4 and 50th · 3:48am Nov 26th, 2013
I just came out of a viewing, in a movie theater, of the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who. Which makes for quite the weekend with the premier of Season 4.
Just to put thing in context, I've often been told that I critic thing too much. However, it's who I am; I'm harsh. However, I'm even harsher against myself, if it means anything. I don't critic to put something down, I do it because I want it to be better. I also never critic anything unless I got ideas on how to improve it. It's part of my professional job; I fix problem, and where there is no known problem, I discover some nobody thought existed and fix them. I just have to improve the way I bring those critics. :)
Also, I would like to express an opinion I have; writing and story-telling skills are totally different, but are related to each other when building a story. A good writer may be a terrible story-teller and vise versa.
Writing is the ability to build coherent sentences and use proper words. Bad writing skill - like mine - will give imprecise ideas, and will make the reader wonder what the author really meant. It may even convey the totally wrong concept; the author think something and every reader understand something else.
Story-telling is the ability to build characters, world and events that are interesting and compelling. A bad story-teller will have plot holes, deus ex machina and all kind of errors or incoherency in his story flow. His characters won't be interesting, be impossible to relate to, and will take action that doesn't make sense. Lot of questions would be left unanswered because the author simply doesn't know himself. Most importantly, a good teller will be consistent in his world building and will plan ahead everything.
About the Doctor Who 50th special, it's the first time in a really long time that I came out from watching a movie or a TV show without having anything in mind about what I would remove, add or change to improve it.
About the Season 4 premiere... I believe MLP's writers are may be great writers... but horrible story-teller. The list of thing I would have modified in the premier is long! The same way writing and story-telling, for me, is two different thing, this episode was, again for me, good, but the story was bad. I'm not a good writer, I know that much, but is it such really egoistical to think I could do a better world-building job than them? I know very well I would be terrible at making slice-of-life episodes. I know myself enough for that. However, their world-building is lacking the coherence, flow and answers that I enjoy in universe like Doctor Who.
And that's the whole issue here. It feels like the MLP writers want to push the series to the next step - and that very commendable - and make something bigger, but it also feels like they don't have the structure or the experience at making that kind of stories. Do they have a bible that answers question like;
- Who wrote the 1000 years prophecy?
- Why Celestia believed so much in Twilight in Season 1? Blind faith doesn't suit such an experienced ruler.
- How did she know Twilight would make five friends with exactly the proper attributes to active the Elements?
- Why Celestia left the Elements in the old castle when she built new Canterlot?
- Why Celestia/Luna didn't bring the Elements back to the tree after sealing Discord?
- Why Celestia was unable to "cleanse" Luna like the Mane 6 did?
- Why Princess Cadance foalsit a common unicorn with no cutie mark?
- If Celestia was able to use the Elements alone, why they needed to be six ponies in the present?
- Was the changelings really that dumb? How could they feed love off frightened ponies?
...
and many more questions. If they cannot answer them right now, for me, it's a huge flaw in their story coherence. I never start writing a story without knowing everything about it, otherwise it becomes very hard later to fix the holes left behind.
If I didn't like my job so much, I would maybe try to find how to become a professional story writer for TV shows or movies. I would probably fail, mind you... heh.
I think the problem really comes down to the fact that this is technically a children's show. The target demographic generally doesn't care if the plot and backstory are completely cohesive. So they just kind of let that stuff go and focus their efforts elsewhere.
I'm sure that we would all love to see the show written with the same intensity as Doctor Who, but I don't know if it could do that and still keep the four-year-old girl demographic.
Not that any of that will keep me from criticizing stuff like that too.
1542230 Well, lot of Pixar's movie are also made with this kind of demographic in mind... But I truly believe it should never be a reason to stop from raising the quality. Just don't underestimate kids! They are not stupid, they can spot quality, even if sometimes they don't understand it. Would they be able to fully appreciate a storyline similar to Doctor Who? Probably not, but I think it's no excuse to let quality slip. Making something simpler is no synonym of making it worse and leaving errors in it.
A story like Wall-E is very simple and straight forward. Damn, the dialogs aren't very complex! However, it's nicely crafted with a lot of depth. They could very well make some MLP movie with the quality of a Pixar movie, if they wanted to. (And I'm not talking about the graphic)
I can try to answer a few.
