is still contested to be about the power of whining, and Feeling Pinkie Keen was probably about the struggles of having friends with different faiths, but became... I don't even know. But enough of the easy targets; what about Wonderbolts Academy? The message was a fairly basic... okay, technically there is an "I" in "flight team" and wow that one fell apart before it even started. But the point is that the episode is about teamwork, and during her big finish in the spotlight, Spitfire dances around the word like it's just on the tip of her tongue and she's stalling for time until she can remember it. All the talk about pushing yourself too hard is nothing that hasn't already been stated a dozen different ways in the scenes leading up to it, and the actual lesson of "being the best is meaningless if you can't work with others" is just sort of gestured towards. That's clarity in one line when Spitfire failed to do it in four. And this is starting to sound like nitpicking (which most of my observations about pretty much anything are) so maybe I'll jump back to the easy targets again.
On that note, Equestria Girls. Near the start we get a small pile of exposition about Sunset Shimmer and this mysterious, alternate dimension that she's fled to. Now, I've already forgiven the film for its marketing-friendly premise, so I'm willing to put up with at least some "no see this is totally plausible" exposition. But when it comes to the villain, we get... what? Apparently she used to be Celestia's student, but ran away to another world when she didn't get her way, which raises a heck of a lot more questions than it answers. (Especially since the age difference between herself and Twilight is about three human years maximum... but I'll let that slide.) So... what happened? Did she not understand why her teacher kept giving her subtle jabs about making friends? Did Celestia refuse to turn her into a princess? Actually, I like that one. "When I explained to her that I could not make her a princess simply because she was my student, she fled to this other world." That takes up exactly the same amount of space as the original, but gives us a lot more insight into the villain and, by extension, the plot. And more from the evil lady of the dusk herself would have been nice; she does get one good zinger on Twilight, but her time spent mocking Twi's ignorance could have been better used filling us in on, say, her thoughts on friendship, and why she wants to be a princess, and basically what her deal is. And... the ending.
Okay, here's my take. What I thought Equestria Girls was going to be about was Sunset Shimmer confusing popularity with friendship. She believed that the point of friendship was to get as many ponies to like you as possible, resulting in her forming a lot of shallow, immaterial friendships, then couldn't understand why even though everyone loved her she was never good enough for Celestia. She flees to another world to prove that her way of dealing with friends is better, and at first seems to be entirely right; humanland is a place where popularity is the most important thing of all, and she fulfills her dream and becomes a princess of her own high school. But then Twilight and her close-knit group of actual friends show up and prove that friendship isn't some impossible ideal fit only for children's cartoons, but a necessary and wonderful force that's superior in every way to fickle popularity contests, a valuable lesson that the film's target audience, and most people really, could actually stand to hear. That's something that the movie almost lands on, and this interpretation would fit pretty much seamlessly into it (aside from the irony of Twilight winning a popularity contest) if the film would ever just sit still for a second and explain itself. But when we get to the climax and the movie goes full Sailor Moon in the last ten minutes, because we still don't know what Sunset Shimmer's motivation is and the ostensibly central concept of friendship has only tangentially been addressed, Twilight has basically no material to work with and just mumbles about "Friendship... magic... more friendship... eat rainbows, ya crazy harpy!"
Maybe I care too much about exposition. Maybe I just don't know how to let things go. Maybe it's harsh to so critically analyze a film that was put together aimed at an entirely different demographic. But that's not the point. The point
I just realized that I was about to launch into a defense of pop culture overanalysis, and there's really no point to that. So a better question is: What can we learn from this? What can we take away from this to make our writing, our analysis of writing, and the world a better place? Well, what I learned is that the world needs more character-defining one-liners. I don't care if they're cheesy, they're memorable and they get the job done. Exposition needs to be dealt with efficiency, especially when dealing with time constraints, and everything (and this is the classic artistic ideal) should point back towards the central concept. I also learned that Equestria Girls is a movie that I would very happily show my hypothetical future daughter. I guess I should watch the season 4 premier at some point.
(Oh, and as to the fact that I rambled on for half a dozen paragraphs instead of getting straight to the point: no, see, it's okay when I do it.)
This was a fascinating read.
While the movies should have addressed this, it IS addressed in a comic that was recently released that was basically the back story of EQG. Maybe that comic should have come first...
I have no love of EQG. I will say that you should sit down and watch the season 4 premiere. I really enjoyed it and it renewed my faith in the future of the series.
"Every supporting detail must tie back to the thesis" -every high-school English teacher ever.
Personally I will forevermore blame the inefficiencies of dialogue on Celestia's (read: Arrogance's) attempts to keep the main characters complacent so that she can keep her regime intact and infallible in their eyes. I can't say I've read many alternative explanations, but of the ones I have, I feel that is the one that can answer the most questions in the most (keyword) efficient way possible.