The Classic Is Back: A Serious Review of G. M. Berrow's 'Equestria Girls: Through the Mirror' · 2:06am Jul 23rd, 2014
I originally removed this post after a reader complained, but, having looked at it again, I don’t think it’s much worse than, say, a Conan novel, so I’m putting it back up. After all, Rainbow Rocks is coming out soon, so I think this is a good time to discuss its (no doubt superior) predecessor, the epic that deserves more recognition as the capstone of the My Little Pony franchise. Yes, the book is certainly sleazy, but it is so much more than that. It is unfortunate that the literary establishment has turned up its nose at Berrow's masterpiece simply because it is associated with children's toys.
I am aware that comic illustrator Andy Price claimed at a convention that Equestria Girls happened because Hasbro was inspired by Brony anthro art. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I have my doubts: the official word Hasbro gave its investors was that the Equestria Girls line of toys was meant to tap the tween market, a set of girls older than that at which My Little Pony has traditionally aimed. Considering the success of other fashion dolls such as Bratz, Monster High, and the reinvigorated Barbie, it’s no surprise that Hasbro has come out with a fashion doll line of its own. One way or the other, Equestria Girls was, so I understand, quite successful with its target demographic when it aired on The Hub, so I predict that this new branch of the franchise is here to stay. Thus, it seems a good time to put jokes aside and write a serious review of G. M. Berrow’s novelization, in which I believe she has buried hints of where not only the Equestria Girls brand, but all of My Little Pony, is headed in the future.
I have a bad feeling about this.
As you might expect, the novelization of Equestria Girls follows the film version closely. There are some differences, most of them minor and some of them superfluous; according to the title page, the novel is based on Meghan McCarthy’s screenplay, so I would be unsurprised if some of the additional scenes represent moments cut from the final release of the film. Most notable among the novel’s additions are a scene in which Twilight Sparkle meets Rainbow Dash before she meets the other anthropomorphized versions of her friends, and a scene in which she attempts to ingratiate herself to other students by quoting factoids about high school life she read in a yearbook. The former scene contributes nothing, but the latter is quite funny, featuring Twilight’s signature social awkwardness.
Berrow also alters scenes that in the film are done with song and dance. This is necessary, but regrettable: the big musical number in the lunchroom becomes in the book a comparatively mundane scene in which Twilight’s friends pass out Wondercolts ears and tails to promote school spirit. It’s more realistic, perhaps, than a song-and-dance number, but hardly seems likely to win Twilight much popularity.
Berrow expands on the relationship between Twilight and Flash Sentry. Twilight spends some time ruminating on how “cute” Flash is. She stammers and stutters after running into him at the Sweet Shoppe, and though she decides to stay away from him as much as possible to avoid aggravating Sunset Shimmer, she also decides that staying away from him after getting her crown back “might be negotiable.” During the lunchroom scene, instead of jamming on his guitar as he does in the movie, Flash walks up to Twilight to show off the ears and tail he’s wearing. Twilight considers how his tail looks “a little silly stuck to his jeans, but in a good way.” It is after this that she realizes he resembles the pony she met in the Crystal Empire, and against whose chest she braced herself in the novel’s risqué first chapter.
“And in here is where I keep my hawt boyfriend!”
Berrow develops, though not as fully as I would like, Twilight’s inner conflict over her new body. Her attraction to Flash seems to cause her some turmoil: after first noticing that he’s cute, she quickly adds to herself, “for a weird, two-legged animal.” But it isn’t long before she has stopped thinking his two-leggedness is weird; at one point, while sitting in the coffee shop with her new friends, she even thinks that she wouldn’t mind staying in this new world forever and developing a more serious relationship with him.
Nonetheless, in spite of little moments like these, the book still follows the movie’s general outline, and it ends with Twilight returning to Equestria and reuniting with her old friends. Berrow does at least add a hint of wistfulness: it’s clear that Twilight will miss all the friends she made in the human world.
But that, of course, is only the beginning. What we saw in the movie makes up just the first third of the novel, which runs under the title, “Book One: The Other Side of the Glass.” The novel has two further sections that do not appear in the film, but, assuming they are not merely Berrow’s inventions, may tell us what Hasbro has in store for the future of the My Little Pony franchise. If this is really where seasons four and five are headed, we’re in for a wild ride.
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That awkward moment.
At first, I was disgusted when Berrow depicted Flash Sentry taking Twilight to a motel after the Fall Formal. I thought such a scene was tasteless, unnecessary, and inappropriate for a children’s book. However, it does make sense of the film’s final moments, in which it is faintly hinted that Twilight has returned to Equestria pregnant with Flash’s child. This leads into the novel’s second part, “Book Two: The Fugitive Princess.”
