Season 4 Premiere and Humor as Evil (MINOR SEASON 4 SPOILERS) · 7:47pm Nov 24th, 2013
Writing, reading, thinking, watching ponies. I submit to you that there is no better way to spend a Saturday.
Season 4! I approached this with mixed feelings, a bit of enthusiasm, a bit of apprehension. Season 3’s premiere was mediocre at best, its episodes the same, its only saving grace its last episode.
But I loved the premiere. It was lengthy (though a bit slow to kick off), had some great drama and value-conflicts, Discord (around whom this essay is devoted), and had some nice eye-candy. It was really nice seeing the girls again, and for the first time in a while, after too much cynicism and too many forebodings, I’m actually excited about My Little Pony again.
With that preamble, let us now get to the thesis of this essay:
Discord is horribly evil.
Not just a little bit evil, not just Saturday-morning cartoon villain evil; but a deep, insidious evil—a deep hatred for the good. His whimsical, chaotic nature, his air of “not giving a fuck,” is not what makes him a villain; they are merely symptoms of his underlying nature, effects of his mindset and his weapon for evil. And though he only has one weapon to unleash upon the good, it is a weapon that he’s refined and has become adept with, so much so that it is with this alone that he can wreck havoc on the minds and bodies of those of the good:
Humor.
To explain why this is so evil, we need a bit of pseudo-philosophy:
Humor is a human being’s reaction to an absurdity. A human laughs when he sees a contradiction collapse in on itself. This is why second best pony, Rarity, is indeed so funny: it is absurd and contradictory to see this prim and proper lady losing herself to a rock, or when her fake eyelashes fall off. She has this image, and the essence of the humor is to have this negated. When you see this contradiction, you laugh.
The implication of this is that laughter is a reaction which destroys the integrity of concepts, and renders them . . . well, ludicrous. E.g., picture a salesman presenting with a smile on his face his idea for an enterprise to some interested investors; and, when he’s done, the investors say nothing but laugh. As a human beings, all watching are immediately aware of the entrepreneurs’ perception of the concept—they view it as contradictory, and therefore unintegrated in concept. The reaction is laughter.
An artist can use humor in very subtle (and not so subtle) ways to negate things he thinks are necessary of being negated. The most obvious example of this is satire: a satirists paints, in a humorous light, things that he regards to be evil or destructive. By laughing, he (and if the satire is good, along with the audience) negates the integrity of these concepts, destroying them in concept.
Discord is the exact opposite of a satirist: whereas a satirist uses humor to negate evil, Discord uses humor to negate good.
And the most insidious part of all of this is that you’re not even aware of it. You think: “Discord is just being silly, and he does funny things, so I’ll laugh with him!”—and you permit yourself a laugh, you permit yourself even for a second to negate what he’s negating, and you don’t realize that what he’s negating is something good, and he’s already brought you over to his side (see the Season 2 premiere for a dramatization of this abstraction).
What made me realize this was a certain something he said to Twilight (among other things in the same vein): “Congrats, by the way, on the promotion. You totally deserve it.”
And I laughed. In fact, I laughed really hard. I laughed because the implication is that Twilight did not deserve it, and to see him say that she did is a conceptual contradiction (i.e., sarcasm).
But the axiom or implicit assumption of Season 4 of My Little Pony is that Twilight did deserve it. My Little Pony is telling us that Twilight worked hard to get where she was, and if you cherish the message of My Little Pony and the view of good that it has, then you have to implicitly accept this too.
Discord, naturally as the antagonist, disagrees with My Little Pony’s view of good. And his way of negating that view is to subject it to humor. And the most insidious part of it is Discord’s facade is one of innocuousness.; yet if you laugh with him, you’re also implicitly agreeing that the Mane Six’s struggles are meaningless and futile, that the message of My Little Pony is naive and unrealistic, just by your laugh. Your laugh implicitly accepts that he’s right.
Of course, by virtue of the fact that you watch and enjoy My Little Pony, you don’t agree with him at least conciously and you see him as a destructive villain; but such is the efficacy of this villain that even if you consciously regard him as evil, he is able to pick out your subconscious contradictions and inconsistencies and expose them, and have you laugh at them, having you yourself negate your own premises. (I submit that if you are absolutely certain that what comes out of Discord’s mouth is unequivocally wrong, you will not find anything he says funny; like in the premiere of Season 2, he plays to your uncertainty, and he’s damn good at it.)
Lines like the one above quoted are very characteristic of Discord, and he uses them all the time, ranging from the blatant to the pants-shittingly subtle. In the Season 2 premiere, I laughed when he said: “Maybe the magic of friendship will help you”—the implication is that such a concept is unsound and will not hold in the real world; the implication is that the whole theme of the show is false. But the theme of the show is not false. In the end, the magic of friendship does help the Mane Six. Yet it is Discord’s ingenious and insidious use of humor that gets the Mane Six to doubt themselves (when he gets them to doubt themselves, that’s when he wins); such is his insidiousness that he gets me to doubt myself and my enjoyment of My Little Pony—such that whenever I laugh with Discord, I, for a second, am aware of the literal ludicrousness of my situation: an adult man watching a show about talking colored horses for fun and solving things by blasting them with friendship. Even if there’s nothing wrong with that, he is able to depict it so effectively as absurd that he makes me laugh—and his use and aptitude with humor to focus its destructive elements upon the good makes him one of the most evil characters I’ve ever seen.
Discord is a wonderfully well-written villain, exceptionally well-implemented, and I would like to see more of him in the show. The fact that he’s “reformed” (which really only means that he’s convinced the heroes that he’s on their side) only adds more opportunity for the writers to show how destructive humor can be.
An insightful piece. And Discord is back to the long con; by framing S4E01-02 as a friendship lesson, he's tossing up the question of whether he misunderstands good, or is just biding his time. And the scene with the vines holding the ponies only cements his darkness.
I never thought about Discord as such. Interesting.