After seeing Twilight's impressive magic outburst and noticing her cutie mark's resemblance to the Element of Magic, she miiiiight have figured out Twilight's destiny had something to do with the Elements. And maybe the prophecy.
She probably didn't. She did, however, know that making friends would help Twi unlock the power of the Elements.
Because they were both in the wrong. Luna's jealousy was not entirely without cause, and Celestia did little to help the issue. Also, the user(s) may not be able to control the Elements' effect. (Or, afraid of hurting her sister with the Elements, she banished her instead of turning the Elements' full power against Luna.)
She probably wanted to leave that chapter of her life far behind her. She may have seen the Elements as a weapon too powerful to keep on hand anymore. Other possibilities include: they were seemingly inert, or they were left as a memorial to her sister.
The magic levels of an apparently immortal alicorn and an average unicorn/pegasus/earth pony are likely very different. Also, the number of users seems to vary (Luna and Celestia wielded the Elements in tandem against Discord).
As to whether their bible answers all of these questions, well, one can't be sure until they release it.
1542277
To be fair, Wall-E is about 90 minutes long with maybe 4 main characters, and it takes place in our world (even if it is in the far future). Friendship is Magic gets 20 minutes (or 40 with these two-parters), has at least a dozen important characters, and takes place in a completely unknown world.
That's not to say that Wall-E isn't great (it is), or that there couldn't be an MLP movie of comparable quality (I really think there could, which is part of the reason I didn't like Equestria Girls, but that's another discussion entirely). But when you're restricted to short, self-contained episodes, I think it's hard to tell a really compelling story without leaving a few plot holes.
And looking over your questions again, I notice that they all come from the various two-parters, and those are the episodes where they really try to tell big stories. So it's basically just like you said, the writing staff might be great when it comes to slice-of-life type stories, but these bigger stories don't seem to really be their forte.
But even though the season four premiere was certainly flawed, and there were things I would have preferred them to do differently, it's still among my favorite episodes.
1542603 It's some nice... theories. Those answers would change from one individual to another. The issue is not that some answers cannot be found - I'm also very good at making up theories - but that the show is slowly painting itself in a corner where it will never be able to answer them.
1542638 I agree that 44 mins - 2 parts - is rather short for epic stories. It's also why it pissed me off to see some scenes being useless to the story progression; such as Celestia/Luna fight, or the crocodile issue that get resolved in matter of 2 mins. It sometimes feels they try to pack too many ideas in a too short time-frame. It was cool to see the Celestia/Luna fight, until I find out it lasted 4 mins and added nothing we didn't already know. That could have been a whole episode or even a 2-parters! In the end, it was more of a fan service and a cheap cliffhanger than anything useful.
1542959
Yeah, the Celestia-Nightmare Moon "fight" (and that's using the word rather liberally) was probably the biggest disappointment for me in the two episodes.
As for the crocodile issue, that led into the decision to send Twilight away. However, I think that decision was stupid and probably a bit out of character for her friends, but it at least brought up a good point. I just think it would have been better if, after talking about it like they did, they realized that sending Twilight away was a bad idea. Or, if the writers really wanted to send Twilight away, they could have given her and her friends some more time to deal with the consequences of the decision. But on the plus side, it did show us a thing or two about Discord, so it wasn't all bad.
1542987 It also showed an out-of-character Discord... He is the one who sent Twilight back to her friends, which was... Rather weird. Could have been Zecora. Or he could have told her it was a good idea to run away. Inverse psychology... There just too many "if" in that episode.
1543020
Really? I think he stayed in character. He told Twilight to go back to her friends, but he did it by basically being a passive aggressive jerk. I bet that, unless she's stopped and really thought about it, Twilight doesn't even realize that Discord helped her. At face value, it seemed like he was just trying to aggravate her. So it showed that while Discord may not automatically be opposed to being helpful, he's not going to be obvious about it or make things easy for anypony.
It's also worth noting that Discord had a golden opportunity to take over Equestria again. With Celestia and Luna gone and the Elements split, there wouldn't really be anyone to stop him. But he didn't even try. Despite what some of the ponies may think, that reformation seems to have really done something.
So perhaps he sent Twilight back for Fluttershy's sake. Or maybe because he secretly wants to become friends with Celestia, Luna, and/or the rest of the mane six.