Disgraced in Canterlot’s court and forced to wear a scarlet A on her breast, Twilight soon foals. Her half-pony, half-human baby is an alicorn, whom she names Skyla. Because Skyla, though a very young filly, is already a princess, she is unable to control her powers, and thus she frequently causes accidents, some of them horrifying and heartrending. Indeed, the scene in which she burns the Cutie Mark Crusaders to death and then weeps over their blackened corpses, though it caused many Bronies to leave the fandom, is the moment in which I believe the My Little Pony franchise finally came of age.
“After this, wanna destroy the multiverse together?”
When Princess Celestia declares that Skyla is too dangerous to live and orders her execution, Twilight flees with her daughter into the San Palomino Desert. Her friends soon rally to her, as do the buffalo tribes, who resent the settlers for pushing them out of their traditional lands. Gradually, Twilight gathers around herself a ragtag army of adventurers and ne’er-do-wells, altogether creating a formidable force large enough to rival even the Royal Guard. Twilight leads her band of brigands on raids throughout the frontier and outer provinces, thereby amassing wealth and prestige and terrorizing the Equestrians. Meanwhile, as her mother becomes a robber queen, Skyla grows steadily more powerful in arcane and forbidden forms of magic.
It is at this point that I threw the book across the room in anger. Berrow here inserts what appears to be an entirely unnecessary love scene, vividly salacious, between Twilight and a stallion. I realize that Twilight has become a pirate by this point, and no doubt Berrow wants to capture some of the decadent atmosphere of a life of crime, but this is the second such scene in what is supposed to be a book for young readers. Not only that, but it cheapens the main character irreparably: before stepping through the mirror portal to return to Equestria, Twilight had pledged her heart forever to the man she loved, and now here she is gallivanting with a stallion too unimportant even to have a name.
Nonetheless, I did pick up the book again a few days after throwing it, because I wanted to know how it ends. I’m glad I did, for Berrow, to my surprise, weaves together a shocking, beautiful, and wholly unexpected yarn: if they weren’t ignoring it because of the “My Little Pony” label on the cover, critics would no doubt be hailing this as the greatest novel of the new millennium.
Shortly after Twilight’s tryst with the unnamed stallion, the story shifts point of view to human Flash Sentry, who discovers a rift in the space-time continuum in the corner of his mom’s basement. Determined to reunite with the pony he loves, he leaps into the rift and begins a lengthy (five hundred pages in all) journey through several nightmarish realms of alternate reality, in each of which he meets Lovecraftian horrors and monstrosities. Becoming increasingly hardened, callous, and jaded, Flash fights his way through world after world, in each realm discovering strange magic or stranger technology with which he can open another interdimensional gateway; he passes through each portal in the hopes of finding the world of ponies, only to plunge each time into a new world of terrors even darker and grimmer than the last. Through it all, the only thing sustaining his life and his sanity is the dim, flickering hope of once again standing by Twilight’s side.
I shoulda known that girl was bad news.
As he opens rift after rift in his wanderings, Flash destabilizes the multiverse: each new portal becomes a passage through which the armies of one world, hungry for new resources and lands, invade the next. Soon, universe after universe is decimated by war, and Flash becomes a legend: everywhere on every planet, they whisper his name in curses, and children shudder in their beds when they hear the fearful tales of his deeds, for he is Flash the Unmaker, Unraveler of Worlds.
Only gradually does Flash come to recognize what he has done, yet he never wavers in his resolve. In the book’s most powerful scene, he climbs to the top of a high mountain peak and, shaking his fist at the Almighty, declares that he loves Twilight Sparkle and that he will see all the worlds burn and all their peoples die before he will abandon his quest to once again behold his little pony.
This startling moment ends “The Fugitive Princess,” and thus we begin the novel’s final act, “Book Three: The Unmaker.”
When the tale returns to Equestria, we find the ponies embroiled in civil war: the forces rallied around Twilight Sparkle and Skyla fight tooth-and-hoof against the forces of Celestia and Luna. Twilight has given up any high-sounding notions of friendship and now craves only power and vengeance. Her one mission in life is to see her daughter Skyla sit alone on Equestria’s throne. Little does she know how ironically this hope will be fulfilled.
At this point, Flash Sentry at last breaks through to Equestria’s shores, where he finds Twilight waiting for him. And that’s when I threw the book across the room again. This is, after all, the reuniting of a family, and Berrow could have written something poignant, but instead she depicts Twilight tossing Flash over her back and galloping straight up to her bedchamber. Revolting. It’s as if Berrow aims for the lowest common denominator of entertainment.
But, as you guessed, I picked the book up again, and I’m glad I did, because there’s a twist I didn’t see coming. More on that in a moment.
“Twilight! You're getting the blood of your vanquished enemies all over me!”
The story progresses from there to a grand and inevitable climax: decimated and ravenous, all the depleted forces of all the universes through which Flash has trudged now pour through the space-time rift into Equestria. The ponies must cease their infighting and band together for a final stand against the barbaric remnants of millions upon millions of wrecked worlds. The cause is hopeless, and countless ponies are slaughtered. Flash and Twilight hold each other tenderly while, around them, all their friends, allies, and enemies die bloody and meaningless deaths as the multiverse is consumed in the fires of the forbidden passion between man and horse. In the midst of the lengthy battle sequence (eight hundred pages in all), numerous shocking and torrid scandals come to light: Apple Bloom is really Applejack’s daughter, Scootaloo is Angel Bunny’s long-lost sister, Kaneda-kun is really Kyoko-chan, Celestia is really Grogar, and there are a host of other revelations.
And, as you might suppose, in the novel’s final chapter, the true nature of Princess Skyla’s dark power is at last revealed.
When, after nearly four thousand pages, the book finally ends, and when all the worlds are dead and Skyla sits alone on a heap of bones and recites those famous lines from Shakespeare, we can say without a doubt that this is, indeed, the great novel of the Twenty-first Century. This is the culmination not only of G4, but of all the franchise. This is Berrow’s great gift to the world of literature, and this is Hasbro’s great gift to the world of art. This is Through the Mirror. This is Equestria Girls. This, my friends, is My Little Pony.
Now I’d like to return to the aforementioned part in which Twilight and Flash find each other again. I was expecting yet another torrid hugging and kissing scene, since Berrow had written two of those already, but I was pleasantly surprised. Just as Twilight brings Flash up to her bower, who should appear but that aforementioned yet unnamed stallion with whom Twilight had previously dallied? It turns out that he was unnamed for a reason: we now learn that he is none other than Buck Withers, formerly the rival of Shining Armor for the hoof of Princess Cadance, and now the rival of Flash Sentry for Princess Twilight!
What I at first found obnoxious has become my favorite scene from the entire book, so I have chosen to excerpt it:
With a snort of contempt, Buck tossed his head, and a length of cold steel clattered against the floor and slid to Flash’s feet.
Flash glanced down at it before returning his eyes to Buck’s face. “What is this?”
“What does it look like, fool?” Buck snarled. “A weapon. A sword. Pick it up and fight me, if you’re stallion enough.”
Flash’s lip curled into a sneer. “I? Stallion enough? If you only knew, little pony, what I have—”
Buck spat on the marble floor. “Do you claim great deeds, you puny, two-legged freak? Am I to cower before you, a mighty hero from the worlds beyond? Ha! I see nothing before me but a sniveling churl, yet five months weaned from his wet-nurse. You are, no doubt, one of those worthless sorts who are great heroes in the bedroom but not on the battlefield.”*
[*Footnote: As fans of My Little Pony no doubt know, Equestria is a masculine, militaristic society that places great value on honor and skill at arms. Thus, in order to seduce mares, stallions will often ply them with long, involved tales of martial triumphs. Buck is here accusing Flash of embellishing or inventing his stories of combat. According to Equestria’s elaborate honor code, any stallion who receives such an insult is to respond immediately with violence. —GMB]
Flash bent down, picked up the sword, and tested it in his hand. It felt good; its weight was solid against his palm. “And I see before me,” he said, “nothing but an obstacle, a nuisance to be smashed like an insect. Do you want to know who I am, little pony? I am Flash the Unmaker, Unraveler of Worlds. Countless planets have fallen beneath my tread. Countless nations have crumbled at my touch. I have destroyed men, women, and children in my quest, and I can easily brush you aside as I might brush aside a fly. Do you hear me?” He slid his feet into the en garde position and pointed the tip of his blade at Buck’s chest. “I am Flash Sentry, fool, and you will not deny me my wedding night. Leave here now, and do not come back.”
Buck scoffed. “I, turn tail and run? I think not, puny human.”
At this, Twilight at last rose to her hooves. With eyes half-lidded, she said, “Your speech does you no credit, my lover. You have unmade worlds, but would you leave a rival unvanquished?”
“He is beneath my contempt,” Flash replied, “and therefore unworthy that I should kill him.”
Twilight chuckled mirthlessly. “You are in Equestria now, darling, where a stallion’s bravery and skill in the fight are paramount. Buck has challenged you to a duel, and no lover of mine will turn his back on such a challenge: much as I cherish you, I would see you dead rather than dishonored by shirking combat.” She turned her back on him, but cast a sharp, sultry glance over her shoulder as she added, “If you wish to take me in your arms, you must do so as a conquering warrior—not as a coward.”
Twilight stepped to her brass chest and opened it, revealing the booty she had captured in her many raids. She pulled forth a bright necklace of gold set with lapis lazuli, which she draped over her long and supple neck. She adorned her legs with bangles and her hooves with bell boots of gold. Into her ears she clipped earrings of silver and pearl, which she attached by a length of golden chain to another ring in her nose. She painted her eyes with kohl, pulled a filmy and translucent veil across her face, and then, at last, brought forth an alabaster jar. After snapping the jar’s neck, she poured its contents—olive oil beaten with cinnamon, cardamom, and myrrh—over her mane. The scent of the perfume wafted throughout the chamber.
Now bedecked with jewels and dripping with both unguent and fecundity, Twilight mounted the steps of her pedestaled and petal-strewn couch, where she lowered herself amongst the down-filled pillows. As she languidly wound her hooves in the silken sheets, she again gazed at Flash from half-lidded eyes. Sliding her tongue across her lips, she husked, “The one of you who conquers the other shall likewise conquer my heart. Delight me now with the strivings of your thewy limbs, and to the victor shall go the spoils.”
But Twilight’s hair was not the only thing in the room that was well oiled: with a grunt, Flash ripped open his shirt to reveal his broad and muscular chest, which rippled and shimmered in the candlelight like the waves of a storm-tossed and moonlit sea. He bowed his head toward Twilight and said, “Your Highness, since you wish it, it will be my honor to rid the world of this vermin.”
“And,” said Buck with a whinny, “it will be my honor to slay this misshapen creature who has so stained your virtue.”
Without further ado, but with deafening roars of rage, the two heroes fell upon each other and brought together their blades with a mighty clash that would have left lesser mortals senseless. They struck and struck again, unmindful of their hurts, until the marble floor was beslicked with their blood, yet still they strove, neither giving an inch.
And as this he-man and this he-stallion pressed close, as their blades shone in the flickering light, and as their sinewy thighs bulged and pulsated with the strain, Twilight took a cup of dark wine in her pastern and sipped daintily. Lowering the cup, she again slid her tongue across her full lips, and she whispered five words in her characteristically husky voice:
“This . . . is . . . so . . . totally . . . hawt.”
“Psst . . . I think somepony's not being honest.”
2307909
What are you talking about? I only reviewed Berrow's novel here.
What's been going on with you these days?
With this and the blog post from the other day, write those stories now!
2307917
Neither of these stories is mine. The last blog post was merely a description of Hasbro's plans for G5, and this post is a discussion of Berrow's published novel. If I were to "write" them, it would be plagiarism.
2307921
More like idealism and isn't imitation the sincerest form of flattery? What the heck are we all doing on this writing website if we weren't all imitating to a degree?
2307927
Both of these stories, if I were to write them, would be gigantic. That is the problem with most of my ideas: they're epic-sized. I have a hard time coming up with ideas for short stories.
2307934
Don't tell me I put out your other eye.
2307933
Couldn't you write them through arcs? Limit yourself to a certain amount of chapters until you finish one arc and so forth. Pretend that your writing for tv and you're only allowed 13 episodes for your first season. But when your show airs, Boom, your green-lit for a second one with 20 episodes. Maybe a mini-special, too. Wait, it feels like my metaphor has gotten away from me but I think you understand what I mean.
2307909
It's his way of telling us he's gone off his rocker
2307945
My infatuation? No, the infatuation is Twilight Sparkle's.
Look, I didn't create this character. You talk as if it's my fault he looks so good in his underwear. You talk as if I'm the one who decided that his chest would be ripply, hairless, and oily. The way you tell it, you'd think It was me and not Meghan McCarthy who chose to describe him striving to his utmost, shirtless and glistening with sweat, as he battled hoards of venomous monsters while his beloved pony languished against his firmly muscled thigh. In your delirious world of falsehood, it was somehow my idea to depict him pouring a bucket of water over his face, in slow motion, as doves took flight behind him.
I have yet to read this novelization, so can I ask, what happened to Sunset Shimmer, and pony Flash Sentry? Which side of the civil war did they fight on? Dare I ask, did they find solace in each other's arms? (well really forelegs, but whatever)
2307948
yeah. too much corn pone
2307973
Are those my only two choices?
2308035
My ideal woman is a six-foot red-headed Mennonite barista with glasses and an overbite. Can I choose her?
2308050
Don't ask me to explain my thing for Mennonites.
Actually, if you really want to know, the last girl I had a major crush on was a member of an anabaptist commune that had converted to Catholicism and become a Catholic secular society. So she was a sort of Catholic Mennonite, if you will, complete with the mode of dress.
Relinking this because I must. My friend and I drunk-read part of this post when you posted it originally:
Oh oh oh!
Please tell me our project is back on! I'll tone down whatever you want!